The commercial attempted to tone down the porny aspects by also showing a woman on a park bench breastfeeding, or a woman lifting weights, but those moments were overwhelmed by the titillating nipple-probing, the barrage of boobs stuffed into tight, low-cut tops. Overall, the effect was striking: love porn or hate it, the total pornification of culture is complete.

This is only partially a story about the adult-entertainment industry, which is huge and growing, with an estimated $71 billion in revenue expected in 2025. Nor is it a story about porn serving as the true means for sex education, though the average boy or girl encounters pornography at age 13, according to the UK Children’s Commissioner. What does seem to be new is a cultural takeover that goes beyond adult entertainment.

We no longer lustfully and happily tit-stare, as has been the human way since time immemorial. Nor do we fantasize about breasts as something we might like to catch a glimpse of. Instead, they’re all dolled up and shoved in our faces, aesthetically sexualized but contextually neutered, no more or less an object of desire than a can of Bud Light. Keep your pharmaceutical company off our porn, please. There’s sexy, and then there’s breast cancer, and the two are not the same.

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How the world fell for ‘romantasy’

By Valerie Stivers

There are signs of this everywhere, in high culture and low, perhaps starting with the fact that the one of our most popular social-media platforms is now called X for no apparent reason. Beauty trends for young women on an even bigger platform, TikTok, are a driving force. Heavy makeup, exaggerated lips, breasts and butts, and long plastic nails that used to read “stripper” or “porn star” are now for everyone. The latex or leather dress paired with over-the-knee platforms and (of course) jet-black acrylic claws, the regalia of the high-end dominatrix, is now part of the Upper East Side mom’s humdrum repertoire, divested of erotic meaning.

“Clean girl”, one of the dominant makeup trends, might appear at first glance as a countervailing tendency. It’s “clean” in the sense that its adherents wear light eye makeup and a natural lip and cheek palate and dress classy or preppy. But the look relies on thick layers of “natural looking” foundation and is mixed up with porn tropes like huge puffy lips and perfect fake nails. Clean-girl influencer Frida Aasen Chiabra has 1.1 million followers on Instagram and got her start as Victoria’s Secret model. Her feed shows her spraying perfume on herself, frolicking on tropical islands, and routinely going about her “real life” in lingerie or offering a butt-shot. Porn users have taken notice. The No. 1 trending porn search term for 2024, according to statistics released by Pornhub was “demure”, up 133% year-on-year, along with “modesty” (up 77%) and “traditional clothes” (34%).

It’s perhaps no surprise that two actresses from the television show Euphoria, which depicted teens in hard-core sex situations as a matter of course, are also social-media influencers of this type, known for their assets. With Sidney Sweeney (23.5 million Instagram followers), it’s breasts; with Chloe Cherry, who had a role on the show’s second season, it’s lips. Sweeney, fresh-scrubbed and collegiate-looking in a turtleneck sweater, made a cameo on the Super Bowl’s When Harry Met Sally reunion ad for Hellman’s Mayonnaise — and delivered the famous line “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Chloe Cherry (1.1 million followers), whose lips are silicone-injected to alarming proportions, was a porn actress before her role on the show, and made a pornographic parody of the show with Jenna Foxx in 2023. The two actresses have notably different public profiles — to have surgery and implants versus “natural” attributes — telegraphs variations in social class to some extent. But both are defined by a body part — in the way porn-searches reduce our desires to a single anatomical feature or piece of apparel: “fake lips”, “big tits”, “high heels”.

The porn is unstoppable. Tradwife influencer? You wear a corset over your frills and also have enormous breasts. Trendy? You’re wearing cheetah-print and have “aura” pattern on your dagger acrylics. Sally Rooney heroine? You make your money on OnlyFans. French bad-boy writer anguished about your country’s relationship with its Muslim inhabitants? You made a porn tape. Married to Kanye West? You drop your coat on the Grammys red carpet, naked except for a transparent slip. Ye himself? You share videos of your favorite porn stars during the Super Bowl (and deactivate from X afterwards, after a flurry of anti-Semitic posting).

Female reader of mass-market fiction? You’re reading Romantasy, a genre that slips into graphic descriptions of penetrations and orgasms every few chapters. American teen? You routinely refer to glazing, which now means paying too much attention to someone, but whose etymology is the porn term for having someone ejaculate on your face.

The young-man version of TikTok is probably rap music, where a similar dynamic unfolds: everything is sexualized, and none of it means a thing. The graphic description of sex acts in rap has been happening since at least the 1990s. The direct pipeline to young children, however, is a Zoomer phenomenon, and the normalization may be newer yet. My 13-year-old son, three seconds after the Netspend lyric “shut up, bitch, I need some spit” comes out of his phone, assures me that “all rappers respect women” and that they wouldn’t consider doing otherwise, because it would damage their careers.

