August 12, 2003 12:00am
Australia's Pornography Study Unlocks Porn Secrets
Source: Townsville Bulletin
by: Vera Devai
Super-size breasts scare some men, conservative voters love dirty magazines and adult videos have realistic plots.
These are the interim results of Australia's most comprehensive study into pornography.
The three-year government-funded study, also believed to be a world first, aims to unlock the fascination of pornography in Australia.
The two-part project run by University of Queensland (UQ) and Sydney University researchers comprises a critique of the top 50 adult videos and a national survey of Australia's pornography tastes and buying habits.
The survey is also finding out everything from political leanings to religion, musical tastes and favourite porno plot lines.
UQ media studies lecturer and project leader Dr Alan McKee said the initial results had shattered the "dirty old man in a trenchcoat" stereotype of pornographic consumers.
Twenty per cent of the 320 respondents so far who said they used mainstream porn were younger women, 33 per cent were married, 93 per cent believed in gender equality and 63 per cent considered themselves to be religious.
"What's been interesting about that for us is how many of the people involved in that have been women," Dr McKee told AAP.
The researchers pored over 50 of the top-selling porn videos to analyse their plots and also found that most were believable and empowering for the fairer sex.
The majority of videos were imported from the US and bought through mail order companies in the ACT.
"They tend to have better story lines, better acting, more expensive production values and they actually set up scenarios and fantasies for the lovemaking rather than simply people bump into each other and start having sex," Dr McKee said.
Dr McKee said a lot of the videos were also "very open" about body shapes and tended not to concentrate on women with huge breasts.
"In fact, in quite a few of the videos they actually make it a selling point that there are no boob jobs and it's all natural breasts," Dr McKee said.
Dr McKee said the majority of respondents were Liberal/National voters, which was interesting given those political parties were anti-porn.
The study, which will extend to 1,000 more people nationally, will be written up into a popular culture book and an executive summary given to the Federal Government.
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