Sexualisation/Pornification/Frustration

So, one of my supervisors recently suggested that I should look into the influence / impact of porn on intimacy; that essentially intimacy had become 'pornified'. I thought it sounded like a fair assumption to make, there are a few adult-dating sites out there, such as Adultmatchmaker and Ashleymadison that I'm sure feminist critique would label as having a negative impact on relationships...Indeed, as people like Adam Turpin (2006) and Pamela Paul (2005) would have you believe, society is more or less "pornified", and that men in particular are "wired for porn", an addictive force not unlike heroin use or binge drinking.

A fellow postgraduate student of mine (thanks Joy!) over the weekend linked me to a BBC production called 'Websex: What's The Harm?' (2012), a tongue-in-cheek documentary which purports to give "a revealing look at the growing trend of young people initiating sexual relationships on the internet and mobile devices. What are they risking? What are the boundaries?". It revolves around recent research concuted by Andy Phippen over at the University of Plymouth, who argues that an alarmingly high number of young people in their teenage years are using the internet, and their mobile devices, for casual sex.

However, as I have learnt there are recent critics of the pornification theses and the moral panic. Academics and researchers such as Jacobs (2007), Lumby & Albury (2010), Paasonen (2011), and Smith (2010) have labelled it as being reductive, overly negative and caught in a binary mode of thinking. They argue that the internet, and porn, have changed the way sex and sexual identity is expressed.

I thought that there would be something widely cited on the link between porn and online dating (particularly from the pornification angle, perhaps even a feminist critique which lambasted the way in which men hiding behind a screen treat online female daters with little respect), but so far I have found nothing. If I'm to be honest, the section on the sexualisation/pornificiation of intimacy is, I believe, my weakest part to the literature review so far. If you know of some research that's more along the line of how porn influences the way men and women negotiate dating websites, let me know, because that's essentially my train of thinking, I just don't see anything out there along that line.

References

BBC 2012, Web Sex: What's The Harm?, accessed 09/08/2012, http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/program/24626

Jacobs K, Pasquinelli M, Jannsen M 2007, C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader, Paradiso, Netherlands

Paul, P 2005, Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families, Henry Holt and Company, USA.

Paasonen, S 2011, Online Pornography: Ubiquitous and Effaced, The Handbook of Internet Studies, Mia Consavlo and Charles Ess (eds), Wiley-Blackwell, USA.

Turpin, A 2006, 'Not Tonight Darling, I Am Online', FT.com, accessed 10/08/12, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/docview/228992003