Takedown:
Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking
by laila mickelwait
thesis, 320 pages, $30
I doubt the readers of First Things need persuading that pornography is bad. It might feel invigorating to revisit this moral, cultural, and religious case, but doing so is perhaps a less valuable use of these paragraphs—and your time—than considering a related question. Why, given the persuasiveness of the case against pornography, is it still so endemic?
A recent memoir by anti-porn activist Laila Mickelwait may shed some light, however obliquely. Mickelwait, author of Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking, is founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and leader of the #Traffickinghub movement against Pornhub. A lawyer by training, with experience in international relations, she found her way to anti-porn activism through campaigning work against human trafficking, in the course of which she grew aware of how deeply bound up sex trafficking is with the porn industry. From this awareness emerged her campaign against Pornhub, the largest international website for pornographic images and videos. Over the course of the book, Mickelwait details her work to expose Pornhub’s indifference to the presence of child sexual abuse material on its pages.
Mickelwait’s campaign, as described in Takedown, began in 2020 with a petition against Pornhub. As support grew, Mickelwait’s organization began facilitating child-trafficking victims’ lawsuits against the site. Some of these victims later told their story in a New York Times exposé, which caused such an outcry that Pornhub took down the majority of its videos, going from 13.5 million videos to around 3 million in late 2020. Visa and Mastercard stopped providing payment services, the site was deplatformed on social media, and Pornhub has since grudgingly tightened up—or so it claims—its processes for verifying age and consent. The pressure was such that, as Mickelwait tells it, Pornhub’s management was eventually deposed and the significantly devalued company sold to new owners. Today, the site is still standing, but it is a shadow of its former self. In activist terms, it is an impressive achievement.
But for those to whom the moral case against pornography is evident and urgent, both the overt message and the subtext of Takedown point to an uncomfortable possibility: that to make arguments against pornography that are grounded in Christian sexual ethics is to bring a knife to a gunfight. Indeed the deeper history of opposition to pornography in particular, and the sexual revolution more generally, suggests that one explanation for this lack of efficacy is a failure to emphasize a central truth: that the question concerning pornography is and always has been a subcategory not of the question about sex but of the question about technology.
In his famous 1954 essay on technology, the philosopher Martin Heidegger characterized the essence of technology not as any particular tool or technique but as a way of thinking about the world—namely, one in which no aspect or quality of the world is registered as meaningful, unless it can be employed to some further end. Thus viewed, the world has no “Being” in or for itself, but is reduced to mere “standing-reserve”: inert units of utility, standing ready to be instrumentalized. Heidegger characterized this reordering as Gestell, usually translated as “enframing.”
This reordering inevitably means a kind of epistemological violence by omission. In choosing to notice only the use-value of what it encounters, the technological mindset refuses to see the world in itself—let alone meet it on its own terms. A vivid illustration of this violence can be seen in the practice of “crating” pigs in intensive pork farming. Banned in multiple American states, crating involves literally enframing pigs in bare metal stalls scarcely bigger than the pigs themselves. It permits maximum efficiency in feeding and animal management, and is thus desirable from a perspective that values utility alone. Meanwhile, the violence this practice does to the full being of the living animals thus imprisoned, unable to turn around or exhibit much instinctive behavior, should be self-evident.
It was not until relatively late in modernity, which is to say the era of the technological mindset, that serious attempts were made to map this technological mindset onto human sexuality. This mindset proposed that in lieu of such messy and dubiously effective expedients as social mores, we might “solve” the “problem” of sex, and of its (not always desirable) procreative consequences, through modern, effective, and above all neutral technological means. Pornography is, in multiple senses, a product specifically of this technological ethic—and not just for the literal way it “enframes” those who engage in sexual acts, by means of the camera’s mechanical eye. To perceive this fact requires us to contrast the technological ethic of sexuality with the Christian one that preceded it, and that it displaced.
Christian social ethics always viewed as foundational the question of how best to order and direct sexual desire. As the historian Kyle Harper has argued, Christian moral intuitions, including the dignity of the weak, the personhood of women, and the desirability of monogamy, in fact constituted a “first sexual revolution”: a disciplining of those male sexual urges that, in the older Roman culture, had been understood simply as a question of entitlement conferred by power.
In radical contradistinction to this Roman norm, in 1 Corinthians St. Paul held up chastity and continence as the ideal for both sexes. When sexual passion refused to be thus sublimated, he conceded, it was “better to marry than to burn.” Everything else was porneia: illicit sexual activity. Pauline thinking on the topic has been extensively glossed and contested, but it governed Christendom until relatively recently, as the core of a broader embodied social ethic. Where sexual mores were concerned, this ethic aimed to discipline and guide our unruly passions using tools such as norms, proscriptions, and social pressure. And the point at which this ethic was overtaken by the technological one as the pre-eminent public means of managing sexual desire was the FDA’s 1960 licensing of the Pill. From then on, questions of desire, family formation, fertility, and all that follows were to be treated as matters for neutral technological management and free individual choice.