To take Kendrick Lamar and Drake — he’s right. Both say they respect women, and have made extensive public comments on it. Another example that’s currently popular and apropos is the rapper J. Cole’s song “Wet Dreamz”. The song has more than 1 billion streams on Spotify and describes the rapper’s desire to lose his virginity: “hadn’t been in pussy since the day I came out.” When the song’s narrator and the girl he likes get into bed, Cole says, “And most of all I’m praying, ‘God, don’t let me bust quick’ / I’m watching pornos, tryna see just how to stroke right / Practice putting condoms on, how it go, right?” The song endorses porn as sex ed, comes from a person who “respects women,” and bows to convention and popular morality with contraception. All good!

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The logical endgame of the sexual revolution has been to turn sex into a recreational activity whose only meaning is defined by the people experiencing it, and whose only moral issues center around consent. By these standards, there is scarcely any reason for consenting adults not to make porn, if that’s their choice, and it’s equally OK for other consenting adults not to enjoy their solitary pleasures while watching it. Equally, it makes sense to export porn’s tropes into the mainstream and enjoy them, if that’s what we’re doing. Most of us have certain squicky feelings when it comes to kids viewing porn, but large-scale cultural pushback against these images entering our homes is only just beginning. The age requirements for porn access currently being enacted by 19 states will be an interesting test case.

There are cracks in the façade: a loneliness epidemic, statistics that this generation of oversexualized teens is having less sex, an increasing prevalence of porn-addiction and erectile dysfunction in younger and younger men. Also, the acts seem to grow more extreme and less desirable the more we get used to them.

The great and much maligned anti-pornography activist Andrea Dworkin has been having a bit of a renaissance lately. She has received some semi-positive tributes in the press, including on the right, and Picador is reissuing three of her books on this month, including Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Dworkin was a brilliant extremist and a wonderful writer, and though most of her conclusions are utterly wrong, she’s fun to read. Some lines from her fiery, man-hating pen will go down in eternity. And oddly, despite how wrong she was on almost everything, it has turned out the way she thought it would with porn and mass culture—they’ve become one.

Yet it was only after the Second World War that Jews became white. A new book by Emily Tamkin tells the story of how the racial identity of American Jews evolved. Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities reminds us, again and again, of something too often forgotten: Jewry isn’t homogenous, and its ethnic character hasn’t always been static.

The early Jewish community in America, from the time of the revolution, was largely Sephardic — that is, Southern European and North African. Paler-skinned Ashkenazim from Germany and Central Europe, who were more bourgeois and assimilationist, didn’t arrive in significant numbers until the mid-19th century. But it was the mass migration of poor, oppressed Jews from the Russian empire, which began a few decades later, that dramatically altered the composition and culture of American Jewry, making Ashkenazim overwhelmingly dominant. That’s not to say American Ashkenazim were a cohesive, mutually supportive ethnic group. The earlier settlers feared that the newcomers, with their markedly different cultures and Yiddish language, would give Jews a bad reputation.

When they first arrived in significant numbers, the pale skin of Ashkenazim Jews was not a privilege. Those who settled in America faced considerable social and cultural prejudice — and certainly weren’t viewed as white. After the First World War, the images of Jews in pop culture were quite often of gangsters or Bolshevik subversives. During the Second, the American state was not enthusiastic about accepting Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. One of the reasons behind the opposition to America intervening in “European entanglements” was suspicion that it would be doing so at the behest of Jewish power.

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Nevertheless, despite the discrimination they faced, the philosophy of the diaspora was assimilationist and remarkably successful. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews gradually transitioned away from living in the urban slums of the Lower East Side — with their radical socialist politics, Yiddish culture, and strong association with Jewish ethnic identity — and into the leafy middle-class suburbs of white bread America. Now, Jews are among the most socially integrated groups in America. Total assimilation is commonly accessible for those that want it. A Jew, in other words, can be Jewish by choice.

The title of Norman Podhoretz’s memoir, Making It, captures the post-war ethos of American Jewry. Loyalty should be pledged to America. Jews shouldn’t stress their particularity. They should become “white”. The GI Bill, which virtually excluded black people in practice, as Tamkin notes, “enshrined their status as white Americans”, enabling them to become “publicly, outwardly all-American and privately religiously all-Jewish”. Whiteness, for many American Jews, was a result of assimilation: it meant stability, material comfort, upward social mobility, and safety.

Jews have never been an oppressed minority in America. Even early migrants faced nothing like the systematic oppression of the Pale of Settlement, which they fled from. When David Ben-Gurion toured America in 1916, he noted the existence of a “Negro Pale of Settlement” in Nashville, which does put things in perspective. And it wasn’t just Jewish immigrants who were treated as outsiders. The Irish, Italians, Poles — most ethnically “white” arrivals in the 19th and 20th centuries were treated as “alien” by an America that unofficially defined itself as White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant; most were accepted into the mainstream and ultimately seen as white, which entailed moving up the social hierarchy. All were regarded much more favourably than black Americans.

