In the world that porn has built, young men’s efforts are literally infertile: explosions of violence or otherwise that yield a big, pleasurable nothing. Hatfield’s anti-porn crusade paradoxically embodied this fundamental impotence.

The man was clearly unstable, and his manifesto, with its frequent references to knowledge of secrets that remain “almost entirely hidden from people,” betrays delusions of grandeur. But the manifesto is also of cultural significance, considering the ascendancy of the incel ideology among swathes of the online Right and the percolation of many similar ideas about men, women, and dating in the mainstream. Its Right-Left ideological flattening — Hatfield was both anti-liberal and anti-capitalist; he rails against transgenderism and Western cultural supremacy  — is significant, too, representing the bitter end of Christian metaphysics, even on the Right. 

Hatfield’s manifesto is the first, but possibly not the last, appearance of hypergamy, a new buzzword of the online Right, in a mass-shooting. The word has its origins in an Indian caste law that required women to marry men of the same or higher caste and, in modern parlance, means “dating up.” The desire to “date up” could generically be assumed to be shared by both men and women — aspirational mating is a universal human urge, after all — and to include desires for partner-benefits like social status and finances. But in today’s manosphere and as embraced by Hatfield, it concerns only physical attractiveness. In Hatfield’s definition, this is the only quality that matters when a woman chooses whom to have sex with — which she can do freely in contemporary culture. He defines it as a “phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically [sic] and culturally to just one male.”

As the theory goes, a man’s height and physical attractiveness are signs of “health” and “genetic quality” which are desirable qualities in a mate because they suggest healthier offspring. Hatfield is cribbing from evolutionary psychology, which argues that women are more invested in any individual child than men are, since men can have hundreds of children, and women only a few. Thus women are supposedly especially motivated by attractiveness — which signals health, meaning a better chance for survival of the offspring — in their choice of sexual partners. Women are also choosier about partners than men are for the same reason: the sum number of chances a woman has to pass on her genes is very limited; men have hundreds, or theoretically even thousands, of such chances, no childbearing or nurturing work required. 

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When you combine the female preference for tall, attractive men with a liberal sexual culture, according to the incel theory, you get a situation in which tall, attractive men are having lots of sex with multiple female partners, and the other men are having no sex at all. This, supposedly, has nothing to do with the men’s habits, personalities, or physical presentation, but is purely genetic. In the “hypergamy state,” as Hatfield writes, the “common man” is hopelessly “cast out of the divine realm of truly intimate love and attraction” through no fault of his own. “The only things that matter when it comes to experiencing love as a male … are the length of the bones in your legs, and the shape of the bones in your face.” 

All this takes many wild leaps, but it is to some extent — and more than Hatfield actually references — based on theories of evolutionary biology and psychology that are becoming increasingly popular. One such popular, biology-based idea about the psychology of dating is the conviction among very-online Zoomer young women that the birth control pill “makes you choose the wrong guys.” A groundbreaking work on the matter is evolutionary psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Hill’s book, How the Pill Changes Everything, which focuses on the Pill but also provides a fascinating walkthrough of the evolutionary view of modern dating. According to Hill, the preference for healthy offspring is — and in many more ways than Hatfield’s manifesto suggests — encouraged by female biology, and gene-maxxing in fact does play a significant role in women’s partner choices, though the standard seems more likely to be highly complex issues of genetic compatibility, which is predicted by sexual attraction, rather than brute height-and-looks measurement on some objective scale. Hill would also argue that social and psychological traits such as female partner-choosiness are hardwired by evolution. 

Hill’s research doesn’t support incel conclusions throughout. She has found that women in the pre-ovulation phase of their menstrual cycles are more likely to choose men they find sexier or better-looking. Post-ovulation, the preference switches to men they find rich, nice, or reliable. Her argument is that since hormonal contraception sets female hormones at a permanent “post-ovulation” state, it may be skewing partner choice toward provider types,  and away from the men women are most attracted to. The skew is bad in that it affects birth rates and marital happiness, since couples who have good sexual chemistry also seem to have better child-health outcomes (due to genetic compatibility) and lower divorce rates. Given that around 30% of women in their 20s are on hormonal birth control of some kind, with the share presumably higher among the sexually active, many women in the dating pool, artificially influenced by hormones, in fact should be seeking personality over looks. 

Still, the underlying premise that sexual behavior follows rules of hard science is shared by both men and women. And distorted through a million video clips and Reddit threads, such material could make the position of short, unattractive men seem desperate indeed. Hatfield calls it the “ghastly state of things that the Western world has found itself in” and a “situation of terrible loneliness, isolation, and social degradation.” 

In his theory, this problem for men is particular to the modern world, because while hypergamy ruled in the state of nature, the misty dawn of agriculture and civilization somehow naturally produced monogamy, supposedly a great leveler against the tyranny of female choice. He discounts or is unaware that Christianity was the foundation of monogamy in the West, and that it substantially improved women’s cultural position. Instead, he views monogamy as a spontaneous “stabilizing” development that served the purpose of bringing formerly discarded men into useful social participation by giving them something to live for — subservient wives. “Having gained secure and steady access to intimacy through the institution of monogamy,” he writes, “these men could now experience copulation and romantic love, thereby attaining self-actualization, something which was previously inaccessible to them.” 

Now, Hatfield says, capitalism has eroded monogamy, pushing women into the workforce and giving them the freedom to return to their preferred state of hypergamy. Hence, his call to social violence seeks to end “high capitalism,” and to return women to enforced monogamy with the type of men he refers to as “common” — not tall and attractive. The manifesto concludes with a list of 12 categories of  “class-A targets” that would hasten this state of affairs; section V — yes, he uses Roman numerals — addresses targeting the headquarters of players in the porn industry. “Be unflinching, go forth and KILL THEM ALL!” he commands.

It’s nothing new to say that incels hate and dehumanize women, viewing them purely as sex objects. A description of one woman as a “vaguely female-looking clump of humanoid biomass” in Hatfield’s manifesto is fairly typical. Nor is it new to say that for all their talk of love and intimacy, what such men are really focused on isn’t even sex, but instead status and self-worth. Hatfield’s rant is clearly envious of the kind of dominant man he claims to despise. His fever-dream descriptions of the vile and disgusting life of pleasure and bliss lived out by attractive men are almost touching in their transparency. “And let nobody convince you,” he writes, “that the more wealthy of these males do not occasionally indulge in the blackest depths of depravity and twisted perversions, together with countless attractive women of differing backgrounds, within various orgies and other such hideous events, that take place in their skyscrapers, mansions, and at many luxury hotels in major cities.” Sounds terrible! 

Moreover, the length of the section in the manifesto where Hatfield responds “in dialectical format” to “objections” that he could get a girlfriend if he just changed his behavior, suggests that the whole thing is a desperate cope to avoid accountability, and that the incel project really is just the Right-wing version of progressive victim culture. 

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However, the fully consumerist, materialist understanding of love and dating is, to some extent, a new and unwelcome development. Materialism, according to natural-law philosopher Heinrich Rommen, “regards man as nothing more than a highly evolved animal” and puts “in place of a personal God … a doctrine of impersonal eternal force or of perpetually recurrent changes of matter in accordance with the blind necessity of the laws of nature.” Marxism is one form of materialist metaphysics — society is determined by “the conditions of production” — though Marx, unacknowledged, retained much of Christendom’s old framework of good and evil. What Hatfield calls “biological consciousness” is another kind of materialism — everything happening between men and women is in accordance with our lower animal natures. 

That such a philosophy serves humans poorly is easily visible. The manifesto uses a dehumanizing terminology of “females” and “copulation”; elides the difference between copulation and love; assumes marriage is a mutually hostile transaction for individual benefit; and mostly lacks concern that, in its preferred future state of affairs, most women would be married against their wishes. More frightening is that all the underlying — and essentially Christian — ideals that humanized previous materialist systems and made them aspire to nobility and justice are just … missing for the incels. Moral relativism, and its corresponding ideology of individualist self-pleasure, have been espoused for generations, but it’s never previously been tried without underpinnings of some kind of vestigial morality. Hatfield — and we might here genuinely say through no fault of his own — was trying it. 

In this sense, Hatfield is one of an emerging cohort of young people — and not only men — committed to violence for causes that are either overtly or covertly in search of self-esteem. The confusing new reality in which the political sides seem to be getting mixed up is often attributed to “internet extremism” looking the same in any flavor, but it actually represents a deeper convergence. Is Tyler Robinson — the pro-trans youth accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk — on the Right or Left? It’s hard to tell. Is Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot an insurance executive, a Left-wing freedom fighter? Is he any different than the failed Seth Scott Hatfield, his Right-wing-ish doppelgänger? And don’t the armed or violent ICE protesters in Minneapolis feel like they’re on the same continuum, despite their arguments of righteous civil disobedience? 

The search for self-esteem, without any kind of restraining hand, isn’t going well. Hatfield targeted the porn industry for peddling a false and humiliating substitute to a good he believed every young man somehow deserves: unfettered “copulation” with an attractive woman. He pathetically failed in his mission, but was highly successful in terms of fully living out the mandate to take only himself and his group’s interests into account, as dictated by the framework most contemporary young people now share. To do otherwise is the kind of hard, self-denying work that the Christian commandments were rather good at, and no materialist version has come close to. Without this kind of work, all activism is masturbatory — and fruitless. 

Niblett’s big idea is to herald in what she calls a “summer of sex”, instructing the general public in the art of having satisfying, mutually respectful erotic experiences. Perhaps assuming that the Right needs more help with this than the Left, she appears to be spinning her campaign towards Reform and Restore voters in particular: “it’s about taking control of our patriotism, about taking control of our Britishness, and not feeling ashamed”. Accordingly, she has named the project “Yes Sex Please, we are British”, which ironically sounds like something only a foreigner could have made up. In fact, though, it’s a riff on a Seventies sex farce featuring Ronnie Corbett — probably a little niche, even for Rupert Lowe fans.

The details of Niblett’s project sound unlikely to get the national pulse racing. Or as Aristotle percipiently noted in a different context, one swallow does not a summer make. She plans to team up with a fellow sex positivist — the equally improbably named Cindy Gallop — to replace the pornographic stereotypes in people’s heads with images of “real people” having sexual contact. In other words: don’t picture the slick thrustings of Pornhub, think Matt Hancock smooching in an office. Gallop is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), a website where, according to its own hype, you can “watch real world sex videos in all their loving, hot, and messy humanness”. Niblett apparently enjoys visiting the site herself — “It’s a turn on, it helps you masturbate, helps you cum”, she elaborates to the reporter, somewhat unnecessarily — and says she is looking to facilitate engagement between its founder and government ministers.

Gallop, meanwhile, is a 66-year-old entrepreneur who recently told the Telegraph she is proud of the fact that she “regularly and recreationally” sleeps with younger men. It was apparently in the course of these amatory adventures that she had a Eureka moment, in the traditional sense. She started to notice that the young men with whom she was sleeping had various misconceptions about sex, based on hardcore porn consumption. And lo, the idea for MLNP was born.

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In a spirit of inquiry, I signed up for the free version. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience much, though perhaps it was because the clips I was watching were only three seconds long — you have to pay to watch full videos, and I didn’t. Generally, the site looks like an updated Readers’ Wives section. If you like brutally natural lighting, concentrated facial expressions, low-energy writhing on well-worn Ikea furniture, and occasional grunts interspersed with the sounds of the Heathrow flightpath, this might well be the place for you.

Participants write their own blurbs to lure viewers in, and several seem to involve references to childcare: “This is just a short video we made while finding some time in the morning while the children were still asleep”; “We’re again using the time our toddler is napping to get as much of each other as possible”. Another theme is the outdoors: “Witness as Tausha’s body responds to Trevor’s touches. Hear her moans echo through the forest, listen to the birds respond to her primal tones”. I did as instructed and think I might have heard a startled woodpecker, though it was quite hard to tell.

Of course — as Niblett’s fellow MPs have been quick to point out — this is all a right Carry On, and a distraction from current political priorities: wars, looming food shortages, systemic state failures resulting in the murder of children. As Kemi Badenoch pithily put it in the Commons, “it gives a whole new meaning to fiddling while Rome burns”. Stung by the criticism, Niblett has apparently now changed her PR strategy, suggesting yesterday that the campaign is for the benefit of “old people” who “want to have sex”. Presumably Badenoch’s Spads are brainstorming double entendres about the triple lock as I write.

But what is also frustrating is that Niblett and Gallop identify a real problem, though the solution they propose is hilariously empty. It is obvious that porn use, among other modern malaises, is infecting sexual behavior to the detriment of both women and men, but the solution cannot be yet more porn — for this is indeed what MLNP provides, despite the disclaimer in its title. True, there are no webcams or teary-eyed women retching, an undoubted plus; but the mere absence of something awful scarcely counts as a valuable education.

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 judgments 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 judgment… 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 behavior immune to serious critique, as long as accompanied by the transformational fairy dust of adult consent.

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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 judgment by definition; yet modern moralists have a kink for being non-judgmental, as their preferred phrasing goes. Accordingly, they treat sexual activity as utterly unlike any other sphere of human behavior: 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.

Talk of moral panics is cheap, but during an actual one, what is going on becomes difficult to name. Usually keen detectors of collective cortisol spikes go quiet, for the category of perceived evildoers has now started to expand chaotically. Make one incautious statement about insufficiency of evidence or the importance of due process, and you might find yourself in there too.

Still, it has to be said: there is definitely something dysfunctional going on. To press this point is compatible with noting matters of genuine public interest in the files: for instance, indications that Peter Mandelson and the former Prince Andrew passed on privileged financial information to Epstein, now being reviewed by police. Other countries are also belatedly realizing that when politicians or royalty get too close to billionaires, national interests can start to look horribly parochial. 

But there isn’t much excitement in a whiff of financial corruption on its own — as demonstrated by the relative silence on a recent Wall Street Journal scoop involving a UAE microchip contract and $500 million investment in a Trump-owned firm. The presence of colorful sexual scandal is clearly the magic extra ingredient that ensures a feeding frenzy. And yet, strangely, the files don’t offer much in the way of interesting new information in that respect.

This is not because they are low on sleaze — on the contrary. It is rather that we already knew about it. We have long been aware of Epstein’s exploitative sex crimes against minors and Maxwell’s grooming of victims. There have been interviews, documentaries, books. We also knew about the constant presence of very young women, the nightmarish taste in vaguely pedophilic art, and the boast of keeping a copy of Lolita by his bedside.  

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On this basis, we could surely have guessed about the pornography on hard drives, the women offered as gifts, the gynecologist on speed dial. For years, it has been obvious that many friends and associates must have turned a blind eye to the lubriciousness pouring off the man, and that a few of them were probably similarly inclined.

When Mandelson was appointed as an ambassador, the basic facts about Epstein were all in the public domain, and most did not care about the personal connection — a fact which makes the current hypervigilance about further associates look bogus. Some now seem to be playing a game of Six Degrees of Separation, but with Epstein in the place of Kevin Bacon. The mycologist Merlin Sheldrake was in the papers this week merely for discussing taking a large grant from Epstein, though in fact the two never met and no money changed hands. Elsewhere, the chairman of the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee is under pressure to resign. The main charge is that he had a flirtatious email exchange with Ghislaine Maxwell in 2002. 

This feels like overcompensation, but is still fairly vanilla compared with the absolute scenes in cyberspace. A dump of one million files with little immediate context has proved irresistible to online detectives. The main rule of interpretation is that every document deserves the most lurid treatment possible. 

Any off-color remark or hyperbolic statement made in a private context — quipping about attending a “paedophile convention” with Woody Allen, or writing of an unnamed other “I give you permission to kill him” — is to be understood perfectly literally. Epstein’s ordering of a reproduction of “Massacre of the Innocents”, a 1591 painting by the Dutch old master Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, should be taken as a direct confession of baby-killing. 

In this hysterical register there is no irony; no possibility of a malignant personality knowingly satirizing his own infamous reputation; and nor are there any mistakes or coincidences. Pity the chef mentioned several times in the files, charged with satisfying Epstein’s apparently large appetite for “jerky”. This has been interpreted by internet sleuths as a secret code for human remains. In retrospect, the chef probably regrets his professional connection with the disgraced financier; and I bet he regrets naming his former restaurant Cannibal even more.

In one sense, this was all inevitable — the result of the ungovernable internet getting rocket fuel from the monetization of clicks. A variety of bedroom-based obsessives are teaming up to bang their drums together: I won’t mention your rampant antisemitism if you support my quest to bring down Harvard elites. But even mainstream commentators seem prepared to endorse madly conspiratorial claims as long as it will hurt their enemies. Given the unusual range of Epstein’s social associations, there is material in the files for score-settling in many directions; though frustratingly, nothing juicy for Trump haters yet.

There is a way of using the term “moral panic” which purports to exhibit a worldly indifference to Epstein’s sexual decadence, and a contempt for critics’ irrationalism and prudery. In this view, the panicking is bad but the moralizing is worse. I only half agree. People should certainly stop panicking, but they are not moralizing nearly hard enough. 

Were people to stop the former, the files would provide ample material for less dramatic, more acute critique of familiar human weaknesses. It’s like a satire of modern hypocrisies brought to life. There’s Deepak Chopra, the New Age spiritual guru who refers to Epstein’s “girls” as if they were a string of polo ponies; Noam Chomsky, the famous Left-wing intellectual apparently indifferent to the economic exploitation under his nose; Lawrence Krauss, the astrophysics professor dealing with his own allegations of sexual assault, asking the veteran offender for advice. (Epstein’s irritated verdict is also recorded for posterity: “you may be a great scientist but you suck at this sexual harassment game.”)

After the file release, Chomsky’s wife protested in her husband’s defense that Epstein “began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities” in order to “ensnare” him. You can see the same dynamic with Krauss in the emails: a car sent on a family holiday here; a lawyer paid there. One particularly dependent cognitive scientist, Joscha Bach, seems to have received plane tickets, an apartment, and tuition fees for his children at a private school. This may not have been prostitution, but there was definitely a kind of quid pro quo expected of academics taking Epstein money: they had to accept his rules, help him to perform philanthropic respectability for the outside world, and offer intellectual stimulation to keep him amused. While the women had to pretend to enjoy sex, the men had to feign interest in his ideas about the nature of consciousness.

But perhaps the biggest lesson to draw from the publication of the files concerns the reaction to them. The basic elements in the Epstein story that make his behavior abhorrent are, in fact, depressingly mundane. I have seen online outrage at child-like pornographic images in the files that would cause mere shrugging, had they been found on a different browser — not because they aren’t disgusting (they are), but because they are everywhere. And if you ignore the private jets and the Caribbean islands, everything awful thing that ever happened to a girl or young woman on an Epstein property would be just another day to many of those stuck in prostitution. Grooming, pimping out, coercive control, sexual exploitation, an insatiable appetite for extreme youth and novelty: all fall under the respectability cover of “sex work”. There was nothing unusual about Epstein’s perversions. He just had the means to indulge them to the max.

Yet it seems that onlookers can only get really offended about these sorts of events when there is another element to keep it spicy: for instance, if the perpetrators are billionaires. And even then, the topic cannot stay interesting for very long, apparently requiring further injections of drama to maintain fascination: tantalizing rumors about new names, or fantastical tales of murder and cannibalism. Before you know it, the discourse has run away with itself, and yet again the conspiracy theorists have failed to join up any actual dots.

The depressing fact is that sexual behavior like Epstein’s is absolutely standard in our society, in the twin forms of prostitution and the pornography industry. Not only that, but they are mostly tolerated. You can either take this as a defense of Epstein or as an indictment of society, and I do the latter. It’s great that we are all tough on Satanic cannibal billionaires now, but it would be good to channel all that outrage into something real. 

Tia Billinger is 26 and from Nottinghamshire. She didn’t know her dad growing up and was raised by a stepdad. She married young and took up a job in financial recruitment for the NHS. These days, she claims to make around £600,000 a month by having sex with men she doesn’t know on OnlyFans under the nom de guerre Bonnie Blue. Her stepdad watches her TikToks. Her mum works as her PA. She is a PR nightmare and a pornographer’s dream.

An old Facebook post shows Hope as a girl clinging about her father’s neck in a blue zip-up jumper, smiling sweetly. Another photograph dug up by sleuths on TikTok shows Billinger smiling with a group of friends in her early teens, decked out in quintessential 2010s British fashion — shorts over tights, dip-dyed hair, white Converses. These two images feel so removed from the polished, perfectly lit personas we see today, but are worth revisiting. Why? Because they more closely resemble those who suffer from a system which heralds sex on demand as a mark of progress. Open your eyes, and it’s anything but.

Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay are entrepreneurs of outrage, flirting with progressively shocking taboos as a way of driving engagement. Blue, never one to miss a headline grab, has messaged Tay asking to do a “collab”, piling hype on hype. They have each carved out a USP: Lil Tay is the barely legal wild child, very much still baby-faced, trading in her existing internet virality for quick cash from the porn world; Bonnie Blue is all about quantity over quality (1,000 men in one day) and quips calculated to piss off girlfriends (those who don’t satisfy their men are “lazy”, she says). Both are engaging in a form of disaster capitalism, whipping up spectacles of moral crisis so intoxicating that their stunts leap from porn sites onto the pages of national newspapers. Their infamy is the result of curiosity: how can she do this to herself? It has us looking through our fingers at each sickly development, and shifts subscriptions so porn-buyers might “see what all the fuss is about”.

Since the spring, a series of lily-livered articles on Bonnie Blue have lamely framed her as a maverick in a respectable and empowering profession: Cosmopolitan claimed her critics were peddling “moral panic” at a time of sexual conservatism; she is in fact an “autonomous worker” and victim of misdirected rage.

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Yet the fact is both Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay are middle-class young women who have chosen to imperil those more vulnerable than themselves by glamorizing pornography and prostitution — global scourges driven by the worst kind of men, who beat, traffick, drug, rape and hate women and children. For milquetoast feminists afraid to question men’s unimpeachable right to a fuck at any cost, it is the “stigmatisation” of “sex workers” that kills them. In reality, it is male pornographers, clients and pimps who grip women’s necks, pump them with sedatives, and grind their personhood into the mud.

Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, some women choose when to be filmed and bought and knocked around — but many do not. Many women, beneath the gleaming entrepreneurial tip of the iceberg, prostitute themselves to survive, to keep warm or high or escape a beating. For those who care to look, this reality is everywhere. Over the course of a single January night last year, Stuart Thomson raped three women, all prostitutes, at knifepoint in Manchester city center, and attempted to rape another. He selected them as his victims because he thought they wouldn’t report him to the police. When Thomson was arrested, one detective sergeant said that in the interview, he came across as if “he didn’t think there was anything to worry about”. Perhaps this was because he didn’t think of those women as normal people with dignity, but instead as collections of body parts to be penetrated, proprietors of bargain assets which could be bought, sold and stolen without much thought. The acceptable face of this perilous, exploitative world are women like Lil Tay and Bonnie Blue.

Amid all the chin-stroking about the role of camgirls in “the culture”, it is fashionable to be vague about the harms for which they are responsible. We wouldn’t want to be judgmental, would we? Yet all this appeasement is at the expense of clarity. Let me spell it out: Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay glamorize exploitation. We know that the subjects of porn translate into real-life encounters — like the 12-year-old girl strangled by a boy during their first kiss. “He had seen it in pornography and thought it was normal,” the children’s commissioner said. The fantasy of the porn lobby is that these videos are a sort of value-neutral shadowplay with no bearing on viewers’ behavior. The reality is that it is already warping sexual dynamics. For this we should hold both “creators” and “fans” directly accountable. It really is simple: don’t watch.