It is no coincidence that the Pauline distinction between licit sexuality and porneia began to crumble at this point, nor that the 1970s are known as the “Golden Age of Porn.” More profoundly, too, as the Pauline distinction collapsed, so did the Christian ordering of sexuality to the human end of creating human life. With this dis-ordering of desire came, instead, its detachment even from recognizably erotic ends, toward, in many cases, something more like a compulsive and ever escalating violation of taboo, ordered only to individual whim and commercial profit.
Pornography is a principal vector for this dis-ordering, in that its appeal is only secondarily its production of images of sexual activity. Its primary appeal is the thrill of witnessing the brutalization of something profoundly relational—sexual intimacy—through the objectifying power of the camera’s (literal) frame. This enframing, and the violence it implies, is pornography’s real source of titillation—a fact that perhaps accounts for the well documented phenomenon of desensitization experienced by habituees of pornography, in which users crave progressively more extreme taboo-violating content in order to continue experiencing the same thrill. One instance of content hosted by Pornhub should suffice to illustrate. Mickelwait describes finding videos of women tied up and then enveloped in a vacuum bag, from which the air was slowly removed, whereupon the camera footage coolly observed their desperate convulsions as they suffocated. It was, she records, unclear whether the victims survived the experience.
Those who benefit from the cheap meat and dairy produced by intensive livestock farming generally prefer to ignore or compartmentalize factory farms’ byproduct of animal suffering, or shrug it off it as an acceptable externality for widely available, affordable protein. In the case of pornography, though, suffering is not an unfortunate trade-off for some positive third thing. Rather, the suffering is the product. But the technological mindset is much bigger than factory farming, or even Big Porn. As Heidegger argued, it is a whole Weltanschauung. Calls for its application to human sexuality had in fact been building for nearly a century before the Pill was licensed. And those who first opposed extending this mindset to human sexuality seem often to have intuited the real enemy far more completely than is conventionally possible today.
Perhaps the best-known nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opponent of both contraception and pornography in America was the anti-obscenity activist and U.S. Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock. The 1873 Comstock Act made it a federal crime to send through the US Postal Service any material deemed “obscene, lewd, or lascivious.” What is striking about Comstock, from a contemporary perspective, is the breadth of his definition of “obscenity.” And it is here that that obscenity’s relation to technology comes closest to being spelled out.
From our vantage point some decades downstream of the second sexual revolution (the 1960s one), the prevailing modern understanding of obscene material is sexually explicit words or imagery. Or, still more narrowly, an unusually explicit subset of such “adult content.” Even Mickelwait is at pains to emphasize in Takedown that her quarrel is not with sexually explicit media as such, but only with that subset of such media that features minors and non-consenting adults. By contrast, the Comstock Act took a much broader view. It prohibited Postal Service distribution not only of lascivious publications, words, or images, but also of information on artificial contraception and of contraceptive and abortifacient products. Comstock’s nemesis was not producers of porn but the birth control activist Margaret Sanger: Their running battle came to a head in 1915, when Comstock arrested Sanger’s husband for distributing copies of Family Limitation, a pamphlet describing contraceptive methods.
From a modern perspective, most would not view birth control as “obscene material” in the same sense as pornography. Comstock’s approach is coherent, though, if we adopt Marshall McLuhan’s definition of “media” as not just communication media, but anything that extends, modifies, or transforms existing human capabilities. In a word: technologies. It thus becomes clear that the Comstock Act aimed to prevent the Postal Service from being used to disseminate “media” in the McLuhan sense—specifically, media whose field of operation was human sexuality and reproduction.
From Comstock’s perspective, there is continuity among the distribution of pornography, of instructions for artificial contraceptive methods, and of contraceptive products or abortifacients. All are subsets of the same overall objectification and instrumentalization of human sexuality. More plainly: Anthony Comstock was fighting a rearguard action against the enframing of sex. What he recognized, but failed to articulate with sufficient clarity, was the underlying metaphysical violation.
And this is where Christian opponents of pornography can learn from Laila Mickelwait’s victory. Takedown illustrates in grim detail how little the suffering of rape victims counts, within the porn industry, as an argument against its practices. How can this be, when in pornography the violation is the source of titillation? As she goes on to show, fighting tech-enabled sexual brutalization requires seeing the violence it does to human sexuality, then battling that violence using the tools afforded by technology itself.
