Aotearoa, it’s time we had “the talk” about porn. The Spinoff launches Porn Week on November 7, an entire week of content dedicated to our relationship with pornography and brought to you in partnership with Netsafe.

The week will coincide with the launch of Chris and Eli’s Porn Revolution on The Spinoff, a new six-part documentary series in which local comedians Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson start a campaign to get Aotearoa to talk about porn.

Together we are asking some big questions. Who owns all the online porn that we consume? How are sites like OnlyFans changing the dynamics of the industry? What impact is online porn having on our rangatahi? Can porn be ethical, artful, even feminist? How should parents and schools be responding to the rise in porn consumption? And how does sex as depicted in porn compare to sex in real life?

Pornography is more popular than ever and ignoring it isn’t going to change the fact that Pornhub gets over 115 million views a day with 13 videos uploaded per minute. Sites like this now form the basis for many young people’s sexual education – a 2018 study found that 75% of boys and 58% of girls had watched pornography, and that 25% of those who have watched pornography were exposed at 12 years or younger.

“In today’s ‘always online’ world, no information-vacuum goes unfilled. Search engines and apps are at the tips of everyone’s fingers serving up information to all.” Says Netsafe CEO Brent Carey. “

“We are partnering with The Spinoff to deliver a level of creativeness to a topic that kids often struggle to talk about. Throughout the week we will be raising awareness about pornography and promoting positive online experiences by removing the taboo of sexual conversations.”

There’s much to be critical of when it comes to pornography, but it won’t be all doom and gloom. Porn Week will also tell the stories of people who have porn to thank for helping them realise their own identities, and content creators who are taking back the power on user-led platforms like OnlyFans. We’ll speak to the producers building an ethical porn empire, and the team who made Aotearoa’s only feature length gay pornographic film in 2011.

Bringing you these issues in a range of digestible formats, from Toby Morris’s Side Eye comics to data visualisations, Porn Week will take a taboo topic and thrust it into the public domain in a way that no mainstream media site has done before. There will be uncomfortable conversations, there will be hilarious confessions, and there will probably be a few parts that are NSFW. We aren’t claiming to have all the answers, but we’ve got to start somewhere.

“Porn Week and Chris and Eli’s Porn Revolution are big steps for us at The Spinoff to start some long overdue conversations about pornography and our relationships to it,” says Spinoff editor Madeleine Chapman. “We’re so grateful to be partnering with Netsafe to get Aotearoa talking about porn in an open and humane way.”
 

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