In the case of Lil Tay, the moral waters are muddier. Her family life seems fraught; in 2018, allegations of abuse against her father appeared on her Instagram account. She later claimed she’d been hacked. Elsewhere, various magazines have suggested that it is her older half-brother, Jason, who has always directed, controlled and profited from her flourishing career in the attention economy. “You’re no good, it’s no good,” he would shout at her, a source told The Atlantic; “she was crying hard.” When she was a child, Jason was said to be the only one with access to her megabucks Instagram account. Who holds the passwords now? Is Claire Hope really in control?

The stakes for Bonnie Blue and Lil Tay may seem high but in reality, these women are rich and protected by fame, managers, wealth — more than can be said for the average “sex worker”. I consider their videos degrading in themselves; they might not, and that’s alright. But they are famous, and so are responsible for more than their own degradation. They are responsible for cultural shifts which encourage men to think of women as buyable, disposable and exploitable. They are responsible for normalizing slinging women banknotes in exchange for their bodies. They toy with the frontiers of tolerance, pushing the envelope on what men can expect women and children to do for them.

All the while, they are engaging in a sort of sexual WWE: high-camp, high-gloss, low risk. Like stage wrestlers they adopt personas, vaulting between roles. Bonnie Blue is the cradlesnatcher (hunting for virgin freshers outside Nottingham Trent University in 2024) and the passive damsel (in her infamous “petting zoo”, for which she got booted off OnlyFans this summer). Lil Tay is the bolshy child gangster singing words she shouldn’t even know and then, as soon as it’s “legal”, the canny coquette. Yet in the real world, women and children are not able to put on different masks; they are pushed into porn-film formulas without wanting to be. Real women, real children, like the smiling little girl in her blue zip-up jumper, like the awkward teen in shorts over tights.

In the flesh, Bonnie — real name Tia Billinger — was burnished and svelte, giving every sign of being genuinely happy with the career that has made her millions. Her gimmick is to have sex on camera with what she calls “normal men”, not porn stars, then make subscribers pay to watch — and for six months, she has allowed the documentary-makers to follow her around. Gangbangs are her self-professed kink, including an infamous one in January allegedly involving 1,057 men in 12 hours. This proved too much for OnlyFans bosses, who refused to air the footage much to its star’s frustration. Instead, she has persuaded Channel 4 to show excerpts. The accompanying voiceover calls it “an unofficial world record”, as if waiting for Roy Castle to arrive with a certificate.

Along with journos and TV types, members of the Billinger family were in the audience for the screening, including her proud mum and gran. We all watched as their girl got penetrated by various portly naked men, touted for virgins at freshers’ fairs, and did jigsaws and crafting projects as downtime. “My brain works differently, I’m not emotional,” she says to camera at one point, and I believed her. Filmed at the end of her mass orgy, she lies down on the condom-strewn floor and does a comedy starfish.

I’m afraid I laughed. Blue/Billinger is quite funny in a Carry On Up the Algorithm sort of way. Asked during the Q&A whether she ever “hit the wall” during marathon sex sessions, she replied that “the only walls that get hit are mine”. She is good at bathetically juxtaposing the outrageous with the mundane: “I would love you to rearrange my insides somewhere near Oxford Circus”, goes a typical TikTok advert for one of her events. She also says she is looking for male participants whether they are “barely legal or barely breathing”, and that they should hide any wedding rings for the cameras.

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With a cool business head, she explains that the provocation is deliberate: the more wives and mothers rant angrily about her, the more husbands and sons go searching for her online. Making money like this is far more fun than her previous job in finance recruitment for the NHS. Yet she also likes to think of her content as educative, teaching men to have better sex. “I am basically a community worker,” she declares somewhat implausibly, before masterminding a sex scene in a classroom. Frightened-looking young women, awkwardly dressed up in school uniforms, say that they hope their unpaid participation will drive more subscribers to their own tiny porn accounts.

Also involved in Thursday’s presentation were the Channel 4 backers, visibly confused about what sort of film they were promoting: heartwarming story of feminist empowerment or hollow-eyed nightmare. (On camera, Blue says it is the former: “If anything I’m the image of what you [feminists] have been asking for for years”.) The anxious commissioning editor got a laugh when he fulsomely thanked “Kirsty from legal”; while director Victoria Silver seemed to struggle with Blue’s cheerful sociopathy, switching incoherently in the Q&A between praise for female autonomy and sad head-shaking on behalf of her teenage daughter. At one point, she told the audience that “all of us” should “park” our judgemental responses to Bonnie: she’s just out there doing her thing.

But part of Blue’s thing is to resist others’ attempts at humanisation. At one point in the documentary, she gets banned from the OnlyFans platform altogether, for announcing that she next intends to film herself displayed in a clear glass box in central London, bound, gagged, and open to all-comers to penetrate as they wish. “Do you consider yourself an artist?” a pretentious American journalist asked her after the credits had rolled, perhaps keen to frame her as the new Marina Abramovic. Replied Blue with derision: “Oh my god, that’s far too intellectual a question; what is it you think you’ve just watched?” Another questioner noticed that some subscribers seemed to crave emotional connection, and asked her what men who paid to watch her might be “grateful for”. The frank answer came back: “my holes”.

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.”

It’s almost as if he’d been watching Channel 4.

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Having a lovely time around the dinner table at Scrutopia, I chatted to serious young men about expectations placed upon them. One of them brought up the dangerous practice of sexualized choking, made popular through exposure to violent porn. He said that, just like most women, most men don’t like it either, but sometimes feel they are expected to do it, and may even be reluctantly complying out of embarrassment. It seems like a horribly dark version of the Abilene paradox: nobody wants to go to Abilene, but everyone thinks everybody else wants to, so they all unhappily troupe there together. Except that this time, a woman is involuntarily strangled instead; and here too, it turns out nobody was ever having any fun.

Blue — who perhaps needless to say, is a big fan of being choked — would undoubtedly say this issue is to be solved by more vocal consent. It was a point she came back to repeatedly when questioned on Thursday night. But having to read out an ever-growing list of internet-approved acts you positively don’t want to participate in, every time you get into the bedroom, does not seem to me a liberating state of affairs for anyone. And for every future dead, strangled daughter who once watched a Bonnie Blue video — or whose sex partner did — it won’t be much consolation for her family to think she nominally had a choice.

Scruton was the sort of social conservative who positively fought for the beautiful and noble things in our culture, trying to safeguard their presence before they disappeared entirely. If the rest of us are too jaundiced to manage that, we should at least try to fight off the obviously ugly and degrading. OnlyFans has recently been valued at $8 billion. It’s all very well saying you won’t be looking into the abyss; either way, the abyss will end up looking into you. Do we really want to have to decline balaclavas in the bedroom on a case-by-case basis? Do we really want sex as a pay-per-view circus with Bonnie Blue as ringmaster in-chief? I suggest we get our disapproving judgments out of the carpark and back on the road.

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.

Last week, a primary school-aged boy was filmed shouting at a woman sunbathing in her own garden in a bikini: “Give us a bit of fanny… I’ve been craving it all day. Suck my dick. Get on your knees. Give me your minge. Bend over.” In the background, a companion made moaning sounds. They cannot have been older than 10.

The video upset me for hours after. Something irreplicable about childhood, something critical about the respect between adults and children, men and women, has been spoiled — probably forever — by degrading pornography. And Bonnie Blue is partly responsible. That these boys’ instinct was to sexually intimidate a woman they saw only as a potential porn star; that they themselves have been exposed to that sort of language and material; that the generation of girls forced to sit in classrooms with them will face problems none of us ever did, is no less than disastrous.

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When children are exposed to pornography, it burdens them with psychologically troubling ideas about the women they know in real life: that they all belong in a hidden sexual world in which men turn them into pretzels and fuck them unconscious, and that they secretly enjoy it. Our safeguards against violent sexism are hopeless: primary-school boys are scolded for pulling girls’ ponytails at break time; they are given history lessons about Cleopatra and Boudicca; they sit through assemblies about women’s football and Florence Nightingale. But all of this soft-touch equality conditioning is undone the moment they see a naked woman strangled, beaten and humiliated on a screen. And how could it not be? The absorption of the worldviews of Andrew Tate and Bonnie Blue is nothing short of radicalizing. Blue and Tate, and the pornography industry they represent, are directly to blame for the way Generation Alpha girls are being treated in the playground now, and will probably be treated for their entire teenage years. They will come up against a supercharged strain of misogyny which women my and Bonnie Blue’s age cannot even begin to understand.

We cannot rely on bullshit 2020s feminism to fix this — the boner-advocacy brigade which refuses to ask any difficult questions about who it represents or what it is for. As things stand, the young women of the future will be forced to fend for themselves, with Gen Z having utterly disappointed on the critical questions of gender, prostitution and pornography. So what can be done? Perhaps the only hope is that the 2030s will mark a turning point: that youngsters then will finally realize that the excesses of liberal feminism — the dogma that every choice a woman makes, however violating, is feminist — must be swept away if they are to survive this radioactive new breed of woman-hatred. Perhaps they will finally lobby politicians to accept that society simply cannot be trusted with extreme pornography; that, like other radicalizing material, it should be restricted, and that this fact is a matter of life and death. With moves to criminalize strangulation on porn sites made last week, there is a glimmer of hope in this regard. I hope that young girls of the future will view Bonnie Blue in the same way that Tate so clearly does, as a stooge for failed feminism. I hope for their sake that they do, because our culture, as it stands, will not save them.

Since then, I have (without actively looking) casually come across a scattering of articles that mention it and/or worry about it, including a piece on this site by Kat Rosenfield, titled “The Death of Intimacy”. In the piece, Rosenfield declared that, in a dramatic shift of mores, women have “cast off the mantle of the sexual gatekeeper only to find themselves in a world where your boyfriend’s idea of first-date intimacy was to engage in a little light choking before ejaculating all over your face… oh, but consensually of course.”

“The Death of Intimacy” is of a piece with a number of articles on UnHerd, apparently written to call out the crisis state of our current erotic (or rather anti-erotic) landscape, for example: “Porn Will Destroy You” (Sarah Ditum), “How to Save Sex” (Blake Smith), and the mutually respectful conversation between Aella (OnlyFans advocate and Substack star) and Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. In this context, sexual choking appears to be another aspect of the dehumanising, porn-influenced bad direction we are headed in, and/or a dangerous rebound reaction to a neurotic obsession with sexual safety and feminist overkill. Indeed, it’s easy for me to see it that way.

I came of age during the Seventies, a time of great permissiveness that segued into the even greater permissiveness of the Eighties. It was a very male-dominated time, but playfully so, in my circles anyway; feminism could be pretty playful too. Almost anything you could think of was okay. BDSM in particular came out to party in full regalia, and all flavours of queerness — including trans-ness — were celebrated at least in some communities; the word polyamory wasn’t in use, but people lived it, albeit more quietly. Of course, much of this depended on where you lived and who you spent time with; it was great to be young and queer in San Francisco or New York but not so much in small-town Texas or Michigan. I have the impression that this is still the case.

During this period I had many friends and acquaintances who spoke frankly about their preferences and experiences and in all that time I can only recall hearing a girlfriend mention choking once: in a mild, bemused tone she remarked: “So George strangled me a little bit last night.” (Oddly I don’t remember anything more of the conversation, just the matter-of-fact quality of her statement.) Of course, just because I didn’t hear of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; there must’ve been some couples who played with choking under the general heading of kink. And there were the occasional media stories about “strangubation” — that is, masturbation combined with self-choking, something young men seemed to do alone, and only made the news when it went fatally wrong. So: not exactly a popular pastime.

And now… it is? The aforementioned Rosenfield essay was not, despite the provocative mention, about choking but rather the datafication and commodification of sex. To illustrate her points, she featured a spreadsheet created by the (also aforementioned) Aella: this document featured “every sexual encounter” that Aella had experienced along with a myriad of details about those encounters. I had a look and found myself more interested in another of Aella’s charts: a sex guide purporting to help frustrated men achieve greater sexual success via a “data-based theory of vagina-kind”. This meant, basically, a flow chart revealing what a sample of 600 women like and don’t like in terms of positions, attitudes and acts. Or, as Aella put it: “A) how much they like the thing and B) how much they’ve encountered men doing the thing.”

The idea of such a chart made me roll my eyes (more on that later) but I perused it anyway. And, with my vague knowledge of the subject, I was surprised to learn that, along with the classics (oral, doggy style and general masculine dominance), “most women” love choking — love it! In fact, it was in the category of what Aella called the “land of the unfulfilled feminine”, meaning women want it more than men are doing it. Insert wide-eyed emoji here!

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Of course, 600 isn’t a very big sample; it’s also skewed demographically. Aella described her group as “straight, biological… moderately liberal” women in their early 30s who’d had sex with at least five people. But her sample is not the only one. According to the National Library of Medicine (an official arm of the US government), fully 58% of female American college students have experienced and enjoyed (mostly) voluntary choking during sex. Some of them had been introduced to it as young as 12.

So… why? Why do so many women and girls suddenly want to do something that women of my generation would’ve considered a little too close to… murder? Because that is what it looks like to me. Dominance bordering on cruelty is for whatever reason a pretty standard feminine taste — but choking suggests murder, even if the suggestion is purely symbolic.

The phenomenon is sometimes explained by the ubiquity of internet porn, but that seems only half-right, the right half being “ubiquity”. In the past, a young guy might discover erotic choking via porn but he would not assume that his middle-class 15-year-old date would’ve heard of such a thing; if he wanted to live the fantasy, he would need to approach it with a great deal of care and her possibly horrified reaction would probably not seem worth it. Now, a 15-year-old girl has likely heard of sexualised choking because she may well have been exposed to porn on the same laptop she uses to attend Zoom classes.

This cultural change is huge. But it doesn’t explain why choking is regularly showing up in porn. I could be wrong but I think porn exists to make money, not to push a cultural agenda; it doesn’t manufacture desires, it caters to them. And, according to the NLM, women and girls also learn about choking through social media, fanfiction, movies and friends.

There are any number of explanatory theories floating around, one being that, because of the increased feminisation of society, women are so hungry to feel masculine strength that they will respond to it in this physically extreme form. This makes some sense. Superior physical strength has been a lynchpin of masculine social dominance for most of human history; it was vital for the survival of families and communities. But this is no longer true for modern societies which value mental prowess far more — an area in which there is no gender disparity. (On top of that, culturally we are now pretending, or at least people who make movies and TV shows are pretending, that there is no physical disparity either: female characters are now commonly portrayed as physically equal to men to the point of beating them in fistfights!)

Even so, I think the gender-neutral privileging of intelligence is in general a positive and inevitable development, but the animal nature of masculine force remains a compelling and beautiful thing. It makes sense that both men and women might want, on some profound level, to be reminded of it in their most intimate joining.

But there are many less murder-adjacent ways to be reminded. So I wonder too about subliminal anger and despair. American society in particular is so violent and rageful, so steeped in fear that it has become part of how we experience the world in our bodies — especially women who are more physically vulnerable. In sex, as in dreams, there is an element of metaphorically processing life experience, including that which we most fear; to experience it in a way that we can control ideally with someone we trust which, at best, may alchemically transform something frightening or ugly into pleasure and connection.

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In a long email conversation, the writer Lillian Fishman told me that she thinks most people who are “into choking” are into a light-pressure version of it that is mostly “representational”. She described its appeal in the following way:

“I think most light sexual kink tends to come down to wanting to feel temporarily paralysed/powerless/stuck/held down, in a non-scary way, so that the anxiety of how to act or of being the more interested party disappears (same reason I imagine that rape fantasies are so prevalent among women). And in good sexual relationships, this anxiety fundamentally retreats, without needing to be coaxed, one hopes. But I think choking is a shortcut to it. My suspicion is that most choking… is about this.”

This is something I understand: a “shortcut” to intimacy through intense experience that, while ritual, still requires trust.

But if all these reasons seem over-thought, consider this far simpler one: the eternal desire of the young to explore, to push past the acceptable or the known. The NLM survey features interviews of young women who describe their experiences of being choked in a variety of ways, some of which reveals touching sweetness:

“It feels very warm. It feels affectionate. It feels like a security. I don’t know. It’s like when you hold someone’s hand and it’s just kind of like a possessive kind of thing… Oh, like ‘I got you’ kind of like a dominance thing as well. Like if it’s being done to me, like, which is nice in the context of sex.”

For this young woman, the experience of light choking/facial ejaculation on the first date might be sublime. But only if it was done in the right way, by the right person who could give her that “I got you” feel. That might sound ridiculous. But a lot of sexual stuff sounds ridiculous if you aren’t there in the moment.

Which brings me back to my eye-roll at Aella’s instructive chart detailing the dos and don’ts of “vagina-kind”. Such instructions are nothing new, even if spreadsheets are; we have for decades seen books, columns and blogs claiming to school men on how to succeed with women. Sometimes, their advice is very sensible — Aella is sensible and witty. But this broad-spectrum counsel always leaves out the secret ingredients because those ingredients are impossible to describe in words or charts and depend almost entirely on the invisible and changeable emotional dynamic between any given two people. What can be incredibly exciting with one person might be lacklustre or actually repulsive with another; even the same words can have a very different quality depending on who is saying them, when and how.

I distinctly recall doing things in my youth that a month earlier I would’ve said I’d never do — and I only did some of those things once, with a particular person. It wasn’t even a question of liking or desiring that person more than others. It was about responding to him in a way that was unique to him and me, together. How can that be factored into a chart?

Which is exactly what makes it troubling that choking, rather than being accepted as something that some people like, has seemingly become something you’re expected to like or to do regardless; the sudden taste for it seems crowd-sourced, and that is not a mode that favours intimate nuance. This predicament is also very much reflected in the interviews conducted by the NLM. As one young woman said:

“… and so I fake moaned a lot when he was choking me ‘cause I felt like, ‘cause I’m also like a people pleaser. I like to make people feel happy. So I felt like I had to make him feel comfortable and everything like that… even though it’s just like during that time I was just like, oh this is new, it’s going to happen. Um, but also at the same time I’m just like, I don’t necessarily fully like this. I wish it was different.”

It is true that women have fake-moaned over all kinds of things, for millennia. It’s a perennial struggle for many people — men as well as women — to learn how to say no. But it seems different when it’s a girl feeling like she has to reassure someone who’s squeezing the bones of her throat. Reading those words online from a young woman I don’t know made me feel sad. If she were my daughter, it would break my heart. It would also make me angry without knowing quite where to direct my anger.

Then I remember: my mother would’ve been pretty sad and mad about some of the stuff I got up to if she had actually heard me talk about it. It’s probably impossible for mothers, for older people generally, not to sometimes feel that way about the stuff that much younger people get up to on their way past the acceptable and the known, especially “stuff” that looks or sounds violent. It’s easy to forget that, like the charts and the data, what you can see from the outside via interviews and articles does not reveal the inner workings, the private interplay that can happen even when people are being crude with each other. It’s easy to forget that what looks grotesque and awful on paper might feel exalted when you’re in the middle of it. And that each generation has to make its way through its own grotesque, awful and amazing experience.

***

This article was first published on 23 March, 2024.

Barely anybody I still speak to from primary school remembers that fateful day, and thank god. Yes, I was teased for a week, but generally people forgot that I apparently “loved” another 10-year-old in my class (who was far more popular, hence the scandal). But what if that had happened now? Would videos of my beetroot-red face be plastered across TikTok and Snapchat? Would I ever have lived it down?

My generation was the first for which nudes rocketing around secondary schools, or the masterminding of toxic cyberbullying campaigns, was both commonplace and expected: one memorable Instagram burner account viciously tore into girls in my year, Gossip Girl-style, only for the culprit to eventually be caught out by a bungled double-bluff post. But since the passing of the Online Safety Bill in October, legislators have been taking stock of our saturation in all-consuming tech.

Only last week, the Education Select Committee once again sounded the alarm, reporting that one in four children use their phones in a manner resembling behavioural addiction. Ministers are now debating whether to ban under-16s from owning smartphones altogether — an extreme proposal which 33% of parents nevertheless support. The recommendations could not have come at a better time to circumvent the glacial pace of policymaking: as we await election manifestos, legislation on smartphones may well hitch a ride to becoming a governmental pledge, with the idea holding appeal for both major parties.

If it does appear on a manifesto, it will not be without a hitch. For the Conservatives, it may be tempting to see a ban, alongside the reintroduction of National Service and the phasing out of smoking, as part of a glut of boomer-friendly panic policies, directly mined from the resentments of village-hall coffee morning-goers. But in promoting a ban, the Tories would be pushing an instinctively un-conservative interventionism. For Labour, meanwhile, the unchecked power of Big Tech is an indictment of slack regulation of corporations — tick — but it also curries the least favour among the young, the party’s electoral home. Starmer’s decision to slash the voting age to 16 may backfire in a second-term election if the youngest voters are livid about being denied TikTok for 15 years of their lives.

Yet while the question of smartphone use can easily fall into a political storm drain, ministers should understand that any legislation it throws up is more than an election gambit. Like cigarettes and alcohol, it is fast becoming a public-health issue. In his new blockbuster book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt drew attention to the “selfie” function on smartphones and its deleterious effect on Gen-Z girls’ self-image, calling Instagram “unsafe at any speed”. But what is it doing to Gen A, the freshest crop of smartphone guinea pigs, born between 2010 and 2025?

My sister has two children, both toddlers. Like many stay-at-home mums, an important part of her day is going to the supermarket. I remember these times myself: me and my twin being plonked into our car seats, then sitting in Costa having a frothy milk while our exhausted mum glugged a 12-shot cappuccino, and finally getting to sit in the small compartment at the front of the trolley while we sailed through the aisles. (My sister, because she was better behaved, got the proper seat.) There was so much to watch and touch and smell; we’d go to the fish bit and grimace at the heads, or snigger in the bra section. Hardly Little House on the Prairie, but now this real-world interactivity seems quaint.

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These days, my correspondent tells me, trolley-seats are replete with zombified, glassy-eyed tots glued to Paw Patrol, Bluey or whatever else keeps them quiet. They aren’t babbling — just squealing when their phones or iPads are withheld. Their chauffeur — or “mum” — is often scrolling away herself.

Generation A scares me. And I suspect it may be because they have rarely known the value of being really, really bored. Boredom is such an integral part of childhood. Irritating parents tell us “only boring people get bored”. They expect you to spend an hour on your tod on a rainy Sunday and come up with a Picasso, that having nothing to do is a prerequisite for some incredible creative flourish. This isn’t true, and I don’t want to see your child’s art. But I do wish all children would know the crushing, annihilating boredom of being little with nothing to do, because it counteracts the cult of impulsive self-centredness which tells us that we must be happy and stimulated all the time. You cannot be. As a child, you must sit in excruciating boredom in assemblies, dentists’ waiting rooms, funeral services, MOT garages — so that being dragged around shopping centres or being dumped in a creche with other kids is a relative delight, not an unwelcome interlude to hours and hours of bed-bound scrolling.

We know smartphones are already affecting this. But what of the effects of technologies we know nothing about, which are developing so quickly that legislation can hardly get a look in? A recent thread on X drew attention to a worrying number of AI apps which claim to be able to “delete any clothing” or blend real photos with sexy composites — essentially a deepfake handbook, arming users with airbrushed breasts to append to real images of women or girls you know. “Crushmate” allows you to “chat with the girl of your dreams” who will “accommodate even your wildest requests”. “Talk about any topic with AI stepsister,” promises another, complete with an image undoubtedly compiled from 10,000 porn thumbnails. Why bother finding a real human being to undress, when you can blast your retinas with instantaneous, pornified and forever compliant facsimiles?

Something must clearly be done — but what? The problem with “banning” smartphones outright is that it almost definitely wouldn’t work. Age limits for social-media use, the key element at the heart of the smartphone issue, are almost impossible to enforce, and so easy to circumvent. ID verification techniques — which have been recommended for pornography — are seen as intrusive and risky for data protection.

