A Brit In Defence of Porn

The way internet pornography is treated as if it is a public health crisis, you would think we would have to see warnings on porn sites like you get on packets of cigarettes and bottle of alcohol. Something like this:

For this to be possilbe, the policymakers would have to agree on an exact message. In the past, the evils of licentious imagary was taken for granted, handled under the vague heading like“obscenity”. That wouldn’t cut it today — we’re some time removed from any Victorian-like “Society for the Supression of Vice”, thank god.

We live in a more scientific age, and people like Gary Wilson from YourBrainOnPorn have done a commendable effort to warn against the dangers of an internet where every possible pornographic variation is there at a click of your fingers. I encourage everyone, parents and children, porn-aficionado’s and puritans, to educate themselves on the matter.

This article, however, will only have half a foot in that camp.

I was inspired to write this by the new rules for porn sites set to be introduced in the UK this July. Under the Digital Economy Act 2017, pornographic sites must verify that their users are over the age of 18 before

Though the age-verification enforcement is touted as a protection of children, it is also (intentionally or unintentionally) an attack on porn in general: those who are old enough to pass the new barriers still have to suffer through them. Part of that process includes passing personal information onto the porn sites themselves. All users — young and old, responsible and irresponsible, deviant and conservative — are disadvantaged, therefore discouraged from indulging.

The new law is tragi-comic for a number of reasons, not least because the age being checked against is 18, two years older than the age of consent in the UK. 16 — old enough to fuck, but not old enough to view depictions of nudity and sex online.

But most of us already know that the new rules are bad: Wired described it simply as “one of the worst ideas ever”. What seems to me more interesting, is whether pornography is deserving of special treatment (bans, blocks, forced age verification) in the first place.

Porn is… well, let’s just say that, like television and videogames, it is a form of entertainment. Is it fundamentally different than those other forms of entertainment? It puts a representation of something in front of you in order to elicit a reaction. In traditional films the reaction is all cerebral, whereas with porn you are expected to have a physical involvement ie. to masturbate.

But I don’t think that alone is enough to say that pornography and film must be treated differently. Film is a sort of emotional pornography anyway, and porn could be described as theatre that targets the emotion of desire.

If we are going to create restrictions on porn, should we also do so for television and videogames? I’m not asking that for rhetorical effect, but as an honest question: both pornography and videogames are effective at stimulating the reward centres of our brains. Both give us sense of pleasure and accomplishment for an illusionary activity. Both are associated with addiction, with unhealthy lifestyles, with wasting potential, of loneliness and poor social development — I’m not saying pornography and videogames cause these personal circumstances, only that they are associated with them. Also, in many cases, it seems the two addictions seem to go hand-in-hand.

But television, film, videogames, these all have benefits (social, emotional, cerebral) if used responsibly. What benefits could watching porn possible have?

Well, is it so outrageous to claim that there could be some instructive benefit to your sex life to watch videos of people engaged in sexual practices? I’m not saying any porn will do this — sure, a steady diet of Brazzers is likely to make for a bad lover. I’m saying in theory. Kama-sutra visual guide? Honest, unscripted encounters between loving couples? Naturally, videos of lovemaking could be an aide to expand your bedroom repertoire, assuming you are watching the right videos.

That’s just the obvious level, though. Admitting the following may be dangerously uncool, but it’s the truth: porn, like any artform, can be good for us purely because it lifts our spirits. Why else do we bother to take time out of our day to find and watch it? Good porn can calm our senses or inflame our passions, and such rare effects are not ones to be dismissed out of hand.

Should we discourage people from watching porn? Has anyone considered that we could encourage people to watch better porn instead?

Pornography is an art with a specific application, but an art nonetheless. It can have the same role in our lives that other art can ie. to relax, to excite, to offer respite, and to show us something new. It can be healthy, and when it is unhealthy I don’t think it is fundamentally more unhealthy than other forms of adult content online. So should it be treated differently?

