QotD: “A real sex education must be, partly, a moral education, and moral education involves judgement by definition”
Part of the problem is that images of people enjoying one another say nothing very complicated. Not being made of words, images tend to be simple like that. Gallop grandiosely claims that each of the videos on her site “is an object lesson in consent, communication, good sexual values, good sexual behavior”. But that’s like saying that a photo of Kew Gardens is an object lesson in how to grow roses. In fact, though, what we are supposedly seeing demonstrated onscreen at MLNP — respect, mutuality, loving concern for the other, or whatever — is the end result of a process that is still a complete mystery to many.
Since the sex you have with others is a product of the wider relationship you have with them, a sex education worth its name would require making substantive moral judgements about good and bad relationships — and not just in the bedroom or on the picnic rug. Yet beyond the usual platitudes about consent and better communication, this is something both Niblett and Gallop are very unwilling to do; and it’s a reluctance shared with nearly everyone in the so-called “sex education” space. Niblett insists in her interview that she is not “saying that anybody else’s preferences are wrong”. And in a 2009 Ted talk, Gallop states: “this is absolutely not about judgement … this is not about good and bad”. She even professes herself a regular watcher of hardcore porn. Her big revelation is that for every possible sexual proclivity, there will be some that like it, and some that don’t; and if you don’t like something, it is OK to say so.
But secondary schools, women’s magazines, and soap operas have been harping on this basic point since at least the Eighties. Announcing it yet again is not going to change a thing. In fact, the average person who assents to a hated sexual practice knows perfectly well that a firm “no” is always available; but they don’t want to use it, and not necessarily because they are feeling open-minded. A rival explanation is that they can’t think of any persuasive consideration against the practice in question; and, in this regard, mainstream culture has done nothing to help. On the contrary, it has made nearly every kind of sexual behaviour immune to serious critique, as long as accompanied by the transformational fairy dust of adult consent.
Saying that something is only bad if you don’t like it, but fine if you do, is a particularly unconvincing argument. It doesn’t even work well for wine tastings, let alone human relationships. It makes your likes or dislikes of certain things seem like they must be built on sand, and scarcely worth defending. Feelings of disgust become “preferences” rather than helpful reactions of ethical discernment. You lose the capacity to articulate what in other circumstances would be a perfectly natural thing to say: “No, I’m not bloody well doing that, because it expresses nothing but contempt for me; and you are a creep for even trying”.
A real sex education must be, partly, a moral education, and moral education involves judgement by definition; yet modern moralists have a kink for being non-judgemental, as their preferred phrasing goes. Accordingly, they treat sexual activity as utterly unlike any other sphere of human behaviour: as bizarrely insulated from everyday attitudes like hatred and resentment, even when the actions undertaken are obviously hateful and resentful. In no other context could you slap someone hard in the face, choke them, pull them around on a lead, or intentionally cause them to retch, yet still claim later without embarrassment that you “respected” them hugely throughout.
Since only radical feminists and religious types seem willing to contest this absurd narrative, vacuous platitudes from the likes of Niblett and Gallop about “better communication”, “freeing people from shame” and, of course, “increasing consent” will likely continue unabated, circling vaguely around the real ethical dilemmas of sexual interaction but never actually engaging. In a 2019 interview, Gallop talked of plans to start a business called ConSensual: not, as you may have first feared, a sex education site aimed at Conservative Party members, but rather a “safe social sexting app, which both enables you to sext completely securely and improves your sexual communication in your relationship (I have this all planned out in the pipeline, I just need investors)”. Imagine a Cindy-avatar in kinky boots, cheerfully reminding you that if someone calls you a filthy, disgusting whore, that’s perfectly fine, as long as you happen to like it; but absolutely not if you don’t! Personally, though, I think I’ll just stick to WhatsApp, plus my usual practice of avoiding sexting people who clearly loathe me. And that’s a bit of sex education the world can have for free.
