I am currently in college for Human Services (essentially a stepping stone for a number of careers like addiction counselors, mental health counselors, social workers, etc) tonight our seminar was about pornography and prostitution, and was truly appalled by how many people supported legalized prostitution and considered the banning of something like porn unreasonable. However, interestingly enough my classmates were more critical of the porn industry and were actually shocked that no “age verification” is required for porn sites. I am disappointed that so many women have fallen victim to this illusion that prostitution and porn are lifestyle choices no different than being a “paid athlete” (that was an actual comparison someone used.) One of the stats in our text book mentioned that the average sex worker had 694 partners a year-I am not sure how any woman can interpret that as empowering experience “that’s totally not exploitative.”
Men on Twitter kept comparing it to boxers or MMA fighters, which strikes me as pretty insulting to boxers and MMA fighters... Like, these guys are highly trained athletes who *want* to fight and enjoy their sport.
They only relevant point they have in that context is that historically boxers specifically (not sure about the MMA) were those with far less economic opportunities thus more willing to get their ass kicked for money (I only know this bc my cousin did it after he got out of prison until he got his life together.) HOWEVER, that is still ridiculous considering the reality of our society that regardless of how woke or accepting someone claims to be there will always be a stigma associated with sex work due to the inherent biological and sexual differences of men and women. Those who argue against that may want to consider how many prostitutes and porn stars do they interact with regularly and not in a form of virtue signaling or to further exploit them? If these academics and activists truly believed there was no stigma they would be clinking glasses with them at charity events on behalf of their cause-showing everyone how they are totally fine and definitely not suffering from the exploitation they chose to promote.
Thanks Meghan, this is excellently written and spot on. Hopefully more voices and legislation are similarly raised to eliminate this horrible scourge. Always liked your work, and this made me a subscriber.
I think I might get 'anal sex is not speech' on a t-shirt. It's insane that pornographers managed to get videos of sex acts designated free speech or expression.
To all those saying banning porn isn't possible and anyway porn can't be defined, how about starting by banning certain types of porn? Rape porn, for example, and porn in which the actors purport to be children. Making it illegal to produce fake child sexual abuse material is hard to argue with, right? From there you could move on to Holocaust porn, slavery porn...the list is truly endless.
haha. We could go all sorts of places with that slogan... Re: banning certain kinds of porn, I haven't thought this through enough to know if it would work, but it seems an obvious move to ban 'barely legal' porn... Though I suspect they'd find a way to get around it idk...
It only just occurred to me we could try banning different types of porn as the first step in a progressive approach, but I reckon it could work because which politician actually wants to stand there and say, yes, men SHOULD be able to wank to incest-themed barely legal videos, it's their right!
i love this article. it reminds me of a friend bridget who (this is back in the early 1980's) was jumping up and down in the backyard smoke billowing... she was burning a playboy magazine she had found and jumping on the embers. back in the day we all thought this was very wise. we being a whole pile of teenage boys and girls. hurrah for bridget!! hurrah for meghan!!
Thanks Meghan. It's a well-written piece. I'm going to have to read more and watch the comments. I'm in an uncomfortable place: I agree with your points in this article, but am secure in my conclusion that government or big-corp-government censorship is a huge loss of liberty, and not in a this-is-an-unfortunate-trade-off kind of way. How to protect the vulnerable without transforming the government and the powerful into authoritarian moral arbiters?
I understand your points about men (I make no apologies for being one). But, for the record and to offer some anecdotal balance, I've said "no" a few times to women who have encouraged or outright requested sexual acts from me that I felt were shameful or would compromise me in really stupid ways. Men aren't the only perverted sexualists out there.
Finally, I share your wide-eyed distress about the lack of boundaries between porn and children. I'm at a loss. So much tech, so much bad content, so many ways to get around filters and controls. My wife and I talk with my son as much as possible about this stuff. As he matures, we try to discuss porn and sexuality with careful regard for what's out there and who he is. Ignoring it probably isn't the best answer for us.
