Imagine A World Without Pornography
A review of ‘Pornocracy’ by Jo Bartosh and Robert Jessel
In the final year of her life, the legendary anti-pornography campaigner Andrea Dworkin worried that feminism was losing to ubiquitous pornography. “If we give up now, younger generations of women will be told porn is good for them, and they will believe it,” she told journalist Julie Bindel. Almost a quarter-century had passed since Dworkin declared “the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die” and joined forces with legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon to enact an Anti-Pornography Ordinance in cities around the country.
The Ordinances were struck down by US courts on First Amendment grounds, which proved to be a decisive defeat for anti-porn feminism. Would such Ordinances be conceivable at all today?” Back in 1981, Dworkin referred to magazines such as Hustler, as well as the then-newly available videotapes depicting graphic sex acts, as “the new pornography.” By 2004, however, pornographers and the internet produced new “new pornography” at dial-up speed. Though Dworkin did not live long enough to see broadband internet and internet-enabled phones become ubiquitous, she did foresee the defeat of feminism at the hands of yet another “new pornography,” or as a new book labels it, “pornocracy.”
In Pornocracy, authors Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel write that “today’s porn is as far removed from your grandad’s centrefolds as a petting zoo is from an abattoir.” Porn sites contain so much imagery of performed abuse, known as “gonzo porn”, that it is impossible to separate out the uploads of genuine abuse, which are distressingly common. The two most common keywords for exploitative and coercive content are “schoolgirl” and “teen”, while sexual violence and real or simulated abuse of minors are both widespread and wildly popular. Far from a sexual liberation for women, the pornocracy consists of “ancient patriarchal scripts rebooted for the digital age”, offering only “a future of relentless sexualized surveillance, where women and girls are shut out from public life altogether” if they are to avoid pornification.
“Limbic capitalism,” which exploits primal emotions, pleasure, and memory at the level of the brain, is the secret to the success of websites like OnlyFans. Dopamine habituates users to anticipate the bliss of consuming it, like when the smoker craves a cigarette. This excitement is different from the actual sensation of pleasure from the nicotine. This habituation, whether harmful or beneficial, acts in the same way on the brain, creating reward systems that harden plastic neural pathways, as in drug addiction. But unlike exposure to a substance like fentanyl, which creates a physiological need, the addictive quality of the experience of viewing porn stems from this limbic habituation; it does not fit neatly under the umbrella of addiction as it is traditionally understood. For example, the American Psychological Association does not recognize pornography addiction, although Bartosch and Jessel note that it has no compunction about recognizing other nontraditional diagnoses such as gender dysphoria. Perhaps that is because there is no money to be made in telling a man to stop using porn, while gender distress can be medicalized at great profit.
A Hard Habit to Break
“Half a century of feminist-led anti-porn theory has made a negligible impact on men’s willingness to be aroused by the degradation of women”, the authors acknowledge. “To reduce the death grip of pornography on our culture and society,” they argue, “we have to convince men that porn hurts them.” How does this harm manifest? By conditioning men to perform “solipsistic sex” that pleases the pornographers, but does not resemble sex between real people who are making a real connection — and disconnected men are discontented men. “Life under the Pornocracy is eroding what pushes ordinary people to greatness: our willingness to make ourselves vulnerable by falling in love.” Porn exploits a man’s natural desire for variety by pushing a stream of ever more extreme material. “Each scene imprints itself, dulling empathy and twisting desire, until what once repelled now arouses,” introducing themes and images they cannot enact in a real relationship with a real person. Porn users are simultaneously sensitized to crave these images while desensitized to their violence.
Reading this book, I was reminded of another commentator from the early 1980s who saw it all coming: filmmaker David Cronenberg. His masterpiece, Videodrome, now seems a very obvious and prescient take on the internet and autogynephilia. In the story, Max Renn, the pornography-addled character played by James Woods, has a monster-movie-like vagina installed in his chest, into which are fed videotapes that take control of him and weaponize his “new flesh” in a series of hallucinatory sequences. Cronenberg foreshadows the 21st century, when transgender writer Andrea Long Chu openly declared that he regards women as sex objects and wishes to become the pornified object himself. Bartosch and Jessel argue that “This grotesque definition of womanhood is not an outlier; it is the foundational belief of transgenderism.” Pornography has played a policy role in the rebranding of paraphilias as “whole, authentic selves.” The reification of these pornographic ‘gender identities’ is evidence that pornographers increasingly “dictate the moral, social and legal codes that govern our lives.”
