We want to thank the 5,000+ people who took the time to tell us about your experiences of online pornography.  We hope that your willingness to trust us with your feelings about this will be repaid by the way we use them.

It will take us some time to carry out our analyses of this very large and complex set of responses.  We will be exploring both the statistics these generate, and the (often very long) answers to our open questions – and the relations between these.  We will then be presenting and publishing our findings in a variety of ways.  We will  publish a digest of our main findings here on this website,  you can find preliminary results here and the original questionnaire is available here.

This is very important to us.  One of the main motives for our research was that porn research has been dominated by completely artificial, and highly judgemental ways of investigating, that simply won’t ask ordinary people what they enjoy about porn, and what it means to them.  Instead, such research judges from afar, and effectively presumes them (you) to be incompetent, and damaged.  It also aims its results towards moral campaigners and policy-makers, not the people it is claiming to talk about.  We belong to a different research tradition which believes that people who contribute to knowledge should have the chance to think about and learn from that knowledge.  So, we aim to make what we learn as available and accessible as we can to you, our participants.

Thanks again.

Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood & Martin Barker