I agree that women encourage this stuff too, and probably should have made that more clear, as I don't actually think it's always, like, them being pressured. But I think the REASONS they do it is because they think it makes them 'sexually liberated' and that it will impress men. I know men who've also said 'no' to women who ask for violent acts, as they should imo.
Re: the point that 'government or big-corp-government censorship is a huge loss of liberty,' I agree, but honestly don't see this as 'censorship, if we approach it from a prostitution lens. If we approach from a 'banning certain imagery,' we might end up in a sketchy zone...
I think it is essential to recognize that the policies (pornography & prostitution abolition) many of us advocate for are not solely beneficial to women. For instance, my brother and many other male family members suffered severe sexual abuse as children. It is not a coincidence that they all struggled with a pornography addiction later in life (and yes, I am aware that many people who have porn addictions were not sexually molested or raped as children.) It breaks my heart to say that my brother still struggles with that addiction. He did not elect to get help until his wife disclosed this to my sister, my mom, and me, wherein we talked with him about our concerns. That conversation was tough; he cried and admitted he hated that his addiction was controlling his life, wrecking his marriage. He later recognized it was prolonging much-needed healing from his childhood. Porn is not simply harmful to the sexually objectified; it is disruptive and addictive to the consumer.
Contrary to popular belief, a well-written law can be established something along the lines of:
Sexually explicit imagery or video content that depicts penetration or oral sex acts or ejaculation.
Sexual imagery in which one or more individual is nude and positioned in a sexual nature that does not have historical or educational relevance either appear in the image or explained in the accompanying text.
Sexually explicit content does not include: women wearing bathing suits, marketing lingerie in the absence of nudity, those in clothing which some may interpret as sexually suggestive, such as short skirts, short shorts, low-cut tops, backless dresses, etc., so long as they are not also performing sex acts. Such content restrictions should never be employed on content that would deliberately interfere with or diminish a woman’s self-expression or inherent sexuality so long as it does not include nudity.
Big Tech would seem to be the only group that could actually enforce a porn ban, so banning porn would require giving Big Tech even more censorship power than they already have, while also putting those ever more powerful Big Tech censorship tools even more firmly in the hands of politicians.
Right now we seem to have the worst of both worlds - an internet filled with the dregs of humanity but also Big Tech overlords arbitrarily swinging the banhammer at a few token targets, deserving or otherwise.
That mix of anarchy and random drive-by censorship arguably still seems better than if the censors actually pull ahead and establish hegemony. If they can fully ban porn, they can fully ban TERFs too.
Whack-a-mole, basically. Chase it off specific platforms by all means (I can't believe Instagram hasn't), but it will pop up somewhere else, because as long as demand exists supply will adapt and find a way.
The only way to stay ahead of supply-and-demand driven whack-a-mole is to establish control over every website, run out of every country, so that porn producers have nowhere to distribute their product except a guy in a back alley with a trenchcoat full of DVDs.
Cutting off online porn distribution is doable, but then we'd have a handful of Big Tech oligarchs who basically control the entire internet. At which point the question becomes what else they'll do with all that power, now that they've got it.
Yeah true, re: the whack a mole. But this is why we need to go after the companies that produce it, making it as unprofitable as possible... We can't just chase individual women around the internet... Like, can't we make legislation that makes it illegal to profit from porn?
In the US/Canada, yes. In Romania or wherever that Tate guy was operating out of, not so much.
(Side note: It's actually kind of impressive that Tate was such a dumbass he managed to get himself arrested for pimping in Eastern Europe of all places. That's like getting arrested for IP theft in China)
I don’t know how realistic this would be but maybe a nonprofit that helps women who want to get out pornography and prostitution-providing them with financial assistance or fund their education so they have other economic opportunities. & maybe seek out some of the most watched porn actresses in hopes to get some of them to consider other opportunities thus narrowing down the supply. We have to stop looking at only minors as victims of sex trafficking and extend that to those in the adult film industry. But your suggestion of shame is a good start, there should be shame surrounding the exploitation of women.
Indeed, it would mean the end of the free and open internet as we know it, and would go way beyond porn. Even then, porn would simply migrate to the Dark Web and be accessible by anyone who downloads Tor, just like all other illegal stuff would be.