Besides, there are good arguments against a blanket ban. Ian Russell, whose 14-year-old daughter Molly killed herself in 2017 after viewing suicide content online, wrote in The Guardian last month that he opposed an outright prohibition, calling it “naive”. “This would punish children for the failures of technology companies to build their products responsibly,” he said. As a result, the best the government may do at present is to issue guidelines which strongly recommend. This is already happening on a local level: last week, the headteachers of 20 of the 24 primary schools in St Albans signed a letter addressed to parents to urge them not to buy smartphones for their children until the age of 14.

But if childhood has been one of the first sacrifices on the altar of Big Tech, the “victims” themselves do not want salvation. “Children have told us that being online is fundamental to their lives,” wrote Russell. The NSPCC similarly denounced consultations for leaving children’s voices “glaringly absent”. And when outlets do consult them on the prospect of age restrictions, children express concerns about “controlling” parents infringing on their privacy, or mention easy workarounds like using VPNs. Young people’s knowledge of these routes underscores a fundamental problem with adults imposing such rules on children: their tech literacy is likely to be much higher than that of the legislators themselves.

The only realistic and sensible approach, then, and one which does not appear to trample on civil liberties, is to better regulate the companies cultivating addiction-like behaviours in children, and to approach smartphones like a traditional public-health concern: raising awareness, and putting rules in place so that at least sometimes — and certainly during school — kids are not on their phones.

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In February, the government issued guidance on schools’ individual policies on mobile phones, recommending prohibiting use with a firm foreword by Gillian Keegan. But how equally can this be enforced in schools with dramatically varying resources and teachers per pupil? Myleene Klass recently told The Times about volunteering in state schools, passing on her own parenting wisdom to children less fortunate than her own. One of these pearls was that phones must be kept in “magnetically locked pouches” at all times at her children’s private school. That this was spoken of as a novelty suggests that smartphones have taken their place among the many class-markers of modern Britain: a greater conscientiousness about the harms of tech obsession may, like healthy eating, be considered a luxury for those who have the time and money to strictly enforce or to provide satisfying alternatives.

Meanwhile, mental-health problems, like physical illnesses, are increasingly bearing down on the body politic — affecting worklessness, happiness and prosperity. Policy must reflect this, taking into account the clear and present risks of being “too online” to self-image, confidence and social cohesion. Cracking down on platforms’ age-restriction enforcement, limiting the harmful content available on those platforms (something which the Online Safety Bill was, on paper, meant to enact), and raising awareness among parents with something resembling a public information campaign might all help. Parents accept that drinking and excess junk food is bad for children; in time, social media will join these as something to be judiciously introduced, and enjoyed in moderation once the brain is developed.

I pity the children who have the thousand embarrassments of being young, like that day in the playground, reflected back at them by the funhouse mirror of the internet. But aside from electoral brownie points, what do the big parties have to gain by taking this issue seriously? Both main parties have, in the past few days, launched cringe-inducing campaign blitzes on TikTok — one by Labour compares Sunak poorly dribbling a football around some plastic cones with Starmer prancing around a pitch to the Match of the Day theme tune. What is certain is that this may be one of the most difficult policies to get right, and if social media can be a silver bullet for a successful bid for power, politicians are likely to continue to dance to its rhythm — even if on the edge of a volcano.

Since then, I have (without actively looking) casually come across a scattering of articles that mention it and/or worry about it, including a piece on this site by Kat Rosenfield, titled “The Death of Intimacy”. In the piece, Rosenfield declared that, in a dramatic shift of mores, women have “cast off the mantle of the sexual gatekeeper only to find themselves in a world where your boyfriend’s idea of first-date intimacy was to engage in a little light choking before ejaculating all over your face… oh, but consensually of course.”

“The Death of Intimacy” is of a piece with a number of articles on UnHerd, apparently written to call out the crisis state of our current erotic (or rather anti-erotic) landscape, for example: “Porn Will Destroy You” (Sarah Ditum), “How to Save Sex” (Blake Smith), and the mutually respectful conversation between Aella (OnlyFans advocate and Substack star) and Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. In this context, sexual choking appears to be another aspect of the dehumanising, porn-influenced bad direction we are headed in, and/or a dangerous rebound reaction to a neurotic obsession with sexual safety and feminist overkill. Indeed, it’s easy for me to see it that way.

I came of age during the Seventies, a time of great permissiveness that segued into the even greater permissiveness of the Eighties. It was a very male-dominated time, but playfully so, in my circles anyway; feminism could be pretty playful too. Almost anything you could think of was okay. BDSM in particular came out to party in full regalia, and all flavours of queerness — including trans-ness — were celebrated at least in some communities; the word polyamory wasn’t in use, but people lived it, albeit more quietly. Of course, much of this depended on where you lived and who you spent time with; it was great to be young and queer in San Francisco or New York but not so much in small-town Texas or Michigan. I have the impression that this is still the case.

During this period I had many friends and acquaintances who spoke frankly about their preferences and experiences and in all that time I can only recall hearing a girlfriend mention choking once: in a mild, bemused tone she remarked: “So George strangled me a little bit last night.” (Oddly I don’t remember anything more of the conversation, just the matter-of-fact quality of her statement.) Of course, just because I didn’t hear of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; there must’ve been some couples who played with choking under the general heading of kink. And there were the occasional media stories about “strangubation” — that is, masturbation combined with self-choking, something young men seemed to do alone, and only made the news when it went fatally wrong. So: not exactly a popular pastime.

And now… it is? The aforementioned Rosenfield essay was not, despite the provocative mention, about choking but rather the datafication and commodification of sex. To illustrate her points, she featured a spreadsheet created by the (also aforementioned) Aella: this document featured “every sexual encounter” that Aella had experienced along with a myriad of details about those encounters. I had a look and found myself more interested in another of Aella’s charts: a sex guide purporting to help frustrated men achieve greater sexual success via a “data-based theory of vagina-kind”. This meant, basically, a flow chart revealing what a sample of 600 women like and don’t like in terms of positions, attitudes and acts. Or, as Aella put it: “A) how much they like the thing and B) how much they’ve encountered men doing the thing.”

The idea of such a chart made me roll my eyes (more on that later) but I perused it anyway. And, with my vague knowledge of the subject, I was surprised to learn that, along with the classics (oral, doggy style and general masculine dominance), “most women” love choking — love it! In fact, it was in the category of what Aella called the “land of the unfulfilled feminine”, meaning women want it more than men are doing it. Insert wide-eyed emoji here!

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Of course, 600 isn’t a very big sample; it’s also skewed demographically. Aella described her group as “straight, biological… moderately liberal” women in their early 30s who’d had sex with at least five people. But her sample is not the only one. According to the National Library of Medicine (an official arm of the US government), fully 58% of female American college students have experienced and enjoyed (mostly) voluntary choking during sex. Some of them had been introduced to it as young as 12.

So… why? Why do so many women and girls suddenly want to do something that women of my generation would’ve considered a little too close to… murder? Because that is what it looks like to me. Dominance bordering on cruelty is for whatever reason a pretty standard feminine taste — but choking suggests murder, even if the suggestion is purely symbolic.

The phenomenon is sometimes explained by the ubiquity of internet porn, but that seems only half-right, the right half being “ubiquity”. In the past, a young guy might discover erotic choking via porn but he would not assume that his middle-class 15-year-old date would’ve heard of such a thing; if he wanted to live the fantasy, he would need to approach it with a great deal of care and her possibly horrified reaction would probably not seem worth it. Now, a 15-year-old girl has likely heard of sexualised choking because she may well have been exposed to porn on the same laptop she uses to attend Zoom classes.

This cultural change is huge. But it doesn’t explain why choking is regularly showing up in porn. I could be wrong but I think porn exists to make money, not to push a cultural agenda; it doesn’t manufacture desires, it caters to them. And, according to the NLM, women and girls also learn about choking through social media, fanfiction, movies and friends.

There are any number of explanatory theories floating around, one being that, because of the increased feminisation of society, women are so hungry to feel masculine strength that they will respond to it in this physically extreme form. This makes some sense. Superior physical strength has been a lynchpin of masculine social dominance for most of human history; it was vital for the survival of families and communities. But this is no longer true for modern societies which value mental prowess far more — an area in which there is no gender disparity. (On top of that, culturally we are now pretending, or at least people who make movies and TV shows are pretending, that there is no physical disparity either: female characters are now commonly portrayed as physically equal to men to the point of beating them in fistfights!)

Even so, I think the gender-neutral privileging of intelligence is in general a positive and inevitable development, but the animal nature of masculine force remains a compelling and beautiful thing. It makes sense that both men and women might want, on some profound level, to be reminded of it in their most intimate joining.

But there are many less murder-adjacent ways to be reminded. So I wonder too about subliminal anger and despair. American society in particular is so violent and rageful, so steeped in fear that it has become part of how we experience the world in our bodies — especially women who are more physically vulnerable. In sex, as in dreams, there is an element of metaphorically processing life experience, including that which we most fear; to experience it in a way that we can control ideally with someone we trust which, at best, may alchemically transform something frightening or ugly into pleasure and connection.

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In a long email conversation, the writer Lillian Fishman told me that she thinks most people who are “into choking” are into a light-pressure version of it that is mostly “representational”. She described its appeal in the following way:

“I think most light sexual kink tends to come down to wanting to feel temporarily paralysed/powerless/stuck/held down, in a non-scary way, so that the anxiety of how to act or of being the more interested party disappears (same reason I imagine that rape fantasies are so prevalent among women). And in good sexual relationships, this anxiety fundamentally retreats, without needing to be coaxed, one hopes. But I think choking is a shortcut to it. My suspicion is that most choking… is about this.”

This is something I understand: a “shortcut” to intimacy through intense experience that, while ritual, still requires trust.

But if all these reasons seem over-thought, consider this far simpler one: the eternal desire of the young to explore, to push past the acceptable or the known. The NLM survey features interviews of young women who describe their experiences of being choked in a variety of ways, some of which reveals touching sweetness:

“It feels very warm. It feels affectionate. It feels like a security. I don’t know. It’s like when you hold someone’s hand and it’s just kind of like a possessive kind of thing… Oh, like ‘I got you’ kind of like a dominance thing as well. Like if it’s being done to me, like, which is nice in the context of sex.”

For this young woman, the experience of light choking/facial ejaculation on the first date might be sublime. But only if it was done in the right way, by the right person who could give her that “I got you” feel. That might sound ridiculous. But a lot of sexual stuff sounds ridiculous if you aren’t there in the moment.

Which brings me back to my eye-roll at Aella’s instructive chart detailing the dos and don’ts of “vagina-kind”. Such instructions are nothing new, even if spreadsheets are; we have for decades seen books, columns and blogs claiming to school men on how to succeed with women. Sometimes, their advice is very sensible — Aella is sensible and witty. But this broad-spectrum counsel always leaves out the secret ingredients because those ingredients are impossible to describe in words or charts and depend almost entirely on the invisible and changeable emotional dynamic between any given two people. What can be incredibly exciting with one person might be lacklustre or actually repulsive with another; even the same words can have a very different quality depending on who is saying them, when and how.

I distinctly recall doing things in my youth that a month earlier I would’ve said I’d never do — and I only did some of those things once, with a particular person. It wasn’t even a question of liking or desiring that person more than others. It was about responding to him in a way that was unique to him and me, together. How can that be factored into a chart?

Which is exactly what makes it troubling that choking, rather than being accepted as something that some people like, has seemingly become something you’re expected to like or to do regardless; the sudden taste for it seems crowd-sourced, and that is not a mode that favours intimate nuance. This predicament is also very much reflected in the interviews conducted by the NLM. As one young woman said:

“… and so I fake moaned a lot when he was choking me ‘cause I felt like, ‘cause I’m also like a people pleaser. I like to make people feel happy. So I felt like I had to make him feel comfortable and everything like that… even though it’s just like during that time I was just like, oh this is new, it’s going to happen. Um, but also at the same time I’m just like, I don’t necessarily fully like this. I wish it was different.”

It is true that women have fake-moaned over all kinds of things, for millennia. It’s a perennial struggle for many people — men as well as women — to learn how to say no. But it seems different when it’s a girl feeling like she has to reassure someone who’s squeezing the bones of her throat. Reading those words online from a young woman I don’t know made me feel sad. If she were my daughter, it would break my heart. It would also make me angry without knowing quite where to direct my anger.

Then I remember: my mother would’ve been pretty sad and mad about some of the stuff I got up to if she had actually heard me talk about it. It’s probably impossible for mothers, for older people generally, not to sometimes feel that way about the stuff that much younger people get up to on their way past the acceptable and the known, especially “stuff” that looks or sounds violent. It’s easy to forget that, like the charts and the data, what you can see from the outside via interviews and articles does not reveal the inner workings, the private interplay that can happen even when people are being crude with each other. It’s easy to forget that what looks grotesque and awful on paper might feel exalted when you’re in the middle of it. And that each generation has to make its way through its own grotesque, awful and amazing experience.

This is a company that has been awarded government funding. On Monday, it was reported that Scotland’s national arts quango is reviewing REIN’s £85,000 award, “because its hardcore content is more explicit than initially indicated”. The publicity suggests that three performers will be doing an explicit sex scene — actual, non-simulated sex. Which perhaps explains why the company is seeking applicants with “experience of porn and sex work”.

These applicants must be “Dyke identifying performers”, but the list of sub-genres is long. It is topped by trans dykes, followed by, among others: poly(amorous), stud, baby, bi, asexual, fag, daddy, and princess dykes. In fact, the site clarifies that anyone who has “a relationship to the word DYKE” can apply. That is, anyone at all.

This is pornography, postmodern style. Here, lesbian terminology is being subverted beyond all recognition. And there’s no reckoning with the thorny question at the heart of the endeavour: is it even possible for lesbians to produce “ethical pornography” for the consumption of other lesbians, when “girl on girl action” is one of the most popular genres among men?

For the libertarian, porn is about freedom; for the libertine, fulfilment; for religious conservatives, it is immoral and depraved. Many feminists, like me, see it as misogynistic propaganda. But if my 40 years of researching the industry have taught me anything, it’s that porn is just big business, one of the most profitable industries on the planet. Annual revenue has been estimated at up to $90 billion, nine times more than Hollywood’s revenue.

And unfortunately, the lesbian market is just too small to be attractive to the key players in porn. Therefore anything in the “girl on girl” genre must, if it is to generate profit, appeal to men.

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As Robert Jensen, author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, tells me: “I think the industry phrase ‘girl on girl’ is key… Porn producers I have interviewed over decades never talked about making ‘lesbian porn’.” He spells it out: “The target audience is straight men.”

“But wait”, I hear you cry, “loads of women love watching porn!” In fact, in 2017, an article published in Marie Claire claimed that women were more likely than men to watch lesbian porn. But the research was conducted by YouPorn, which is owned by the same businessman whose portfolio boasts MindGeek, Pornhub and RedTube. Another recent article claims that women are “by far” more likely to access lesbian themed porn. The source? Pornhub, which has more than 40,000 lesbian porn videos in its archives. Obviously, it’s in the site’s best interests to suggest that porn is consumed and enjoyed primarily by those most harmed by it.

It’s tempting for porn apologists to view lesbian porn as Mexican sexologist Karimme Reyes does: as “an egalitarian sexual encounter in which the enjoyment of the other person and vice versa is very much taken care of. There is no focus on the obsession for penetration and you can see an enjoyment in different forms of pleasure for all tastes.”

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But this ideal doesn’t match reality. I’ve been on three different porn sets over the years, and have spoken to directors, “minders”, and on occasion performers. On one, the team was shooting entirely lesbian porn; I asked if the performers were lesbians. “Yes, of course,” came the reply. And yet, each and every performer was accompanied by a pimp describing himself as her “boyfriend”. One performer, an actual lesbian, told me she absolutely hated doing a scene involving “strap-on anal” (not the most common or popular sexual practice among lesbians). She also told me she had suffered a vaginal tear because her female co-performer, who had never had sex with a woman before, had no idea how to penetrate her.

Typical titles of “lesbian” videos on the big porn sites include: “Cheerleader seduced by teachers”; “Mummy wants her pussy eaten”; “Two hot babes, fisting”. There’s an entire “Wild scissoring” genre, and one for lesbian threesomes, lesbian squirt parties, and Japanese lesbians on heat.

It’s worth comparing these titles to those on For Her Tube, which platforms content supposedly by women, for women. There are more than 3 million videos in the lesbian section. Some titles sound tamer than others: “I think about sex with a woman,” or “Two gorgeous housewives, giving into their wild, lesbian urges”. The usual fisting and giant sex toy themes are there too, and even a naughty lesbian nun. Then there is some hardcore sadomasochism. It’s not dissimilar to what you would find in mainstream porn, which is guided by male fantasies.

Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, does not believe that lesbians are being targeted as consumers: “There are over 143,000 videos on Pornhub under the lesbian category. In 2023, according to Pornhub stats, ‘Lesbian’ was the most searched term,” she says. “We know from studies that men are the main consumers of porn so clearly these videos are made for men.”

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It would be nice to think that lesbians could enjoy artisanal porn produced by a collective of “DYKES”, all of whom have happy experiences on set, only doing stuff that really turns them on, with regular health checks. Erika Lust, the self-described “ethical porn producer”, claims to promote the rights and fair treatment of performers: she is a big fan of the role of the intimacy coordinator — so much so that at last year’s Oscars she called for a new category: “Best Intimacy Coach in a Motion Picture”. But intimacy coordinators are used on film sets during scenes involving nudity and simulated sex; porn, of course, involves actual sex. As does the REIN production, which similarly sets a lot of store by the intimacy coordinator.

And yet, this project conspicuously ignores the fact that the vast majority of “lesbian” porn is violent, degrading or painful; like all other genres, it is defined by domination, sadism, and brutal, endless penetration. Because, to cut through in a saturated market, porn producers will objectify female bodies in every imaginable way, for the sexual pleasure of predominantly male audiences.

The inherent misogyny of porn is a key reason why so many lesbians tend not to consume it. It’s not made for us. I don’t believe that women have sex with each other wearing five-inch spike heels and brandishing three-inch sparkling false talons: this is how men fantasise about women getting it on. There is evidence, however, that lesbians watch gay male porn — perhaps because it is the only kind free from misogyny.

Does that mean it’s impossible for porn featuring women to ever be ethical? To go back to the Scottish project: what if they really did manage to just hire lesbians — who were totally comfortable with everything they were doing during the performance? And what if there were only lesbians in the audience?

It’s still exploitation. The porn industry profits from non-consensual acts and causing harm to performers. And even if the spectators are lesbians, it doesn’t make the dynamics safer. I once interviewed female strippers at a since-closed bar in Soho, and many told me how much they hated stripping in front of crowds of baying lesbians, some pushing banknotes into the dancers’ underwear. Women who seek enjoyment from the sexual debasement of other women are not dissimilar from their male counterparts. Live sex on stage is prostitution, not, as REIN might have us believe, art.

Sheath, an expert in child protection, can rattle off the titles of mainstream pornography as well as any habitual user: “Daddy I don’t want to go to School!”; “Teen whore used and abused part 2”. These are real videos found on mainstream sites, and all are legal.

“But this legal stuff, accessed mainly by men who are surfing Pornhub or whatever site, can be a gateway to the illegal content in which real children are horrifically abused by adults,” says Sheath. “You can’t have child abuse images without child abuse having taken place.”

The scale of the problem is shocking. According to a major study released a couple of months ago, one in 10 men have carried out sex offences against children, either online or offline. And it is a problem that Sheath is determined to shine a light on, having dedicated the best part of his career to raising awareness about the link between freely available, mainstream pornography and illegal child abuse imagery.

Many feminists, including myself, have long made this connection ourselves. More than two decades before the arrival of the internet, Andrea Dworkin pointed out that it is ridiculously naïve to suggest that pornography doesn’t shape attitudes and sexual responses. And yet the phrase “porn is the theory, rape is the practice”, coined in the Seventies by radical feminist Robin Morgan, has been dismissed and derided by libertarians, who accuse Morgan of adopting a simplistic notion of “man watches porn, man goes on to rape”.

Likewise, the views to which Sheath subscribes are deeply unpopular today among those who consider pornography to be harmless fun — and, of course, those who profit from it. As porn producer Gerry Barnett laments, when he became politically aware back in the Eighties: “Much of the feminist movement appeared to have gone through a drastic transformation: from joyous to humourless, from sexual to sexless, from a celebration of everything female to an embrace of androgyny.” Today, he complains that “these new anti-sex feminists share platforms with religious moralists”.

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But Sheath’s views come from profound experience. He qualified as a probation officer in 1988 and has spent his career trying to understand male sex offenders. In the early days, he counselled them, ran groups for them, worked with them in prison. “Eventually, these men would reveal how they operated,” says Sheath. “Many of the men talked about mainstream, free and legal porn having been a gateway to the illegal stuff, and some went on to create porn themselves, which, of course, requires children to be abused.”

Pre-internet, child abuse imagery was extraordinarily difficult, risky and expensive to get hold of. “Back in the day, one of the men on my course had come back from Amsterdam on the ferry with a bag full of hard-core VHS videos,” says Sheath. “But online, a man can have his beer or a line of coke and in the comfort of his own home can disconnect from the reality of what he is doing.”

Multiple attempts have been made to address porn’s role in perpetuating child abuse. Anti-porn campaigners have had some success of late in bringing legal challenges against sites such as Pornhub — as have victims. In 2021, Pornhub and several affiliated companies settled a class action lawsuit brought by 50 women who alleged it profited from pornographic videos published without their full consent.

But it’s not easy for individual victims to get justice. When Rose Kalemba was 14, she was brutally raped by two men while a third man filmed the assault. The film ended up on Pornhub, entitled “Passed Out Teen and Teen Getting Destroyed”. Kalemba, now 28, only discovered this when she saw school friends sharing the link on social media. She contacted Pornhub numerous times, begging them to take down the footage, explaining it was a recording of a sexual assault. But she was ignored by the website until she threatened them with legal action, after which the footage was suddenly removed.

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The trouble is, the legal system can only deal with men who have already been accused of abusing children; it is less effective when it comes to preventing crimes. “It’s been very difficult to deal with non-convicted people,” says Sheath. “We have always had a preponderance of men who have already been arrested.” Conscious of this, in 2002 the Lucy Faithful Foundation — where Sheath worked from 1997 until 2022 — set up the Stop It Now helpline. This was, Sheath says, “the dawn of the age of the downloader”. But although the helpline’s primary aim was to stop men before they acted on a desire to access child abuse imagery, it transpired that more often than not, men wouldn’t get in contact until they were in trouble with the law. “Most men are worried not about the consequences of their actions, but of the consequences to them. They say, ‘I am not a paedophile, I am an ordinary man that went down a dark path’,” says Sheath.

Because of this, Stop It Now has now chosen to dance with the devil: last year it announced that it had made an arrangement with PornHub, meaning that consumers entering certain search terms are directed to sign up to Stop It Now. “There are more than 45,000 triggering words that activate the bot to send them to the course,” says Sheath, “such as the combination of ‘rape’, ‘child’ and ‘torture’ for example. Pornhub are telling us: ‘We don’t want those customers.’”

And yet Sheath acknowledges that Pornhub is a huge part of the problem. Plenty of legal porn makes adult women look like children: there are so many videos of very slightly built women with small breasts, their hair in ponytails, looking eager to please. When this is no longer “exciting” enough, men often become increasingly curious about the illegal content it simulates. To demand that Pornhub deter men from entering search terms such as “child” and “rape” is to miss the point: that its legal content, including the Barely Legal genre (with tropes such as “schoolgirl/babysitter”), is partly responsible for men wanting to search for such things in the first place.

