In praise of the porn ban
There is no right to enjoy pain and degradation. Thanks to The Critic magazine where this article was first published on 8th November.
Pity the perverts: they’ve had a stinker of a week. Brand is behind bars, the World of Walliams has been dismantled, and now porn users can no longer legally access pornography showing schoolgirls being strangled by their “horny stepbrothers”. It’s enough to leave pornography users squinting through tear-filled eyes and grasping for a fresh tissue.
The last of these modest wins for humanity, a law criminalising possession or publication of certain types of extreme pornography, is predictably being cast as the first step towards tyranny. Jess Asato MP’s addition to the Crime and Policing Act has majority public support: 78 per cent want scenes depicting strangulation banned, 77 per cent say the same of incest porn, and 88 per cent oppose pseudo-child pornography featuring adults pretending to be under 16. Support is lower among men, young people and pornography users, but remains in favour overall. Good news surely? Democracy, it seems, is working.
But the implementation of the law has unleashed a swarm of furious oddballs, some of whom claim to be libertarians, fretting that their days of masturbating to films with titles like “Young chubby toilet slave gets pissed on and fucked with her head in toilet” (genuine title) may be numbered. They are certain that the prohibition on downloading such content is an infringement on their human rights, rather than simply a long overdue adjustment that brings online content into alignment with DVD and print. (Though depressingly, as it happens, so long as the “chubby toilet slave” can breathe and doesn’t look too childlike, the chances are it would remain legal.) With almost admirable chutzpah, they are now trying to shame their critics who defend the new law.
Yet today, just 48 hours after the ban, if you search “strangulation porn” the fourth result on one of the most popular search engines is a site called “Rape Lust” which helpfully has a whole section tagged under “strangulation porn”. It sits in the search results just above an article in the Economist bemoaning the ban as illiberal.
The latest law came into force on 6th November, which would have been Jane Longhurst’s 55th birthday. Longhurst, a Brighton teacher, was murdered in 2003 by Graham Coutts, who had a longstanding sexual interest in strangling women and viewed online pornography depicting strangulation, rape and violent sex. Her mother Liz’s campaign helped secure the 2008 law criminalising possession of extreme pornography depicting life-threatening acts.
“Choking”, as it is euphemistically described, isn’t a harmless bedroom game. Pressure to the neck can render someone unconscious in as little as 10 seconds, trigger a seizure within 17 seconds, and cause death in under three minutes. Survivors can suffer lasting brain injury, miscarriage, thyroid damage and loss of bowel control. One study found that people previously strangled by a partner were 7.5 times more likely to be killed by that partner. Home Office reviews found that strangulation was the method of killing in one in four domestic homicides.
It is also so depressingly normal that some school children are now warned about it during sex and relationships education. A BBC poll found that 54 per cent of women aged 18 to 24 had been “choked” during sex, compared with 38 per cent of women aged 18 to 39 overall.
Some police forces are concerned that the new law will be difficult to enforce. In a Guardian report this weekend, DCI Gerard Smith, who oversees a team of specialist child-abuse investigators in West Mercia, said officers see the effects of violent pornography daily as they knock on doors in the early hours to arrest people viewing or sharing child abuse material. “The volume of arrests is going up very significantly,” he said.
Across England and Wales every month, police arrest about 1,000 people (overwhelmingly men) for online child sexual abuse offences. The officers say that men report having travelled through escalating extreme pornography habits to get to “a dark place”.
“They describe a numbness to extreme material,” DC Pep Saladino told the Guardian. “There is a desensitisation — that is how they find themselves in a dark place. Often the men we arrest tell us they are glad to have been caught.”
That’s in part because the existing law to curb violent pornography was never used against pornography sites or platforms. In 2014, regulations extended BBFC classification rules to UK on-demand services, prompting pro-porn campaigners to simulate sex acts in the road outside Parliament. Just as today, the claim was that “face-sitting” would be banned. In 2019, following whining by some of the very same “civil liberties” campaigners who ignored feminists being fired for social media posts that offended trans activists, the CPS revised its guidance under the Obscene Publications Act. The CPS declared, “It is not for the CPS to decide what is considered good taste or objectionable.”
The consequences of inaction, of pretending that unlike any other form of media pornography exists in some hermetically sealed realm, have been devastating. Criticising pornography has become “kink shaming” — an embarrassing, low status opinion. This insouciance about pornography has bled through into the school curriculum to the extent that today, many young people simply think violence and pain are normal parts of sex.
A viral post on X in defence of Brand by a young dental nurse described this more eloquently than I could. First, she failed to understand that Brand had committed anal rape against a young fan. When she was corrected she added:
“Why are people attacking me for trying to understand? I’ve had men do this but I had no idea it was rape. I put it down to the heat of the moment and normal. I’m not sure I’d go to the police for that. Maybe we need to start recording what we do and don’t concent (sic) to before sex.”
This is what pornography has done. It has created a world where generations have now grown up not understanding women’s most basic bodily boundaries. This is a social catastrophe. Attempts to correct this through law might be belated, but they are better than nothing.
Anyone whose brain has not been deprived of oxygen should welcome a law targeting footage of women being strangled, dressed up as little girls or made to enact incest and not pretend access to such content is a human right. Because there is no way women can have freedom of speech when porn addled men have their hands around our throats.