Someone mentioned a story this week in the Times so I looked it up. I hope I'm not breaking any copyright rules here but anyone interested in this topic should read this:
I'm watching what the kids are watching: porn. Most of it is disturbing
10 May 2023
The Times
As a new report points to the impact of violent pornography on British children, Helen Rumbelow downloads the most popular content for a day's viewing
Just before my day of watching porn a male friend said, "Wow, you get the best jobs." I wasn't actually sure what to expect. I assumed it would involve becoming at first titillated by, then desensitised to, the endless repetition of poles and holes; the glossy boobs and bums hypnotically rising and falling before my eyes, something like the visual eroticism of Gregg Wallace inspecting an iced bun factory. At first fun and then cloying.
Naughty, but nice.
Instead, when my time was up, marked by my teenagers getting home teenagers who are now way past 11, the average age of first exposure to video porn in the UK I found myself longing for desensitisation. I felt like I had witnessed sexual assaults and torture. For days, I couldn't get the pain these women experienced out of my head.
It wasn't like watching a horror film, when you know they use fake blood and phoney knives. The strangulation, gagging, binding and slapping, the glassy dead eyes of the teenage girl set upon with extreme force, was real. Real violence, humiliation and punishment. It didn't help my brain that the women were being paid perhaps to suck it up. It didn't help my brain to know the suffering was for such a good cause: male pleasure. I felt contaminated by sadism.
The influence of porn is now profound. This week the children's commissioner used statutory powers to analyse more than 500 case files of sexual abuse between under-18s provided by police. In 50 per cent of cases the interview transcripts referred to acts of sexual violence specific to pornography such as strangulation and slapping.
Some teenagers who carried out the abuse referred to their porn exposure as excessive, one saying, "I was really badly addicted to it at one point." An earlier study by the NSPCC found that one in ten schoolchildren aged 12 to 13 were worried they were already addicted to porn.
In 2016 the Journal of Interpersonal Violence published findings of a survey of almost 5,000 boys aged 14 to 17, which found an association: the more boys watched porn and the more they were sexually coercive, the more likely they were to send explicit images and the less respect they had for girls.
Yet for all this talk of the side-effects of porn, we don't discuss the porn itself. This is unique. Usually when there is a moral panic about a liberal frontier, say, rock music, all sides could confidently argue from evidence. But people either don't want to watch porn, or watch it and don't want to admit it.
The public debate on the Online Safety Bill, a pioneering piece of legislation making its way through the House of Lords, is therefore spectacularly ill-informed. Hidden by shame, porn gets a free pass. I recently explored the social media world of teenagers like my children for another article, but I was missing the bare-naked elephant in the room.
At 9am on a fresh Monday morning after the scrabbling to get the kids to school, I put on a wash of football kit and sat down with a cup of tea to watch Pornhub. Full disclosure: this wasn't even the first time I have investigated porn for The Times.
In May 1999, 24 years ago, I was a young reporter in the newsroom with a scoop. It was the battle between the censors at the British Board of Film Classification, who wanted to maintain the ban on sexual penetration, or "hardcore", on screen, and an obscure Home Office committee who overruled them. The porn video was called Makin' Whoopee! and it subsequently went missing from my desk; I assume someone was interested in the legal position.
The liberalising Home Office committee included Biddy Baxter, the former Blue Peter editor. When we interviewed Baxter about her decision she was idealistic. In Makin' Whoopee!, Baxter said, "everything was totally consensual and did not involve violence against women" (true).
At a subsequent appeal I heard a barrister invoke the spirit of the 1960 censorship trial for Lady Chatterley's Lover. Looking back, the Makin' Whoopee! case was seminal. Not that the ruling mattered much: soon video cassettes and censorship would be made irrelevant by the internet.
It was more a symbol of a new era of "sex-positive post-feminism", where we uptight Brits would become sophisticated Europeans. As a young woman in the 1990s I was living this Blairite and "lads' mags" cultural change. I found the porn-denouncing views of writers such as Andrea Dworkin un-fun. I was keen to be open-minded, not a prude.
Now, clicking straight onto Pornhub the website is free in every sense and didn't offer even a cursory check of my age I discovered what we started in 1999. Every video is "hardcore" now, of course, but Baxter's hopes about consent and violence seem to be "wrecked", to use a common porn euphemism for abusive sex.
Pornhub was the fourth most visited website in the United States in March 2023, according to Semrush traffic analytics, and the UK is its fifth largest market. It still gets billions of views, despite the fallout it experienced from The New York Times investigation in 2020 that concluded that of the more than six million new videos posted on the site each year, "many depict child abuse and non-consensual violence". I chose Pornhub as I could safely assume it has the most brand recognition for teens.
As a snapshot I picked the "most popular in the UK" page for that morning. There were 32 thumbnails of videos to click on. I scanned each one: mostly just a few minutes long and most involved people speaking in eastern European languages.