Kathleen Stock, Spare me Labour’s summer of sex, full article here
QotD: “Things went wrong the moment Blue decided to treat her fellow human beings as depersonalized objects, and to let them treat her like an object in turn”
Kathleen Stock (who I also quoted in my ‘The Dystopia of OnlyFans’ post) has also written about the Bonnie Blue documentary; I would recommend reading Stock’s article in full, but what I want to post from it here is, specifically, what she has written about conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, and his attitude to sexuality, and how it relates to our current porn-saturated culture:
We don’t really need to wonder what Roger Scruton would have thought about all of this, because in 1986 he wrote a book called Sexual Desire which told us. In it, he sketched a Platonic ideal of sexual arousal: of erotic desire involving mutual recognition and communication of pleasure between you and your partner, ecstatically directed towards an irreplaceable particular person in all their specificity, rather than towards a mere selection of body parts, or some pictures on a screen. Sexual desire in this ideal state is individualizing, not objectifying; it is a “cooperative enterprise” between two people, discovering new aspects of the mysterious other; it is sacred and full of awe. It is the absolute opposite of hundreds of men standing in boxer shorts and balaclavas, waiting for a few seconds of bodily contact with a woman they have never met; or of thousands of spectators, home alone with credit cards out and flies unzipped.
Scruton — someone I knew a little through our shared interest in philosophical aesthetics — did not write from a religious point of view. His arguments in Sexual Desire were all secular. Still, he was very clear that sex is always a moral matter, and seemed confident that any sexual impulse falling short of his demanding interpersonal conception must be relegated to mere perversion. I used to find this endearingly idealistic, assuming that he had probably got an exaggerated idea of love’s redemptive power from listening to too much Wagner. Now though, I think he was probably right.
For while it seems clear that something has gone hideously awry with Bonnie Blue’s general approach to sexual matters, if you take modern morality at face value, then it’s hard to say exactly what. Was it when she passed a certain number of penetrations? Was it fine at 10 men, but not at 11? Would it have been better if she had spaced out the bodily collisions a bit, with a few hours between each? Or if she hadn’t filmed it for others to watch?
Faced with the unsatisfying arbitrariness of these proposals, Scruton’s more tempting answer beckons. Things went wrong the moment Blue decided to treat her fellow human beings as depersonalized objects, and to let them treat her like an object in turn. This was just as wrong the first time she did it, as the 1,000th. The awkward thing about this answer is not that it is unsatisfying; it is more the way it forces most of us to say “Je suis Bonnie Blue” too.
Contemporary theories of sexuality urge us to go beyond feelings of love and desire for particular special people to the “true”, more basic nature of sexual contact. They reduce sex between humans to a blind urge to reproduce genes, or to a repressed version of childhood attachments, or to animal lust untrammeled by civilizing religious impulses, or whatever the modern story is. Via such narratives, we are supposed to think of human relationships as fruitfully extracted from the world of familiar subjective appearances, and given up to the pitiless objective gaze of the scientist, sexologist, or psychoanalyst, so that the “real” story can emerge about what we are doing when we long for another person.
But as Scruton saw, in trying to strip the world of enchanting sexual appearances to get to the supposedly real urges “underneath” the appearances, we just replace beautiful appearances with uglier disenchanted ones. As he wrote:
“… to see human beings as objects is not to see them as they are, but to change what they are, by erasing the appearance through which they relate to one another as persons… It is to create a new kind of creature, a depersonalized human being, in which subject and object drift apart, the first into a world of helpless dreams, the second to destruction.”
QotD: “Blue, who is my age and from near where I grew up, is the product of a feminism which has encouraged young women to prostitute themselves”
Channel 4 has a documentary out this week about Bonnie Blue, I haven’t watched it yet, but it has already generated plenty of online commentary. I have quoted Poppy Sowerby before, in my ‘The Dystopia of OnlyFans’ post back in February, she is excoriating on the failures of liberal feminism, and what this may look like for Generation Alpha (currently primary school aged). I would recommend reading her entire article.
Blue publicizes her own violation in ways that are unusual in traditional pornography, with its closed sets and narrative formulas. She demystifies how porn is created, hosting public events where masked men queue up to “have a go”. She is no bashful industry starlet — she is a self-made brand, a camgirl disruptor for whom discomfort is not a problem: it is the point. She has well understood that OnlyFans, Reddit and PornHub are oversaturated: big followings can no longer be won by being the hottest, the youngest, the most shiny and waxed and inflated. The trailblazers of the 2010s, infantilized e-girl Belle Delphine and hijabi porn star Mia Khalifa, showed that controversy was now the best way to build a brand.