It would be easier to shut down social media (which is not very easy to do) than it would be to eradicate online porn.
To really tackle demand, you would also have to criminalize the possession and consumption of porn as well, and set up reverse stings (fake porn websites run by law enforcement) to catch them as a form of legalized entrapment. That comes with it's own can of worms. Keep in mind that a good chunk of porn consumers are women, so they will undoubtedly get caught in the dragnet as well.
And defining it? No one has ever been able to legally define it beyond "I know it when I see it", lol.
Slopes are MUCH slipperier than they appear, in other words. Be very careful what you wish for.
For better or worse, porn is here to stay, both online and off. The best one could do is to jam the culture, I think.
You can't eradicate online porn, but you can definitely ensure the industry shrinks enormously, make it harder to produce and profit from, etc. Doing that doesn't equate to more abuse, that makes no sense as the abuse in porn now is endless, on account of there being a multi billion dollar industry and billions of consumers.
The less of it and the harder to make/access the better...
We could indeed make a law that makes it illegal to profit from the exploitation of others, across the board, for example. Problem solved. Well, kinda. Of course, that would effectively result in the end of capitalism, a system in which exploitation is literally a *feature* rather than a bug. Fair enough. So what are we waiting for?
I think as a society we decide on practices that are unacceptable, then address those practices through legislation: murder, rape, domestic abuse, slavery... The argument that everything made illegal will make it worse doesn't make sense because we also, for example, have made it illegal to breed and kill tigers for profit (for anything, really). This has created a black market in places like Thailand, but would you argue we should simply legalize?? I mean, that's insane. The argument that prostitution and porn are jobs like any other (i.e. all exploitative in exactly the same way) also makes no sense, considering having sex for money is like no other job... We all *know* porn is abusive and degrading. We can all see this. Why do we pretend otherwise?
I am currently in college for Human Services (essentially a stepping stone for a number of careers like addiction counselors, mental health counselors, social workers, etc) tonight our seminar was about pornography and prostitution, and was truly appalled by how many people supported legalized prostitution and considered the banning of something like porn unreasonable. However, interestingly enough my classmates were more critical of the porn industry and were actually shocked that no “age verification” is required for porn sites. I am disappointed that so many women have fallen victim to this illusion that prostitution and porn are lifestyle choices no different than being a “paid athlete” (that was an actual comparison someone used.) One of the stats in our text book mentioned that the average sex worker had 694 partners a year-I am not sure how any woman can interpret that as empowering experience “that’s totally not exploitative.”
Men on Twitter kept comparing it to boxers or MMA fighters, which strikes me as pretty insulting to boxers and MMA fighters... Like, these guys are highly trained athletes who *want* to fight and enjoy their sport.
They only relevant point they have in that context is that historically boxers specifically (not sure about the MMA) were those with far less economic opportunities thus more willing to get their ass kicked for money (I only know this bc my cousin did it after he got out of prison until he got his life together.) HOWEVER, that is still ridiculous considering the reality of our society that regardless of how woke or accepting someone claims to be there will always be a stigma associated with sex work due to the inherent biological and sexual differences of men and women. Those who argue against that may want to consider how many prostitutes and porn stars do they interact with regularly and not in a form of virtue signaling or to further exploit them? If these academics and activists truly believed there was no stigma they would be clinking glasses with them at charity events on behalf of their cause-showing everyone how they are totally fine and definitely not suffering from the exploitation they chose to promote.
Thanks Meghan, this is excellently written and spot on. Hopefully more voices and legislation are similarly raised to eliminate this horrible scourge. Always liked your work, and this made me a subscriber.
Thank you so much!
I think I might get 'anal sex is not speech' on a t-shirt. It's insane that pornographers managed to get videos of sex acts designated free speech or expression.
To all those saying banning porn isn't possible and anyway porn can't be defined, how about starting by banning certain types of porn? Rape porn, for example, and porn in which the actors purport to be children. Making it illegal to produce fake child sexual abuse material is hard to argue with, right? From there you could move on to Holocaust porn, slavery porn...the list is truly endless.
haha. We could go all sorts of places with that slogan... Re: banning certain kinds of porn, I haven't thought this through enough to know if it would work, but it seems an obvious move to ban 'barely legal' porn... Though I suspect they'd find a way to get around it idk...
