Pornography is turning sex into an extreme sport

‘You know what would make this world a better place? More pornography,” said no sensible person ever. And yet every day, more pornography is what we get: more online videos, more social media clips, more people burning the images into their eyes. Occasionally there are small panics about this. Last week there were two.

On the one hand, there was the voyeuristic Channel 4 documentary about Bonnie Blue, a young woman who has found fame by treating sex like an extreme sport, posting videos reminiscent of the 2000s stunt television show Jackass, but with more penises, which are jammed into her orifices. She’s so obscene, so masochistic — and yet so popular, fretted the critics. What to make of it all? On the other, there was the debate about age verification on pornography sites, which became mandatory two weeks ago. Is this protecting children or pointlessly invading people’s privacy?

All of this discourse is a desperate avoidance of an obvious truth, fussing over the deckchairs long after the iceberg has destroyed the ship. Because the simple but apparently unsayable fact is this: pornography is bad. No, not just for kids. For everyone. And it has eaten the world.

The first time I gave any thought at all to pornography (I refuse to use the cute diminution “porn”) was when I was a teenager and saw the 1996 film The People vs Larry Flynt, about the Hustler publisher’s fight to print his gynaecological magazine. What I took from it was that pornographers are creepy masturbators and the people who pose for them are deeply damaged. What the rest of my generation seemed to take from it was that pornography is a triumph of free speech, and only evangelical weirdos could object to photos of a woman shoving a dildo inside herself.

I quickly learnt that querying any of this made people dismiss you as a joyless Mary Whitehouse. Why was it cool to admit you need to stare at strangers’ scrotums and labias to masturbate? Wasn’t it cooler to get off on your own imagination? But to say you don’t enjoy pornography is seen as an admission that you don’t like sex, which I didn’t understand then and still don’t now. After all, I don’t like the Fast & Furious movies, but I love driving.

Then pornography went online, and the world went insane.

At a conservative estimate, a third of adults look at online pornography every month, and the vast majority are — surprise! — male. Forget football and cricket: masturbation is now the national sport. Oh, do I sound like I’m shaming people who watch pornography? Good. Online pornography has made the world so much worse, and the more people look at it, the more people make it. Pornography doesn’t slake desire, it creates desire for more pornography.

I don’t need another prurient documentary about another woman who encourages men to use her like an old dishrag to know we live in a pornography-soaked world. Even aside from the normalisation of “rough sex” (a euphemism for degrading and dangerous sex); the fact that more than a quarter of children in this country have looked at online pornography by the age of 11; the ceaseless supply of blank-eyed young women who insist they find it “empowering” to be used as a meat puppet by some, for the masturbatory pleasure of millions. The ubiquity of pornography has made it impossible to date. No — again — not just for kids. For everyone.

I recently went into the dating world, opting for the divorced forty and fiftysomething dads, in the belief that their brains would be less broken by pornography than those of their younger cohorts. Fat chance. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe what these guys suggest by the third date: Do I want to watch “extreme porn”? Do I want to try S&M? Do I want a threesome? Pal, you ain’t even getting a twosome. Enjoy your onesome. Increasingly, sex is no longer about connection and pleasure. It’s about showing off how warped you are by pornography.

Too many believe criticising pornography is illiberal, and worse, judgmental. Well, I judge. I judge an industry that so aggressively sells the lies that humiliation is sexy and that other humans exist for your mid-afternoon onanism.

During lockdown, BBC News ran a celebratory piece about “the increased demand” for online pornography, bringing to mind a nation stuck in their homes, gripping their phones and rubbing themselves so hard they were on the verge of erasing themselves. The predictable types (“OnlyFans content maker”, “sex and relationships YouTuber”) gave the usual quotes about how online pornography is just about “exploration” and something “you just do by yourself”.

But it’s not. The idea of a wall dividing online spectacle and real world behaviour is as ludicrous as the fantasy of a glamorous “porn star”. Putting pornography online has made it more ubiquitous and more extreme, with self-pornographers such as Bonnie Blue doing ever more ludicrous stunts for clicks.

Pornography has gone past being a free speech issue: it is not quietly satisfying our deepest desires, it is distorting people’s sexuality, to the detriment of everyone.

I am too much of a realist to believe pornography can be banned. But as last week’s stories show it should not be shruggingly accepted as a part of life, one that occasionally needs a little finessing around the edges. It should be seen as what it is: a psychological and social menace. As addictive as narcotics, as damaging as cigarettes, as destructive as pollution.