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Over the decades, I have interviewed male porn consumers who have freely admitted that their perception of women changed because they got sexually excited by watching them be abused, degraded and hurt. Few men start off logging on to porn because they hate women and want to debase them. But porn gives them the message that this is how sex is, that women really love having their heads shoved down a toilet, or strangled until her lips are blue.

With the porn industry acting as the main source of sex education for boys, and encouraging men to develop fantasies relating to sex with children, what chance is there to curb the tidal wave of child sexual abuse? Especially given that, when Sheath talks about stopping the abuse before it happens — rather than mopping up the mess and dealing with the fallout afterwards — he often encounters resistance. “Some think that the best thing to do is target individual abusers, call them ‘paedos’, lock them up and say ‘he’s never coming out’,” says Sheath. “But bearing in mind it is incredibly rare for children to report abuse, let alone the pathetic number of convictions along the line when they do, very few of these men do get locked up.”

It’s very difficult to tackle porn’s role in paedophiles’ crimes without being accused of shutting down free speech, and spreading an anti-sex message. In my view, long-term education — or rather, re-education — is the only thing that will bring about change. Men who have chosen to stop using porn need to have serious conversations with boys about its harms. “Hard questions have to be asked about why so many men find the idea of abusing underage kids sexually exciting,” says Sheath. “Until we find a way to talk to boys about what they are viewing, and how it’s affecting them, we don’t have a chance in hell to change things.”

A lot of the most vocal feminists of recent years are obsessed with helping men. In her 2018 book, self-styled Guilty Feminist Deborah Frances-White declares that feminism “must fight for men who are being pushed into lonely desolation by the patriarchal pressures”. And in her recently published On Our Best Behaviour, Elise Loehnen tells women to spare a thought for the boys: girls might have to suppress our feelings “to function in what otherwise might be dysfunctional relationships or a dysfunctional society”, but “at least we’re allowed to cry”.

For years, it is implied, feminists have focused on women and failed to acknowledge that patriarchy hurts men, too. And men cannot be expected to sort this out for themselves because, well, they’re just men. Rather like remembering birthdays, making doctor’s appointments or caring for elderly relatives, sorting out the patriarchy is something that women must do because women have always done it, therefore making us better at it. In her book, What About Men? — in which she argues that “we’ve neglected our boys” — Caitlin Moran writes: “The advantage women have is that we talk about the patriarchy, and we know how it disadvantages us”, whereas “men haven’t yet started the conversation.”

One could be forgiven for thinking that no one has made these particular observations before — that feminism has thus far ignored men’s inner lives. Of course, one could also argue — with some legitimacy, I’d say — that women ought to be allowed one solitary political movement just for them. But the point would be moot, because the reality is: there have always been feminists expressing concern for men’s emotional lives. The fact that this gains so little acknowledgement is symptomatic of neglect, not of men, but of female intellectual legacies.

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There is an entire PhD thesis to be written on “feminist takes on why men aren’t allowed to cry”, with a special section devoted to “why we keep forgetting this issue has already been noted”. In 1983, for instance, Andrea Dworkin made a speech at an American convention that was entitled, the National Organisation for Changing Men. There she acknowledged the shame and impotence felt by many of the ‘good’ men around her: “Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don’t do, what you want to don’t want to do but are going to anyway.”

It is a measure of the defeatism that dominates this particular strand of feminism that its early adherents were already offering a critique of its limitations. Granting men more space in which to emote might provide them with more healthy ways in which to interact, but it is not the same as transforming power relations between the sexes. As Adrienne Rich wrote in 1976, “men are increasingly aware that their disorders have something to do with patriarchy. But few of them wish to resign from it.” Her suspicion that “the majority of ‘concerned’ or ‘profeminist’ men secretly hope that ‘liberation’ will give them the right to shed tears while exercising their old prerogatives” does not seem particularly off-target. Half a century on, many men might wish to cry about what unfettered access to porn has done to them; far fewer are keen to take on the industry itself.

Do men actually want to save themselves from patriarchy? Dworkin, at the National Organisation for Changing Men, talked of meeting men who would tell her, “what you’re saying about me isn’t true. It isn’t true of me. I don’t feel that way. I’m opposed to all of this.” It’s the Eighties equivalent of #NotAllMen, a phrase now so widely mocked that it feels incorrect to write it without a hashtag. Yet Dworkin’s response was not just to laugh or shame. “I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues.” She asks men to take responsibility — to challenge one another — rather than simply offering up their apologies to women.

Today’s popular feminists see men more as victims than agents. Moran blames the ascendance of Andrew Tate on teenage boys hearing phrases such as “‘Typical men!’ or, ‘Ugh, toxic patriarchy!’”. Amia Srinivasan, in 2021’s The Right to Sex, concludes that “a feminism worth having must, not for the first time, expect women to be better — not just fairer, but more imaginative — than men have been”. Here, the helplessness of the Lost Boy merges with a presumption of over-sensitivity and moral inferiority. I wonder if, when Moran and Srinivasan write these things, they really grasp that men can read them too. If men react badly to suggestions that they are useless as a sex, what benefit lies in finding other, albeit more benevolent, ways to say it? Men are granted no dignity, no capacity to change on their own terms. They are portrayed as weak and petty, so why should they even try?

There is also something deeply and depressingly gender-normative in the expectation that women be better than men. Again, this is something that feminists seem to have forgotten — even if their predecessors analysed its implications. Rich already pointed out in Of Woman Born that, “the women’s movement is still seen in terms of the mother-child relationship”; feminism is seen “either as punishment and abandonment of men for past bad behaviour, or as a potential healing of men’s pain by women”. Either way, it “will ease men into a more humane and sensitive life. In short … women will go on doing for men what men cannot or will not do for each other or themselves.”

Rich wanted this infantilising dynamic to change. But half a century later, Moran is insisting that men can’t be expected to act independently because, “it’s so much easier for women and girls to show love and support for each other”. We are, apparently, just better at this sort of thing, so it’s on us to help men be more human. If this is irritating for women, it is profoundly insulting to men.

Indeed, one of the great ironies of a position that dismisses earlier feminists as insufficiently sympathetic to men is that there are far more parallels between today’s fix-men feminism and genuine misandry. “To be male,” wrote Valerie Solanas in The SCUM Manifesto, perhaps the one (known) work of the Second Wave that might genuinely be said to be man-hating, “is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples”. Solanas wrote off men as beyond help; fix-men feminism takes a similarly disparaging view of half the human race, while patronisingly offering to save them. The hostile response of many men to Moran’s book shows that pity is counter-productive; men are not so emotionally illiterate that they can’t understand they are being belittled.

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This rhetoric is dangerous to women, as well as irritating. Fix-men feminism validates the excuses abusive men have used for their mistreatment of female partners — how can he be in touch with her feelings when he’s not even in touch with his own? — while providing good men with a reason to feel victimised. The reason why “I Can Fix Him” has become such a popular parody meme is because we know it isn’t true. The woman who imagines herself “fixing” the Joker is funny; the one who imagines fixing a real-life Tate acolyte is less so. It is not safe for women in toxic relationships to feel they are responsible for men’s responses, nor is it safe for men to be told that yes, if they hate women, perhaps it is because feminists have driven them to misogyny by neglecting their needs. Many men who hurt women really do feel powerless, but placing their redemption in the hands of women is hardly likely to inspire them to change.

Moran has said that her book is written in part as a response to the anxieties of mothers of sons. (She has two daughters.) I have sons, two of whom are teenagers, and the challenges they face offer a constant reminder of the way in which the myth of masculine invulnerability sells both men and women short. Men are not forced into a state of heroic independence, but there is shame, and often rage, when they are forced to acknowledge their reliance on women. I do not see how telling them they are needier than they already are can resolve this. In her 1979 essay Man Child, Audre Lorde described the importance of “teaching my son that I do not exist to do his feeling for him”. “Men who are afraid to feel,” she wrote, “must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly ‘inferior’ capacity to feel deeply.” We can hardly eradicate this toxic maternal dynamic by replicating it.

The problem, then, is not that feminists do not care enough. If we respect men — if we do not see them as helpless, stupid children, dumb Ken dolls, or “a bit like dogs” — we ought to consider them up to the challenge of a feminism that does more than oscillate between mocking and pandering to them. Fix-men feminism views itself as realistic, “muggins here” taking charge because men can’t be better. In truth, it lowers expectations, restricting opportunities for growth. “He can’t change unless he wants to” might be a cliché, but it’s one that today’s feminists would do well to take on board. It may be that the best thing we can do for men is not to make our movement all about them.

Its father was William Dugdale, who had been a rising star during the political ferment in the hard years that followed the Napoleonic Wars, which E.P. Thompson called “the heroic age of popular radicalism”. Dugdale gave his first public speech to a mass rally in 1818, calling for armed insurrection against the state. He was 18 at the time. He was also mixed up in the Cato Street Conspiracy, a plot to assassinate the cabinet, and as a publisher he brought out the first edition of Robert Wedderburn’s abolitionist pamphlet, The Horrors of Slavery (1824).

But the radical moment passed, the market for revolutionary tracts collapsed, and Dugdale turned instead to publishing obscene literature to make a living. By the 1840s, he had established himself in Holywell Street as importer and distributor, as well as publisher and retailer, with a thriving mail-order business on the side. An 1851 raid on one of his seven shops saw the seizure of goods worth, allowing for inflation, £350,000 at today’s prices. This was new. The trade in obscenity had previously been centred on market stalls and itinerant salesmen; there had never been anything on this industrial scale before. Mostly, Dugdale’s trade was in prints, etchings and books — with titles such as Confessions of a Voluptuous Young Lady, The Quintessence of Birch Discipline, The Curious and Diverting History and Adventures of a Bedstead. But he also published The Exquisite, the first recognisably modern pornographic magazine. Others followed him and by the 1850s, Holywell Street had become a byword for filth.

Inevitably, all this brought Dugdale into conflict with the law. He was repeatedly sentenced on obscenity charges, normally getting two years’ hard labour each time, though it is uncertain how long he actually served. He had some influential men among his customers, and a tendency to get out of jail on technicalities.

Anyway, he saw the prosecutions as proof that he was still an irritant to all the right people: the religious and secular authorities. Their condemnation of pornographic literature was rooted in a concern that it would fall into the hands of the working class, at a time when literacy was spreading rapidly. Time and again, judges thundered that this celebration of lust, at the expense of family and parenthood, was “subversive of the foundations of civil society itself”. And since Dugdale was subversive, he saw pornography as a continuation of the political struggle by other means.

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His enemies were also crusaders, part of the great evangelical revival that came to define Victorian Britain. Most of the prosecutions were initiated by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, co-founded by William Wilberforce in 1802 to combat all manner of immorality. By the middle of the century, though, the SSV was in decline, its membership dwindling, its funds exhausted. Nonetheless, its secretary, Henry Prichard, engaged in a decades-long war with Dugdale, as the two men brought cases and counter-cases against each other. Prichard, Dugdale claimed, allowed himself to be bribed by his rival shopkeepers in their attempts to avoid prosecution; he was also reputed to re-sell onto the market the material seized in raids. There was sufficient suspicion to prompt the passing of the first-ever Obscene Publications Act in 1857, which was specifically aimed at suppressing Dugdale, while also clipping the wings of the SSV: new powers of seizure were given to the police, assumed to be less susceptible to corruption.

Dugdale carried on trading, and carried on being prosecuted, right up to his death, in 1868, while serving yet another jail term. This time the charge sheet had included obscene photographs for the first time; even as an old man, he was still moving with the times. Dugdale has never been seen as a political hero. Even at the time, few of his radical comrades approved of his business. But the state saw him as a genuine threat, and it saw pornography as dangerous. One of the exhibits at Dugdale’s last trial was John Cleland’s novel Fanny Hill, published a century earlier and still banned a century later; the works of, say, Karl Marx faced no such suppression.

A century later, at the dawn of what became known as the Golden Age of Porn, much of the story was repeated. Dugdale’s belief that he was fighting the good fight was again evident in the political counterculture of the Sixties, especially in America. “Pornography was seen to be a vehicle of liberation,” remembered Andrea Dworkin. “Anything they tried to stop us from doing, we did.” The reality turned out to be grubbier than the idealism. Dworkin and other early feminists were horrified when former comrades, with whom they had marched side-by-side on anti-Vietnam War demos, embraced the money to be made from porn. “Suddenly they weren’t so anti-capitalist anymore.” The sense of betrayal fuelled much of the feminist anti-porn campaign that followed.

Meanwhile in Britain, Suck magazine — arty, radical, pro-feminist — was launched in 1969 by figures from the alternative press. It only lasted eight issues, closing after Germaine Greer lambasted her comrades on the editorial staff as “pseudo-revolutionary”. But Suck had been strictly underground anyway, published in Amsterdam, since it was far too explicit to be legal in Britain. That was the key difference: America had a First Amendment guarantee of free speech, which by the Seventies was being successfully invoked to defend porn; Britain did not.

The second Obscene Publications Act, of 1959, did largely free the written word, but visual imagery — as various trials established — was far more restricted. In America, the film Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace, was a massive box-office hit with its explicit sex scenes. It was banned outright in Britain, which had to settle for the home-grown Come Play with Me, a comedy that went a little further than Carry On Camping, but not much further.

It wasn’t always clear what was permitted, but the fear of prosecution meant that the trade self-censored to be on the safe side. Depictions of an erect penis, for example, were avoided, guaranteed to get a conviction. Accordingly, an eye was always kept on “the angle of the dangle”. Indeed, there operated a semi-joking Mull of Kintyre Test: anything steeper than a map of the Scottish peninsular was deemed to be too erect. In this semi-legalised world, the imagery was less explicit than it had been in Dugdale’s day, when everything was banned and one might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. The result was that the permitted material reflected the dominant values of a still sexist society: unable to show intercourse, it opted for willing and waiting women. In such circumstances, it was hard to see pornography as “a vehicle for liberation”.

Instead, the rapidly growing porn industry was concentrated in the hands of the criminal fringe, who had been running strip-clubs in Soho since the turn of the Sixties, and now added sex shops, magazines and movies to their property portfolios. Following Dugdale’s model of multiple outlets in a tightly defined area, they made Soho synonymous with porn, just as Holywell Street — less than a mile to the east — had once been.

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As society became more liberal in sexual matters, the magazines that were sold over the counter in Soho gradually migrated to licensed sex-shops elsewhere in the country and, more significantly, to the top shelves of newsagents, where their presence became hard to ignore. Softcore porn became normalised to the extent that it could be joked about on mainstream television. In a 1977 episode of sitcom George and Mildred, she inadvertently donates his stash of magazines — including copies of Nudge, Wink and Titter — to the vicar’s jumble sale, leaving him to fret over their loss: “Be hard to replace some of them. Especially the Swedish ones.”

That reference to Scandinavian titles suggested something far more serious: the hardcore magazines and films that were smuggled in from the Continent. (A mark of quality was said to be if it smelt of bacon, since that meant it had been imported on a container ship from Denmark.) This stuff was illegal, of course, but it continued to arrive, partly because the profit margins were astronomically big, and partly because there were surprisingly few prosecutions. And that was because, in another echo of the 1850s, those who were supposed to be policing the industry were actively supporting it. Between 1975 and 1976, 15 members of the Obscene Publications Squad of Metropolitan Police were jailed for taking bribes and effectively running a protection racket. The legal definition of obscenity is material likely to deprave and corrupt; that has always been a difficult concept to pin down, but what is certain is that porn has repeatedly corrupted the guardians of society.

William Dugdale had seen pornography as a way of attacking the power structures of society; now Andrea Dworkin was arguing that it was actually an expression of those power structures. Porn, she said, was “the nerve centre, the Pentagon” of the war against women, the place “where strategies of sexual abuse were both planned and communicated”. Previously, the church, social norms, a shared morality — these had been enough to enforce male power, but they had been weakened by the rise of the women’s movement, and heavier weaponry was required. The modern proliferation of porn was a reaction to feminism, an attempt to intimidate women into subservience.

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Further, it was inherently totalitarian and genocidal. “Dachau brought into the bedroom,” was Dworkin’s assessment of pornography, an image that was adopted by others. In the Nineties, former editor of The Times William Rees-Mogg was shown the material being broadcast on European satellite TV station Red Hot Dutch; he was horrified: “It reminds me of films about concentration camps.”

For others, pornography defied rather than represented repressive regimes. Porn may have become an established part of life in America and Britain, but it was still being ruthlessly suppressed in the communist Soviet Union and in apartheid South Africa. When those systems fell in the Nineties, there was an explosion of porn comparable to that in the West a couple of decades earlier. The development felt like a manifestation of freedom.

Today, North Korea and Iran are not noticeably tolerant of pornography. It is still seen as subversive, a threat to religious and political control. In the liberal, individualistic world of post-Christian Britain, on the other hand, criticism has increasingly centred on the impact on the consumer. With the unprecedented availability of porn on the internet, are children acquiring a distorted, corrupted vision of sex? Is the instant hit of digital porn inherently addictive? Again, these concerns are not entirely new. Some 220 years ago, prosecuting counsel William Garrow, acting for the SSV, cautioned that obscene books and pictures were a very real danger to “young persons of both sexes, particularly of the female sex, addicting themselves to such publications”.

So, how subversive is porn? Historian Donald Thomas argued that it should be seen as akin to satire, attacking those things that are considered sacred to society. In William Dugdale’s day, incest was a favourite theme, a way of making light of 19th-century family values. It also meant that women were depicted as actively enjoying sex, something that was not spoken of in polite society.

The tone now is far more aggressive than it was then, or in the Seventies. Not all pornography is anti-women, but there is more overt misogyny in material aimed at men than there used to be — a response to the rise of women in employment and society. Lesser trends illustrate the same point: the continuing growth of cuckold porn, for example, or even the appearance, following #BlackLivesMatter, of fantasies centred on slave-owner Edward Colston.

The subversion, in other words, is negative and reactionary. Porn delights in poking at conventional morality — not in pursuit of revolution, but illicit thrill. The primary aim is arousal, the secondary to ridicule human aspirations to virtue. It is also remarkably ineffective in its subversion. Generations of those addicts that William Garrow warned about have been and gone. Holywell Street rose and fell, Soho rose and fell, and through it all, civilisation survived. Society has changed in the process, but porn, despite all the fears, has reflected, not initiated, those changes.

Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History — a transcript of 19 meandering conversations with anonymous interlocutors on the subject of sexuality, kinks, feminism and pornography — introduces narcotic doses of nuance into a “conversation” one might have considered already unwieldy enough to begin with. The book is “a compilation of messy, ugly conversations brimming with contradiction and ambiguity”. Indeed, by the end of her 19 conversations, Barton has been exposed to so much nuance she appears to have achieved full cognitive disengagement. “I am increasingly unsure what a position or even an opinion on porn could look like for me,” she concludes with satisfaction.

This is a common enough phenomenon when it comes to thinking reflectively about sex: bully your basic reactions with nuance to the point where you can disengage from the underlying phenomenon and believe almost anything. Barton’s conversations — especially those with women — are full of reports of sincere, sound, and persuasive first-order judgments about porn that are then swiftly crushed by second-order deference to a sexual morality of nuance. Her interviewees spontaneously notice that some sexual or pornographic convention strikes them as wrong, or degrading, or disgusting, then will immediately check themselves by noting that things are of course subtler and more “complex” than that suggests.

Contemplating the diverse horrors of porn — its violence, its tendency to warp and infiltrate sexual taste, its exploitative business model and association with criminality — Barton’s interviewees are near unanimous. They feel “extremely uncomfortable”; something “between anger and disgust”; “a kind of nebulous, all-pervasive worry and discomfort”. Porn is “unhinged”; “doesn’t sit right with me”; is “super off-putting”; “terrifying in a quite non-specific way”; “I just think about how the porn actress is in pain.” Barton notes the “flashes of discomfort in [their] eyes” as they answer. “I’m scrolling down,” reports one man, “and then I get to something that will suddenly be a turn-off. Women with their mascara running, or they start being tied-up, or they’re being abused and humiliated… It’s awful… It makes you feel dirty…[but] in a way I want to say, each to their own.”

Each to their own? This familiar corrective is more than an expression of the admirable liberal view that depraved practices ought not to be outlawed simply because they are wrong; it is the view that it is a mistake to register them as depraved or wrong in the first place. One interlocutor reports being made “queasy” by porn, but then to being “troubled… because I don’t what to be a prude and I want to be sex positive”. Another person is disquieted by styles of porn in which “the woman is treated quite violently”, but smothers this thought with the “understanding of that diversity and wanting to celebrate it”. “Why am I strangling you?” one man recalls thinking with horror, while discussing the sexual choking he was invited by a partner to imitate from porn. He then urgently corrects the record: “It’s not that I’m against it. I’m not against any of it.”

He’s not against any of it? Another woman, having discovered her husband’s penchant for “eight person gang-rape” videos, feels conflicted: “I understand that is some people’s fantasy… and I’m hesitant to kink-shame.” Several of the women are understandably scared by the idea that their boyfriends may be secretly aroused by the spectacle of misogynist sexual violence: “I struggle with it… sometimes I get myself in such tangles,” one says apologetically. Of course, some people might see this mental tangle as symptomatic of enlightened political thinking. Perhaps these people are in the process of refining their baser aversions to being slapped, degraded, and ejaculated on. They are overriding their untutored judgements, tuning them politically to the sex-positive framework, making them more sophisticated. More nuanced.

One diagnosis is that these people are attempting systematically to loosen their grip on fairly reliable patterns of response that we unproblematically accept when applied to the rest of human life. They have imbibed a doctrine of sexual morality that tells them to uncritically embrace every sexual impulse, on their part and that of others, apart from the ones sending them warning signals of fear and aversion. Of course, as Barton’s interviews remind us, it is very difficult to restructure one’s basic reactions as to what is bad, dreadful, threatening, or gross. They continually reassert themselves, despite attempts on the part of the subject to crush them in vindication of some putatively more elevated sexual ethic. The upshot is a feeling of helpless conflictedness.

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A striking feature of Barton’s interviewees is that they take it to be obvious that the broad-minded, sex-positive attitude that explicitly shuns “judgement” of others is the most empathetic view, and therefore the right one to hold. It is not at all clear, however, what is involved in the exercise of empathy free from judgement. Examined under a different light, such supposedly broad-minded assessments look more like failures to fully exercise empathy, rather than the opposite. “I’m not into people getting slapped in the face, or pinned down by the neck, or kicked,” says one interviewee. “I get that maybe some people are, but to me that doesn’t seem enjoyable.” Under ordinary circumstances, the judgment that another person might like to get slapped in the face does not strike us as a successful exercise of empathy. It seems about as successful an extension of empathy as the short-tempered schoolmaster’s judgement that, contrary to everything else he knows, what his student really wants is a good beating.

It is not obvious why we should accept the wholly exceptionalist picture of sex as immune to the relatively robust norms that we happily apply to the rest of life (for example, the norm that it is wrong to slap someone in the face merely for your own gratification). The sex-positive outlook of unconstrained nuance is not of much satisfaction to those who embrace it, as becomes all too clear to anyone who reads Barton wallowing in it for over 300 pages. As she comes close to admitting: she knows that porn is largely horrific, but wants to believe that it isn’t.

Barton attempts various unsuccessful means of easing this instability. One is to venture that while porn may be an ethical free-for-all, the general dislike she has of it might be to do with its “problematic aesthetic elements”. But the attempt to wholly divorce the aesthetic and ethical deficiencies of porn is almost certainly ill-fated. The two modes of appraisal are too closely entwined. The judgment that what one has just watched is nasty, or dreadful, or simply gross, invariably draws on both dimensions of value.

