It's Time To Go After Porn
This isn't about being a prude. Do you really know the truth about the industry - and it's impact on society? Prepare to be horrified
Porn is a major public health crisis.
It’s everywhere you look.
Hypersexualisation has become so normalised, it is actually a shock to look back on the washboard abs and thigh high boots of The Spice Girls in the 90s and wonder why anybody ever considered this risqué, when the likes of Bianca Censori exist.
But even putting aside the most extreme case, you only need to delve into the YouTube videos of female artists being watched by teenage girls to realise the message is very clear: Empowerment is all about “owning your body”. But sadly, this means surgically rendering it into a composite of fantasy components for the delight of direct sexual enticement. Basically, becoming a sex doll rather than a fully rounded human.
Adverts targeting little girls to get cosmetic procedures have had to be banned as teens clamour to pump up their lips and mess with their faces to look more like Kardashians.
The hypersexualisation being forced upon teenage girls is believed by many academics to be at the heart of why so many girls now account for adolescents saying they are gender dysphoric. The rate of females claiming to want to change gender is around 75% of all cases, when historically, dysphoria was a very rare condition accounting for a tenth of a per cent of the population and almost uniquely a male condition.
Rape culture in schools is spiralling out of control, with websites of testimonials such as Everyone’s Invited documenting more than 50,000 heartbreaking accounts of school kids sexually assaulting one another.
Child on child rape and sexual assault has skyrocketed. Teenagers now account for half of convicted child abusers.
According to the National Police Chiefs Council report on data from all 42 police forces in England and Wales:
106,984 child sexual abuse offences were reported in 2022, a 7.6% increase on 2021
73% involved sexual offences against children
27% were offences relating to indecent images of children
52% involved reports of children (aged 10 to 17) offending against other children with 14 being the most common age.
The reason being cited over and over again for this burgeoning crisis is the prevalence of pornography.
But this is far more complex than simply saying children should not access adult content. The prevalence and mass availability of pornography, particularly hardcore or fetish, causes major damage to adults, too.
Today, porn is estimated to be cited in as many as 60% of divorces. Ever since it jumped down from still images in dirty magazines with opaque covers on the top shelves of newsagents into a limitless supply of increasingly extreme video content, pop culture has been defined by it. And now that is defining society at large. How else did the Kardashians, a discernibly talentless family who have invested millions on going under the knife to look impossibly crafted for the male gaze, become the highest earning brand in the world, and what sort of message is that sending to people? That their only purpose is to invest in fundamentally changing their biologically natural self for the specific purpose of sexual use. Not loving, intimate sex, but bestial, visual, disposable and on display for everyone, not just your partner. Is it any wonder we have the saddest, most confused generation ever questioning their gender, altering their bodies, unable to forge relationships and sinking under an oppressive culture of unnatural perfection and instant gratification?
But it’s not just the grotesque and tragic effects that normalising porn consumption is having on society, rendering women into objects of casual abuse and sexual perversion and men into impotent falluses only able to stimulated by increasingly hardcore content.
The content itself which needs to be called into question.
The biggest online free pornsite Pornhub had to delete a staggering 80% of its content in late 2020 because it was of either child abuse or rape. Let that sink in.
More than 10 million videos were removed within days of investigation cutting over 13.5 million uploads down to 2.9 million.
Mastercard terminated use of its cards on the site, as did Visa, pending its own investigation. The truth is, with every click and every view, casual porn viewers are keeping afloat a multi billion dollar horror story of child trafficking, grooming, rape, revenge porn, sexual assault and abuse on an industrial scale, with Pornhub alone attracting over 42 billion visits a year. That’s 150 million visits every day. The West is drunk on a level of instant sexual gratification that is frankly disastrous for society at large. And yet nobody is doing anything about it.
And nobody is a passive user.
Casual visitors are not only aiding and abetting some of the most serious crimes behind a veil of anonymity, but normalising them. Every click emboldens an industry that feeds off exploitation, racking up billions for dot com giants with unscrupulous morals. If most men knew that at the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, criminal gangs from Ukraine, Russia, Albania and beyond were lying in wait to pluck off young women by pretending to be charities, only to traffic them into sexual slavery, would they pause to be revolted at what they might be funding with their clicks?
The truth is - and most men may not want to hear this - the vast majority of women do not like fetish, they do not want to perform for camera, casual sex does in the long term cause them deep psychological problems or is rooted in extant ones, and so when an obliging woman is apparently enjoying deep throat, spanking, anal sex, facial ejaculation or threesomes, the truth is, she probably is not. She probably has little choice but to act as though she does. So when men watch porn, they are often partaking in the sexual assault, abuse or rape of a vulnerable woman.
Do the sense check. If this was your sister, daughter, cousin or friend, would you worry about their welfare if they were suddenly partaking in sex acts on camera?
So when the UK government claims it will make the UK the safest country in the world online, I demand to see the receipts. We are miles behind even France and Germany on this, who have already made moves to put age verification on websites to prevent minors stumbling across adult content. Considering the reputations for sexual liberalism both countries have, it’s a wonder Mary Whitehouse’s Britain, which was under a Conservative government for almost 15 years, has allowed in that time such insalubrious and harmful social changes to run amok, and with patently devastating consequences.