It only just occurred to me we could try banning different types of porn as the first step in a progressive approach, but I reckon it could work because which politician actually wants to stand there and say, yes, men SHOULD be able to wank to incest-themed barely legal videos, it's their right!
That’s a great idea I never thought of that and would probably be easier to get support for that
i love this article. it reminds me of a friend bridget who (this is back in the early 1980's) was jumping up and down in the backyard smoke billowing... she was burning a playboy magazine she had found and jumping on the embers. back in the day we all thought this was very wise. we being a whole pile of teenage boys and girls. hurrah for bridget!! hurrah for meghan!!
Thanks Meghan. It's a well-written piece. I'm going to have to read more and watch the comments. I'm in an uncomfortable place: I agree with your points in this article, but am secure in my conclusion that government or big-corp-government censorship is a huge loss of liberty, and not in a this-is-an-unfortunate-trade-off kind of way. How to protect the vulnerable without transforming the government and the powerful into authoritarian moral arbiters?
I understand your points about men (I make no apologies for being one). But, for the record and to offer some anecdotal balance, I've said "no" a few times to women who have encouraged or outright requested sexual acts from me that I felt were shameful or would compromise me in really stupid ways. Men aren't the only perverted sexualists out there.
Finally, I share your wide-eyed distress about the lack of boundaries between porn and children. I'm at a loss. So much tech, so much bad content, so many ways to get around filters and controls. My wife and I talk with my son as much as possible about this stuff. As he matures, we try to discuss porn and sexuality with careful regard for what's out there and who he is. Ignoring it probably isn't the best answer for us.
Again, tough topic. Thanks for writing.
I agree that women encourage this stuff too, and probably should have made that more clear, as I don't actually think it's always, like, them being pressured. But I think the REASONS they do it is because they think it makes them 'sexually liberated' and that it will impress men. I know men who've also said 'no' to women who ask for violent acts, as they should imo.
Re: the point that 'government or big-corp-government censorship is a huge loss of liberty,' I agree, but honestly don't see this as 'censorship, if we approach it from a prostitution lens. If we approach from a 'banning certain imagery,' we might end up in a sketchy zone...
Thanks for your thoughts!
I think it is essential to recognize that the policies (pornography & prostitution abolition) many of us advocate for are not solely beneficial to women. For instance, my brother and many other male family members suffered severe sexual abuse as children. It is not a coincidence that they all struggled with a pornography addiction later in life (and yes, I am aware that many people who have porn addictions were not sexually molested or raped as children.) It breaks my heart to say that my brother still struggles with that addiction. He did not elect to get help until his wife disclosed this to my sister, my mom, and me, wherein we talked with him about our concerns. That conversation was tough; he cried and admitted he hated that his addiction was controlling his life, wrecking his marriage. He later recognized it was prolonging much-needed healing from his childhood. Porn is not simply harmful to the sexually objectified; it is disruptive and addictive to the consumer.
Contrary to popular belief, a well-written law can be established something along the lines of:
Sexually explicit imagery or video content that depicts penetration or oral sex acts or ejaculation.
Sexual imagery in which one or more individual is nude and positioned in a sexual nature that does not have historical or educational relevance either appear in the image or explained in the accompanying text.
Sexually explicit content does not include: women wearing bathing suits, marketing lingerie in the absence of nudity, those in clothing which some may interpret as sexually suggestive, such as short skirts, short shorts, low-cut tops, backless dresses, etc., so long as they are not also performing sex acts. Such content restrictions should never be employed on content that would deliberately interfere with or diminish a woman’s self-expression or inherent sexuality so long as it does not include nudity.
Big Tech would seem to be the only group that could actually enforce a porn ban, so banning porn would require giving Big Tech even more censorship power than they already have, while also putting those ever more powerful Big Tech censorship tools even more firmly in the hands of politicians.
Right now we seem to have the worst of both worlds - an internet filled with the dregs of humanity but also Big Tech overlords arbitrarily swinging the banhammer at a few token targets, deserving or otherwise.