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A more disconcerting reflection for the anti-exceptionalist view of sex might be that one risks denying an important truth: that the erotic has, to a certain extent, a life of its own. More, the erotic stands in some interesting relation to transgression itself. The attempt to tame sexual impulse with ethical norms immediately raises the prospect of their being flouted. It is the perennial pornographic leitmotif: the sideways glance, the final trembling protest of one’s better nature, and all the rest gives way to extravagant gratification. Erotic life takes us by surprise; takes us out of ourselves. It is ruled by murky and poorly understood impulses. Of course, even if we accept this picture wholesale, it wouldn’t follow that our account of the erotic should be similarly murky and poorly understood, as Barton seems determined to make it. More tellingly still, to attach any great significance to transgression, one must first acknowledge that there are some norms in play to be transgressed.

The fantasy of a sexual realm that can float untethered from the rest of ethical life and human judgment is just that, a fantasy: just like the view that ever more nuance is a necessary good, and conversation always remedial. As Barton’s book makes all too clear, in fact, “conversation” can serve to conceal, rather than reveal, the truth. The complaint — which she occasionally makes — that we do not yet “have a language” that is sufficiently nuanced to reconcile us to pornography and the degrading sexual practices it depicts can, under this light, take on a cynical quality. Actually, the language with which to describe violence, coercion, and the lack of self-knowledge and false consciousness required for people to uncritically approve it, is all too readily available; what we do not always have is a language of critical reinterpretation that is sufficiently opaque to disguise uncomfortable truths from us.

“The knock” is the term given by families to the day the police came for their father, partner, husband, son or brother after being caught downloading indecent — and often violent — images or videos of children or babies. It is a moment when lives change forever, when women realise that the man with whom they have shared their life is actually a stranger, and, in some cases, a monster.

“In an instant, the life you had disappears, and you realise that nothing will ever be the same,” says Katie, a 43-year-old mother of two boys, aged six and eight. “The person you thought you knew, you didn’t know at all. Then the suspicion starts among your neighbours and extended family, because surely you must have known what was going on? Your friends melt away, and your kids’ play dates stop, and the police tell you to be careful of vigilantes attacking your house, and your children ask awkward questions. So, you give up your job and pack up and move, and you end up with nothing.…  You lose your home and your friends and your job, and you have damaged children who will grow up without a father. And even though none of it is your fault, you constantly carry round this irrational sense of guilt.”

What happened to Katie happens to scores of families every month. According to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, 35% of homes raided because of online paedophilic activity include children. In 2021/22, there were 10,181 arrests for downloading indecent images of children (IIoC) — an average of 848 each month. That figure has risen from 417 a decade ago. This means that an average of 298 families with children experience the knock each month — almost 10 families a day.

This is a massive, and growing, problem in the UK. The viewing and downloading of child porn is increasing all the time. According to the Internet Watch Foundation, the number of child sex sites found by its experts increased by 1,420% between 2011 and 2020. In 2021, it found 252,000 images of child sexual abuse — up 21% on the year before. The Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which campaigns and provides help to encourage offenders to stop viewing child abuse content, found that “isolation, unemployment and escalating pornography habits” during the pandemic resulted in more than 165,000 people seeking help via its advisory website in 2021. That was a 107% increase on the year before.

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But while the victims of abuse in online images are rightly given help when they can be found, the women and children left behind after the knock receive no special support from the state, whether financial, emotional, educational, psychological or practical. Because even though they become victims of the crime committed by the man in their life, the government doesn’t recognise them as such.

The knock came to the home of Carly Peters, a 59-year-old nurse, at 11am on a winter’s day in 2019. “You never forget it,” she says. “It’s like when people ask where you were when Diana died. For me, it came the day after a lovely evening which my then husband, Matthew, and I had had with my two sons and my daughter from my first marriage, and his daughter from his. We had been together for 11 years and had the perfect life, a great family, no money worries, a beautiful home, all of it.

“The kids — who are all grown up — had stayed over. The last time I saw the man that I thought I knew was at 8:50am that morning. I kissed him goodbye because I was taking one of my sons on an errand. When we got back, Matthew had gone into work — he owns a furniture business — and suddenly there was a knock on the door.

“Two men told me they were police officers and asked if they could come in. They said Matthew had been arrested on suspicion of ‘illegal downloading’. I had no idea what that was. Then they said he had admitted the offence at the showroom — because that’s where the downloading had taken place — and he had told them there was a computer and a hard drive in a bag under our bed. They asked whether I knew anything about that and I said no. My head was spinning.”

The police asked if there was anyone else in the house and Carly said her children were there. Visibly concerned, the officers asked how old the “children” were and she told them: in their late twenties and early thirties. The police relaxed — there were no young children at risk. The siblings were asked to gather in one room and to surrender all their storage devices, laptops, iPads, telephones, memory sticks and so on. So was Carly.

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“I asked them what Matthew was supposed to have done, but they said they couldn’t tell me under GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]. More officers came in and they took my home apart. They searched everywhere and put all our devices into black bags and took them out to unmarked police cars. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but it must have been obvious to the neighbours that something strange was going on.

“Then the most senior officer took me into our bedroom and pulled a bag from under the bed. Matthew had hidden it there. But I still didn’t know what he was supposed to have done… After two hours, they were gone, and we were none the wiser. They said Matthew would be home later, and he would explain everything, but Matthew didn’t come home.” Over the next couple of days, Matthew avoided contact with Carly, her children and his daughter. He went to the home of Carly’s father, where he tried to overdose on the father’s insulin. When that failed, he took an overdose of paracetamol and ended up in hospital.

Carly had no right to be given details of their partner’s alleged crimes unless the partner gave permission. “We had Googled ‘illegal downloading’ and seen that it could be for pirated music or indecent images of children or something else,” says Carly. This is a common problem for families in this situation, and it creates a vacuum in which offenders can lie about, or minimise, their illegal activities. These periods of deception — during which women are sometimes tricked into staying with the offender — can last for up to two years because of unprecedented backlogs in court cases post-pandemic and the time it takes to have devices examined by digital forensics experts.

“A couple of days after his arrest, Matthew told me he had a problem with pornography and it involved children,” says Carly. “I asked him how old, and he said: ‘Between three and 12.’ I’ve been a nurse for many years and so I have a strong constitution, but when he told me about the poor victims in these images, I vomited.” But it took two years for Matthew’s case to be heard at Crown Court. Only then did Carly learn the full extent of his crimes. He pleaded guilty to possessing or making more than 4,000 indecent images of children.

“The ‘making’ of indecent images charge was brought because of the way he had downloaded them and organised them into folders,” she says. “They were in age groups: three to five; six to eight; nine to 12. Most of them were ‘Category A’ images, the most serious, which means full penetrative sex. We’re talking about people having sex with toddlers.”

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Matthew was given a two-year suspended prison sentence, and put on the sex offenders register for 10 years. Carly stopped living with Matthew after he told her the bare basics of what he had done, and she has since divorced him. She sold their house, changed her name, gave up her job and moved to a new town. After months of counselling — which she paid for herself because she wasn’t entitled to any special help — she says she is making progress.

Families of online child abuse offenders suffer mentally, physically, socially and financially, according to research conducted by Professor Rachel Armitage and her colleagues at Huddersfield’s Department of Criminology. In 2021, they interviewed 126 family members and friends of offenders. They found that all but 17.5% of interviewees had symptoms consistent with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); 70% had symptoms that suggested they ought to have been diagnosed with PTSD, yet only 22 had received formal diagnoses and treatment for it.

The researchers also found that 65% reported symptom levels that were sufficient to suppress their body’s immune system. According to the Impact of Events Scale they used, a score of 35 would merit a diagnosis of PTSD and more than 37 would be high enough to put immune system function at risk. The mean score for offenders’ children was 55.6 and for their wives or partners it was 44.8. One of the women I interviewed said she developed rheumatoid arthritis after her husband was arrested, while her daughter’s hair fell out.

“Some of the respondents referred to experiencing relapses of disorders that were thought to have been resolved in the past — for example, eating disorders — and several also noted that the stress of the discovery had led to them developing physical illnesses such as autoimmune system disorders and irritable bowel syndrome,” the researchers wrote in their findings.

“Participants described how the psychological impacts were exacerbated by the loneliness and isolation of being in this situation where you have little or no access to agency support, where you are unable to disclose the truth to your own family and friends, where you have lost somebody that you love.”

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None of the partners and professionals I spoke to was demonstrably critical of police officers who carry out the knock, but they did wonder whether it could be handled more sensitively — in ways that could protect children from the trauma of seeing their father taken away, their homes ripped apart in searches. The National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead on child protection and abuse, Deputy Chief Constable Ian Critchley, says: “The NPCC are aware of and understand the impact policing can have on families where someone has been subject to an arrest involving online child sexual abuse and exploitation. Often there are restrictions on the amount of information which can be provided due to several factors including GDPR, which we acknowledge can be frustrating and upsetting for innocent family members trying to understand why this is happening.” He says the NPCC is working with police forces, researchers and academics to find ways to make the knock and its aftermath less distressing.

During the period between arrest and trial, wives and partners (who, remember, usually don’t know the minutiae of what their man is supposed to have done) must decide whether to allow their children to see their father — usually under the supervision of a responsible adult — or whether to cut ties completely. If they suddenly remove the father, they risk damaging their children’s mental health; if they don’t, they risk being judged negatively by friends and family. Whatever they choose to do, they can’t win.

Katie White discovered this after agreeing that her husband, Bob, a 40-year-old civil servant, could see their two boys under the supervision of Bob’s mother. Within days of the knock, the Children’s Services department of her local authority had turned up, but “once they assess that your children aren’t at risk – because the offender is no longer living in the household – that’s it; they disappear from your life,” says Katie. “You get no help from them. The only time social services get involved is if your husband applies for more access rights or if you want to change the person who supervises his visits.”

Bob was convicted of possessing more than 1,000 indecent images of girls, some aged under eight. “At first, he had told me he might have accidentally clicked on a few images of girls aged 16 or 17,” says Katie. “It wasn’t until his hearing a year later that I found out the truth. I felt sick — lied to, cheated, and utterly disgusted.”

During that time, however, she had agreed to let Bob see their children once a week, supervised by his mother. The children were missing their father – to remove him completely did not seem like the right option. Not everyone agreed. One of her closest friends cut ties with her for allowing Bob to see the boys. After that, Katie, who had already given up her job, sold the family home and moved to a new town. Life was even harder there.

“I made a real effort at the school gates to get to know the other mothers, and fairly quickly I made a lot of acquaintances, but it was hard to make proper friends because I couldn’t afford to let anyone get too close,” she says. “I told them about getting divorced and said I’d moved there for a fresh start. There would be invitations to spa weekends away, or for late nights out and they would say: ‘Why can’t the kids stay with their dad?’. And I would say things like ‘It’s complicated’ or ‘That’s a long story’ but you can only keep batting away questions for so long.”

Eventually, she told three of her new friends about Bob’s offending, but they, too, judged her negatively for allowing her boys to have him in their lives. “One by one, they told me that if this had happened to them, they wouldn’t have allowed their children’s father to see them,” she says. “They didn’t drop me straight away, but they slowly melted away and don’t call any more. Now there’s nobody. I’m isolated in the community, and I feel very lonely.”

Bob re-offended last year. One of the boys wants to cut all ties with him; the other doesn’t. For Katie, this is just the latest in a long line of agonising quandaries that will inevitably see her cast her as villain, either in the eyes of one of her boys, or Bob’s family, or the so-called friends watching from the shadows.

“Every image contains a real child — an innocent victim — being abused, and that heart-breaking fact is never far from my mind,” says Katie. “All I can do is hope that they are identified and given the support they need. But our children need some professional help as well, because this crime has life-long emotional ramifications for them. They are victims of their fathers’ crimes, and they are more vulnerable as a result.”

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The Ministry of Justice decides who can legally be described as a victim of crime. Under its “Code of Practice for Victims of Crime in England and Wales”, also known as the Victim’s Code, the definition is: “A person who has suffered harm, including physical, mental or emotional harm or economic loss which was directly caused by a criminal offence; or a close relative (or a nominated family spokesperson) of a person whose death was directly caused by a criminal offence”.

Being described as a victim is important as it confers statutory rights. Among these are the right to be kept updated with the investigation and the offender’s court appearances and, crucially, “the right to be referred to services that support victims, which includes the right to contact them directly, and to have your needs assessed so services and support can be tailored to meet your needs”.

Victims also have the right to claim compensation — something that might concern ministers — yet none of the women I interviewed mentioned compensation. Instead, their priority was getting practical and psychological support for their children, at home and at school. Neither they nor their children are currently offered counselling or any other kind of help.

Natalie Smith, a 39-year-old partner in an accountancy firm, says she is struggling with the difficult questions that her daughters, Jane, seven, and Sarah, four, are starting to ask, but she has no access to professional help or advice as to how she should answer them. She got the knock two years ago after a tip-off to the police that her husband, Brad, a 45-year-old businessman, had been sharing images of girls aged under 10 with followers on Twitter.

“After his arrest, I began to feel guilty because maybe I should have noticed something,” Natalie says. “Then you feel guilty for the children your husband was looking at, his first victims. You feel guilty for choosing this man to be the father of your girls, because now they are also his victims. And you feel guilty that this is going to affect them for years to come because they will grow up without a father.”

Natalie immediately moved out of the family home and in with her parents. She is still there, and her husband has no contact with their children. When the girls ask where he is, Natalie wants to answer honestly, but in ways that will not adversely affect them in the long term – she just isn’t sure how to do that. All she has to work with are suggestions from other mothers in an online forum set up by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation.

“Jane came home one day and said there was a boy in her class whose parents didn’t live together, but he still gets to see his daddy,” says Natalie. “She asked why Daddy didn’t come home to us, and so I told her he had looked at something he shouldn’t have looked at and that meant he wasn’t allowed home. Then she asked what he had looked at, and I told her she was too young for me to tell her, but I promised I would when she was old enough. Mothers on the forum say I should give ‘age-appropriate answers’, but I have nobody to ask what is appropriate. Recently, Jane has been asking me to get married again because she wants a daddy. She didn’t say her daddy, just a daddy.”

I asked the Ministry of Justice whether it might attribute victim status to partners and children of IIoC offenders. It replied: “The Victims’ Code stipulates that a victim for the purposes of the Code is ‘a person who has suffered harm, including physical, mental or emotional harm or economic loss, which was directly caused by a criminal offence’.  Therefore, families of offenders are not deemed victims of crime unless they were directly harmed by the offence. There are no plans to change this as it could inadvertently result in victims of crime receiving less support.”

It was a response that disappointed Professor Armitage. “At the very least, under this definition, children of online child sexual abuse offenders should be defined as victims,” she says. But Sarah Champion, the MP for Rotherham and a leading light in the fight against child sexual abuse and trafficking, not least as a result of grooming gangs in her own constituency, is the only Parliamentarian so far to back the calls to acknowledge them as “victims”. “Whenever a close relative is found to commit some of the most heinous crimes, the impact on their family is devastating, and of course they deserve our support,” she says. “But the children of online child abuse offenders become caught up in a complex and unique situation through no fault of their own. I will be doing all I can to get these children the protections and legal recognition they deserve.”

For now, this is where the story ends. This year, hundreds of families will experience the knock and its disastrous consequences — the broken homes, broken relationships and broken children — yet theirs is a dilemma borne of a despicable act that seems too difficult to talk about, too easy to ignore. “We’re a group of people that society would rather not recognise because of the horrible crime that has created us,” says Katie White. “And while I feel there is an acceptance that all of this horror is sure to have damaged my children, it seems that it hasn’t damaged them enough for anyone to care.”

Names have been changed and details withheld to protect children and families.

But just as social mobility has stalled, so has sex. Faced with an online bedchamber of horrors since they were pre-teens, successive generations are holding on to their virginity longer and having less sex. The proliferation of porn since the Seventies has changed us from chastely yearning swains, capable of producing beautiful sonnets, to masturbating chimps — a process completed during the sad months when we were warned not to touch anyone except ourselves.

Meanwhile, young feminist thinkers have reclaimed monogamy, convinced that all permissiveness offers is men who take, in Germaine Greer’s memorable phrase, “joyless liberties” with them. Once girls stayed virgins for fear of burning in Hell; now they stay virgins for fear of being choked to death by a callow suitor who has picked up his smooth moves from playground porn.

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We may be vaguely aware that there was once something better than this, but we have no idea how to go about regaining it. It’s always tempting to think that throwing money at a problem helps. Enter capitalism. The commodification of sex starts with pornography — where one literally chooses from a menu of flesh — and ends up with those nutters who get “physical with” model aeroplanes they claim to be in “love” with. But it also provides the wily entrepreneur with an excuse to get rich quick. Having ruined the sex lives of young men by confronting them with super-schlongs, the market then sells them the chemicals that can “cure” them; the most recent sales figures from Viagra Connect show that more than 60% of users are between 25 and 54 years old. Young women, meanwhile, blaming themselves for their lovers’ difficulties, will spend thousands of pounds while still in their gorgeous 20s trying to emulate the actresses they see writhing on screen.

Sometimes the discourse around these sexual accessories reveals unintentionally amusing things about both the buyers and sellers. Lily Allen probably didn’t mean to out herself as a prude when she stated that she didn’t know how to masturbate before she started using “sex toys”. But how else to explain: “I felt weird trying to give myself pleasure. It didn’t feel like something that felt natural to me — then I discovered sex toys and it broke the barrier of intimacy with myself.” Does she think Down There is too dirty to touch? Likewise, though the sexually naive may have found it arousing to see photographs of Cara Delevingne and her girlfriend lugging a £360 “sex bench” into their house, it made me think: “that relationship won’t be lasting much longer”. Within a year, it was over.

It remains a rule of thumb that if you need to spend money on sex, you’re probably not doing it right. But in our efforts to make monogamy last longer than is natural, we’re prepared to purchase endless hardware. We’re so steeped in the flagrantly dumb culture of “retail therapy” that it pollutes the most intimate areas of our lives, giving a glossy sheen to the corrupted heart. The Fifty Shades books were just as reliant on the fiscal as the physical for their appeal: substitute a succession of shabby mobile homes for the string of private jets and suddenly getting bashed about by the boyfriend doesn’t seem luxurious.

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So, given the popularity of property porn and porn proper, it was dismally inevitable that Netflix’s How To Build A Sex Room would happen. The presenter Melanie Rose is one of those Game Old Birds who signals sensibleness through her shoes and specs but hints at a raunchy past with cropped hair and Statement Lippy. For over 15 years, Rose has been making “high-end” (over-priced) sex rooms for “bankers, teachers, cops” and more. I’m sure this was meant to be reassuring, but considering that last year a policeman became a household name for abducting and raping a young woman, it failed to give me the warm, snuggly feeling intended.

Still, the couple in episode one, Taylor and AyJay, eyes a-pop with anticipation, reassured Rose (and each other) that “we love each other and we love having sex and we’re ready to have a space to spice things up with a space where we can push ourselves, push the boundaries of our relationship!” Perplexingly, Taylor and AyJay desired “a sex dungeon — but not in any way that a dungeon implies”. Even more puzzlingly, they liked the fact that it was “hidden away, and no one knows that it’s there… It’s a pretty hot little secret”.

Well, unless Netflix has lost even more viewers than they let on, a secret is one thing the couple’s sex room is not. Which is the point. Despite the alleged variety of these couples’ tastes, they’re drearily alike in that they’re all exhibitionists. (Though one man in episodes four and five was very romantic, having asked Rose to help him propose marriage to his girlfriend.) By the time the “polyamorous family” — all seven of the dirty swine — rock up in episode four, you’ll want to watch a documentary on a religious order, just to break the monotony.

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Rose’s RP is clearly meant to give the show a frisson of incongruity, but ends up blurring the tours of various shag-palaces into one. She is not prepossessing, but knowing how horny Americans find English accents, I’d guess that the show’s appeal across the pond is the crisp way she says “tit” — like Mary Poppins on poppers. But her superior air rubbed me up the wrong way. Goodness knows I’m not the wokest, but watching this posh white woman instructing attractive African-American couples on how to have orgasms categorically turned me off.

Watching yet another couple gag each other prior to a good flogging (otherwise known as “impact play” — that creepy infantilising thing again), I reflected that, far from being a bit of fun, such antics may express sublimated resentment between long-married couples. Isn’t gagging what he longs to do when she tells the same story for the nth time? Isn’t flogging what she wants to do when he swipes the remote control? I couldn’t help thinking of the day these couples break up and argue over their sex room’s contents in a small claims court — now that I would pay to watch.

I suppose it shows how far we’ve come that no one will think that any of these couples is immoral. These days, ninnies reserve such judgement for bad people like Boris Johnson, who they childishly scold for “cheating”. At least Rose’s subjects are trying their very hardest — indeed, going to extreme lengths — to remain monogamous. (Except in the case of the seven swine.) But they are certainly misguided to ignore the simple truth that when you’re in the first flush of horniness, every room is a sex room, and when the thrill has gone, no room is — no matter how much money you spend on your “high-end” consolation prize. 

“There’s nothing happening here,” the man says, when he stops laughing. “They’re just letting this town run down to the ground. They aren’t doing anything. You walk down through there” — and he points at a road — “they were going to take a building down, make more room for the market. They’ve scrapped that now. Why? Nobody knows.”

This is dairy country with undulating, sun-wilted hills from Exmoor to Lyme Bay. The towns are golden and ancient: less sleepy than necrotic. Londoners buy second homes and treat the landscape, which looks like an advert for butter, as a garden while common issues — low pay, lack of housing, infrastructure, local services — have been ignored. Still, it was safe for Tories: farmers are conservative. Parish’s majority in 2019 was 24,239 votes: 60.2% of the vote. Labour came second in 2019 and 2017 but the Liberal Democrats, the professional opposition, hope to repeat their successes in Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire with their candidate Richard Foord, a former major in the army.

Three hundred activists a day come from out of the constituency to help: angry Tories don’t vote Labour. If it goes Liberal Democrat, it means Johnson is still in danger. If it doesn’t — and even Liberal Democrats are unsure — it means Partygate is forgotten, and he has hope: to continue his personal redemption through destruction.

“I would like,” the man continues, “to think the Liberal Democrats will get it. Make a completely new start. Because the Conservatives — what have they done?” But this is a by-election: just one less brick in the wall. It will change nothing. Does he know that? He answers his own question, enunciating carefully: “Very, very little. Did he [Neil Parish] make a mistake? Would you walk into the Houses of Parliament and produce a phone and start looking at porn?”

“Is he the only one who’s doing it?” asks his friend, and they guffaw for a while. In east Devon you must be patient. They think in decades. To them, Parish is a fool, not a fiend. There is not the same anger towards him as there was towards Owen Paterson in North Shropshire. Those who liked him still like him. (One man says he loves him.) Those who hate him hated him anyway.

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At the edge of Tiverton, where it segues from golden town to sprawl, I find the Community Arts Theatre. Public hustings are almost unknown nowadays because they are unpredictable but, since it is organised by the Fund Our Tivvy High campaign — the school needs to be rebuilt — the main candidates agreed to it.

I arrive early and watch the For Britain candidate, a ruddy, pinched boy called Frankie Rufolo, who carries aggrievement like a cartoon cloud over his head, attempt to infiltrate the hustings. He was not invited. “You’re a racist,” a youngish man tells him. “I’m an anti-racist,” Rufolo pleads back. (For Britain is endorsed by Tommy Robinson.) A security guard approaches to remove Rufolo. I ask Rufolo if he is local. “I have relatives in Devon,” he says sulkily. “No, you don’t,” says the security guard (though, in fact, he does), and leads him away, head hanging like a daffodil.