In pursuit of further controversy, Blue is now on a podcast with Andrew Tate. The misogynist influencer — who faces 10 criminal charges in Britain, including rape, actual bodily harm and sex-trafficking, and who promotes a business model of acquiring “girlfriends” who can then be pimped out on porn sites — appeared in a promotional image with Blue and podcast host Rob Moore. Tate wears wonky sunglasses and a shirt open to his navel in the style of Jack Sparrow, looking like a man who spikes drinks in Popworld; Moore, who describes himself as a “creator/ranter/rebel”, stands awkwardly next to Bonnie Blue, who is kneeling on the floor with her tongue sticking out. In a teaser on X, Tate wrote: “Bonnie is the end result of feminism.” He is completely right.
Blue, who is my age and from near where I grew up, is the product of a feminism which has encouraged young women to prostitute themselves — and I worry for her. I see her degrading stunts as acts of self-harm. Half of her job is to receive the emissions of the worst cross-section of men in society, film it and smile about it; the other half is telling society she enjoys this, along with volleys at the women who resent or pity her. In the podcast, she discusses “what men want”, the hypocrisy and laziness of wives and girlfriends, the myriad ways “sex work” is good for society, and why it’s alright for men to override women’s consent with money. She also says she believes Tate is innocent of the charges against him (“well, why would he?”). He naturally encourages this world view, bleating a line which will be familiar to any survivors of bullshit liberal feminism. Bemoaning the men who chastise Blue for her sex stunts, he tritely says: “It’s your body, your choice, right?”
Unfortunately, Blue struggles to hold her own in the conversation. She is useful to Tate insofar as she can appear to legitimize his business model, but really she means less than nothing to him — in fact, he views her with a kind of erotic revulsion. Tate says he would not allow a daughter of his to follow Blue’s path, nor would he want a son to sleep with her. She is a useful pariah: she, like him, has understood our sexual culture better than most, to great professional acclaim. But unlike him, she has no admirers (public ones, at least). It must be lonely.
The personal consequences for Blue in the years to come are uncomfortable to consider: we can already see the psychological cost of her lifestyle ticking up like a taxi meter in her glazed blue eyes, in her monotone voice, in the frightened look on her face as she is shoved around on that bed. But she is an adult, and she is responsible — alongside Tate — for accelerating a sexual culture which has enriched her and which will harm and mislead thousands of women and girls. I have known young women who have chosen, entirely without financial need and through a vague sense that it is empowering, to set up shop on OnlyFans; one, who did it aged 21, had the standard experience: she burned through the couple of grand she made, quit after a few months and now must live with the fact that pictures of her naked body and faux-ecstatic face will be circulated around the internet forever. How many young women across the country share her experience?
But there are other consequences, too. Worse ones; ones that pertain to the magma of sex violence coursing through modern Britain, ones that begin in the low-lit bedrooms of tween boys and end in dark alleys and dorm rooms, in the bruised and violated bodies of the girls of the future.
QotD: “Strangulation is now the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40”
On the second aspect, though – the normalisation of strangulation during sex – Mackenzie believes the situation has only worsened. “I’d hoped that lots of other charities and sex educators, the government and academics would get behind it, but instead what we’ve got is this completely mad idea that we can somehow help women to keep having violent sex but in a safer way. Maybe in a hi-vis jacket?”
Hannah Bows, a professor of criminal law at Durham Law School, believes strangulation is one of a few crimes where public awareness has dramatically regressed. “I think it’s a really troubling sign that 50 years ago most people would probably know strangulation was an offence – just like we all know that stealing is illegal,” she says. “We’re nowhere near that now, especially among young people. There’s actually less acknowledgment and understanding, even though we have more laws criminalising it.”
There’s good reason for these laws. Necks are alarmingly fragile. Blocking the jugular vein requires less pressure than opening a can of Coke. Evidence suggests that strangulation is now the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40. According to one piece of sobering research, it’s more dangerous than the torture known as waterboarding, because strangulation affects blood flow as well as airflow. Though some cases can cause loss of consciousness in seconds and death in minutes, in others consequences can be delayed by weeks. It can cause a change in voice, difficulty swallowing, incontinence, seizures, problems with memory, decision-making and concentration, depression, anxiety, miscarriage.
