”Nothing shocks me anymore,” Kate Dawson told me. We were speaking about her findings on porn usage in the recent Smart Consent Survey. Dawson, a PhD researcher and sex educator, from the School of Psychology, NUI Galway, is one of three authors of the paper. Professor Saoirse Nic Gabhainn (School of Health Promotion) and Dr. Padraig Macneela (School of Psychology) are the others.

This survey is the first of its kind in Ireland, with 1,934 NUI Galway students participating. Those surveyed were asked a range of questions in regard to porn usage and sexual consent. Kate was focused on the porn side of the survey. We spoke about her findings, as well as sex education, masturbation and squirting, in a fascinating, hour-long interview.

Dawson originally started researching porn with the attitude many have about it: a negative one. She believes that this was a product of what she calls sensationalist stories.

“I was expecting to find that it was a really bad thing, whereas in reality it’s not,” she says. “Porn is only associated with some, I suppose, negative outcomes for a very, very small percentage of people. So that’s good because everybody watches it. Well, lots of people do!”

PORN’S POSITIVE EFFECTS

That is certainly true in Ireland: we were the sixth highest consumer of porn per capita in the world in 2016, according to Pornhub. I asked Kate how she got interested in this field and she told me about her work in secondary schools, facilitating sex education workshops.

“The students can write an anonymous question and we answer them the next day,” says Dawson. “Loads of their questions were about porn, about squirting and how to be good in bed. They asked how much masturbation is too much, or worried that they were masturbating too much.”

This got Dawson into researching how porn affects people’s feelings about their genitals.

“It looks like people using porn just to masturbate has positive effects,” she comments. “But for people who are using it as an educational tool, they are way more likely to feel bad about their bodies, because they might be likely to use it as a source of comparison.”

Dawson told me that this was the case especially for young girls, as porn is the only place you can really see what a vagina looks like, whereas for boys penises are more spoken about. “People are kinda getting this idea that penises are gigantic or vulvas are very symmetrical,” she observes.

One of the findings is that in comparison to other European countries, Irish males start watching porn much younger, with 57.9% having watched it under the age of 13 either by accident or on purpose. 0.6% were five and under, 4% were between six and nine and 53.3% were aged 10 to 13. There's a number of possible explanations, Dawson says, including the poor quality of our sex education.

"We really don't have great quality sex education in schools," she says. "Lots of people's parents don't talk about it with their children, and then you hear about it and you are curious. Maybe we watch it a bit younger because we don't get any information from other sources until we're perhaps in transition year."

NOT AN ADDICTION

80% of those surveyed weren't satisfied with the sex education they'd received in school - which leads neatly to the issue of sexual harassment.

"Sexual harassment stems from our history of being really sexually repressed," says Dawson. "People don't think through how their actions are going to potentially really upset somebody."

I ask Dawson about her finding on the number of participants watching porn once or multiple times a day: 26.9% of males, 2% of females, 23.8% of genderqueer/non-binary and 30.8% of transgender people. Dawson explains that according to other research, it isn't an addiction like drugs or alcohol. The brain's passageways don't light up in the same way, but people can feel like they're addicted. If your need to masturbate, or watch porn, is preventing you from going about your day, then there may be an issue.

"When it comes down to problematic porn use," says Dawson, "it really is down to the individual on whether they feel that they have an issue with it."

To finish, I ask Dawson about her recommendations for future education. "I think we need to focus our attention really on getting comprehensive porn literacy education in secondary schools," she replies. "But we do need to start talking about sexual media from a way younger age, especially now - because everybody is online."

Dawson concludes that we need to educate parents and teachers on the best way of dealing with what can seem like difficult subjects.