The Times - UK (2021-12-18)

the times | Saturday December 18 2021 39

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Porn apologists are running out of excuses

The pop star Billie Eilish will be an inspiration to many young people in rejecting grotesque images of sexual violence

calls a “normalisation” of sexual

harassment and porn being woven

into children’s lives.

Children’s charities have implored

the government to bring in age

verification. True, a 16-year-old may

circumvent any barrier. But 60 per

cent of 11 to 13-year-olds are first

exposed to porn unintentionally, so it

might at least stop a small child

blundering across gang rape. (And if

Netflix can defeat VPNs, why not

governments?) The online gambling

industry has used age verification

successfully for years.

Dame Rachel de Souza, the

children’s commissioner for England,

reports that porn companies are

happy to introduce age verification

via third-party sites. But they want

government to compel them so

everyone must fall in line. De Souza

says her office is having under-21s

draw up online guidance aimed at

protecting younger siblings. She

says: “They are seriously concerned.

I doubt they’ll be letting their

children do it.”

A generational shift is under way.

Those supporting unlimited porn

access aren’t liberated promoters of

social justice, but shills for Big Porno

which degrades human sexuality for

cash. Younger people, whose

childhoods were defiled, will agree

with Billie Eilish who says with a

fearlessness born of pain: “As a

woman, I think porn is a disgrace”.

companies, users feared their

identity and sexual proclivities would

be exposed in any data breach. The

proposal that porn access tokens

could be sold at newsagents was

viewed with hilarity and horror.

Yet since 2015 political pressure to

bring online platforms under the

same ethical and legal constraints as

terrestrial publishers has grown.

There is disgust at Instagram and

Facebook for allowing, say, self-harm

images to be viewed by vulnerable

teenagers. Moreover, the moral

exceptionalism once afforded to porn

is dead. Last year campaigners

revealed that Pornhub allowed child

rape and other non-consensual acts

to be uploaded on to its platform.

When MasterCard threatened to

block use of its cards on the site,

Pornhub took down ten million

videos overnight. Thus the world’s

heedless governments were schooled

in ethics by a credit card company.

It is now impossible to ignore the

alarming sexualisation of children

exposed to porn. An Ofsted report in

June revealed that nine out of ten

secondary school girls and half of boys

had been sent unsolicited “dick pics”.

In the two primary schools it studied,

children were already accessing porn.

Only the wilfully blind could dismiss

a link between girls being pestered

for nudes, TikTok videos where 14-

year-olds proclaim they enjoy being

strangled and spat on, what Ofsted

“ethical” porn. (As if a few arty shags

can displace Pornhub’s millions, or

that men would watch them.) Yet I’d

bet her students, boys and girls

suffused in traumatising images from

childhood, now angry their most

tender, intimate selves have been

shaped by rapacious companies,

would consider stronger solutions.

This week a joint committee

report was published on the draft

Online Safety Bill, putting age-

verification controls back on the

agenda to keep children safe from

accessing pornography. Although a

government commitment since 2015,

this was kicked around for years

until finally killed by Nicky Morgan

three months after Boris Johnson

became Tory leader. With an

election looming, the prime minister

was reportedly unwilling to get

between Red Wall man and his

right hand.

Five years ago this policy was

loudly disdained: surely canny, horny

teenagers can breach age blocks with

virtual private networks (VPNs)

which conceal your country location.

When porn companies proposed

launching their own verification

B

illie Eilish began watching
porn aged 11 to be cool, “one
of the guys”. But the brutal,
abusive scenes she
encountered gave her
nightmares and in her first sexual
relationships she complied with acts
she hated “because I thought that’s
what I was supposed to be attracted
to”. Porn, she said this week,
“destroyed my brain”.
Yet already Eilish, who only turns
20 today, is being censured for her
“anti-porn tirade”. Her lush voice,
dark lyrics and seven Grammys can’t
save her from being branded a Swerf
(Sex Worker-Excluding Radical
Feminist), a slur applied to any
woman who dares challenge the
global sex trade.
For a decade the supposed
progressive position on pornography
has been that it is liberating and “sex
positive”. Those alarmed by its
ubiquity and ever more savage
content are right-wing, “pearl-
clutching” old prudes. Cancel culture
has given porn a free pass. A 1990s
sitcom episode must be erased for

showing blackface and an unwanted

pass is classified as abuse. Yet porn,

awash with grotesque racial tropes

and extreme sexual violence

including choking and slapping,

often of apparently non-consenting,

underage girls, is mere “fantasy”.

When you point out this paradox,

many in their mid-twenties and

thirties insert fingers in ears. So

Eilish’s opinions raise a fascinating

question: have the youngest adults,

internet natives, scrolling

smartphones from 12, watching

anal sex years before their first kiss,

formed a different view of porn?

In her recent book The Right to

Sex, the Oxford professor Amia

Srinivasan describes teaching her

students the work of “second wave”

feminists Andrea Dworkin and

Catharine MacKinnon, who argued

that porn writes the script for male

oppression. Srinivasan assumed

undergraduates would find their

position as outdated and repressive as

she did. Instead they were electrified,

agreeing with 1970s feminists that

porn objectifies women, ignores

female pleasure and, like Eilish, that

it groomed them into sex acts they

didn’t enjoy. Srinivasan reflects that

at 36 she only encountered porn as

an adult, while “sex to my students is

what porn says it is”.

Srinivasan concludes with the old

liberal fudge, that violent porn is best

defeated by feminists creating

Women said they felt

groomed into sex acts

they did not enjoy

Janice

Turner

@victoriapeckham