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And yet, there’s something fraught and imprecise about describing American Jews as “white” in the same way one would describe a Polish-American as white. It doesn’t completely fit. Considering how Jews have been among the most detested groups in history, it seems callous to casually claim we benefit from “white privilege”. As David Baddiel argued in Jews Don’t Count, contemporary anti-racism excludes Jews to the point of legitimising antisemitism, by regarding Jews as participating in racist structures against people of colour. It’s true that in Western countries, Jews don’t face the institutionalised oppression that other minorities may do and largely. Jews are included in national identities, while being free to preserve Jewish culture. None of this suggests antisemitism doesn’t exist.

Moreover, as Tamkin usefully points out, any association with Jews and “whiteness” has the problem of taking the Ashkenazim as the sole paradigm of Jewishness. Obviously, this isn’t the case. Judaism has had a historic presence in so many societies across the world; Jews come in different appearances and hues, imbued with different cultures. In Israel, at least half, possibly a slight majority, of the Jewish population is visibly “non-white” — the nation airlifted 14,000 Jews out of Ethiopia over two days in 1991. Far-Right parties draw much of their support from this demographic, puncturing many of the assumptions about Israel’s supposed “white supremacy”. But an overwhelming majority of American Jews are Ashkenazim, and because American culture dominates the world, Ashkenazim end up representing “authentic” Jewish identity worldwide. Ethiopian Jews are overlooked, despite being one of the most ancient Jewish communities, and much of the way we discuss Judaism is white-centric.

This mentality also affected Jews themselves. Within America, Jews have divided and demonised one another. Many Ashkenazim, as Tamkin reveals, regarded their Sephardic co-religionists as “bad Jews”, or not Jews at all, since they didn’t speak Yiddish, didn’t pray in the same way and looked different. In her history of Sephardic Jews in America, Aviva Ben-Ur recounts stories of Ashkenazic landlords in New York excluding Sephardic Jews from lodging, and petitioning Mayor William Jay Gaynor to “remove these Turks from our midst”.

Throughout American history, groups condemned to the lower rungs of the social ladder often disdain those even lower down the racial hierarchy than they are. Black people, being right at the bottom, bear the brunt of this retaliatory discrimination. There is a history, which Tamkin documents, of Jewish leaders arguing that Jews are white for immigration purposes, of Jewish leaders using the language of eugenics to abjure the connection between Jews and Africans commonly made by racial scientists, of bigoted Jewish shop owners discriminating against black customers. Tamkin also notes that, “Jewish support for civil rights was not unanimous”. Reactionaries such as Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer saw the “Negro revolution” as a threat to Jewish security. Their case, as Tamkin describes, was based on the premise that Jews “belonged to white America and one need only look at Black America to see that that was true”.

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The demise of 'political blackness'

By Ralph Leonard

Their attitude was not universal, however. Many progressive Jews, such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, avidly supported equal rights — and indeed were overrepresented among the white people that joined the freedom marches in the South. And prominent black leaders also supported Jewish causes: Paul Robeson, Bayard Rustin and W. E. B. Du Bois were vocal about sympathising with Zionism, out a deep affinity and solidarity with the plight of European Jewry.

Indeed, some Jews were, to use Leonard Fein’s phrase, the “unintended beneficiaries” of the black-power style. Jewish leaders took inspiration from black-power activists: if blacks can advocate for blackness, then Jews can advocate for Jewishness. The zenith of black power coincided with Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of 1967, after which American Jews embraced Zionism more fully. “The perceived heroism of Israel,” Tamkin writes, “led some Jews to identify openly as Jews.” This embrace of Israel, ironically, was a function of American Jews finally “making it”: being fully integrated into the fabric of America. They could adopt a dual identity without being accused of “dual loyalty”. Israel becoming a key strategic ally of America helped in this regard. Supporting the state complimented American patriotism and fealty to liberal democratic values.

And of course, black people and Jews are not a mutually exclusive group. Tamkin estimates that there are as many as 1.2 million black American Jews, whose Jewishness is so often be ignored, including by Jews themselves, because they don’t “look” the part. They are mostly a product not of immigration but the erosion of the stigma directed at interracial marriage. Their Jewishness therefore tends to be Ashkenazic, whereas the only vague blueprint for black Jewishness rests on an indigenous African version of the religion. Ethiopian Jews, isolated from the rest of the Jewish universe, also face racism in Israel. The double consciousness of being both black and Jewish remains more vexed than that of being both American and Jewish. If becoming “white” is the only way for Jews to escape cultural prejudice, what are black Jews supposed to do?