There is no point attacking a porn-merchant on the point of his morals; you have to kick him in the wallet, and in the platforms. To this end, Mickelwait leveraged the viral power of social media to launch her campaign, then parlayed the virality into funds, support, and media attention for a sally against Pornhub on that most technical-managerial of battlefields: lawfare. These results then fed back into media and PR work, culminating in the New York Times exposé. The decisive move was Mickelwait’s lobbying behind the scenes to shame Mastercard and Visa into cutting off payment processing services.
Takedown offers no theoretical objections to porn as such, either feminist or religious, but prefers to focus on obvious, profit-motivated violations of existing laws. In its verbal register, the book borders on enacting the disregard of relational goods that is characteristic of the enframing mindset. It is written in a pacy, thrilleresque prose style that, to me, felt dissonant with the industry it depicts: a world of at best cold indifference and at worst sadistic wickedness, in which vulnerability calls forth not compassion or protective instincts but coercion, violence, exploitation, trafficking, blackmail, and worse. As Takedown presents it, Big Porn is a world in which child victims of rape are taunted with audio clips of themselves screaming; in which videos of violent sexual abuse, waterboarding, child torture, and still more incomprehensibly monstrous cruelty are filmed, broadcast, and monetized as masturbatory aids. Even briskly recounted, in airport-novel prose, the sheer intensity of ambient evil Takedown records obliged me to put the book down at intervals.
But from another perspective, the prose is fitting. Takedown is not a literary artifact or academic paper. Mickelwait comes across as a woman on a mission, her every action ordered to the goal of bringing down Big Porn. And in this context, Takedown is not just an account of that mission, but also an intervention to the same end. An unapologetically commercial written style thus makes pragmatic sense: It increases the chance of wide readership and campaigning momentum. Again: Battling the enframing of sex means weaponizing the technological mindset against itself, and this weaponization extends to verbal registers that come, at times, close to reproducing its cold efficiency in relation to pain and violence.
Anthony Comstock was prescient in seeing little distinction between the enframing of sex by means of contraceptive products and its further, literal en-framing in visual depictions of the acts those products enabled. But his intuition was never made explicit, and in any case the broader direction of cultural travel militated against his aims. Sanger won her battle. In due course the Pill facilitated the collapse of Paul’s distinction between licit sexual intimacy and porneia. Thereafter, the original Comstock Act’s broad view of “obscenity” as every enframing of sex could no longer easily be argued—not when the now-dominant mechanism for managing sexuality, the Pill, was predicated on the very technologization that Act had so fiercely resisted.
Comstock was, perhaps, grasping at the sense that “obscenity” never really lay in the –graphy, but in the prior enframing of sex that enabled porneia to be industrialized at scale. And the power of Laila Mickelwait’s book is in the playbook she sets out, for waging war against that enframing, on its own terms: that is, technologically and administratively. To wage that war means mobilizing the technological era’s laws, regulations, procedures, and broadcast media against its own excesses.
Like the struggle each of us must face, with our fallen nature, this battle ultimately cannot be won with a single victory. It is a never-ending war of attrition. But Big Porn’s opponents have secured further victories on the same field, using methods internal to the technological mindset, since the events described in the book. As of June 2024, for example, successful campaigns have seen nineteen U.S. states pass laws requiring age verification for anyone accessing porn websites, a measure that has caused Pornhub to withdraw altogether from those states. Of course other technologies may proliferate to enable the truly determined to circumvent such strictures; but the scope for children to stumble upon Pornhub’s pit of horrors has at least been narrowed.
And of course none of this is to say that moral values have no role to play. Mickelwait’s personal moral commitments remain largely offstage in Takedown, but they are still palpable in the urgency and moral certainty that energizes her activism. And this surely is also a lesson: that such modern battles as have been won against the distinctive forms of cruelty enabled by the technological mindset necessitate a kind of double vision. To see such violence for what it is, whether in intensive farming or in the porn industry, one must be able to see the world and its creatures holistically, in their full being, and resonate with their suffering when their being is abused. But to do anything about that abuse, one must be able to navigate the cold world of systems, platforms, profits, and power.
If we are to order our technological age to human flourishing, we must meet that cold mindset on its own terms—then use its detached, procedural affordances to assert control over it. This project presupposes a moral framework still unsubordinated by the mindset itself—no mean feat, in a culture now largely premised on treating its blind spots as givens. It would require a different kind of book than Takedown to dig into this metaphysical challenge. As regards the practical one, meanwhile, there is a great deal to learn from Laila Mickelwait.