I listen to the Labour candidate Liz Pole, a genial woman essentially trying to climb a mountain in slippers, giving a TV interview: “The Conservative vote has collapsed, even people who are voting Conservative are doing so through gritted teeth, a lot of people are staying home or are switching…” Her press officer, who is presumably decorative, won’t brief me on or off the record but I think it is less tactics — an informal non-aggression pact with the Liberal Democrats is a persistent rumour — than laziness. Later, when I call out to her, she places a finger in the air and walks to the carpark with it.

As the audience muster, a group called LIFT (Local Independents for Tiverton) unfurl a banner that says: The Party’s Over, Prime Minister. Post confidence vote, it is an ancient slogan. It could be by Cicero. “The Conservatives have taken us for granted,” says a LIFT supporter. “The only time we were on the news is when our MP was caught looking at pornography in the House of Commons.” He talks about local food poverty, which is “remarkable” (donations have flat-lined and the church that stores them is empty), the dangerous condition of the school and lack of representation, homes for locals and well-paid jobs. There used to be a clutch of thriving factories around Tiverton, he says. Now they are shuttered or small.

He is by far the angriest man I meet in Devon. This is not raging North Shropshire, where former Conservatives would denounce Johnson on street-corners, or Chesham and Amersham, where the atmosphere was a kind of gleeful transgression in sunlight. It feels sadder than that: splintered, tetchy, defeated, as if Johnson’s corruption is settling over everything like dust, leaving people bewildered and exhausted. Many people tell me they won’t vote, and never have: “I’d rather sit in my garden and have a cold beer.” “They’re all the same”. One Labour woman voted Liberal Democrat tactically in 2010, and never will again; an old betrayal haunts her and so she will help Johnson by voting Labour. A youngish man is one of the few Tory splitters I find: “I was a paid-up member of the Conservative Party and there’s no way I can vote for the Tories in the state they are in. They’ve lurched to the Right.”

Some people are gently awed that politics has fallen on them. A man in a checked blue shirt with exquisite RP accent, who is here to find out if the Conservative candidate is pro field sports, says: “I’m not going to tell you who I normally vote for, but I am much to my own surprise” — and he does look very surprised — “a floating voter.” If he is anything other than a Conservative now leaning Liberal Democrat, he needs a better disguise.

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Inside, it is packed with political obsessives who know how they will vote: anti-Tory. The Tory candidate Helen Hurford, a former teacher who now owns a beauty salon — Corbynistas smirk at this because they are snobs — sits with Gill Westcott, the Green Party candidate, who is the sort of woman who sags under her obvious intellect. Liz Pole sits with Richard Foord. He looks open-faced but exhausted, as if a burden is upon him. That’s the disease of by-elections: the idea that they matter for anyone beyond the lobby’s Kremlinologists. They are only runes.

I have covered many by-elections and Hurford is the worst candidate I have found. Initially she says she wants to share “all my ideas and my aspirations for the Tiverton and Honiton”. The definite article is singular to her; she considers everything from her own perspective; her speech is filled with exclamation marks; its content is banality meets rage. “I know what it’s like to raise a family and be brought up in this area,” she says. “It’s beautiful! I’ve had lots of ministers coming down to support me and they’re saying, ‘isn’t it gorgeous?’ and I say, ‘Yeah it is, why would you want to live anywhere else?’”

A woman in a straw hat rises to ask: “In light of the resignation of two ethics advisers in less than two years, what is your personal view on the moral character of Boris Johnson?” “It’s hard to know where to start, just the lies, the repeated lies,” says Liz Pole, looking phlegmatic because the alternative is screaming: “The brass neck of the man.”

“The first part of that question, I believe, was about the resignation of the ethics advisers,” says Hurford. “It’s very Westmistery. That’s the expression I use. I’m not in Westminster but my understanding is that it was a commercially sensitive issue.” There are heckles at this, but she moves through them like a tank: “That’s what I’ve been told, thank you very much!” The chair presses her: do you have any concerns about his character? “I have no concerns that his pledges are honest”. Foord says: “To lose one ethics advisor could be regarded as misfortune, but to lose two ethics advisers can only be carelessness.”

Hurford is pressed on the cost of living (“I’m feeling it too!”) the environment (“I don’t have the answer!”) and the policy of sending refugees to Rwanda: when the refugees get there — “and it will happen” — they should “be treated kindly and fairly!” She summons Zelenskyy in her support and, at the end, when she is asked who her favourite thinker is, she names her grandfather. (Westcott names Gandhi, Pole Dickens and Foord W. B. Yeats and Paddy Ashdown). “You know, I hated school,” Hurford says conversationally, and it sounds like the truest thing she has said. “Slightly ironic that I became a head teacher.”

I think of May Welland from The Age of Innocence: Hurford has that hard, unyielding brightness. It shines. It lets nothing in. She is a typically Johnsonian Tory; evasive, anti-intellectual and self-obsessed; quick to anger when threatened, slow to change her mind, if she ever does. Every time she speaks, I feel materially closer to autocracy. At the end she says: “This is a fantastic opportunity for a girl that was born and raised and absolutely adores this constituency Tiverton and Honiton”. I wonder if she will burst into song. “Everything that I do will be for the benefit of Tiverton and Honiton because I am Tiverton and Honiton.”

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Later I meet Richard Foord. He is not as interesting as Hurford, not being a mad kind of nadir, but he has spoken to hundreds of former Conservatives and, like Pole, he believes the Conservative vote is ebbing. “There are a lot of long-term traditional Conservatives who don’t regard Boris Johnson as a Conservative,” he says. “The most cited reason is that they regard him as lacking in integrity and honesty and for some people these traits are part of their own identity as Conservatives. Some Conservatives do put that above everything else.” There are Johnson loyalists, he adds, “who will stick with him, but I think they are outnumbered by the number of Conservatives who feel they should be better led.”

The next day I find the Liberal Democrat office on Honiton High Street. It is swagged with Union Flags. There are no chairs inside to discourage sitting down, which is not a sign of confidence. An elderly man returns from canvassing in Axminister. He moans that people aren’t budging from the Conservatives — “We are Conservatives,” he reports them saying to him — takes another bundle of leaflets, and leaves disconsolate.

The Honiton Conservative Association, a few doors down, is shuttered. There is a rumour, which I cannot confirm because it is shuttered, that the officers of the Honiton Conservative Association are voting Liberal Democrat. There is a Liberal Democrat sign on the Honiton Conservative Association, but I cannot say who put it there. I think it is a joke.

This by-election is the most depressing I have covered. It feels sunken and shameful, which is not surprising when you consider its origins: a by-election not for constituents, who feel ignored no matter their stripe, but for other people. The media is here, mugging locals and holding up queues in the butchers. They gawp at the nerve of it: as if we are more interested in a prime minister’s fate than a constituency’s. They wonder why they were not always so interesting to us; why we never came here before; if we are irreparably trivial.

I meet aghast and defensive Tories, thwarted Leftists, the undecideds who will choose whether Hurford gets to parliament or not and the eternal, maddening non-voters. But I can’t find the purity of the anger I heard in North Shropshire like a bell. “It’s quite amazing,” a Left-leaning bookseller tells me, his fingers stroking their spines, “how much people will tolerate before they rouse themselves.” I can’t escape the sense that the Tiverton and Honiton is just another distraction: another tiny chapter in the incremental narrative of Boris Johnson’s will to power. I wonder if he is more afraid of boredom or hatred. And we are back to him, again.

But the days when feminists were largely against porn are a distant memory. With the rise of the Christian Right in the Eighties — and the rise of home video — so-called “sex-positive feminism” won the day. As a popular Ellen Willis line went: “In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to ‘What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic.’” In this view, pornography wasn’t about social issues such as the eroticisation of violence against women or their submission, economic and physical. It was just about, well, “what turns you on”.

This view is a pretty simplistic one. As Amia Srinivasan observes in The Right to Sex, it’s not like our desires come inborn, just waiting for their validation and release by streaming. Instead, porn sites — algorithmically overdetermined, like everything else dependent on online ad sales — push site-goers to eroticise whatever’s getting the most hits in their area. Most often, it’s pretty harrowing stuff.

One might object to this state of affairs. The porn industry is worth almost $100 billion worldwide; it is the way most boys and many girls are first exposed to sex in the developed world, and often at preteen ages. Performers are rampantly abused, and women mostly age out by their twenties. Many posit a connection between porn consumption and sexual dysfunction and body dysmorphia. Only the most naive would deny that women feel pressured to accommodate an androcentric ideal of behaviour, and that pornography partakes of and amplifies that pressure.

But despite a recent spate of critiques of “sex-positive” liberal feminism, few today really condemn porn. Co-opted and defanged like so many countercultural movements of the Sixties, feminism has now generally settled into uncritical embrace of choice, wary to articulate any theory of good, bad, or even fair sex beyond the presence of “consent”. This liberal, legalistic framework is something of a fiction, of course; much as the underdogs in capitalism are treated as giving free and informed consent even under the most dire economic duress, women today are treated as giving consent even when their wishes are as minimised and obscured as ever. But the imperative of sex-positive feminism is to not question women’s desires, but instead take them at their word.

Hence the strange case of Pleasure, the feature debut of Swedish director Ninja Thyberg, for which I had high hopes: it is perhaps the most widely released film about porn to actually go “behind the scenes”, hand sanitiser and all. By delving into the actual production of all those mountains of mysterious videos, Thyberg handles a subject ripe for a critical perspective. As lead Sofia Kappel told the Guardian, “I think the porn industry as a subject is very interesting since it’s very present in our lives but we don’t talk about it. We act like it doesn’t exist.”

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She’s right. But a promising subject is no guarantee of artistic success. Pleasure, praised to the sky by major critics, is less a work of art than a piece of self-defeating propaganda. It is an attempt at a pro-porn feminist flick that is so violent, so thin, and so degrading for creators and viewers alike, that Thyberg may have inadvertently created one of the greatest arguments yet against so-called sex-positive feminism.

Thyberg is a former anti-porn activist, and Pleasure is an adaptation of her 2013 Cannes short portraying the violent pressuring of a woman performer into an extreme act. As one might expect, its plot reads like an after-school special. Bella Cherry, an attractive 19-year-old Swede with virtually no backstory, personality, or desires, comes to California to enter the porn industry. In short order, she’s pressured into BDSM and then an even more extreme act before, in her own words, being “raped for hours” and finally quasi-assaulting a more attractive rival. She ends up so sickened with herself she crawls out of her limo onto a crowded LA freeway.

But as she has exhaustingly demonstrated on the press circuit, Thyberg has squarely imbibed the dogma of non-judgment. Explaining to the Guardian that she’s changed from anti-porn to judgment-free, she says, “The things that [Bella’s] going through that are bad in the film don’t have anything to do with having sex on camera.” In a New York Times profile, Thyberg declares that “Bad things happen, but it’s not because people are having sex on camera… Abuses of power exist in all workplaces.” To HuffPost: “[Bella is] sometimes the victim or in the bottom of some kind of hierarchy, but sometimes she’s also the one in the top.”

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Reviewers have praised Pleasure as a triumph of even-handedness. In its glowing piece, titled “She’s a Go-Getter”, the New York Times tells us that “women make porn and women watch it, and for different reasons, including because they like it. Because it’s their choice.” The LA Times similarly observes that “Thyberg does well to withhold judgment, approaching the porn industry not as an evil.” Mechanically drawing on the word bank of liberal feminism (“affirming”, “sex-positive”, “consent”, “non-judgmental”), NPR praises a scene where a female director has the lead tied up in rope, ball-gagged, and beaten by her easy-going male costar.

But no one unfitted with blinders could see this as anything other than an anti-porn film. Pleasure’s script is a string of feminist clichés set against scenes of violence, exploitation, and entrapment that collapse the shaky, pro-porn myth of free choice they rest on. Indeed, one wonders whether Thyberg may have been pressured to market the film for a sex-positive age.

In Bella’s first shoot, she meets the counterpart to her “teen” role — a fat, much older man, in what’s essentially a babysitter scene — and while preparing in the bathroom, has a panic attack. The director and crew tell her that she simply has “stage fright” and that “when you’re doing anything for the first time, it’s normal to feel nervous”. They successfully pressure her back on stage. Her final, post-coital triumph involves smearing the desideratum all over her face and posting selfies to Instagram with the hashtag #proudslut. Driving her back to her model house, a male porn star asks her how she got into this industry. “Well, my dad raped me…” she begins to joke in remarkably bad taste, before he tells her to shut up. Then she provides the right answer: “I just want to fuck!”

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But for all her claims to concupiscence, neither she nor any other character in this film has any amorous or even amicable relationships: they have sex on camera, in scenes that, from that first one on, are consistently horrifying, and none of which seems entirely “voluntary”. If Bella really just wants to have sex, as she repeats again and again, why does she freeze up before every scene? And why does her vision go fuzzy during every shoot, even the “feminist” one? How, after she is “raped for hours”, can she possibly be saying to her agent that she does porn because “it’s a lot of fun”? How does her triumph over a prettier rival consist of sexually brutalising her? How can the conclusion of a pro-porn film involve the protagonist jumping out a limo in shame?

How is this not satire?

Despite herself, Thyberg has made an allegory for the central contradiction of “sex work is work”: it may be work, but sex is also the main human conduit for intimacy and mutual desire, and its alienation in a free market makes it all the more difficult for one to say what they really feel or desire. Bella’s only consolation is the hope of online stardom, which doesn’t seem to be coming. All she’s done is become a monster.

In her interviews, Thyberg has said that the film was about how abuses in porn stem from capitalism and patriarchy. But is a heterosexual BDSM scene with a female tied up and gagged, so long as it’s filmed by a woman, really all feminism can aspire to?

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To Thyberg’s credit, she does emphasise the more craven side of the industry: the pressure to go extreme to get bookings, the pressure to follow through to get paid, the way Bella’s darker-skinned roommate is dismissed as “trailer trash” and abused on set. But in her attempts to withhold judgment, Thyberg has landed in unsettling and unsatisfying territory: there are clearly attempts to make porn seem fun — that Instagram post, that nice female director, that pool party — but the bits of economic reality she allows in reveal those touches as the hollow ornaments they are. “Abuses of power happen in all workplaces”, but in no other industry but prostitution do people’s rent cheques depend on a woman submitting to violent sex acts with strangers, driven by the ever-more-extreme tastes of audiences at home.

Bella Cherry doesn’t have any trauma, apparently. But nor does she have any joy, any desire, or, after the first few minutes, much of any hope. Ultimately, Pleasure is unable or unwilling to develop a positive theory of why she wants any of this, or why anyone wants any of this. Thyberg has said that she wanted to show what Bella “gets out” of porn; to show the moments where she’s on “top”. But even at her highest moment, she is merely a blank face, insecure and overwhelmed, sticking her tongue out at her iPhone as strangers wash up a few feet away. And that is its own judgment.

But to me the resonant detail was less the pornography than the tractor. The search term “Dominator” is apparently a class of combine harvester, as well as having more lubricious connotations. This one word slid Parish sideways in a single click from the preoccupations of an old-fashioned Tory to the full-spectrum violence and nihilism of today’s culture of universal pornification.

And he did so in public view, scrolling pornography in the House of Commons — an act as obviously, flagrantly, socially unacceptable as walking out of your front door naked from the waist down. Ascribing behaviour this bizarre to so banal an impulse as sexism doesn’t add up.

Parish called it a “moment of madness”, but psychologists have long recognised that impulsive actions can be revealing. And if you were to read it as a cry of despair, Parish’s act would make eloquent sense — not just for him as an individual, but for those last surviving fragments of conservatism that still somehow cling on in the modern Conservative Party.

For Parish exemplifies a type of conservatism which is homeless. It is incompatible with the Tory Party today and is unrepresented in the increasingly influential “dissident Right”. For inasmuch as there is energy on the Right, it is in this febrile movement, which fizzes with energy — but is wholly estranged from the modern Tory Party, whose aggregate actions (accidentally or otherwise) look more like part of the problem than the solution.

Consider, for example, the current tussle over regulating imported Canadian beef. Canadian officials are pushing for a deal that would oblige us to accept hormone-treated meat, a practice banned by the EU in 1989 and that studies have shown uses carcinogenic chemicals. This is, for Boris Johnson, a difficult circle to square since, much like the once-again radioactive immigration debate, hormone beef pits the Party’s longstanding commitment to “free trade” (ie growth) against what’s left of the Party’s desire to conserve anything at all, including Britain’s increasingly strained and miserable (and hitherto loyally Tory) rural economy.

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The online Right, meanwhile, is so internationally ebullient it’s making the New York Times anxious: it was described as ‘reactionary chic’ by Michelle Goldberg. Unlike the cringy Young Tories of old, this youthful New Right is (according to Vanity Fair) “quietly edgy and cool” in increasingly prominent circles. And it has plenty to say about farming, food standards and animal welfare.

In one of its subcultures, the distinctly fascism-tinged health movement that calls itself “raw egg nationalism”, Benjamin Braddock denounces globalisation in terms indistinguishable from a late-Nineties left-wing green activist. The “large-scale low-quality mindset” of global market capitalism, he argues, results in a “corrupted toxic food supply” that poisons both the earth and the humans who consume its products:

“Our farmers must now compete with the third world in a race to the bottom. We import farmed fish grown in sewage tanks in China and call it progress. Our free trade deals impose legal requirements on our trading partners to throw upon their doors to multinationals like Monsanto”.

And here we get to the heart of Neil Parish’s dilemma. For his party isn’t just running out of ideas. They’re running out of ways to square conservatism and growth, without making life worse for their core constituencies — and especially for the kind of rural true-blues Neil Parish both exemplifies and represents.

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For most of the modern era, the Conservatives have styled themselves as the party of order, heritage and prosperity. In practice, though, their role has been to make sure the “creative destruction” of heritage that fuelled rising prosperity took place somewhere other than Tory heartlands (for example among the working class, or overseas) while the prosperity accrued to the true blue.

In the very first essay I wrote for UnHerd, just before Covid sent the world mad, I accused the Tories of sacrificing conservatism in its entirety on this altar of economic growth. And to my eye, this remains largely true today. The difficulty is that there’s very little of the cultural, ecological and economic family silver left to sell. (Privatising the Passport Office, Boris? Really?). And having run out of places to externalise its costs, the Tories are turning on the amenities and social fabric enjoyed by Tory voters themselves, in the rural British heartlands.

In this, they are more aligned than not with the progressive consensus. To illustrate, consider a by no means exhaustive list of things I’ve seen condemned lately as “problematic” or as having “shades of fascism”: farmers’ markets, going to the gym, beauty, classical architecture, talking about England before the Norman Conquest, Greek and Roman literature, gardening, sex dimorphism, punctuality, objectivity, enjoying the natural world, and mums. In other words: the stuff most ordinary people, and all ordinary conservatives, believed until about five minutes ago made life worth living.

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A non-problematic world, then, must have whatever the opposite of these things is. That suggests a world that’s childless, touch-less, and relativistic, that embraces ultra-processed food, de-materialised occupations, artificial surroundings and transient, possession-less renting, and in cultural terms swims in a formless meme-soup where embodiment, memory, beauty and the natural world are your political enemies.

To capture the support of adherents to “reactionary chic”, the modern Tory Party would have to oppose this (frankly not very appealing) vision. But recent policy decisions suggest they’re at best ambivalent. They’re hopelessly confused on families and decent housing, vacillating between shoving young people into overpriced urban shoeboxes, and forcing hectares of identikit box-homes onto greenfield sites typically converted from Tory-voting farmland.

As regards literal conservation, they make faint noises about environmental subsidies for farmers. But Johnson’s government has also done its best to leave water companies free to disgorge sewage into rivers, and is sidling toward un-banning EU-banned pesticides.

Meanwhile, the Brexit so triumphantly delivered by Johnson’s administration is proving (to say the least) a frightening time for British farmers. Many smaller landowners, confronted with uncertainty over post-Brexit subsidies, are selling up, accelerating a long-term trend toward consolidation in UK farming.

Where does this leave an ageing conservative such as Neil Parish? A look at his voting record suggests him to be about as close as it’s possible to get to old-school, country Toryism: tough on welfare spending and immigration, opposed to gay marriage and EU membership, with a longstanding interest in animal welfare issues and rural affairs. So there’s an eloquent irony in his searching for tractors and ending up clicking pornography in a “moment of madness”.

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The philosopher Byung-Chul Han described capitalism — in other words, the Tories’ sainted value of “growth” — as “aggravating the pornographication of society by making everything a commodity and putting it on display”. Parish’s stumble from “Dominator” tractors to who knows what more titillating form of domination is evocative of the hopeless dilemma faced by such old-fashioned Tories. For a political stance capable of squaring growth with conserving anything at all is now radically untenable. Especially in farming.

Did Neil Parish resolved the quandary for himself by committing professional suicide? As bleak as it sounds, perhaps Parish’s watching of pornography in Parliament could be read as an act of pure nihilism, from someone who has grasped that a long-successful political compromise has reached the end of the line, and that the party which once defended his tribe is now devouring it. It is a gesture strongly resonant of the one now being made in droves by the farmers selling up as a consequence of Tory assent to prioritising the commodifying demands of growth over the unshakeably material nature of land-based livelihoods.

And nor does Parish have an obvious home in the “reactionary chic” subculture now busy celebrating all those problematic things like farmers’ markets, beauty, classical literature, procreation and so on (along with, in some cases, a side order of fascist aesthetics). This movement may be “edgy and cool”, and it may produce strange and sometimes agricultural fruit, from the ‘Doomer Optimist’ neo-homesteaders preparing for collapse in the USA, to the far-right “Anastasian” back-to-the-land movement in Germany.

But such experimental forms of reactionary futurism also flourish largely in the iridescent, dematerialised, borderless digital maelstrom that’s now mostly replaced the politics of places, constituencies and the material world. And there’s little room in this reality for an old-fashioned Tory with a Labrador and a family farm.

But is he really the best candidate to speak about sexism? This is the same man who dropped Joan Smith from her role as Co-Chair of the Mayor’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board without explanation, although it is thought to have been because she has campaigned against giving biological men access to women-only refuges. Khan, like so many prominent Left-wing men, is on the “trans women are women” side in the gender war; he appears not to understand what sex is.

The gender wars have proved useful for these men over the past few years. They have used the issue to firmly and incessantly position themselves as progressive superheroes, bending over backwards to be seen as supporting the oppressed and marginalised at all times. These men signal their support for Black Lives Matter — and spout, at every opportunity, “trans women are women”. But scratch the surface of Left Man and you will find all kinds of hypocrisy.

Left Man uses liberal feminism as a smokescreen to mask his misogyny. He is unwaveringly committed to the “sex work is work” and “porn is empowering” ideologies. So long as there are a few female voices claiming that women freely choose to rent out their body parts for men’s one-sided sexual pleasure, the social structures that underpin porn and prostitution worldwide — the racism, colonialism and misogyny — can be set aside.

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While men on the Right tend not to bother pretending to support feminism, progressive men not only claim to be feminists, but also then try to dictate feminism’s terms. Recently, in the interval of a play exploring the history of racism in the US, I heard a white, bearded dude shout, “my feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit”. He was sitting with a group of mates, sipping real ale, and I heard mumbles of “transphobia” and “TERFs”.

The mantra that the young man shouted out was coined by Flavia Dzodan who, in her scathing critique of feminism, argued that “intersectionality” means including men in the category of women, and celebrating prostitution. It is a twisted version of the original definition, which was created by the feminist law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the specific challenges faced by black American women in the workplace. If you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of oppression and exclusion, Crenshaw argued, you are likely to get hit by both.

The shouty beard at the theatre brought home to me what a gift Dzodan’s bastardisation of Crenshaw’s concept has been to so many men on the Left. They get to look progressive, while still disdaining women.

Likewise, as Tom Farr, a lawyer and pro-feminist campaigner against violence against women says, the reason so many white men are keen to attach their name to anti-racism activism is because they can look as though they are challenging their privilege without actually doing anything. They have precious little awareness when it comes to their own racism — or indeed their sexism.

