Thread by @dilanesper

A lot of followers responded to my sex positive thread about the Internet and young women by asking "what about porn?".

It's a very good question. And I might as well say it-- I think the right wing and feminists have a point about porn as we stand in 2025.

To be clear, "as we stand in 2025" is crucial here. Part of the problem with critiques of pornography is there really was a "crying wolf" phenomenon. The religious right, after all, opposed Henry Miller novels and tried to ban the shipment of dildos under the Comstock Act.

And the religious right and feminists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin equivalenced girly magazines in the 1970's and 1980's with rape.

The critiques were really over the top.

But... the porn industry decided to spend the last 30 years proving their critics right.

As you might imagine, given my sex positive bent, I don't think there's anything wrong with describing or depicting adults in the nude or having sex. This is an ancient practice-- on the walls of Pompeii and in Moche pottery from Peru, you can find depictions of human sexuality.

If you think about it rationally, the whole notion of treating the description or depiction of human activities with taboos is silly. Sex isn't Lord Voldemort-- it's something almost all of us do and which is actually pretty important to us.

There is, I will concede, a justification for age restrictions, because parents have rights (as I discussed in other contexts) and transmitting porn to minors is a massive infringement on them, and is dangerous to the minor as well.

But consenting adults? It's silliness.

So there's this tradition in American society of censoring stuff that adults should have every right to read and view, and you can't talk about porn without acknowledging that history and how bad it was. People were arrested and jailed for it, including my grandfather.

And it was capricious. Something was "obscene" in one place and fine in another. French art films and American stag films contained the same content and would be treated completely differently by the censor. Pornographers would insert material of "social value" to evade censors.

And of course, you could see the same stuff in National Geographic or the art museum that was suddenly dangerous if you saw it in a girlie magazine.

You do not want to go back to the days when porn was unprotected speech. Nor could we.

But the fact of the matter is, while that sort of harmless porn does exist even now-- we have lots of nude models on the Internet, plus plenty of totally consensual amateur porn and professionally produced material that depicts normie sex-- we also have a lot of harmful material.

First, globalization made the porn industry worse. Instead of hiring ordinary women in the Valley and paying them the equivalent of a couple of thousand bucks in today's dollars for a missionary position scene, pornographers go to Eastern Europe to pay $50 for "gonzo" scenes.

There is massive worker exploitation in the production of porn. You see it right on the screen. Girls being slapped, whipped, tortured, crying, forced to do painful sex acts, excreted on, forced to vomit, degraded. And they come from poor countries and make little money.

There have been repeated allegations of sexual assault against numerous big name porn actors and producers, as well as claims that girls were deceived and not told what they were going to be recorded doing (so as to get a more "authentic" reaction.

Second, the viewer is a participant in the abuse. Here, MacKinnon and Dworkin's arguments have particular force in 2025 even if they didn't with Penthouse Magazine in 1984. If you are masturbating to scenes of real women being abused, you are participating.

And indeed, the reason all this abuse is happening is consumer demand. This is really important-- if men weren't so degenerate in what they wanted to see, you might still have the "low pay/Eastern Europe" problem but you wouldn't have the "girl is tortured on the set" problem.

The growth areas in porn, ever since the Internet made it so much more widely available, are all in abusive material. Videos of couples engaging in romantic-looking or even hardcore vaginal sex do not generate nearly as much revenue as "gonzo" material.

And even the gonzo material has gotten far more obscene. I am old enough to have rented porn at the video store. At that time, an "extreme" video might mean it had anal sex in it (not fun for most female porn stars but an act many couples do). But now "extreme" means much worse.

I don't think you need to either be a radical feminist or a religious crusader to understand that if men are masturbating to orgasm stimulated by images of women getting excreted on or slapped around or with 3 penises inside them or vomiting, this is a very dangerous situation.

Third, as just about every young sexually active single woman is saying, the stuff in porn is making its way out into the real world and being normalized. Guys want anal, they want to slap girls, they want to be rimmed, etc. Even girls they barely know and where there is no trust

Choking could be a thread in itself. When I first became sexually active, there was no choking in porn and I didn't even think about it or conceive of it when I was having sex. Now, apparently it is almost as common as oral sex for many young women. And it's very dangerous.

Fourth, and again, this is a point MacKinnon and Dworkin made, porn is turning women into objects. To be clear, men have objectified women long before porn. Porn didn't invent this problem. But it made it worse. Think about a kind of silly issue- plots in porn movies.

The plots in porn movies were never great examples of thespianism. But still-- porn movies used to have them, because they were designed to be watched either in a theater or from front to back in a VCR machine.

And plots HUMANIZE the characters.

Even a silly plot humanizes the characters. Linda Lovelace goes to her doctor because she can't orgasm from intercourse. The doctor discovers her clitoris in her mouth. As stupid as that plotline is, it does at least ask the viewer to consider Lovelace's character's interests.

Whereas modern internet porn has no plot. You have no idea whatsoever who these people are. What their motivations are. Why they are having sex. Whether they know each other. What turns them on (although you always know the man is turned on because they show ejaculation).

Similarly old porn magazines used to have text next to the pictorials, telling you at least something about who this girl was. She's from Oklahoma City, she loved horses, and she wanted to be a nurse growing up. It was vapid, but it said "this is a human being". Not anymore.

The way porn works now, women are nothing but interchangeable, disposable objects. They might as well be Real Dolls. These are human beings and they are being treated like garbage, and why not? The material gives you no understanding of them as human beings.

