Pornocracy
by jo bartosch and robert jessel
polity, 192 pages, $25
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, wrote Terence. “I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me.”
The Roman playwright, however, had not read pages five to sixteen of Pornocracy by Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel. I have read these pages—in which the authors provide a sober, unsensationalized summary of what is currently on offer in the world of online pornography—and, along with much else in this book, they led me to conclude that there is, in fact, plenty in humankind that is alien to me. I am led to wonder even whether actual aliens walk among us, nurturing desires and predilections for things that I simply cannot imagine that a fellow human would wish to see.
Yet people—men, overwhelmingly—do wish to see these things, in their countless millions. The numbers quoted by Bartosch and Jessel are astonishing; I had not thought porn had undone so many. Consumption of extreme material may have its origins in some form of sexual desire, and each instance may culminate in sexual release, but the true and final intent behind modern pornography seems to be the taking of pleasure in the sight of the destruction of human, and especially female, personhood. Women—and children, too—are reduced to mere assemblies of fleshy orifices, or to lab rats in the trial of previously unthought-of forms of pain and humiliation. How much can be inflicted before the person is extinguished?
Porn is testing that question to its very limits. But I will spare readers any specifics. You may, in any case, have picked up, through the expanding discussion of the ubiquity and extremism of contemporary porn, some hints and intimations of what is out there. As I write, a new play is opening at the Royal Court—the favored theater of the London intelligentsia—about a radical, dazzlingly successful young female academic, whose life is divided between lecturing on Paradise Lost and pursuing an obsession with violent porn. The scenario “may sound unusual,” says the Daily Telegraph, “but the reality is that Britain is in the grip of a collective and increasing porn obsession.”
Bartosch and Jessel’s book attempts to lay bare three things in particular: the brutal exploitation on which porn runs; the staggering amount of spillover from porn into the lives of individuals, couples, families, and children, in both expectations of sex and actual sexual behavior; and the porn industry’s conquest and capture of the whole world. We are all, Bartosch and Jessel assert, subjects of the Pornocracy now.
This is the authors’ coinage for the society that Big Porn is creating, with ruthless efficiency. Bartosch and Jessel document the successes this particular interest class has had in getting its hands on every lever needed for its endeavor: politics, for instance, exemplified by Democratic groups paying for ads on pornography sites that warn users that Republicans would restrict access to the hard stuff. Popular culture, too, is a wide-open field of opportunity for the porn barons, with Cosmopolitan glibly advising its readers that “Watching porn is for men like watching romcoms is for women.” Education has succumbed: A couple of pages on school curriculum materials had me removing my glasses and cleaning them in order to check that I had read the words correctly.
Bartosch and Jessel quote a slide pack produced in Britain for pupils of thirteen years and upward: “Porn is often portrayed as something that is BAD or DAMAGING especially for children, when in actual fact we DON’T KNOW what the effects are as there is not good enough evidence.” Taken aback, I searched out and read the whole thing myself. Alongside the clarifying capitals, the slides are peppered with jocular exclamation points, deployed in a spirit of “Betcha didn’t know this about porn, kids!” The entry for 1954 in “A brief history of porn” goes: “Hello Playboy! The first issue was published featuring none other than Marilyn Monroe!” The makers of the resource might add: “Monroe was not asked for her consent before publication and did not give permission! Playboy didn’t pay her! The images left her feeling humiliated and distressed!” But, of course, they don’t. This is child propaganda of the first order.
And then there is technology, of course, with video sites deploying sophisticated algorithms designed to “mousetrap” users, “surveying and manipulating their preferences and presenting them with ever more extreme content,” luring them over a cliff edge into a deeper pit of vice (and thenover the next one and the next). Even morality can be rallied to the side of the blue movie industry, through the “freedom of expression” ruse. The “pornocrats” appear to have achieved full-spectrum dominance.
The clear implication of the book is that we can’t go on like this. Bartosch and Jessel’s stomach for the fight is admirable. The Pornocracy needs to be taken down or it will bequeath us “a generation of pornsick men turned into little more than wanking automata.” Bartosch and Jessel bleakly assume that, in rape cases, “the police to whom victims first report, the administrators . . . who decide whether to take the case forward, the lawyers, the magistrates, jurors and judges will probably be watching pornography.” It is no surprise, they conclude, that, given the normalization of violence against women in video sex, “most rapists never see the inside of a court, let alone a prison.”