“The championing of ‘sex work’, which is in part built upon the racist objectification of black women, makes it clear these men care not one iota for deconstructing their actual privilege”, says Farr. “But to actively challenge sexism and misogyny they would be required to change their behaviour and own up to their own contribution to male oppression and exploitation of women”. They can virtue signal about ending racism, but to work towards ending misogyny, they would have to give up the advantages associated with their male privilege, and their right to treasured modes of sexual release.

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Some men get it, and their genuine commitment to tackling misogyny shines a light on the posturers. Robert Jensen, the author of The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (2017), believes that men on the Left who celebrate pornography and prostitution tend to downplay the prevalence and devastating effects of rape and other forms of violence against women. It is no longer possible for men on the Left to claim that racism, economic or global inequality is irrelevant to their work, he tells me, “but men on the left can, and routinely do, ignore the relevance of patriarchy”. He writes not only about the misogyny explicit in pornography, but also the racism; unlike many men on the Left, Jensen understands Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, and is able to apply it.

But for every man like Jensen, there are ten like Owen Jones. The leftist uber bro insists he is a massive supporter of feminism, while defending men’s use of pornography, despite its inherent racism and obvious harms to women. Jones has even defended MPs and judges — our public servants — accessing it during office hours, because however much men like Jones want to be seen as on the right side of history, they will almost always defend the right of men to debase women. As Jones himself said, magnanimously forgiving the disgraced judges, “There’s clearly a sound argument that judges should be doing their jobs, not getting off on porn. Fair enough, but there’s all sorts of procrastination that goes on in the workplace.”

Men tend to bond over sexual entitlement, and porn specifically. The American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson waxed lyrical about the commendable anti-racist values of Hugh Hefner — the pimp and pornographer responsible for transforming images of women being sexually degraded from a niche market into mainstream entertainment. Hefner “featured” black women in his pornography, because selling the racist stereotype of “exotic” women to white men makes money. Jackson was thrilled to be interviewed in Hefner’s flagship porn rag Playboy, and in an article following Hefner’s death in 2017 lauded him thus: “Very few whites associated with blacks publicly. But Hefner opened his nightclubs to African-American performers and patrons.”

Hefner hated women and referred to them as “dogs”. But boys stick together and damn those bitches that make a fuss about being degraded and abused. It is almost as if they only support social justice movements in which men have a stake. Or, as feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon put it, “It seems that if your oppression is also done to a man, you are more likely to be recognized as oppressed, as opposed to inferior”. As these men of the Left might put it, it’s bros before hoes.

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And, in their quest to put men first, they tell actual feminists how to do feminism properly — using intersectionality, again, to silence women. There was a particularly egregious example at Washington’s march against Trump in 2017. Perched on a plinth above the crowds were two young white men, sporting smug expressions, standing either side of two young black women. The men were holding the poles of a huge banner bearing the slogan “White feminism was built on the back of women of colour”. The imagery is clear, and straight out of the Marvel Universe: Left Man saves the poor powerless heroine, while pouring scorn on the lady villains of “white feminism”. This is a toxic combination of white knighting and virtue signalling, covered by a progressive smokescreen.

And you can see this toxic mix guiding policy. Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch (and a highly paid white man), has lobbied for the removal of all laws pertaining to prostitution, including pimping and brothel owning. When criticised by feminists (including black women) for his support of the sex trade, Roth erected a façade woven from arguments about free choice, and economic empowerment for women from the Global South. “All want to end poverty, but in meantime why deny poor women the option of voluntary sex work?” tweeted Roth. To which sex-trade survivor Rachel Moran responded with: “Wouldn’t you say, if a person cannot afford to feed themselves, the appropriate thing to put in their mouth is food, not your cock?”

But patriarchy is depressingly resilient. It can thrive in all sorts of environments. “As a member of the Labour Party my whole adult life, I’ve always taken it for granted that lefties were the progressives ones, and the racism and sexism was left to the nasty party (the Tory’s)”, says Lucy Masoud, a former firefighter who was one of the very few black elected officials in the Fire Brigade Union, and the only black lesbian. Like many feminists, she is sick of the new breed of progressive man. “They describe themselves as ‘cis’ and hang around in Dalston drinking stout and declaring that trans women are women. But under all the faux progressiveness always lays the same entitled misogynist.”

What worries me, a life-long leftist, is how much power and influence Left Man has over young women looking to find their way as feminists. It is hard to see and believe that these men are seeking only to protect their own interests. But these sexists in sheep’s clothing can’t be allowed to set the agenda.

Is the anonymous internet really just a breeding-ground for nutters, extremists and people whose hobby is harassing MPs? That’s the fear behind a recent petition, signed by nearly 700,000 people, calling for the Online Safety Bill currently making its way through Parliament to require anyone creating a social media account to provide verifiable ID.

The petition will be debated later this month. Defenders of anonymity will doubtless point to its importance as a free-speech outlet for whistleblowers, or for those who don’t have much public clout and wish to speak their minds in the “cancel culture” age without repercussion. But how much longer will it last? For free speech no longer commands wide institutional or even public support.

That doesn’t mean I’m against online anonymity. Far from it: last week I cracked and created an anonymous “alt”, out of nostalgia for that feeling of wandering the internet’s weird byways without a comet-tail of public selfhood trailing after me. But our growing unease over the accelerating weirdness and perverse incentives of our digitised public conversation needs to move on from a simple focus on “free speech”.

It’s not a coincidence that for some time now, public support for online censorship has grown steadily more overt on both sides of the Atlantic. And how could it be otherwise, when the entire medium of digital debate encourages ideas to adopt the most extreme and lurid form possible in order to cut through?

Digital culture embraces an increasingly voyeuristic online dynamic, a “pornography of the self” — a perverse set of incentives, that encourages already fragile personalities to offer themselves up as an ongoing psychiatric spectacle, in exchange for money and attention. The results may not be sexual, but have a tendency to grow steadily more grotesque. This can converge with actual pornography, and culminate in outright atrocity, as when seven people were arrested this week following discovery of a bizarre cult that live-streamed human castration for paying viewers.

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The ratchet toward this kind of monstrous spectacle is captured by a TV trope named after Simpsons character Ned Flanders. In the early series, Flanders is an amiable and slightly cringe Christian neighbour. But over the programme’s history, Flanders’s character becomes ever more exaggeratedly focused on his faith. The trajectory is so pronounced it’s given rise to a TV trope: “Flanderisation”: whereby a comic character becomes ever more grotesquely defined by a single trait.

Over the last couple of years, pandemic restrictions have virtualised ever more of our personal, social, romantic and professional lives. And with it, something like “flanderisation” has spread. It’s not as though “real life” has disappeared, exactly; but the relation between “real” — that is, non-digital — life and the public discourse has grown steadily more lurid and strange.

It’s not as though Technicolour tabloid headlines are a new phenomenon: the immortal Sun splash FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER ran in 1986. And the term “attention economy” was coined even earlier, by Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon, in a 1971 article. Here, Simon explored how to build organisations in a world saturated by information, arguing that attention is a key bottleneck in human culture. That is, the more abundant information is, the scarcer attention becomes as a resource.

Simon believed that people could learn to allocate their attention “efficiently”, among “the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”. But if information felt over-abundant to Simon in the Seventies, that flood became a tsunami with the arrival of the internet. And with that escalation, we’ve been forced to abandon the idea that there’s anything very efficient, rational or wise about how we allocate our attention.

In the brutal competition for clicks, attention is allocated not by reason or efficiency but flanderisation. You can reach a relatively small audience of serious-minded fellow-travellers by weighing an issue thoughtfully and talking reasonably. But for widespread engagement, you need red meat. Scandal; fights; larger-than-life characters; absurd propositions, bad-faith arguments defended to the death. The more grotesque, simplified and caricatured, the more likely it is to cut through.

In this landscape, topics that have serious ongoing repercussions but resist flanderisation will sink without trace. For example, the mere words “agricultural subsidies” will be enough to send many fingers clicking instantly away — and yet the nuts and bolts of post-Brexit farming policy impact millions.

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But it’s an issue where the devil is all in the detail. Outside specialist publications, the only way to make people notice would be to flanderise — a difficult task in a complex subject. A spate of farm fire-sales or farmer suicides might attract brief attention. You might get a whole ten minutes of discourse out of a proposal to improve biodiversity by reintroducing wolves in Britain. In the meantime, though, complex issues with major long-term ramifications for the whole country, such as topsoil erosion or upland subsidy regimes, remain of little interest to the general public. Our long-term food security, biodiversity and rural economy are poorer for it.

This fundamental failure of seriousness in public conversation extends even to the question of how we conduct that public conversation. Even as the Online Safety Bill has continued its lurch through Parliament, with the contours of our entire digital discourse at stake, the press focused its investigative energy on whether or not Boris Johnson had a birthday party during lockdown.

The Bill contains provisions to tackle a range of negative aspects of digital discourse, including trafficking, online abuse, and child pornography. But like all regulatory issues with systemic impacts, it’s difficult to persuade people to think about the fine detail — even MPs — and the Bill itself has been under fire from all fronts, including the parliamentary committee set up to scrutinise it.

And when it does manage to consider the issues, they are flanderised. And perhaps the central such over-simplification concerns freedom of speech — for in truth the “free speech” ship sailed a while ago. And if widespread public and institutional support for the idea is waning, this has a simple cause: the digital era has turned what was once a generous ocean of ideas into a grotesque Marvel Studios cartoon sea-battle, between flanderised caricature concepts.

In the resulting bare-knuckle war for attention, it’s not reason that wins. Nor is everyone saying that the best, sanest, or most constructive ideas will prevail. Rather, it’s the most lurid (or aggressively state-sponsored) ideas that make it to the surface, a dynamic which does much to account for absurdist identity politics, hyper-polarised Covid discourse and the roiling underbelly of online extremisms alike. In that noisome soup, anons may be nutters or extremists — but sometimes they’re really just people who prefer to wander the weird byways and be left alone.

Because it’s also not just politics that gets flanderised. Having an online presence, as an individual, creates a similar incentive to flanderise ourselves: that is, to turn your online “self” into a caricature, based on compulsively oversharing whichever features of your personality are the most attention-grabbing. And while this pressure affects everyone, it’s still greater — as I’ve discovered — if you post under a “real” identity.

For young women, that might mean incentives to garner online attention by posting sexualised selfies. For those not blessed with looks or opinions, but willing to invite voyeurism, another option is a warped version of the common human bonding mechanism of sharing personal information: pornography of the self. Those who embrace this online are often women. But the result is less bonding or intimacy than flanderisation: a kind of ritual self-humiliation for clicks.

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If you have the stomach for it, a glance at how “e-girls’ are discussed on the lolcow website gives a sense of how such compulsive over-sharing often results less in friendliness or bonding than in cruelty and objectification.

In turn, this toxic dynamic (rightly) fuels concerns about online abuse — as well as calls for online anonymity to be banned. The petition to include provisions outlawing anons will be debated later this month; will it rehash the same old free speech ground again? If it does, we can expect it to be even more reductive and polarised than last time: because the real danger we face isn’t restrictions on speech.

What might be most remarkable about this document, and the cultural moment in which it exists, is that this final data point doesn’t necessarily make much difference. The spreadsheet in question belongs to an internet personality known as Aella, who views the physical act of love with the detached curiosity of a scientist and the strategic eye of a statistician. She’s a rare bird, not just in her approach to sex but in how she’s successfully parlayed it into a miniature empire: Aella is a former camgirl, now escort, and an elite member of the 1% on the amateur porn-subscription site OnlyFans, where she once netted six figures per month sharing self-produced photos and videos. 

But while it’s not unusual for someone in her line of work to be good at decoupling heart (and hormones) from mind, when Aella appeared in conversation with sex educator Laci Green at last week’s “Hereticon” thoughtcrime conference in Miami, the presentation revealed less about the niche mindset of the sex worker than it did about how ordinary people struggle to connect in a gamified dating landscape driven by data before passion. In the era of the algorithm, the personal brand, the Tinder marketplace, perhaps all sex carries a whiff of transaction, whether or not any money changes hands. And in a world where young, single people are increasingly taught to be frightened of any threat to their safety — emotional, not just physical — the prospect of true intimacy grows ever distant, ever more impossible.

What’s happening in heterosexual couplings now is also, crucially, about what isn’t happening: a sexual famine amongst Gen Z, who are upending the entire romantic landscape as they come of age. There is less sex, but also less dating, less social interaction writ large without the intermediary of a screen.

This isn’t the free love of the sexual revolution, nor the sex positivity espoused by the commitment-free hookup culture that reigned in the early Noughties. It’s something new, and also something post-#MeToo, and perhaps not entirely unrelated to our contemporary obsession with consent as the primary (sometimes only) framework for determining if a given encounter was good or not. Meeting strangers on the internet went in a generational spasm from being maximally unsafe to the only way to do things, as the existence of dating apps rendered the old ways of connecting not just quaint, but creepy.

Our pre-internet rituals were especially fraught with the risk of approaching someone who didn’t consent to be seen as a romantic prospect. Now, every interaction is preceded by the assurance that your crush has contractually agreed to be lusted-after, that no boundaries are being violated.

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At the same time, the idea of sex as something people do for fun seems faded from the public consciousness, perhaps a natural consequence of too many millennial women having discovered that the utopian promise of feminist sex-positivity was laden with hidden negatives; that being able to have sex free of stigma or slut-shaming still comes with costs nevertheless.

For years, women had been thrust into the role of the bad cop, assigned the unpleasant duty of forever resisting the advances of horny men who couldn’t be expected to exercise restraint or good judgment on their own. But having been released from the social obligation to say “no” lest you be labeled a slut, a new pressure emerged to say “yes”, lest you be tarred with the stigma of the sex-negative prude. The result was a generation of women engaging in sex that was, yes, consensual, but also not much fun, especially when it was happening at the behest of a generation of men whose idea of sex was heavily influenced by internet porn. Women cast off the mantle of the sexual gatekeeper only to find themselves in a world where your boyfriend’s idea of first-date intimacy was to engage in a little light choking before ejaculating all over your face… oh, but consensually, of course.

When you consider how many women have been foundering around for years in the vast grey chasm of sex that is technically consensual but not remotely enjoyable, it’s no surprise that the act itself took a reputational hit. The emerging perception now is that sex is dangerous, dicey, probably not worth the risk — especially as concepts like “trauma” and “abuse” have expanded to include everything from the sting of a lover’s betrayal to the heartbreak when a consensual relationship ends. (See also: the increased use of the word “grooming”, once reserved for the sexual predation of children, to describe flirtatious relationships between consenting adults.) Under this rubric, the idea that someone might engage in physical intimacy for fun seems practically absurd. Young women in the post-MeToo era are taught that they can’t let their guard down for one single moment, while young men are told that they’re always just one misread cue or mixed message away from committing a rape.

It’s hardly surprising under the circumstances that this generation would take refuge in the safety of dating apps, or, for that matter, in the certainty of transactional sex. Whatever the pratfalls of subscribing to a freelance porn star’s OnlyFans the way some people used to do with Playboy, paying for intimacy outright at least eliminates the dangerous ambiguity that plagues an ordinary dating relationship, where the line between asking and coaxing, or coaxing and coercion, might shift at any moment and leave you standing with your pants down on the wrong side of the line.

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Whether it’s settling for an imperfect match or turning to OnlyFans to fill your needs, human beings have always appreciated the security and promise of a sure thing. And when an entire progressive messaging apparatus insists that prostitution is the new empowerment, there’s little to dissuade young women from leveraging the minefield of sexuality into a remunerative side hustle — or young men from gravitating toward it as a safer form of sex.

We may not have quite reached the point where making freelance pornography is a rite of passage akin to attending the prom (even if anecdotes from Green suggest that “Do you have an OnlyFans?” might soon become the new “Will you go out with me?” among the school-age set). But will anyone be surprised when some young, enterprising, self-identified male feminist suggests that subscribing to OnlyFans is the only way to ensure proper consent, actually? Are we, perhaps, already halfway there?

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a radical shift in how we conceive of sex, sexuality, self. In the age of social media, sexual orientation is something you identify into, a public performance that requires no partner and no physical follow-through. (Consider also the odd proliferation of straight-married women who identify as “queer,” based on what seems mainly like a conviction that they’re just too interesting to be plain ol’ heterosexual.) It’s all identification, no action, a complete decoupling of sexual identity from the act itself. If this is a sexual revolution, it’s the chastest one we’ve ever had.

At the same time, the battle of the sexes has been arguably won by women, who are outperforming men in everything from education to investment. They best boys in high school and outnumber them on college campuses. They go to grad school in greater numbers and earn the majority of PhDs. And while they haven’t yet flooded boardrooms or executive suites, women are increasingly likely to outearn the men they marry — all of which adds up to a total inversion of the old dating dynamics wherein women with slightly less education or earning power made ideal mates for men with slightly more.

Instead, a whole lot of accomplished, educated, highly-paid ladies are competing in a dating pool that contains a scant few high-achieving men — and if they can’t land one, then their options are to date down, or not at all. In this reality, it’s the women jostling for position, optimising their dating profiles, trying to look good to the algorithm that will in turn serve them up to someone as a desirable catch. And the odds are stacked against them: for reasons that will some day make fascinating fodder for evolutionary psychologists, women are far harsher judges of male desirability than vice versa. Studies suggest that about 80% of women on dating apps are in competition for about 20% of the men.

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The whole enterprise highlights the distinction-without-much-difference between selling yourself in the dating marketplace and just, well, selling yourself. Maybe you’re trying to make money, or maybe you’re trying to get married, but it’s the same hustle, more or less. If you’re not keeping a spreadsheet yourself, you’re just a data point on someone else’s. Except here, the disposability is a feature, not a bug. If your OnlyFans affair bores you, you can just unsubscribe; if your Tinder match fails to deliver, you can swipe the other way and vanish behind a block. No fuss. No muss. No breakup. Tinder, like Twitter, is not a real place.

This might make women like Aella the smart ones: if they’re savvy (and lucky), they can work the system to their advantage instead of fumbling around inside it like blind supplicants. Making metadata of human beings will always be better as a business proposition than as a strategy for human connection — which might explain why, despite the lauded safety and convenience of the apps, Gen Z is not only having less sex but also suffering from greater rates of depression and anxiety.

Dating apps, social media, the sexual marketplace where you can pay for parasocial affairs: all of this has been an attempt to organise not just raw data, but raw humanity, to contain the complexities of love and sex and intimacy in a set of neat little checkboxes. If it didn’t exactly make us happy, then at least (we thought) it would keep us safe. And it did, sort of — insofar as there’s a certain sort of protection in the avoidance of intimacy. If it’s all just a numbers game, if you’re getting what you paid for, if you never truly allow yourself to be vulnerable and naked, literally or figuratively, with another person, then nobody will ever get close enough to hurt you.

But they won’t get close enough to touch you, either.

And so maybe this is where the next sexual revolution will emerge: among young people who are tired of trying to connect with the contraceptive barrier of a screen between them. Who resent the hidden manipulations of the algorithm in messy human affairs. Who would rather risk the pain of an old-school heartbreak. Who understand the difference between being empowered and being a control freak. Who know, in their bones, that they would rather be sorry than safe.

The acceptance of pornography as part of everyday life, available freely and constantly via our private devices, was based on a compact that should always have been obviously implausible: that the media you consume will not change you in any way. That you can log out after orgasm touched only by yourself. And that anodyne outcome was considered possible even when the material being consumed was the most depraved imaginable.

A 2003 column by David Aaronovitch probably conveys a lot of my own thoughts about the subject at the time. Worries about the number of men accessing images of child sexual abuse were, he wrote, a “panic”. Such material was obviously harmful to the children depicted in it and should be prohibited on that basis, but it would be a mistake to automatically classify those men as paedophiles. They might, he conjectured, “be motivated as much by a strange curiosity as by a desire for arousal or release”.

A line is quietly drawn here: on the one side you have the “genuine paedophiles” whose interest in sexual images of children reflects their authentic interest in sex with children, and on the other you have the “strangely curious” who will never present an in-person risk. Implicit is the idea that there is something essential and stable in the individual’s nature which controls their relationship to pornography. Your sexuality pre-exists and overrides your media exposure. In other words, nobody becomes a nonce because of the internet.

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To think this way felt knowing, authoritative. The world was full of seamy horrors, but I was equal to comprehending them — and not liable to be shocked into overreaction. To recall that way of thinking now is to feel naive, unworldly. Exposure to extreme material reformulates desires, and desires can become actions.

Talking to the Guardian this year, Michael Sheath of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation (a charity which aims to prevent potential child abusers from becoming actual ones) explained the relationship of cause and effect like this: “Of course most people can watch extreme porn and walk away, but I don’t see those people. What we are seeing on a daily basis is the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography, and an interest in child molestation. The link is unambiguous.” There’s a consensus among professional organisations that lockdown has heightened the risks by intensifying immersion in online existence.

Why was this so hard to see coming? By the end of the twentieth century, society had reached a broad accommodation with pornography in its print and video forms. Even if you didn’t use it personally, you probably owed something to it in your everyday life: pornography had driven the adoption of VHS, cable TV and the internet. Its online iteration would be a revolution in convenience but nothing else. To be against it wasn’t just to be a miserable dried-up prude, it was to have turned away from everything modernity had to offer.

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she put anti-porn feminists in the authoritarian camp, happily building bonfires of smut that would light the way for Gilead. The narrator Offred’s mother is one of the book burners, and she takes her daughter with her. In one of Offred’s memories, a friend of her mother’s gives her a magazine to add to the pyre:

“It had a pretty woman on it, with no clothes on, hanging from the ceiling by a chain wound around her hands. I looked at it with interest. It didn’t frighten me. I thought she was swinging, like Tarzan from a vine, on the TV.
“Don’t let her see it, said my mother. Here, she said to me, toss it in, quick.
“I threw the magazine into the flames. It riffled open in the wind of its burning; big flakes of paper came loose, sailed into the air, still on fire, parts of women’s bodies, turning to black ash in the air, before my eyes.”

In this scene, the symbolic violence to women is done not by porn, but by the destruction of porn. And Offred’s exposure to it does her no harm at all: she sees a woman bound for male pleasure, and imagines her as the hero of an adventure story. That resilience is a quiet and total riposte to her mother’s entire politics.

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It seems strange to me now that a novelist should argue, effectively, that culture has no influence. And perhaps even stranger for a political writer to have believed it — someone whose life is spent in the work of persuasion, whose business is using words to change the way people think. But I believed it too. Twenty years ago, I thought that whatever the internet might do to porn, the porn would do nothing significant to us.

***

It’s hard to be a liberal. Free speech can be a dangerous thing. So can sex. Andrea Dworkin — one of the anti-porn feminists Offred’s mother would have read — understood that men use sex as a vehicle for domination precisely because they fear the vulnerability it engenders. As she wrote in her 1987 book Intercourse:

“Sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though pop-culture magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan would suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation. The experience of fucking changes people, so that they are often lost to each other and slowly they are lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, leads to hiding, self-protection, building barricades, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets too close.”

And she knew that exposure to pornography changes people too, because she had undergone it herself. Her analysis of the pornographic classic The Story of O, from her 1974 book Woman Hating, contains a brief but striking aside: “O is particularly compelling for me because I once believed it to be what its defenders claim — the mystical revelation of the true, eternal, and sacral destiny of women.” O’s sexual apotheosis comes when she asks her lover for permission to kill herself, finally becoming the nothing she was born to be.

The fact that Dworkin was speaking from experience when she spoke about porn is inconvenient for pornography’s defenders, whose usual defensive strategy is to say that anyone who criticises it must be speaking from fear and repression. Don’t like what you’ve seen? Then you simply haven’t seen enough. When the singer Billie Eilish described recently about how her consumption of porn from the age of eleven had, among other things, distorted her idea of what “normal” female genitals look like, one female adult performer responded with disappointment that the “vulva diversity” in porn was being overlooked.