In a paper published in May, 32 young women were recruited from a large midwestern university in the US and separated into two groups – those who’d been strangled at least four times during sex in the last 30 days and those with no history of strangulation. (There were 15 from the former group and 17 in the second.) Blood was taken from all recruits. The samples from the women who’d been strangled showed elevated levels of S100B, a marker of brain damage.
“There’s no safe way to do it, no safe quantity of blood or oxygen you can cut off from her brain for fun,” says Jane Meyrick, a chartered health psychologist who leads work on sexual health at the University of the West of England. She describes being at a sexual health conference last year where data was presented on sexual strangulation – the prevalence and harms. “Usually, at those conferences, people will be talking about the extremes of what everyone is getting up to in a very sex-positive way,” she says. “When this was presented, you could feel the tension, the internal conflict, in the room, with professionals being unable to reconcile the gap between what they were hearing and their usual sex-positivity.”
[…]
Few doubt its origins. “It’s about porn and the mainstreaming of illegal and violent tropes in porn practices,” says Meyrick. It’s not just dedicated porn sites, she says. “It’s a click away on TikTok, it’s absolutely everywhere. I’ve had young people come to me in tears, young women saying, ‘I don’t want to be strangled’ and young men saying, ‘I don’t want to do it’ but both watch porn where it’s handed to them in an uncritical way and there’s an assumption that that’s what has to happen.”
Much research shows the impact of porn consumption on sexual behaviour and beliefs. Another study by Herbenick that looked at behaviours such as choking and spanking found that those who engaged in it viewed porn at a younger age and had a higher lifetime use than those who didn’t. The recent proposals to criminalise “choking” in porn follow the recommendations of a review by Baroness Bertin, commissioned by the previous government and published in February. It noted that strangulation was “rife” online, with “competition for clicks” driving the production of increasingly disturbing content. According to the review, “Non-fatal strangulation or ‘choking’ sex is perhaps the starkest example of where online violent pornography has changed ‘offline behaviour’.”
When it comes to criminalisation, Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University, who worked on the proposals with Baroness Bertin, says the specifics will be key. “The provision must be comprehensive and cover all depictions of strangulation and not be based on non-consent,” she says. “If it requires proof of non-consent, or any other such qualifications … it will make no difference.”
Mackenzie is not optimistic and points out that this is the third such “ban”, given that we already have the Obscene Publications Act 1959 and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 (which was introduced after the strangulation of Jane Longhurst and supposedly criminalised the possession of “extreme pornography”). “The problem has always been that not one of the millions of people employed by the state will feel it is their job to enforce such a ban,” says Mackenzie. “If it wanted, the government could start tomorrow to make it uncommon for kids to see strangulation porn, building on existing law – but instead it will ban this content yet again, and hope that state bodies and tech companies will this time take account of the ‘vibe shift’. Not a single site will fear prosecution. They will have seen from decades of experience that no one from the state will knock on their door.”
McGlynn says that previous legislation was problematic – the Obscene Publications Act covers “obscene” material, which, she says, is a “vague concept”. The 2008 legislation covers “life-threatening injury”, which will apply to some forms of strangulation but not all. “While there are serious harms and risks, such as stroke, they are not evident on the face of a depiction and not therefore within the existing law on extreme pornography.” However, she does agree that enforcement will be everything. “The platforms will only act if they think Ofcom will challenge them,” she says. “I hope this will be the case. It should be and I think it could be – but it might require considerable public and political pressure.”
QotD: “We’ve got into a mess with extreme content because nobody wants to talk about pornography”
By mess she [Conservative peer Gabby Bertin] means a situation whereby online pornography (which is viewed by an estimated 13.8 million UK adults every month) is not regulated to the same degree as pornography watched in cinemas or videos, despite the fact that videos have been redundant for decades and vanishingly few people now visit cinemas to watch porn. The absence of scrutiny has created an environment where much of the content created is, she says, “violent, degrading, abusive, and misogynistic”.
[…]
Her review, published in February, made 32 recommendations. Last week the first of these became government policy, when officials announced that pornography depicting strangulation would be made illegal. Her new taskforce of 17 people, bringing together representatives from the police, the advertising industry, anti-trafficking organisations and violence against women charities, will focus on how to ensure harmful online content is better regulated, trying to bring parity between the scrutiny of offline and online content.
