Is porn good for you?

BBC Radio 4 - Today, 23/04/2013, Is pornography good for you?:

Anna Arrowsmith: Porn keeps couples together, in that it's quite often that one member of a couple would have a higher sex drive than the next one. And there, their choices are, you know, to have affairs or to pester their partner for sex, but they can use pornography as a sort of stopgap, if you like, to use that.

But also, pornography has made lots of sexual acts less shameful in society. Whereas women used to take the brunt of that.

Now, you know I can remember when I was younger, women getting absolutely shamed by doing anything that wasn't, you know, in the least bit sort of mainstream. But now that's - we have a far wider appreciation of sex acts, but also, I think very key is how it's democratised the body.

Unlike mainstream sort of beauty, and sort of magazines or television or even news programs, you see a very narrow type of beauty, but in the porn industry there's literally a market for everything.

I mean everything... you've got an amputee or anything. And I always say to women, you know, if there's something you don't like about your body, put it into a search engine and put +porn and you will find a whole host of sites that find that's the most attractive thing about you.

Unfortunately, when porn is represented through the mainstream press, that's not shown, but it is the case.

[30% of porn is consumed by women] They're watching it, they're paying for it with their credit cards etc. But with the idea, with the moral panic around young people there's an interesting book that's come out, called Becoming Sexual by Dr Daniel Eagen and she refutes quite a few of these points.

For instance, in the United Kingdom, America and Australia, it's been proven that young people are actually, especially young girls, she focuses on because they're the ones that're seen as the victims, are waiting longer to lose their virginity, and when they do, they're using, they're having sex with steady partners and using contraception from the first time. And also pregnancy rates are on the lowest rate for 30 years, as is physical abuse against children and also crime in adolescents.

So the data isn't matching the moral panic. And we've had these moral panics before, we've had them with the video nasties. Where Mary Whitehouse said that in ten years time we're going to see the six year olds that are watching video nasties go out on the streets and start killing people. And at that time journalists showed a list of film names to six year olds and they were admitting to seeing films that hadn't even been made.