A protest in 1979. Credit: Colin Davey/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty
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Exactly what percentage of men watch porn isn’t clear, but it’s most of them. In 2009, a University of Montreal researcher tried to do a study on how pornography affects men, and couldn’t find any men in their 20s who hadn’t used it to use as a control group. This study found 98% of men (and 73% of women) had used it in the last six months. This one found 87% of men report using it for sexual purposes, along with 31% of women.
That context is important in the light of the weirdly under-reported fact that, some time in the next few months, the Government will require all pornographic websites to demand age verification of their users.
Full disclosure: I was ready to write this piece as a full-throated blast against the idiocy of the whole thing. Rowland Manthorpe, Sky’s technology correspondent, has done exactly that, and it’s pretty convincing. In the end, I’m going to be a little more circumspect, but only a little.
There are good reasons to be sceptical. One, the verification process screams “bad idea”. It will mean giving a third-party verification provider your credit card details, or your driving licence or passport. Some of these providers will require you to buy a “porn pass” from a local newsagents, which I suppose will bring back a nostalgic thrill for the over-50s who remember hiding a copy of Razzle underneath their Radio Times as they approached the till. One is run by MindGeek, which, incidentally, also owns PornHub, YouPorn and RedTube. Fox in charge of the henhouse, and all that.
This runs a big risk of creating a database of sexual preferences and porn habits, in the hands of providers with varying abilities to protect it. This sort of thing has happened before: the “dating site for married people”, Ashley Madison, was hacked in 2015. It became something of a feeding frenzy for extortionists, and there were reports of suicides linked to the leak. A lot more people use porn than use skeevy hookup sites for affairs. And it’d be OK for those of us with vanilla proclivities, but for people with unusual or hidden kinks, it could be awful.
More importantly, though, I was – and am – concerned that the evidence for the harms of porn is enormously overstated. Those fears were far from allayed when I looked at the impact assessment the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport put out to justify the legislation.
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