That mix of anarchy and random drive-by censorship arguably still seems better than if the censors actually pull ahead and establish hegemony. If they can fully ban porn, they can fully ban TERFs too.
I don't see why it would be so hard to ban porn.. It's not hard to find? Twitter isn't a porn platform, so why have it there?
Whack-a-mole, basically. Chase it off specific platforms by all means (I can't believe Instagram hasn't), but it will pop up somewhere else, because as long as demand exists supply will adapt and find a way.
The only way to stay ahead of supply-and-demand driven whack-a-mole is to establish control over every website, run out of every country, so that porn producers have nowhere to distribute their product except a guy in a back alley with a trenchcoat full of DVDs.
Cutting off online porn distribution is doable, but then we'd have a handful of Big Tech oligarchs who basically control the entire internet. At which point the question becomes what else they'll do with all that power, now that they've got it.
Yeah true, re: the whack a mole. But this is why we need to go after the companies that produce it, making it as unprofitable as possible... We can't just chase individual women around the internet... Like, can't we make legislation that makes it illegal to profit from porn?
In the US/Canada, yes. In Romania or wherever that Tate guy was operating out of, not so much.
(Side note: It's actually kind of impressive that Tate was such a dumbass he managed to get himself arrested for pimping in Eastern Europe of all places. That's like getting arrested for IP theft in China)
And there would be plenty of "nonprofit" porn sites popping up even in the USA. Some far leftists already have their own one called "Freedom Porn".
I don’t know how realistic this would be but maybe a nonprofit that helps women who want to get out pornography and prostitution-providing them with financial assistance or fund their education so they have other economic opportunities. & maybe seek out some of the most watched porn actresses in hopes to get some of them to consider other opportunities thus narrowing down the supply. We have to stop looking at only minors as victims of sex trafficking and extend that to those in the adult film industry. But your suggestion of shame is a good start, there should be shame surrounding the exploitation of women.
Indeed, it would mean the end of the free and open internet as we know it, and would go way beyond porn. Even then, porn would simply migrate to the Dark Web and be accessible by anyone who downloads Tor, just like all other illegal stuff would be.
It would be easier to shut down social media (which is not very easy to do) than it would be to eradicate online porn.
To really tackle demand, you would also have to criminalize the possession and consumption of porn as well, and set up reverse stings (fake porn websites run by law enforcement) to catch them as a form of legalized entrapment. That comes with it's own can of worms. Keep in mind that a good chunk of porn consumers are women, so they will undoubtedly get caught in the dragnet as well.
And defining it? No one has ever been able to legally define it beyond "I know it when I see it", lol.
Slopes are MUCH slipperier than they appear, in other words. Be very careful what you wish for.
For better or worse, porn is here to stay, both online and off. The best one could do is to jam the culture, I think.
You can't eradicate online porn, but you can definitely ensure the industry shrinks enormously, make it harder to produce and profit from, etc. Doing that doesn't equate to more abuse, that makes no sense as the abuse in porn now is endless, on account of there being a multi billion dollar industry and billions of consumers.
The less of it and the harder to make/access the better...
We could indeed make a law that makes it illegal to profit from the exploitation of others, across the board, for example. Problem solved. Well, kinda. Of course, that would effectively result in the end of capitalism, a system in which exploitation is literally a *feature* rather than a bug. Fair enough. So what are we waiting for?
I think as a society we decide on practices that are unacceptable, then address those practices through legislation: murder, rape, domestic abuse, slavery... The argument that everything made illegal will make it worse doesn't make sense because we also, for example, have made it illegal to breed and kill tigers for profit (for anything, really). This has created a black market in places like Thailand, but would you argue we should simply legalize?? I mean, that's insane. The argument that prostitution and porn are jobs like any other (i.e. all exploitative in exactly the same way) also makes no sense, considering having sex for money is like no other job... We all *know* porn is abusive and degrading. We can all see this. Why do we pretend otherwise?
Indeed, Big Tech is a two-headed dragon. Fox, meet henhouse. We need to be VERY careful what we wish for!