She pays tribute to the “hugely innovative side” of the porn industry, which has long driven technological advances in webcams and internet speeds, fuelled by the sector’s enormous capacity to turn profit, but she has not invited any representatives on to the taskforce, wary of anything that might let the industry “mark their own homework”.
This week Ofcom announced that major online providers, including the UK’s most popular pornography site, Pornhub, had agreed to implement stronger age-verification measures in compliance with the Online Safety Act, to prevent under-18s from accessing adult material. Those platforms that do not comply with the measures face being fined 10% of global turnover or being blocked in the UK.
Ofcom is also responsible for monitoring whether sites distributing user-generated pornography are protecting UK viewers from encountering illegal material involving child sexual abuse and extreme content (showing rape, bestiality and necrophilia, for example). However, other forms of harmful pornography that are regulated in physical formats are not subject to similar restrictions online.
It is this grey, unscrutinised area that Bertin’s panel will focus on, as well as calling for better processes to respond to stolen content, working out how people depicted in pornographic videos can request that the clips be removed from sites, and how to build safety mechanisms into AI tools that create sexually explicit content.
Officials at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) guided her through short clips of extreme material to help her understand the nature of easily available harmful content. She remains disturbed by the material she saw – content designed to appear to be child sexual abuse, set in children’s bedrooms – roles played by young girls, who may be over 18 but are acting as children. “The titles are very problematic, things like: ‘Daddy’s going to come home and give his daughter a good seeing to’ or ‘Oops I’ve gone too far and now she’s dead’ or ‘Kidnap and kill a hooker.’” This content would be prohibited by the BBFC in the offline world, but is unregulated online.
During research for her review, she met representatives from global tech companies, and told them how when Volvo invented the three-point safety belt they gifted the patent to the rest of the industry because staff realised the innovation was so vital to raising safety standards. “My pitch was that they have a duty and responsibility to double down on trying to get technology that can clean up these situations, and they should share that technology,” she says. “Taylor Swift can whip a song off a website as soon as anyone tries to pirate it. There’s no reason why the firms can’t come up with technology to sort this out.”
Posing for photographs, she edges away from a watercolour of Margaret Thatcher hung on the wall by one of her colleagues. “Let’s do it without Thatcher in the background. That’s not my doing by the way – I share the office,” she says semi-apologetically, before rapidly adding: “I mean I love Thatcher, obviously.”
But she may be making an important distinction. In a 1970 Woman’s Hour interview, Thatcher said the rise of pornography was a “frightening” manifestation of a newly permissive society that she believed was undermining family life. Bertin describes herself as a liberal conservative and wants to be clear she is neither anti-porn nor running a moral crusade.
“Consenting adults should be able to do what they want; I have no desire to stop any kind of sexual freedom. But restricting people from seeing a woman being choked, called a whore, and having several men stamp on her – for example – is not ending someone’s sexual freedom. This is the kind of content we want to end.”
QotD: “Chemical castration works, so let’s use it”
What should a society do with its paedophiles? The answer from politicians is usually some variation of string ’em up and throw away the key. Our own William Hague once proposed mandatory life sentences for the worst first-time offenders. Because for many voters no punishment seems sufficient when men rape children, short of one administered with a pair of half bricks.
So when the justice secretary Shabana Mahmood said this week the government was considering compulsory “chemical castration” it was dismissed as juicy red meat lobbed to Reform voters, a distraction from softy stuff like more open prisons and early releases. But Mahood raised the valid question of “problematic sexual arousal”, specifically in men, who (according to the Office for National Statistics) commit 98 per cent of sexual offences. Anti-libidinal psychopharmacological interventions — the correct term for chemical castrations, since they are reversible and nothing is chopped off — are proven to work. The UK pilot scheme, which the government will now extend from six to 20 prisons, has shown cuts in recidivism of up to 60 per cent. Another study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden also revealed remarkable results.
This treatment isn’t appropriate for all sex offenders. Not those who attribute their crimes to drug addiction or who are fuelled by violent rage. But it is effective on paraphiliacs, those driven by an intense sexual fantasy or fixation, which they may feel compelled to act out in real life. Such men are extreme examples of how Sophocles or Socrates — sources vary — described the male libido: “like being chained to a madman”. And many long to be free.
