FS Magazine’s porn survey

Bareback porn: ‘It doesn’t do me any harm… but it’s bad for other people’
FS Magazine’s porn survey finds one in four gay men watch porn every day
London, 7 August 2012 – Over 1,000 gay men responded to FS magazine’s survey to find out how porn really figures in gay men’s lives. An overwhelming majority (98%) of respondents watched porn, with almost one in four watching it daily (24%) and just over three-quarters viewing porn more than once a week.
In recent years there has been a lot of discussion around whether bareback porn encourages gay men to have unprotected sex. The survey results demonstrate that the answer may not be straightforward. Although almost 96% of those surveyed had watched at least some bareback porn, fewer than 7% felt that it had led to them personally having unprotected sex. However a majority of men (53%) believed that watching bareback porn can lead to others having unprotected sex. As one respondent put it, “The glamorisation of unprotected sex can influence others into doing it.”
FS magazine’s special porn issue also highlights disagreements about the impact of bareback porn from within the industry. Porn actor Dean Monroe told the magazine, “Porn is sometimes the first taste of sex a young person gets, so naturally what they see on screen, they might emulate in life. Every scene should show the model putting the condom on.” Liam Cole, a producer of bareback porn counters, “My porn is not a fantasy, it’s a record of how some gay men f**k. Bareback sex doesn’t take much encouragement.”
Matthew Hodson of GMFA, who publish FS, comments: “It was clear from the response that we got to the survey that gay men are interested in porn. It’s impossible to say precisely how much impact watching porn has on people’s behaviour but it seems that many people, gay or straight, learn about sex from porn, and perhaps this is even more true for gay men, as we are less likely to get a gay sex education at school.”
Other findings from the survey were that more than half of respondents had recorded themselves having sex and almost a quarter of these had uploaded the results to the internet. The results of the porn survey are published in the latest issue of FS magazine, alongside an exclusive interview with porn superstar Matthew Rush and a host of porn-related features and advice. FS magazine is available for free in gay venues and GUM clinics in London, or can be viewed at www.fsmag.org.uk.

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Visit www.gmfa.org.uk/fsapp for more information.