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This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Around 11 per cent of British people have sex at least once a week. But 14 per cent of men (and 1 per cent of women) watch porn at least twice or three times a week. Each day, there are more visits to porn sites than to Amazon, Linked-In, Netflix, Zoom and eBay combined.
These are just a few of the eye-opening facts in Jo Bartosch’s and Rob Jessel’s fine new book, Pornocracy, which charts the rise of a new world order in which online porn shapes the offline world, from trends in street style and cosmetic surgery to relations between the sexes inside and outside the bedroom. Its ubiquity, they argue, is changing the way both men and women feel and think about themselves and each other, overwhelmingly for the worse.
Pornocracy, Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel (Wiley, 2025)As the title of their first chapter has it, this is “not your granddad’s porn”. Standing out in a saturated market means engaging in an escalating contest to produce ever more extreme content. Curiosity draws consumers in, and variety keeps them clicking through. Scenarios that evoke strong emotions, even if unpleasant, ensure that palates don’t become too jaded.
That means boundary-breaking, freak shows and serious violence. The most popular porn category is “barely legal”; the most common tag in content presented to first-time users is “teen”. Scenarios involving incest are wildly popular; so is “pseudo-child” pornography featuring women who are above the age of consent but don’t look it, often dressed in school uniforms.
The bodies featured in porn are parodies of nature: women with enormous breast and butt implants; male “chicks with dicks”. A taste for sissy porn, in which men are degraded by being forcibly feminised, is central to many trans-identifying men’s belief that they are really women.
The unedifying contest between Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue, two OnlyFans performers, to have sex with the most men in a single day bears about as much resemblance to eroticism as extreme eating competitions do to gourmet dining.
Close-ups of women gagging, vomiting and crying in fear and pain are commonplace. Gameshow-style setups in which men win if they succeed in stripping a woman and forcing her to perform sex acts whilst she wins if she successfully resists make it possible to film sexual assault whilst remaining within the law.
According to a former porn producer, shooting ever more extreme scenes is a conscious decision taken to stand out from the crowd. “At first it was relatively benign — gang-bangs, anal, that kind of thing. Then it was dressing girls up like pre-teens and picking them up on swing sets in schoolyards, forced oral until they threw up, forced anal … The more uncomfortable the girl looked, the more the industry would give it awards.”
Why would anyone watch this? In part because desensitisation means they need a stronger stimulus to become aroused. Even men who take the taboo-breaking step of viewing child porn find it boring after a while, and seek out porn featuring ever younger victims and ever more violent abuse. In part, too, because the combination of arousal and disgust may not be pleasant, but is at least powerful. Many people would rather feel something — anything — than nothing.
How much does it matter? Obviously a great deal for the people who are abused to satisfy the demand porn creates: the women trafficked, coerced or taken advantage of, and most especially the children.
But what about the consumers? Bartosch and Jessel give a fair amount of credence to the claim that porn can be addictive, although it’s not classified as such in manuals of psychiatric disorders. “Like any backstreet drug pushers,” they write, “the pornography industry understands the power of harnessing the limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for feeling and gratification, and has become highly skilled at hijacking it.”
But they also acknowledge that what happens inside the brain is less important than the impact on behaviour. Even benign activities such as shopping and eating can be engaged in compulsively despite devastating harm to the individual and those around them.
Everything about how humans interact with each other is influenced by experience. Now a significant number of people, mostly men, spend far more of their lives watching naked, rutting strangers than having sex themselves, and have seen a variety of sex acts that not even the most dissolute Roman emperor could ever have imagined.
It’s not plausible that this has no impact on their ideas about what people should look like and how they behave. Media consumption influences many social beliefs: when is the right age to marry, how many children to have, what constitutes mental health.
Whether or not porn actually rewires viewers’ brains, it certainly rewires our beliefs about ourselves and each other, how the sexes are supposed to interact, and what it means to be attractive and morally acceptable.
Teenagers now think slapping, spitting, choking and anal sex are mainstream sexual activities
Porn normalises grotesque cosmetic surgery, hairless female bodies and silicone-plumped lips. It’s why teenagers and young adults think slapping, spitting, choking and anal sex are mainstream sexual activities, and why two-fifths of 16–21-year-olds tell researchers that girls enjoy physically aggressive sex acts.
Although most committed viewers are men, a quarter of young people stumble across online porn by the age of 11. Its influence leaks out into society at large through fan fiction and social media, and into song lyrics and film and TV plotlines.
In economics, a doom loop is a vicious cycle in which a government’s spending decisions and market sentiment mutually reinforce negative trends that can bring down the banking system. In the porn doom loop, boys watch porn that normalises once-rare sexual activities, and girls absorb the idea that these activities are likely to be exciting for them, too, and certainly essential if you want to satisfy a sexual partner. Both sexes think the other expects activities that previous generations would have regarded as far outside the mainstream.
Porn is also intertwined with the other pernicious internet-mediated contagion of the age: trans identification. The slogans “trans women are women” and “sex work is work” both express the position that womanhood is a performance, sex is about how things look rather than how they feel, and relations between the sexes are transactional and hierarchical.
For porn producers, man is subject and woman object, which is precisely the same position as the transactivist one that a man can “live as” a woman by dressing as one and acting submissive. To quote from “Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?”, an essay by trans-identifying male journalist Andrea Long Chu, “getting fucked makes you a woman because fucked is what a woman is” and the “essence of femaleness [is] an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”.
Porn is one of the animating forces behind the zombie school of feminism that sees anything a woman chooses to do as “empowering” — in particular when it involves taking money from men. In this zero-sum game, getting men to pay you for sex means getting one over men — and never mind that the men think they’re getting one over women. The normalisation of transactional sex cannot but foster a profound cynicism about the opposite sex and make trust, let alone love, much harder.
As is generally the case in books about vast societal shifts, Pornocracy is stronger on description than remedy. In the final section, the two authors write individually and offer somewhat different prescriptions. Bartosch recommends stricter laws, including age verification requirements for websites with adult content, the criminalisation of “deepfake” porn, and the routine recording of information about sex offenders’ porn use.
Jessel, for his part, thinks the only way to reduce the influence of porn is to reduce demand, and that means making its consumption unacceptable. That would mean smashing the greatest taboo of modern society, fastidiously obeyed by the very people who regard porn as part of a liberation movement, even a human right: “the prohibition on making people feel guilty or ashamed of their behaviour, even when it is, in fact, worthy of criticism or debate”.
