Even if you’re 1000% certain in your beliefs, you should be regularly exposed to contrasting views. Not only do you gain further knowledge, but you also learn how to argue back. This is especially important whenever it seems that “your side” has won the cultural battle: those who fail to carry on making the argument eventually get lazy and cannot rise to the challenge when their cultural hegemony is threatened.
We’re currently seeing this play out in real life in regard to a myriad of subjects: the union between the North of Ireland and Britain, the purpose of religion, the history of Western civilisation, the trans debate.
And now Jo Bartosch & Robert Jessel step into the arena with their arguments about why pornography is not only bad but deeply damaging both for the individual and society overall.
Pornography occupies a strange space in the culture these days: once upon a time it was a battlefield for freedom of speech. Think of Alberts v. California (1957) where the Supreme Court ruled that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment. Or Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997) which was the first case to address the regulation of sexually explicit material on the Internet, and it was ruled that those provisions were unconstitutional. Nowadays, people rarely bat an eyelid at it, unless (understandably) it is revenge porn and/or child porn.
While it obviously isn’t for everyone, is it really such a cultural catastrophe in the way that Bartosch and Jessel make it out to be?
For a start, name checking Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon in a positive manner is a telling indication of the main argument: pornography is evil. Immediately, I have to sigh. To which I’m sure Bartosch and Jessel will assume I’m dismissing them.
I’m not. As I do think that they make many pertinent points such as discussing the crossover between sex education and pornography, which is where the book really hits home as adults are one thing, but children are a different matter altogether:
To a frazzled, overworked teacher, online resource libraries are a godsend. Instead of researching and creating teaching materials from scratch, they simply visit an officially sanctioned third-party website and download everything they need, from factsheets to classroom games to full lesson plans. Need an age-appropriate resource for teaching sex to 11-year-olds? There’s an app for that. The problem is, no one’s checking whether these resources are in fact appropriate at all. In 2023, The Times reported that one of the biggest providers of school lesson plans, TES (formerly Times Educational Supplement), was selling resources for children as young as 11 that described activities including anal sex, pornography and sending nude selfies and dick pics”
How has this situation been allowed to happen?
Sex education in the UK has been described by campaigners as a ‘Wild West’ where any group – including pro-porn campaigners – can submit resources and lesson plans with little to no vetting. That’s hardly surprising given that, until recently, the RSHE curriculum was non-statutory; unlike subjects like maths or physics, there was no government-mandated syllabus that schools had to cover. The introduction of government guidance in September 2020 has yet to provide anything like a clear and uniform framework for teaching sex education. In 2021, a year after the roll-out of the new guidance, the then minister for school standards, Robin Walker, admitted that only a fifth of UK primary and secondary schools had received training on how to teach RSHE. Twelve months later, a joint survey from teaching union NASUWT and the UK’s child-safety charity, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), found that almost half of secondary-school teachers do not feel confident teaching about sex and relationships, while a whopping 86 per cent said they need more resources and training.
A chilling example of how nature abhors a vacuum.
Further discussions around extreme acts in pornography, evidence suggesting that it has rewired the brains of the youth (leading to an epidemic of choking and slapping), zombie feminism and how tech is further removing the act of sex from humanity make for fascinating and uncomfortable reading. However, the tone throughout is one of po-faced hectoring: apparently, people who watch pornography are “clearly accomplices” in the abuse of performers. Really?
At one point, the authors reference the “man or bear” question that did the rounds on social media a while ago without any irony despite the whole thing demonstrating that some women are unable to make a serious point about male violence without resorting to ridiculous hyperbole that undercuts the severity of the argument. And the scenario bookends a chapter on male violence and pornography!
There’s also little to no indication that the breakdown of the traditional family structure and community has also helped in that a stable relationship with family and close neighbours will not only help solidify human relationships but help young men see women as people as opposed to sex objects. These are topics worthy of serious discussion instead of just declaring all pornography the source of the problem.
Certainly a challenging and thought provoking read, but the hectoring makes it much more difficult to sympathise with the authors and their arguments.
Jo Bartosch & Robert Jessel, 2025, Pornocracy. Polity. ISBN: 978-1509565139
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.
Sounds as if they are two Evangelical Christians!!!
ReplyDeleteAs far as I'm aware, they're not. Bartosch is a journalist who has written extensively about the trans issue and Jessel works for the LGB Alliance.
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