Internet Watch Foundation in just 2 years confirmed 118 cases of child rape and trafficking on Pornhub. These are real videos of children being violently abused and traumatised for entertainment and profits.
A study found that 88% of pornography videos contain violence against women. Gagging, slapping, spitting, hair pulling, forceful penetration and unnatural acts that largely bring women zero physical pleasure, and more often than not subjugation and humiliation. This is not suddenly 50 Shades Of Grey is normal and emancipating for all. They are niche fetishes most women don’t enjoy, yet feel pressured into engaging in.
Little girls today are presenting to hospitals with catastrophic injuries to under-developed intimate body parts. They and their male peers are being told that this is all desirable.
There are those that argue that pornography consumption is healthy, enabling us to explore fantasies and so potentially preventing people from acting them out. That doesn’t seem to have been the case with Wayne Couzens who was a regular viewer of brutal porn and felt compelled to kidnap, rape and murder Sarah Everard. That may be an extreme case, but far from sating an appetite, I would argue it creates one.
This is especially true of men from foreign cultures where women are repressed. People traffickers actively advertise on TikTok scantily clad young women on a night out to would-be illegal migrants as an enticement to move to Britain. For a man coming from the Middle East, the existence of Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips who compete to sleep with as many men in a day as possible sends out a deeply dangerous message. Particularly about young, white, otherwise wholesome looking women.
Porn is also affecting men.
Increasingly younger and younger men are reporting impotence, with a third of those under under 40 now suffering from erectile dysfunction having been neurologically rewired to only be able to climax from extreme imagery. Just two decades ago that figure was 2 per cent. What has happened in between? Unregulated hardcore porn.
It has also led to far higher reports of loneliness, detachment, anxiety and depression. The impact on the brain is similar to that of online gambling. It is self-destructive.
The mass and casual consumption of extreme and instant sexual gratification has undone centuries of societal progress that turned uncivilised brutes into the evolved humans we are today. Progress that has not only been reversed within a decade but is plunging deeper and deeper into depths of destruction as readily available carnal clickbait renders a dangerous dissociation that increasingly blurs the lines between what is healthy and what is downright deranged.
When was it acceptable pre-watershed entertainment to put a load of surgically enhanced singletons on an island to have casual sex for the titillation of a nation? This is the New Normal. Except it shouldn’t be. It sends a revolting message to society.
A recent study by Middlesex University found that almost half of 11 to 16 year olds had viewed pornography online. 94% of those had done so by the age of 14. An age that for me, was still happily innocent. Not so today.
My fear is that any attempt to fight this societal blight via the Online Safety Bill will become so diluted in the context of modern day permissiveness that what was normal and respectable, what focused on the sanctity of a relationship and wellbeing of society at large now feels so outdated and prudish, and has now been denied to an entire generation of young people, that it is almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle without bold, top to bottom regulation of the kind alcohol and tobacco are placed under.
Plummeting birth rates, exploding mental health crises, a rape epidemic, spiralling dysphorias, deadly botched surgeries, failing marriages. The message is clear. Pornography is toxic.
I admit that I am a Christian. My fundamental belief is that commitment in a relationship means actively avoiding being titillated or pursuing sexual stimulation by anyone but your partner. It may seem innocuous when it is a video of a stranger, but the rot has already set in against mutual trust, respect and the shared intimacy of monogamy.
The Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy found after extensive research that men who watched porn were far unhappier in their relationships and led to poor quality attachments.
So if we are to stop the systemic abuse of women, the rape and trafficking of girls, the normalisation of extreme objectification, instant gratification and frankly unnatural sexual satiation, the desensitising of men and the poisonous and perverse pressures pushed on women to undergo invasive surgeries to be rendered into something artificially constructed to be used solely for sex, there is only one answer. The entire industry needs to be either highly regulated or shut down. Because the cost is too high.
My fear is that those growing up today to become the leaders of tomorrow have been denied any concept of bounds whatsoever. And that this is already one of the greatest public health crises of a generation.
Alex, the first part of this article left me in tears. The facts are astonishing. As a father to two daughters this is a concern for me on a personal level. My eldest is now 22 and has bought her first property with her childhood sweetheart and all seems well, but my youngest is 17 and on the autistic spectrum. We have had to protect her from the internet. Twice we have intercepted groomers and that was through heavily guarded apps that she has on her iPad.
I have cruised through life without really thinking about the hard hitting truth that the whole pornography industry leaves in its wake, I've just thought it's not for me. Its horrific! What a blinkered fool I have been.
You have educated me hugely in this article and for that I thank you. Please don't stop fighting for our girls and women. Without this kind of work it will never be challenged.
In either 1971 or 72 (I can't remember which) I was one of about 100,000 people who walked through central London to gather in Trafalgar Square and protest about the porn being circulated in the UK at that time. Mary Whitehouse was there, as were Ciff Richard, James Fox (Laurence's father and Edward's brother), Lord Longford and thousands of Christians and other concerned people. Just like with today's mainstream media, the event was ignored because too many of the people in power had vested interests. There IS such a thing as evil and the Festival of Light (preceded by the lighting of alarm flares all over the country) was deliberately "overlooked" by the television and newspaper "elites". They have a lot to answer for. Many of them are dead now and I believe they will have had to answer to God. Today's "elites" (I prefer to call them self-entitleds) should think about what waits for them when their lives on this earth are over.