And again, this makes its way into relationships and hookups. I'm not a purist about this-- consensual sex that is kind of degrading or breaks taboos can be fun. But to do that in a healthy way, you need to actually understand your partner as a human being and respect her.

Porn is telling its male viewers that their partners are entitled to no respect at all, deserving of no respect. They are completely dehumanized.

Fifth, there's the matter of the Internet and the fact porn is ubiquitous. I have discussed this before with Internet betting-- I am not anti-gambling but there was something to the idea that you had to go to the den of vice, the casino or racetrack, a stigmatized place, to do it

Well, we've been on a long trajectory with porn. You originally had to go to the underground screening room. Then it became the Pussycat Theater. Then the adult video arcade. Then the video store to rent a tape.

Now you can look at it on your laptop or phone.

You no longer have to risk any sort of stigma to look at it. There's no friction. You can get it anywhere, anytime. Indeed, people even look at porn at totally inappropriate places like work or school or public transportation.

And there's so damned much of it, and the algorithm selects for the most "gonzo" material. It's actually kind of hard to find the sort of erotic and not abusive porn on the internet (search for "couples porn" but even then you have to refine your search somewhat).

Whereas it's really easy to find the abusive stuff. Just like the algorithms on social media sites often promote the worst sort of content that generates outrage and clicks, porn algorithms promote the worst kinds of porn and make things worse.

Sixth, there's the issues that arise from amateur porn. To be clear, amateur porn has long existed-- in the 1960's and 1970's couples took Polaroids. People have long seen the value in stimulating their partners, and there have always been exhibitionists as well.

But the Internet made it easy to distribute amateur porn. Indeed, it created demand for the content, because for porn sites, they don't have to pay copyright royalties when they distribute amateur content. So we are awash in it.

And a whole lot of it is nonconsensual.

Major porn sites are full of stuff recorded with hidden cams, plus sex videos that people promised to delete and then shared, plus straight out revenge porn. The sites will take stuff down if they are notified, but obviously that doesn't happen very often. We are awash in it.

And of course the presence of all this revenge porn also contributes to one of my earlier points, which was the bad behavior of young men. Because what do young men demand nowadays? That's right, they want to record it. And once they do, it can spread like wildfire.

So you have this thing that has absolutely made things worse for young sexually active people, really not only here in the US but all over the world. What can we do about it?

And here comes the depressing answer: not much.

The Supreme Court just upheld age verification, but really, that's not going to work. Young people already figured out how to use VPN's to get around the parental controls on their phones and computers-- they will have no problem circumventing age statutes too.

In any event, even effective age verification would only affect a small part of this problem. It wouldn't do anything about the extreme content, the worker abuse, the proliferation of nonconsensual amateur porn, or the imitation of porn and dehumanization of women IRL.

And the reality is, while I sometimes see a social conservative saying "well we'll just ban porn", you can't actually do it. First, it won't work (see above with VPN's).

Second, there are massive First Amendment problems because it's hard to draw lines between artistic expression and porn.

Indeed, the reason why porn became (mostly) constitutionally protected was precisely because SCOTUS spent the entire decade of the 1960's trying to draw lines, and it turned out to be impossible.

Third, this is the Prohibition problem on steroids. You can't actually ban stuff that people really want to consume without imposing a totalitarian police state.

I have a great example of this and it's one of the few inspiring stories about Internet porn. The Middle East.

You can literally find, on major porn sites, HUNDREDS of amateur porn videos recorded in repressive theocratic dictatorships like Iran and Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. These people literally risk their lives to show the world their sex lives.

That really speaks to how primal the urge for sexual expression is. It's so important to people that they will literally risk their lives in a repressive dictatorship to do it. Let that sink in for a moment.

That's why we find porn from the ancient world. It's why all those Polaroids exist of the couples from the 1960's and 1970's. It's why Deep Throat was a big hit with respectable Americans and video stores grew huge adult sections in the 1980's.

You can't stop people from wanting to do this. Wanting to produce and wanting to consume. It is almost as primal a desire as sex itself is.

So then, is it all hopeless? Basically, yes, I think it is. But I'll at least try to do some constructive proposals.

The biggest is if I were an educator, I'd think about trying to set the public schools up as the anti-porn. This would require a LOT more frank discussion of sex than religious right types would like.

But I think you have to intervene early and get students to understand why this material is bad and dangerous and disrespectful to women. It's at least worth a shot. Try and shift demand away from the worst sorts of porn.

Second, I think the Eastern Europe side of the industry is a workers' rights issue and we could start treating it like one. Would the Supreme Court hold that foreign porn made by exploiting workers is protected by the First Amendment? I don't know, but it's worth a shot.

Third, we should regulate the amateur porn market a lot more than we do. Make Section 2257, which requires documentation of the ages of the participants, much more universal and hold distributors liable for distributing nonconsensual content.

It might even be possible for things like videos that are obviously filmed with hidden cameras to have special documentation requirements, so we know they are consensual or they don't stay up.

Fourth, we should considering using the tort and criminal justice system against pornographers who abuse women in videos. This also raises constitutional issues-- a lot of BDSM fans will want to say that Lawrence v. Texas extends to hitting people on camera. But, does it?

At the very least, again, if we can't make it fully illegal to show certain acts, maybe we can at least impose documentation requirements where you have to document real consent or you can be charged with a crime or sued in a civil action for abusing a woman on video.

At any rate, we need to try to be creative here. Sexual expression is free speech and is important and, as I said, reflects a primal human need. But a lot of modern porn is a scourge of humanity. We should think about how to thread the needle.