Children’s access to sexual material, a profound “public health crisis” of “historic proportions,” is another abyss this book allows us to peer into. Research in England two years ago found that more than a quarter of young people had seen porn by the age of eleven. And most children “don’t go looking for pornography; porn finds them.” Two-thirds of British eleven- to thirteen-year-olds who had seen it said that their first viewing was unintentional. The upshot? Extreme pornography is “normalising brutal sexual behaviour” among the young.
Though assiduous critics of the patriarchy, and reluctant blamers of any particular women, Bartosch and Jessel produce a cutting chapter on the “sex-positivity” mindset of present-day “zombie feminism”: “a brain-sucking monster that inhabits the body of a once great movement.” It represents the coming-to-pass of what Andrea Dworkin foresaw in 2004: “If we give up now, younger generations of women will be told porn is good for them, and they will believe it.”
They also argue forcefully that the remorseless advance of drag is an engine for the pornification of society and the degradation of women. Bartosch has been a prominent voice in the gender-critical movement in the UK: For much of the past decade, she has “lived in expectation of a knock on the door from the police. This is because I upset men who claim to be women.” She and Jessel take aim at RuPaul’s Drag Race, including one episode featuring Jimbo the big-titted clown, who allows large prosthetic breasts to flop out of a PVC bodice and vigorously pounds them until cream squirts from the plastic nipples. (There is more, but let’s leave it there.) This “vicious misogynistic mockery” is cheered by people who, the authors acidly observe, believe themselves to be on the right side of history. So no punches are pulled here—apart, perhaps, from one that I will come to later.
In the concluding chapter, the authors part ways to provide their separate proposals for resisting the Pornocracy. Bartosch concentrates on practical action: “laws with claws.” She would like to see people who are appointed to positions of public trust and particular sensitivity—judges, for instance, or gynecologists—undergoadvance checks on their viewing histories. Records of what criminals watch should be kept; right now, police rarely track the porn consumption of men who assault women, nor do they systematically record when crimes have been filmed and circulated as pornography (“staggering oversights”). Bartosch also backs a proposal by a British MP that all online platforms should be required to verify that every individual featured in pornographic content on their sites is an adult.
Of course, Pornocracy is full of examples of porn producers and users finding ways to circumvent rules. Robert Jessel’s proposals eschew regulatory or legalistic measures, asking instead where the seemingly inextinguishable power of pornography comes from. “How is it vulnerable?” he asks. “What does it fear?” Jessel proposes a revival of the sense of shame—something (he hastens to add) that has “little or nothing to with faith-based morality.” His position, instead, is “strictly Darwinian.” Shame “tells us we’re doing something that will harm ourselves, or the tribe.” I’m not convinced shame thus constituted would get porn users snapping shut their laptops. They are, after all, a tribe of sorts themselves, bonded by dark obsessions, and their idols are sadism and pleasure.
Tucked away in Pornocracy is an interesting concession, which, though it may not reflect the authors’ settled position, bears consideration. “The question of what constitutes ‘extreme’ porn,” they write, “is subjective.” Or, as one industry CEO puts it with practiced evasiveness, “Relationships are complicated, humans are emotional creatures, and we all have different rules about what’s acceptable.” We find ourselves thus in a “legal and ethical grey area.”
But what if we admitted that—actually, objectively—what qualifies as “extreme” begins long before we enter this alleged grey area? What if, in reality, we long ago sauntered past a clear and obvious boundary marking the “extreme”? What if human persons recording themselves having sex for the pleasure of others in return for money, commodifying the most intimate moments two human beings can share, is in itself—however “vanilla” the action—an extreme act,one that signifies (to borrow one of Bartosch and Jessel’s chapter titles) the death of love?
There are, to be fair, moments when Pornocracy edges within range of this position. Perhaps the authors realize the truth: Having equivocated on this matter, as the world has, we now find ourselves hurtling down a slippery slope, turbocharged by the smartphone, with all kinds of horrors flashing past, victims scattered left and right, and even worse things waiting in the realms of AI and the metaverse. Limits, warnings, and reservations, on any grounds, are by now just motes of dust in a howling gale. One can’t help wondering whether, someday soon—and to borrow half a phrase from the Irish playwright John B. Keane—the world will whimper for the restoration to our hearts of a far simpler code than the one that has landed us in this fearsome mess.
