Alan McKee

The objectification of women in mainstream pornographic videos in Australia

Using twelve measures of objectification, I measured the degree to which women are objectified in mainstream pornographic videos in Australia. Seven of the measures allowed for direct comparison of female and male objectification. Of these, one shows women being more objectified than men (presence of orgasms, where women have fewer orgasms). Three show men being more objectified than women (in time spent looking at camera, where men return the gaze significantly less; in time spent talking to the camera, where they are also less engaged; and in initiating sex, where men are more sexual objects than active sexual subjects in seeking their sexual pleasure in the sample). Three measures showed no difference in objectification between men and women (naming, central characters, and time spent talking to other characters).

Healthy Sexual Development: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Research

ABSTRACT A group of Australian researchers from a range of disciplines involved in studying childrens sexual development developed a framework for researching healthy sexual development that was acceptable to all disciplines involved. The 15 domains identified were: freedom from unwanted activity; an understanding of consent; education about biological aspects; understanding of safety; relationship skills; agency; lifelong learning; resilience; open communication; sexual development should not be “aggressive, coercive or joyless;” self-acceptance; awareness and acceptance that sex is pleasurable; understanding of parental and societal values; awareness of public/private boundaries; and being competent in mediated sexuality.

YouTube versus the National Film and Sound Archive: Which Is the More Useful Resource for Historians of Australian Television?

This article compares YouTube and the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) as resources for television historians interested in viewing old Australian television programs. The author searched for seventeen important television programs, identified in a previous research project, to compare what was available in the two archives and how easy it was to find. The analysis focused on differences in curatorial practices of accessioning and cataloguing. NFSA is stronger in current affairs and older programs, while YouTube is stronger in game shows and lifestyle programs. YouTube is stronger than the NFSA on “human interest” material—births, marriages, and deaths. YouTube accessioning more strongly accords with popular histories of Australian television. Both NFSA and YouTube offer complete episodes of programs, while YouTube also offers many short clips of “moments.” YouTube has more surprising pieces of rare ephemera. YouTube cataloguing is more reliable than that of the NFSA, with fewer broken links. The YouTube metadata can be searched more intuitively. The NFSA generally provides more useful reference information about production and broadcast dates.

Is Doctor Who political

This article presents the results of a research project that investigated the vernacular political philosophy of the television programme Doctor Who. Fans were asked about their political thinking, their interpretations of the politics of that programme and the relationship between the two. The results contribute to a cultural history of the political natures of different kinds of texts. These television viewers are revealed to be well able to articulate their own political thinking and to argue cogently that Doctor Who is not useful for that thinking. The politics of this group range from self-nominated Marxist to extreme right wing, and their interpretations of the programme’s politics, when asked to produce them, are similarly wide ranging. It seems that the programme does not function as vernacular political philosophy. This has implications for thinking about the ‘ideology’ of popular texts.

‘It's all scientific to me’: focus group insights into why young people do not apply safe-sex knowledge

Despite rising levels of safe-sex knowledge in Australia, sexually transmitted infection notifications continue to increase. A culture-centred approach suggests it is useful in attempting to reach a target population first to understand their perspective on the issues. Twenty focus groups were conducted with 89 young people between the ages of 14 and 16 years. Key findings suggest that scientific information does not articulate closely with everyday practice, that young people get the message that sex is bad and they should not be preparing for it and that it is not appropriate to talk about sex. Understanding how young people think about these issues is particularly important because the focus groups also found that young people disengage from sources of information that do not match their own experiences.

Social Scientists Don’t Say ‘Titwank’

Drawing on the textual evidence of a number of referees’ reports this article maps key differences between the humanities and social sciences approaches to the study of pornography in order to facilitate better understanding and communication between the areas. 1. Social scientists avoid ‘vulgar’ language to describe sex. Humanities scholars need not do so. 2. Social scientists remain committed to the idea of ‘objectivity’ while humanities scholars reject the idea — although this may be a confusion in language, with the term in the social sciences used to mean something more like ‘falsifiability’. 3. Social science assumes that the primary effects of exposure to pornography must be negative. 4. More generally, social science resists paradigm changes, insisting that all new work agrees with research that has gone before. 5. Social science believes that casual sex and sadomasochism are negative; humanities research need not do so.

Australian gay porn videos The national identity of despised cultural objects

Debates about the local and the global continue to be prominent in cultural studies. By taking an example of Australian gay porn videos, which in some ways are convincingly ‘local’, the paper suggests that previous attempts to define ‘the local’ - in terms either of textual features or provenance of production - are problematic. It proposes instead the idea of ‘persuasiveness’ as a way of accounting for ‘localness’ which does not rely on implications of authenticity.

Pornography as entertainment

For the majority of its producers and consumers, pornography functions as entertainment rather than art. This paper draws on my recent work mapping out entertainment as an area of study (for the new Entertainment Industries programme at Queensland University of Technology) to explore what it means for this object of study to treat it as adult entertainment. Entertainment is audience-centred culture. It is commonly based around characters and story. It encourages seriality, and is unafraid of adaptation. Its dominant mode is fun, its favourite narrative resolution the happy ending. It commonly encourages audience activity and its aesthetics are organized around fast-moving, vulgar spectacle. Its primary purpose is to create an emotional response. In this article I test mainstream pornography against each of these characteristics as a way of mapping out the shape of pornography as it functions in its everyday form, and explain the advantages of such an approach.

A Profile of Pornography Users in Australia: Findings From the Second Australian Study of Health and Relationships

There are societal concerns that looking at pornography has adverse consequences among those exposed. However, looking at sexually explicit material could have educative and relationship benefits. This article identifies factors associated with looking at pornography ever or within the past 12 months for men and women in Australia, and the extent to which reporting an “addiction” to pornography is associated with reported bad effects. Data from the Second Australian Study of Health and Relationships (ASHR2) were used: computer-assisted telephone interviews (CASIs) completed by a representative sample of 9,963 men and 10,131 women aged 16 to 69 years from all Australian states and territories, with an overall participation rate of 66%. Most men (84%) and half of the women (54%) had ever looked at pornographic material. Three-quarters of these men (76%) and more than one-third of these women (41%) had looked at pornographic material in the past year. Very few respondents reported that they were addicted to pornography (men 4%, women 1%), and of those who said they were addicted about half also reported that using pornography had had a bad effect on them. Looking at pornographic material appears to be reasonably common in Australia, with adverse effects reported by a small minority.

Entertainment Industries at University: Designing a Curriculum

Universities have not traditionally trained students to work as producers in the entertainment industries. This key entertainment role involves balancing creativity, business and legal skills in order to generate and run entertainment projects. Queensland University of Technology has recently introduced a program to train students for these jobs. The program is interdisciplinary, drawing on expertise from the Creative Industries, Law and Business faculties. This Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) article details the course learning outcomes developed from extensive industry and academic consultation, and addresses some of the difficulties involved in developing such an interdisciplinary teaching program.