Twelve of the 32 showed men being physically abusive to women. This ranged from hair-pulling, slapping or holding her arms behind her back to a harder range of violence. Four of them included scenes of something I found out was called "facial abuse", in which a woman's airway is blocked by a penis, what looked to me like a porn version of waterboarding torture.
In one a woman is immobilised and bound by four straps and a collar tightened around her neck. She ends up looking like a dead body found in the boot of a car. In another a young girl, dressed to look even younger in a pair of bunny ears and pastel socks, is held down by an enormous man pushing his hand on her neck while she is penetrated.
The sounds that came from my computer were those you might expect from a battle hospital: cries of pain, suction and "no, no, no". I won't yet tell you the worst video I saw as you may want to stop reading now. I started to have to take breaks to go outside and look at the sky and remember kindness.
The next largest category was that of "pseudo incest", with 11 videos. These depict sex between step-siblings or step-parents and adult stepchildren. Bizarrely, I found these videos a moment of calm because they were rarely violent; the violence of the taboo seemed to suffice.
Also less physically violent were videos that relished power imbalances over women. For example, in one a security guard insists a crying teenage shoplifter has sex in return for being set free. Later I found elsewhere on the site a series of videos on the theme of "Fake Taxi Driver", in which women are in the back of black cabs that are driven to remote country lanes for sex. Another from the same source were "Fake Cops", in which vulnerable women are sexually exploited. In the light of high-profile court cases in the UK involving taxi drivers or police these were both disturbing. On the site, "teen" was one of the most popular categories. The site is keen to label teen as "18+", which is not exactly how "teen" is commonly understood.
In none of the 32 videos were men shown to lack power. At the end of nearly every video women's faces were coated with semen. Where was the Baxter-approved consensual non-violent sex with no family members and no teens? Out of my sample, women were makin' whoopee in only three.
Few academics have attempted to codify the videos on porn sites. In 2019 Eran Shor, a sociology professor at McGill University in Canada, found that 43 per cent of a sample of Pornhub videos included visible aggression, with 15 per cent of videos featuring non-consensual aggression. "Teen" female performers were more likely to feature in videos with titles suggesting aggression, and were more likely to act as if they liked a male performer being physically aggressive towards them.
In 2021 a study led by Fiona Vera-Gray, then assistant professor in the law department of Durham University, used web crawlers to analyse the titles on the most popular three porn websites in the UK, including Pornhub. "Despite heated public and scholarly debate, there is surprisingly little research on the content of mainstream online pornography," she and her researchers wrote in the British Journal of Criminology.
Vera-Gray's data set of more than 150,000 titles made it the largest study of online porn to date. "Sexual violence in pornography is mainstream," the study concluded. The word "teen" was the most frequently occuring word in the whole data set, and was even more common in the videos coded as describing sexual violence. " 'Teen' is thus a more common way to describe pornography than any description of a sex act or body part." They found four main types of sexual violence: most common was sex portrayed between family members; the second was physical aggression; the third were titles advertising non-consensual creation of porn, such as "revenge porn", "upskirting" and "spy-cams" (it is not known if these videos are in reality the result of this illegal activity). The last implied coercion and exploitation, with title keywords like "very young" and "schoolgirl".
As the study points out, it is "more common for descriptions of even the most serious sexual offences to be positioned as ordinary or even humorous". Jokey exclamation marks are a hallmark of the titles for some of the most upsetting material.
Sometimes the women seem to like their bodies being punished, sometimes they seem in agony. The man always likes it when the woman is being punished. I cannot imagine how confusing this would be as a teen's first encounter with sex.
I very much wanted to talk to Vera-Gray, to process what I had seen. She agreed that once you detached the videos from their primary purpose of arousal, the material was "confronting".
"A lot is about women's humiliation and degradation," she said. The videos shown to first-time porn users "could be significantly implicated in muddying the waters between consensual and sexual violence".
"I think that every parent, teacher and policymaker needs to actually go and see what is on these sites themselves," Vera-Gray said. This should be done in a "cold light of day" way, she said, that takes sexual arousal out of the debate.
I kept wondering: if this was another medium, say a wildly popular theatre show among teenage girls and women, that involved young men being humiliated, bound, in pain and sprayed with female body fluids, would we be having more of a conversation? I reread my old copy of Dworkin's analysis of porn as misogyny, written in 1989 "the joy of pain, the pleasure of abuse". Andrea, I thought, you predicted it all.
In one video I saw on the Pornhub site the man experiments with suffocation, the woman's throat is restricted by a penis, and at that point the man, for a few seconds, closes her nostrils with his fingers too.
But the video I found most distressing was one of my original 32. It is described as an encounter with a "teen babysitter", in which the man keeps hurting the girl in different ways. There is facial abuse in which she retches, near-vomiting. Some slapping and hard hair-pulling. Her saying "please", which the man seemed to take as a sexual overture, I interpreted as her begging for her life. Before I went outside for another look at the sky, I scrolled the comments. "Wow," said the first one. "So passionate."