Two types of drugs are used on sex offenders: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) — treatments for depression such as Prozac, which dial down both sex drive and attraction to children. Then there are heavy-duty, testosterone-suppressing anti-androgens, mainly used for prostate cancer: Swedish researchers found that just two weeks after their first injection with degarelix, paedophiles living in the community were less likely to offend. Many reported feeling calm and relief at being untethered from urges which made them dangerous pariahs. Most men asked to continue degarelix after the study ended.
Meanwhile in Florida, injecting paraphiliac sex offenders with the female contraceptive Depo-Provera, often as a condition of receiving probation, has also improved rehabilitation rates.
These drugs don’t just make the world a little safer for women and children when rapists are released to live among them, they cost a fraction of talking cure treatment programmes. Sex offenders are devious, manipulative liars, the hardest cons to fix: even Lord Timpson, whose shops are staffed by ex-prisoners, won’t employ them.
So if the drugs work, why have previous governments been squeamish in advocating them? Compulsory medication is legally problematic: criminals would need to be sectioned and doctors could refuse on human rights grounds. But is it wrong to offer paedophiles and other paraphiliac offenders earlier release in exchange for submitting to three-monthly injections?
The main ethical objection seems to be side-effects. Anti-androgens can cause men to develop breasts, have hot flushes, gain weight and have lower bone density, causing greater risk of osteoporosis. Note that these same drugs were prescribed, off-label and untested, at the NHS gender identity clinic Gids to thousands of gender non-conforming children. I wonder how many doctors balking at “chemical castration” are also campaigning for Wes Streeting’s ban to be lifted on prescribing puberty blockers for “trans kids”?
I’m reminded too of the impediments to any rollout of a male contraceptive pill. Save men from all risk of side-effects: protect at all cost their erections and manly seed. Cue eye-rolling among women treated for decades as reproductive crash-test dummies. Are we supposed to feel sorry now for paedophiles growing moobs, or having a homeopathic dose of the menopause? Unpleasant for sure but probably not as bad as little girls being raped. It is refreshing, for once, to address how men could be rendered less rapey rather than women be more careful, not walking home alone or clutching our keys in our fists.
Besides, there are now 850 arrests a month for child abuse image offences and, according to the child safety institute Childlight, 1.8 million British men have admitted viewing such material. Every week men appear in court, their hard drives brimming with hundreds, maybe thousands, of images, all involving the abuse of a real child somewhere in the world, but few are jailed. The problem is too big for the criminal justice system to handle. Should we allow these men to continue unchecked or demand, in exchange for their liberty, that they take anti-androgen drugs?
Just as junk food made us obese, the unrestricted internet has spawned an epidemic of paedophilic offending. Semaglutide drugs such as Ozempic now suppress appetite, cut down the “food noise” which makes us overeat, will save lives and billions in health care. What if a drug can suppress dangerous sexual fixation, cut out “sex noise”, reduce the shocking fact that 7.5 per cent of adults, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, were sexually abused before they reached 16? Imagine the money saved in court and prison costs, besides the fallout from broken lives.
Politicians cannot or will not take on the food industry or online pornography, where deep-rooted problems begin — and it is achingly hard for people to shift bad habits alone. Mahmood is right to look at any solution for sexual offending, including medication. Drugs are, as Professor Don Grubin who runs the government programme says, “not a magic bullet”. But when our prisons are full and our courts gridlocked, why not swallow the pill?
QotD: “Ban pornography depicting strangulation, review urges UK ministers”
Pornography depicting strangulation should be made illegal along with other kinds of “legal but harmful” sexual material, according to an independent government review.
The recommendation is one of 32 made to the UK government by the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin, who was commissioned by the former prime minister Rishi Sunak to scrutinise the industry in 2023.
Bertin also recommended banning the possession, distribution and publication of other degrading, violent or misogynistic pornography, as well as the prohibition of “nudification” apps.
Choking during sex is becoming increasingly normalised, with one survey showing nearly four in 10 women aged 18-39 have experienced it.
Bertin said pornography had always been a fact of life, but in recent years its scale and impact had “transformed dramatically” owing to online distribution.