Ubiquitous
Pornography is everywhere and yet off-limits for discussion. “Across the political spectrum, grave-faced politicians and pundits opine that social media has led to extremism and the blunting of discourse. Yet the impact of pornography on how the sexes view themselves, and one another, remains a curious lacuna in the commentariat’s chat.” Take, for instance, the case of Wayne Couzens, a Metropolitan Police officer in the UK who was convicted of the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Sarah Everhard.
When it emerged that Couzens was motivated by disturbing, pornography-fueled fantasies, Parliament conducted an inquiry into the role of pornography in fueling violence against women and girls. The inquiry found that Couzen’s viewing habits were a significant “red flag” that police forces missed. “The sexualized hatred and abuse of women is so normalised it does not even register during vetting procedures,” giving men like Couzens authority to abuse women. Even worse, they argue, regular men are increasingly empowered to murder women. “To date, at least sixty men in the UK are known to have killed women and then successfully argued in court that the killings were the result of a sex game gone wrong.” Porn sex is the new wife-beating, the new hidden crime against women, and it is rarely challenged. Magazines marketed to women regularly advise them to embrace their husbands’ porn consumption. Mainstream voices do not speak out against the dangers of sex that imitates porn.
What About Women?
But why, if porn sex is so dangerous, do pornography user statistics show that women are far more likely than men to use BDSM pornography? The answer, the authors observe, is almost always that a male introduced any given female to pornography, which in turn becomes a means to cope with their experiences at the hands of men. The vast majority of self-uploaded images of underage pornography are also from girls.
The authors speculate that “Extreme pornography is warping their highly plastic brains, normalising brutal sexual behavior and embedding misogynistic attitudes at an age when they’re not even old enough to have sex.” Indeed, the earlier a child sees pornography, the more likely they will seek out violent pornographic material in the future: the statistical jump between age 11 and 12 is striking. “While not every child who watches pornography will go on to commit abuse, it undoubtedly shapes their ideas about sex, empathy, and boundaries,” with the result that “violence is an inextricable part of sex” for the new generation. Dworkin was right: young women believe porn is good for them because they have been told it is feminist to say so, and the porn has affected their brains.
While the pornographers want us to believe that their product is good for couples, no more harmful than an after-sex cigarette, porn is, in reality, solitary, and sex that imitates pornography is mechanical, which ultimately robs couples of the mutual satisfaction that strengthens a relationship. Across the western world, fertility rates are down and almost half of Gen Z reaches adulthood without ever having a significant romantic partner. Rather than sexual liberation, we have “sexual anorexia” because our brains are aroused by, and emotionally attached to, images that warp our libidos instead of the presence of another person. Sex drive has been detached from biology.
Zombie Feminism
The authors take the World Health Organization and UNESCO to task for pushing ‘sex positivity’, which the authors identify squarely as academic queer theory aimed at sexualizing children. In contrast to Dworkin’s feminism, which defended the interests of women as a political class, Bartosch and Jessel see a “zombie feminism” that “feeds on the social pressures to which girls are subjected, namely: to be sexy, and to be kind” to avoid social ostracism. This ‘feminism’ confuses money and sexual attention from men in positions of power with empowerment. The authors also see the ‘manosphere’, typified by influencer Andrew Tate, as the flip side of this zombie feminism, an empty “substitution of love for ownership due to fear.”
Pornocracy contends that pornography does not locate genuine desires so much as create them. Scientific research in this area is difficult, as it requires showing pornography to test subjects. For instance, approximately 3 percent of men are aroused by cross-dressing, a consistent result across decades of research, yet pornography has not transformed three percent of American males into ‘trans women’. This suggests that freely available pornography does not, in fact, convince otherwise normal males to become transgender. Rather, men who may have such an interest will surely find it on the internet, developing their taste for it. It seems straightforward. However, as the authors explain, heterosexual men can be drawn into gay and transgender pornography when they become desensitized to other genres, so extreme usage does seem to lead down dark paths. The debate is over how, not whether, pornography shapes our tastes for the worse; it always shapes our tastes for the worse.
Considering what is at stake, one might be tempted to retitle this book, Humanity Against Pornocracy. Bartosch and Jessel want to raise an alarm. “The pushback against porn can only be effective once we recognise it as a threat to the species” and “reforge the link between sexual intercourse and love – or, more fundamentally, simply to rediscover the joy of real sex.” To make matters worse, a generation has been taught via queer theory that porn is necessary for liberation, that “pornification must take place before a minority group is deemed worthy of human rights,” replacing “political vision and personal ambition” with “a warped vision of progress”.
A reckoning is due. “The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too,” Dworkin declared in 1981. She was calling upon the dream of female solidarity, a dream denied in her lifetime and still unthinkable. We cannot unplug the internet. Laws that limit expression quickly become onerous. It is hard to even imagine a world that is not a pornocracy, and yet Andrea Dworkin dared to try. Can we?
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