The pornography industry desperately needs to be regulated as websites prioritise profits over people and the threat of artificial intelligence looms large, an international sexual violence expert says.
Fiona Vera-Gray, one of Britain's leading feminist academics, delivered a keynote address at a symposium on sexual violence in Melbourne on Friday about how pornography websites advertise sexually violent content to audiences.
She looked at the UK's three most popular porn sites and found one in every eight videos advertised to first-time users on their front page described sexual violence in their titles.
That was despite the websites' terms and conditions banning sexual violence, including simulations of rape, child abuse and anything that encouraged someone to commit a crime.
"They are not interested in regulating themselves. We need to just understand that - they don't care," Dr Vera-Gray told the Sexual Assault Services Victoria forum.
"They've got (their) terms and conditions ... and then alongside that, they've got (these) titles on their front page, pushed by their own algorithm."
Porn sites advertising sexual violence to first-time users raised questions about supply versus demand in the industry, when people were shown the content without even asking for it, she said.
"These porn sites could do things very differently - you go to Google and what is it? A blank page with a search bar, (saying), 'what do you want?' They don't do that."
Advertising and broadcasting rules banned "incredibly sexist representations" and racist stereotypes, but they still existed in porn, Dr Vera-Gray said.
She stressed representation was just as important in porn as it was in other media and suggested governments should think seriously about how they could regulate the content, while noting it was hard to keep tabs on people's online activity.
Referencing another author Natalie Purcell, Dr Vera-Gray said society could make porn and sex "be anything" it wanted.
"We've created pornography that just replicates all of the inequalities that we have in the world ... it makes them erotic, it makes them desirable," she said.
"Who are we if this is what we desire?"
Recognising porn's complexity and doing away with binary notions of it being "bad" or "good" would be a major step in addressing the industry's issues, she said.
Oversight was particularly important with the rise of artificial intelligence and "deepfake" porn, along with greater investment in virtual reality porn, Dr Vera-Gray said.
"We've got to hurry up with because these things are getting away from us," she said.
"There is massive amounts of funding going into the metaverse from the porn industry and the porn industry has driven technological advances through the years."
Dr Vera-Gray, who is the deputy director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, has published the research in a new book.
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Australian Associated Press