“The evidence is overwhelming that allowing people to view legal but harmful pornography like choking sex, violent and degrading acts, and even content that could encourage child sexual abuse, is having a damaging impact on children and society,” Bertin added. “The law needs to be tightened with more proactive regulation of online platforms.”
Bertin’s review said non-fatal strangulation or “choking” sex was already criminalised under the 2021 Domestic Abuse Act and should therefore be added to the definition of extreme, illegal pornography.
The review has been published days after the UK communications watchdog published measures to tackle online misogyny, including tackling explicit deepfakes and “revenge porn”.
Online pornography is viewed regularly by more than a quarter of the UK on social media and pornography sites. According to the UK communications watchdog, Ofcom, men are twice as likely to visit a pornographic site than women.
Other recommendations by the review include: making pornography that depicts incest illegal, creating an ombudsman for victims of intimate image abuse and banning people who upload illegal material online from uploading material on to platforms.
The UK tech secretary, Peter Kyle, said on Thursday he would not hesitate to “adapt the law” to prevent people from accessing degrading pornography online.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme before the publication of the review, he said: “I know that this content is harmful to many of the people who currently have free access to it. We have the powers to prevent people getting the access to it, even if the material is provided from elsewhere.
“We just need to find ways of making sure that that is done efficiently and effectively. And if I have to adapt the law in response to any gaps that emerge in these powers, then, of course, I’ll act as swiftly as I can.”
Harriet Wistrich on Desert Island Discs
Harriet Wistrich is one of the country’s most prominent human rights lawyers. In 2016 she founded the Centre for Women’s Justice and over the course of her career, she has won landmark victories in very difficult legal cases. She has helped women imprisoned after killing their abusers regain their freedom. She’s also represented women seeking justice from the Metropolitan Police over their deployment of undercover police officers who have had relationships and children with female activists.
After studying PPE at Oxford, Harriet moved to Liverpool and began her career working in film and documentaries. She retrained as a lawyer in her early thirties and in 1990 co-founded the pressure group Justice for Women.
Harriet lives in London with her partner, the journalist Julie Bindel.
Anti-Porn Feminists 
The Dystopia of OnlyFans
Pornography is now completely mainstream. This is hardly news, it was mainstream back in the 2000’s when our main concern was Playboy branded stationary being sold at WH Smiths.
OnlyFans has a very thin veneer of respectability, hiding behind twee, sanitising, euphemisms like ‘spicy’ to describe its pornographic content, but it has suffered plenty of serious controversies too, and the ‘management’ agencies that have sprung up to take advantage of this new platform are like old-fashioned porn companies, where the real money is in production and distribution, and the management agency takes a 50% cut (only pimps take 50%).
Even the BBC has published many uncritical puff-pieces about OnlyFans, focusing on how much money users make, as well as proper investigative reporting on child exploitation images appearing on the platform (but even that article refers to OnlyFans as “a lifeline or a second income during the pandemic”).
I have read multiple claims about the money being made by OnlyFans users, most of which seem to be derived from this 2020 blog post which says: “Most accounts take home less than $145 per month (after commission). The modal revenue is $0.00, and the next most common is $4.99.” (What’s not clear to me, from reading that post, is whether the accounts making $0.00 are active or not; if someone creates an OnlyFans account, but never posts any content, of course it won’t make any money.)
What does seem clear to me is that while a small number of people are making a lot of money, many are working more than full-time to make less than the equivalent of full-time minimum wage, and all the breathless mainstream articles about people making amazing money (for how long, at what long-term personal cost?), are part of the problem.
Because I am no longer a ‘young person’ and do not consume social media the way teenagers and young adults do now, I had not quite realised how normalised, pernicious, and all-consuming it all was, until reading a recent spate of articles about, specifically, OnlyFans.
Shaping everything into a blog post in my own words is too big a task, so instead I will quote from other people, in order of publication:
Kathleen Stock, Beware the OnlyFans Impurity Spiral
Victoria Smith (Glosswitch), Lily Phillips and the Importance of Feeling
Poppy Sowerby, Bop House Will Make You A Porn Star
Sarah Ditum, How OnlyFans Broke Liliy Philips
Valerie Stivers, How Porn Swallowed Everything