LONDON, Ont. – Their goal: nothing less than cracking the “porn genome.”

Their method: create fake company websites full of sex jokes to arouse curiosity, then launch a crowdfunding campaign where donations result in real sex toys from the fake companies.

Use that money to create an online platform and use crowdsourcing to get hundreds of people to analyze the thousands of genes that make up pornographic images.

Their mantra: Do it. For science.

London, Ont., researchers with an ambitious goal are embarking on an unusual campaign that sidesteps traditional grants — and the politics that go with them — by tapping ordinary people on the Internet to help do for pornography what DNA did for zoology.

“It is quite possible that we are completely out to lunch, I will throw that out there,” said researcher Taylor Kohut.

Kohut is a social psychologist at Western University who’s studied pornography for about 10 years, although this project is something he and others are doing on their own and isn’t connected to the university.

Kohut has faced his fair share of criticism for studying pornography, a widely popular but widely denounced activity for centuries. One anti-porn crusader calls him the Marlboro Man of porn.

“It is not always a pleasant place to be in, when you are that guy that does those things that people don’t agree with,” Kohut said.

That doesn’t bother him as much as the politics of pornography research that can predetermine results.

“There is a very strong component of our research community that is very anti-pornography and does its best to find ways to convey that it is terrible,” he said.

“And then a minority of people that say, ‘Well there are some terrible things that are there probably because of pornography but you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You are not really looking at your data carefully.’ And that is the group I tend to fall in.”

As troubling to him as a researcher, and a related issue, is the lack of a clear and comprehensive definition of pornography.

“I study what porn is. I study how it impacts the way people think, feel, behave and I would like to one day study why it is people choose what they do and not other things. To answer all of those questions you need to have an understanding of content,” he said.

The current research into pornography uses a butcher’s cleaver rather than a scalpel to dissect a huge body of work, Kohut said.

For example, it’s common for researchers to say that 88% of pornography is violent. But that percentage includes everything from rape to two adults agreeing to spanking, he said.

“It is unlikely to me as a psychologist that watching one type of material that is consensual would lead to the same sort of outcomes as forced sex. That seems implausible,” he said. “We want to be able to tease things apart in a much more precise way, so that we can study it. We want to know who uses what kind of material and why.”

To tease out the elements of porn, Kohut first needs money. Limited funding for research and erotophobia — a fear of sex — can both play a factor in being denied research dollars.

“So far we have not been successful in pushing this sort of agenda. I have tried a couple of times,” Kohut said.

So the researchers are going a different route: crowdfunding. And they took a back road to get there as well, by creating an online guerrilla campaign, the kind of curiosity-building effort used at times to promote movies and video games.

The campaign began several months ago with the appearance online of a company called Proctor and Lever, a “medical research center in Wilmington, Delaware.”

It should be quickly apparent to website visitors that the firm is either fake or the worst — some cynics would say most typical — corporation in America.

Most of the products and work done by the company involve sex, and the jokes are not for the prudish at heart. Neither is the webpage of a subsidiary, called Porn for Science.

“We are not expecting your grandmother to come to the site and say, ‘This is hilarious,’” Kohut said.

The Porn for Science page describes what is officially called the Porn Genome Project, and that’s when things get a little more serious.

In a video about the project are links to the actual crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.com.

The campaign page on Indigogo.com explains in detail what Kohut and associates are up to, and the rewards that come with different levels of donations — from condoms to vibrators and other sex toys branded with logos of Porn for Science, Proctor and Lever or the Porn Genome Project.

With the money raised, researchers want to build a database that can store “the thousands of features that constitute the basic genes of pornographic imagery,” the website explains, providing a sample of those genes, from beds, boots, lace and parts of the anatomy.

“We believe that small differences in these genetic codes make pornographic images unique from one another,” an explanatory video on the website says.

Once that database or platform is built, a website will harness “the collective power of amateur porn scientists,” by presenting pornographic images and asking viewers about the presence, absence and degree of certain features.

“You will indicate whether an image contains a naked woman, a bed, a pair of fishnet stockings, or any of the thousands of other genes and indicate where in the image each of these features are located. Once you’re satisfied with your work, you can move on to a new image, and ultimately sequence as many additional images as you’d like,” the fundraising site explains.

In keeping with the reward system, the website will post leader boards for “total ratings and minutes dedicated to sequencing the genome to help you feel proud about how you spend your nights alone.”

Another reward, learning what you like and don’t like, the website promises.

Kohut agrees the approach, from fake companies to crowdfunding and crowdsourcing reward systems, is unusual.

“We are social psychologists. If we want this to be successful, we have to capture attention and there are limited ways to do that,” he said. “You can have reservations whether or not it’s fun to treat pornography in a fun way as we do, but a certain proportion of people are attracted to that and we need money.”

The campaign has a goal of $50,000 but the research will start in stages or at different scales if less money comes in. Kohut is hoping at the end to have a clear, objective genetic mapping of porn that can be used in different studies.

“At a psychological level, the divisions we need to study this phenomenon (pornography) need to be more discrete, more focused than they are,” Kohut said.

Long before DNA, scientists used similarities and differences in the sizes and colours of plants and animals — morphology — to distinguish them.

“We don’t even have that in porn,” Kohut said. “We have something far worse, which is just arbitrary decisions on the part of researchers that vary dramatically from person to person. Understanding what porn is is absolutely essential to doing productive research.”

rrichmond@postmedia.com

Porn Genome Project questions:

What is and isn’t pornography?

How can pornography be categorized in psychologically meaningful ways?

How can we use our refined understanding of pornography to build a more nuanced understanding of its effects on consumers, both positive and negative?

Sample of the hundreds of “genes” in pornographic images:

Heels, pillow, bed, lace, thighs, room, sitting, slender, thong, skirt, ribs, gold, freckles, boots, tongue

How the project works:



Raise money through Indigogo.com

Reward donations with toys, tools branded with logos

Build platform of pornographic images

Have people view images online, answer questions about elements (their genes)

Take those answers to create precise comprehensive map of porn (the genome)

Use refined classifications in genome to better understand porn, and its impacts

What’s real, what isn’t

Not real: Porn for Science, Proctor and Lever — fake companies to build interest

Real: Porn Genome Project — legitimate crowdfunding, crowdsourcing research

The Marlboro Men of Porn

Taylor Kohut has been involved in several other recent studies with findings

— Effects on couple relationships: most common answer: not negative.

— Average porn users hold more egalitarian views regarding women than non-users.

Opposition to findings has been fierce, with the nickname of the cigarette promoting icon the most succinct