We don’t force age verification for videos of injuries, crimes, shootings, war, executions, animal cruelty, or quantum physics. Certainly, I think it would be harder to isolate such material, but trying doesn’t even seem to be on the agenda. Only porn.

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For all the cynical commenters lazily proclaiming that such the law is useless anyway, that kids who want to watch porn will always find a way, I have this to say: no form of ban can, or is expected to, stop every instance of an undesirable activity, but it can discourage people, and even seemingly tiny changes in a system can cause unexpectedly large changes in behaviour. Just making it slightly harder to access porn may mean a small percentage of people don’t partake, and those that do may do so less often, and that sort of change can have some level of widespread impact, cultural or economic (even if measuring that impact might be impossible).

This might be positive. I do believe that people who cut down on pornography, cut down on videogames, cut down on sugar, will end up with a reasonable advantage in life over those that don’t: more time, more energy, more motivation.

That said, I have already mentioned some of the benefits of videogames and pornography, and even sugar is useful in keeping energy levels up (as seen with runners and their glucose pastes). We might posit there is an ideal usage level for these things (one that isn’t zero), where the participant can gain the advantages but minimise the disadvantages.

There is an amount of time spent on videogames that is too much. From the perspective of a child, it feels that no amount of time is too much —in fact, that no amount of time is enough. They could play a game from the second they come home from school until midnight and when Mum tells them it is past bedtime and to come off the computer they will still protest. I’ve learned that you can get a lot out of a videogame in just 30 minutes, then you’ve got the whole evening free for other things. But it took me until I was 26 to realise this. As more children grow up with game-literate parents, I hope better habits will be passed down. But those children that have to learn these lessons for themselves are susceptible to overindulging.

It’s the same with sugary foods, and it’s the same with pornography. The latter is a different case though because, in the UK at least (repression is our middle name), it doesn’t matter how “porn-literate” the parents are: teaching healthy porn habits is not in the typical parenting handbook.

In the fight against smoking, there were legal restrictions but there was also a massive informational campaign. It seems to me that the adverts from public health organizations were the glue that held the campaign together: the public smoking ban alone would have been inconvenient, but without the widespread improvement in understanding the consequences of smoking, the number of quitters would have been far less impressive.

I don’t expect to see adverts about porn usage broadcast on UK television. But if it’s not an issue we take seriously enough to talk about openly, if we can’t start there, maybe we shouldn’t be throwing around bans either.

If we discussed porn more, we might be able to self-regulate better. But we don’t, so we don’t. This law is just another attempt to push realities of modern culture beyond a veil. Deal with it in the dark, pretend it doesn’t exist.

But you can’t uninvent on-demand pornography. We can only deal with it now that it is here. Are restrictions and bans the road we want to take? Will it be effective?

This under-the-rug approach to problem-solving should not be given any moral high-ground. It is a pro-ignorance stance. An educated populace can handle most problems modernity throws out. Teach the realities of sex and the facts of pornography, and you’ll find we manage our vices just fine.

That’s why I’ve got more respect for the way we handled smoking in the UK than how we seem to be handling porn. That’s why I would have so much more respect for a message like the example at the top of this article. “Porn can lead to addiction and a warped view of sex and relationships”. You may or may not disagree with that exact message, but at least it would be explaining the point of view that resulted in the message being there.

Something else the UK has tried recently is to make internet service providers give the option to block adult content, and recent developments have aimed (though not yet succeeded) at having this sort of filter turned on by default for new customers — this, in my opinion, is a more elegant solution than the age-verification system. At present, most internet users choose not to the filters, but I suspect with more options (allowing a distinction between pornography and extreme and/or illegal pornography; allowing different filter options for different users of the network eg. different members of the family) it could be an effective and educational tool. Further development in this area would be a much better use of government time and money than the restrictions due to go into effect in July.

Better sex education in schools is always going to be beneficial. Thankfully, this is something being worked on, and pornography is due to be added to the sex-education curriculum in 2020. I think the key message to get across is simple: use porn responsibly.