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But no one actually paying attention to what Eilish said could genuinely think her problems would be resolved by more porn. “I think it really destroyed my brain,” she explained. “I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn… I would just watch abusive BDSM… it led to problems where, you know, the first few times I had sex I was not saying no to things that were not good. And it’s because I thought that that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.”

It’s something Eilish has talked about before, but one of the things that made it so impressive this time was where she said it: in an interview with Howard Stern. Throughout his career as a shock jock, Stern has proudly stood for the crassest in free speech. (A typical Stern stunt: in 2014, the blogger Perez Hilton fingered one of Stern’s male writers live on air.) Before the internet, he was one of the main forces in creating crossover stars from the adult industry. An invite onto his show was a way to break into the mainstream.

Not that his support necessarily translated into respect for those who worked in the industry. When the performer Sasha Grey (famous for her extreme BDSM scenes, in which she was choked, punched and slapped) accused Stern of being a “closet racist” in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2009, he didn’t just defend his own honour, he attacked hers: “What a genius… Please. Just tell me how much cock you can suck and how far you can swallow a hot dog.” But he liked porn, and helped create a society where porn was the norm.

And yet, confronted with Eilish’s story, his response was absolute agreement. “When I was little, the only thing you had was, like, a New York Times girdle ad… The first time I had sex, I had no clue what the fuck I was doing. There was a certain innocence about it. And I often say, if I had porn when I was a kid, I mean, I would run around spanking people thinking that this was what they would like.”

What he says here is a betrayal of the underlying fantasy of porn. Porn deals, of course, in many different fantasies — fantasies of what women are like and what men are like, different kinks and fetishes — but underlying all of that is a fantasy of inert sex. Sex that, however physically demanding, only reveals and does not change the people involved.

In the same interview in which she insulted Stern (an interview which was, it should be remembered, a shop window for her work and persona as much as a genuine revelation of herself), Grey delivered a perfect articulation of that fantasy. “I am a pervert,” she told the journalist, rejecting the idea that women enter porn because of trauma. “If I am working out any issues through porn, it’s anger at society for not being open about sex.” She claimed her interest in BDSM dated to her childhood — that what she showed in porn was her authentic, inherent self, and that whatever she did was in the service of her own desire to get off.

At least one person who had worked with her expressed scepticism about this. A producer quoted in the article said that he thought her “extreme presence” was a calculated means to raise her profile. Certainly, all the incentives aligned to make extremity work for her: as the “dirtiest girl in the world” (to quote the title of the Rolling Stone interview) she won mainstream attention and breakthrough roles, including the lead part in Steven Soderbergh’s movie The Girlfriend Experience.

Sex is not a solo activity, and her partner in this case was not another person but a whole industry. Whatever interests and inclinations she arrived with, only some of them were valuable enough to be encouraged.

***

Sometimes it seems there’s a conspiracy between the people who make porn and the people who don’t actually watch much porn to maintain the fiction of harmlessness. For the former, the idea of porn as a vast and effective subterranean propaganda network is a threat to their bottom line; for the latter, it’s a threat to their sense of security in the world. But the people who use it know otherwise, even if they don’t often admit it publicly.

The horror filmmaker David Cronenberg is not anyone’s idea of an anti-porn feminist, not least because his films are insistently, gruesomely pornographic. My favourite of them is Videodrome from 1982. It’s the story of a cable TV executive called Max Renn, played by James Woods, who is searching for something genuinely hardcore to give his small channel the competitive edge. When he stumbles across a scrambled broadcast called Videodrome which shows highly convincing scenes of women being bound, beaten and killed, he’s transfixed.

As Max tries to learn more about these strange films, he is warned that he’s messing with something dangerous: “It can programme you. It can play you like a video player,” murmurs one of the many shadowy people he meets. It contains coded signals that cause Max to hallucinate and, eventually, to undergo physical changes. In the film’s most disgusting, and brilliant, scene, a vaginal opening develops in Max’s abdomen into which a writhing, pulsating video cassette is inserted by one of the Videodrome operatives.

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Whichever way you turn it, the symbolism of this is unambiguous when it comes to the politics of media consumption. You could neutralise it by arguing that it’s a satire on alarmism about the corrupting influence of media, but if the film is satirising anything it seems to be Max’s platitudinous justifications for the sex and violence he traffics in. He talks about “catharsis” and “outlets” and “providing a social good”; he ends up trapped helplessly in fantasies that leach into his real life.

Porn here isn’t just something you watch. It’s something that acts on the viewer, that transforms him in the most literal way. It’s a more sinister vision of what porn does than the one implied by Cronenberg’s contemporary and fellow Canadian Atwood in Handmaid’s; it is nearer by far to the analysis Dworkin puts forward. And, as with Dworkin, it’s born from a frank acquaintance with the complications of his own sexuality and the influences at work on it.

“I’m not Max,” Cronenberg stressed in the book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, but “that isn’t to say I haven’t noticed that I’m attracted to images of sexual violence, and wonder what that means about myself.” Videodrome is, obviously, about the institutional shifts of video and cable TV, not about the then-non-existent internet. But the way Max chances on Videodrome, rather than seeks it out, and the way it’s stripped of all marks of who made it and where it came from, makes it extraordinarily prescient about the way porn sites would reshape consumption.

Now extreme porn is so pervasive that whenever it’s implicated in some terrible crime, the easy way to dismiss the link is to say — well, everyone watches it, so there’s no significance if violent criminals do it too. This is a cop-out. Media does not exert influence absolutely or in the same way on everyone, but we accept that racist media can engender racism and sexist media can engender sexism. Why should an exemption be erected for erections?

“People who say ‘Revolution now’ and aren’t worried by it are foolish,” said Cronenberg (also in Cronenberg on Cronenberg). “The lesson of history — early, middle, late — is that revolution brings with it death, pain, anguish and disease: often nothing positive to replace what was destroyed.” We are two decades now into revolution in media that was also a revolution in sex, and there is no room left for naivety about what that means.

Before Wayne Couzens committed the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard this year, he watched extreme porn. While the double murderer and mortuary employee David Fuller was committing routine necrophilia against the corpses in his care, he was also recording his offences and adding them to a meticulously maintained library of the most horrific pornography, his trial heard this year.

And regular men choke regular women because they’ve seen it in porn, while regular women accept regular violence as sex, because that’s what they’ve learned to masturbate to. The desire, the fantasy and the act create a self-inciting feedback loop. In what Dworkin called the skinlessness of sex, participants are vulnerable, penetrable.

Whatever your sex is, porn can fuck you.

Those she went on dates with frequently turned out to be married, or single and committed to a polyamorous lifestyle. Most, like her, weren’t aiming for a conventional monogamous relationship. One man, around her age, had recently left his wife and two daughters to live in a bedsit and sleep with as many “girlfriends” as he could muster. Rana, a 47-year-old who tells men up front that she is only interested in having lovers, and will never again embrace monogamy, says that every last one of them has joyously accepted her terms.

Once, boomers’ sex lives were seen as an embarrassing topic; now, they’re exciting, worthy of attention from HBO, even. The remake of Sex and the City, And Just Like That, in which original cast members are now in their 50s, starts this week, and it has been heralded by some as the best instalment yet. “Let me tell you,” said star Sarah Jessica Parker in a recent interview, “there’s still a lot of sex in this version of Sex and the City.” As the series will make abundantly clear, sexual glamour is no longer the preserve of the young, although that’s partly thanks to technologies that keep people looking younger longer. Porn has also helped shift the relationship between age and sexiness, certainly for women, thanks to the rise of the Milf category.

Long a feature of the intellectual elite, the rich and the landed, sexual libertinism among the middle-aged is hardly new. It is newer for the middle classes, though, who became, in the West, less monogamous after World War Two. John Updike, in the Sixties, became known for a set of novels in which bored and angry married people, of varying degrees of affluence, took to sleeping with other people, including their friends’ wives and husbands. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise,” he wrote wryly in Couples (1968), set in 1963. (Working class morality before the Seventies was likely to preclude sexual and marital high-jinxery.)

But the picture of suburban, middle-class libertinism has changed. In the Sixties, the typical practitioner was younger, bored and miserable: the average age of couples getting married was lower, and women had fewer opportunities. But this stereotype has been replaced by a breed of boisterously exploratory 50-somethings in unashamed pursuit of personal fulfilment. This is partly because most moral strictures around sexuality have been eroded — including the final taboo of fidelity, which can now be dressed up as “ethical non-monogamy”, a phrase that now recurs on dating apps.

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We have the progressive young to thank for this: Sietzke, a 57-year-old divorcee with four lovers, tells me that “people my sons’ age” — they are 25 and 28 — have “also helped by making it easier to bring these things up, to talk about them openly”. But “ethical non-monogamy” actually leaves some young people, especially women, frustrated or worse in their quest to find someone to settle down with; it’s actually well-to-do older people who seem to be reaping the sexual fruits. Some of these are bitter: STI rates in the over-50s doubled between 2002 and 2012, and have kept steadily rising.

And so we are at a strange pass. As the olds are merrily fucking, rates of sexual activity in the young have dropped. The preoccupation with being ‘correct’ is perhaps to blame, as well as the sheer barrage of terminology evident on all apps, but particularly on Feeld, the “dating app for couples and singles”, which describes itself as “a space where you can explore your identity” and “start connecting with open-minded humans”. Scrolling through an account, I struggled to understand what the men were saying. “A Dom [dominant] looking for FWB [friends with benefits], etc etc, I don’t prefer ONS [one night stands]…” wrote one. Another, defined as a “Man Queer”, introduced himself thus: “Playfights, cuddling, kissing, lake swimming are all good things. Maybe you want to do them? Say hi, make me feel pretty J.” A pan-sexual 29-year old’s “interests” were “crossdressing, pegging, cum play, lingerie, eye contact”.

The men might have been lovely people, but the way they presented themselves romantically was alien and didactic, even to me, a fairly liberal 39-year-old. The rise of these highly specific demands come, I suspect, from the infiltration of an identitarian politics into the bedroom — one that prizes kink and the erosion of boundaries as ‘inclusive’. Living on the internet has also given many young people a sense of entitlement to instant, bespoke results. Schooled in getting exactly what they want, they’re met with the confounding reality that humans are messier and needier than is convenient.

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Back in the over-50s pool, there seems to be less taxonomising of self and kinks, and those who have had children seem less phased by the complications of having ‘lovers’ rather than either casual hook-ups or a conventional relationship. Many are simply going for broke, hoovering up what sensual pleasures they can — because they can. “As you get older — it’s sort of an Eastern idea — you sort of think, all you’ve got is now, which is much more valuable than a future I really think,” says Sietzke. In other words, age is a freeing agent. “There’s a liberation that comes from being older,” says Rana. ”You know life doesn’t last forever, so there’s an added incentive to give anything a try.”

Rana also points to the fact that being “financially independent” helps. Young people, understandably, are more likely to be focused on the future, and with getting on the housing ladder out of reach for most of them, especially those in the south, the quest for a partner is also a strategy for accruing financial stability and property — and a basis for having children. After her divorce, in her early 50s, Sietzke recalls being constantly told by well-meaning folk that she would meet someone again. It irritated her. “Finding someone is such a construct — someone? What do they mean by that?”

When you’ve had marriage and kids, this perspective makes sense. But for the millennials yet to pull off financial stability and a family, the old, unsexy quest for ‘someone’ may feel more natural. Libertinism is perfect when your traditional romantic life, and its fruits (children), are behind you. Those with the desire for a family and a home in front of them may feel that the joys of free love are not theirs to enjoy. Yet.

Before our call, she’d emailed me explaining that she wanted to talk about incels, and I thought that Whatever was the best book about them ever written: the world is divided into ugly and hot people who compete in ruthless combat, with no relief in marriage and no reward but rot. It’s obviously depressing — when I first read it, I immediately made my first (and for many years, last) therapist appointment. I was a 21-year-old living with my brother on Gainesville, Florida’s Sorority Row. I had no romantic prospects.

A few years later, I was in graduate school further north, in a contrived relationship with a cheerful Connecticut lawyer. In a cold and sunny condo, on the smooth wooden flooring, I read Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior: it was one of the only books about ugly women I’d ever read. There it was, again, but Midwestern and dumpy, not French and brainy: the sick sad world, where you might get laid but you’ll never get better.

Reading Gaitskill’s fantastic latest book, the essay collection Oppositions, I began to see why she’d reacted so badly to Houellebecq: he sounded simple, scientific, and therefore stupid. And Gaitskill doesn’t brook stupidity. Her terror and her grace — alongside her disorientingly good looks — is her intelligence; an elegant and icy one that, in the end, is also merciful. Throughout these astonishing essays about literature, music and more, she seems to be circling the notion that curiosity—embracing the muddle —is the path to empathy for sick, sad creatures like us.

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Most of the essays in Oppositions are reprised from her 2017 collection Somebody With a Little Hammer. That title comes from her essay — included in both volumes — about teaching Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries, with its famous speech: “At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall — illness, poverty, loss — and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now.”

Gaitskill serves as the person with the little hammer, but she doesn’t just remind us of unhappiness: beyond that, her job is to remind us how complicated living is, how little we know, how much we have left to do. Her job is to make us be adults.

That maturity — sometimes painful, often bleak — can prove unpopular, especially when it comes to sex. But here, Gaitskill is in a class of her own: braver, ballsier—just smarter. Twelve pages into an essay defending Lolita as a book about love, about how lovers strive for heaven and dwell in hell, she starts talking about how she was molested at five — and says she felt empathy for the man; that she was even aroused. Wow!

Anyone rushing to dismiss Gaitskill as unempathetic or cold would be hard-pressed: she inserts herself into these questions with unflinching bravery, and she knows suffering herself. But her “story”, like everyone else’s, is up for debate, and she doesn’t make herself a martyr or a hero. And her goal isn’t to condemn — not to condemn Mailer or Nabokov or her assaulters or the pretentious boyfriend obsessed with The Talking Heads: her goal is to complicate. Her goal is to change her mind.

She brings the same remarkable mixture of clear thought and startling vulnerability to questions of sexual consent: her essay “The Trouble With Following the Rules” is, for me, just about the best analysis of date rape ever written. It begins with Gaitskill’s description of her date rape as a sixteen-year-old girl dropping acid with strangers in Detroit, before questioning whether it was really rape. In a stunning turn, she says that when she was “raped for real” by an attacker who threatened to kill her, she got over it pretty quickly. Then, she writes about when a casual friend and her get drunk and he became aggressive and seemed almost to force her into sex.

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In a move reminiscent of Amy Hempel’s The Harvest, Gaitskill writes: “In the original version of this essay I didn’t mention that when I woke up the next day I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and that when he called me I invited him over for dinner again. I didn’t mention that we became lovers for the next two years.” That first draft made the story simpler, but the messy version is braver and more true.

In Gaitskill’s vision, sexual partners have awkward, often painful, negotiations to make, often in the dark, often in a rush, often in confusion. And any decent, kind sex won’t come from rigid rules; it will come from, as she writes, “the kind of fluid emotional negotiation that I see as necessary for personal responsibility”. That negotiation may take years. By the end of the essay, she takes responsibility for pretending to consent, tripping in that apartment decades earlier, with that man who was poor and black and “high on acid and misunderstanding, just as I was”.

Gaitskill isn’t telling women to have lower standards for sex; in a sense, she’s telling them to have higher standards. In a remarkable piece on reading the Bible (“A Lot of Exploding Heads: On Reading the Book of Revelation”), she defines fornication not simply as sex outside of marriage, but as “sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one’s self or one’s partner, let alone any sense of real playfulness”. It is a “primitive attempt” to “give ballast to the most desperate human confusion”.

Lately, outlets including the New York Times have been chattering about the idiotically termed “sex negativity”, supposedly in vogue among young women. However, after reading Gaitskill’s essays, it seems they’re not opposed to sex, but rather to what Gaitskill calls fornication.

“The Trouble With Following the Rules” is probably the best articulation of what, I think, women my age are so unhappy about: in the old sexual regime, the rule was for women to have as little sex as possible, and now the rule is to have as much sex as possible. But neither world really cares what women actually want or need, and in the new, supposedly liberated world, even if you aren’t date raped, as she says: “sometimes I did find myself having sex with people I barely knew when I didn’t really want to all that much.” Sex can be unpleasant or regrettable or confusing without being assault; with women under so much pressure and in so much pain, it’s hard to imagine otherwise.

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As she writes, all people have a mixture of strong and delicate parts; part of them wants strange sex, while part of them flinches from it. Often, we want many things we can’t articulate at all: that’s what being human is. We all know that, and we all deny that as we tell students to fill out “consent forms” on their phones before sex.

Gaitskill is trying — alongside other books of this year, such as Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again and The Right to Sex — to make sex complicated again. Often, it’s neither pure, joyous, free-willed pleasure, nor felony rape. As Gaitskill writes in her sympathetic but clear-eyed essay on Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat who later became an anti-porn activist, “I imagined that Lovelace simply lacked the confidence to describe what she did and felt in a nuanced way, and that the thing was very, very nuanced and contradictory. So she went with either ‘I liked it’ or ‘I was raped.’”

So many experiences are in between; in another anecdote, a woman in her fifties described how she was furious when she thought about how in her twenties, a man in the East Village would grab her breasts. But back then, she was giggly and flirted and loved attention. “So which is true, the giggly girl who just laughed when the guy grabbed her, or the angry woman in her fifties?”

Then she amps it up: apparently, some women orgasm when they are raped. What are we to do with this information? We live in a world of pain and compromise, and we need new language for “the sometimes excruciating contradictions that many women experience in relation to sex”. Without it, to quote her essay on the adaptation of Secretary (“Victims and Losers”), “every American has been “telling his her ‘story’ and trying to get redress for the last 20 years. Whatever the suffering is, it’s not to be endured, for God’s sake, not felt and never, ever accepted.”

Gaitskill accepts suffering. Perhaps that’s why girls my age love her so much. Gaitskill can see that even when we behave badly, we’re not just bad people making bad choices; we often don’t have good choices. We’re not sluts or evil or victims. We’re lost and lied to by everyone that was supposed to give us answers.

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Too many of us, like the protagonist of Secretary, “yearn for contact in an autistic and ridiculous universe, and… wind up getting [our] butt spanked instead.” We know that sex won’t save us, that work won’t save us, we know that feminism won’t save us, and we don’t think the old rules will either. There’s a sense of doom.

The last thing Gaitskill said to me, as I was leaving her home last week, was that she thought she’d have been a very different person if she hadn’t been raised in Michigan. Perhaps that’s the Midwesterner in her — a sense that the world where safety and comfort were a promise, where if you made the right choices the right things happened, has already ended. We showed up late.

But there, too, she’s different from Houellebecq. She might be dark, but she isn’t mean. She sees that everybody is suffering, men and women, beautiful and ugly. We are all both villains and victims. Across these essays, she’s attuned to the way art and experiences people dismiss as upsetting or triggering are simply attuned to the complexity of life — to the way that love is a living nightmare.

Meanwhile, column inches continue to be generated by whether or not the next 007 should be a woman, and Superman is now bisexual. Just as reliable as the output of these franchises is the grumbling about our apparent inability to come up with fresh new stories.

The usual explanation given for the domination of franchises over new material is that media industries like a known quantity. But what if the real problem lies deeper? What if, in truth, we’re no longer able to come up with new stories because we’ve turned storytelling itself into a branch of influencer culture?

This was the unsettling implication of last week’s water-cooler debate: “Kidneygate”. A long New York Times essay told the strange story of Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson, two aspiring writers now embroiled in a bitter dispute.

Dorland donated a kidney to a stranger, then created a Facebook group to talk about her “journey”, and shared it with her writing group. Larson, a member of the same writing group, then wrote a short story depicting an egotistical and implicitly borderline racist woman donating a kidney. When Dorland learned this, she began an increasingly monomaniacal campaign of lawfare against Larson.

Like the dress that was either black and blue or white and gold, the story prompted a lot of debate. When does taking material from the world around you stop being legitimate and become invasive? Do we “own” our own stories? Or as the NYT put it: “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”

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But perhaps the question should be: would you trade a kidney for a shot at immortality? For while on the face of it Kidneygate seems to be two women arguing about art, in truth it’s about the only form of immortality on offer since the internet killed literature: clout.

Once upon a time, the way to get famous as a writer was to publish a book. But the internet inverted that. The print publishing industry today is both bigger than ever and more beleaguered than ever by competition from other media, not to mention the ocean of free digital content. The result is diminishing returns: more than 188,000 books are published every year in the UK alone, but only 5% of authors sell enough to earn more than £30,000 a year.

Against that backdrop, not unreasonably, publishers are more likely to be interested in people with the sort of profile that will help market their work. There are countless talented writers out there; the decisive factor in who gets the book deal is often being an existing player in public conversation. In other words, the swiftest route to becoming a famous author today is already being famous for something else.

That means aspiring writers need that indispensable resource for an attention economy: “clout”, which translates roughly as “the number of eyeballs you can persuade to notice you online”. And chasing clout is indisputably a skill, albeit not a literary one.

Building up clout can be done several ways, but perhaps the two most common are emotional exhibitionism and identity-politics controversy. Expert wielders of clout attract fans and haters in equal measure, set people arguing among themselves and then leverage the resulting public profile for real-world power or earnings.

One such expert clout-engineer is Nikocado Avocado, real name Nick Perry, a YouTube celebrity famous for his “extreme eating” or “muckbang” videos. Nikocado Avocado’s content is voyeuristic in the extreme. Categories on his channel include “Fights”, “Emotional” and “Upset Feelings” among others. More importantly, he has 2.6 million subscribers — a store of clout that translates into serious earnings. In 2019, his net worth was estimated at $3m.

It’s almost impossible to go too far with this kind of content. The only unforgivable crime, as far as consumers are concerned, is being caught faking the emotion. “Mommy vlogger” Jordan Cheyenne was recently pilloried after she accidentally uploaded an unedited video of herself and her child, in which she could be heard encouraging her child to act like he was crying. She has since deleted her channel.

In the more traditional cultural spheres of academia, politics and literature, competition for eyeballs drives clout-chasing identity politics controversies. These can be guaranteed to spice up any otherwise dull policy debate with angry culture war clicks, while handily boosting the profile of the would-be activist. Perhaps the consummate operator in this mode is the US Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who attained meme status recently by appearing at the $30,000-a-ticket US Met Gala in a white dress with “TAX THE RICH” scrawled across the back, then blamed the criticism she received on racism and sexism.

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In every case, though, the core feature of clout-chasing is that it centres not on what you say, but on others’ perception of who (or what) you are. And here we see the heart of Kidneygate: a dispute over who gets to use the organ-donation story as a means of cultivating their public self.

If Nikocado Avocado figuratively spills his guts for those who follow his channel, Kidneygate saw someone spill them literally — and then post about it on social media. Dorland created a Facebook group to collect the applause she expected to receive. She walked in a local parade as ambassador for organ donation. She even created a hashtag: #domoreforeachother.

Larson, in contrast, wanted to use the kidney-donation story alongside her own Asian-American ethnic identity to boost her profile with a short story about “white saviour” politics. That is, she wanted to apply the clout-rich filter of American racial politics to this highly emotive content, in order to increase her own standing in the world of fiction-writing. And it should have worked: before Dorland’s legal action scuppered the offer, Larson’s work had been selected for “One City One Story”, a Boston literary award that would have seen her short story distributed free all over the city.

I’m just about old enough to remember the Before Times prior to mass social media. Back then, we still clung to the idea that writing was about immortality — an idea captured by Shakespeare: “So long as men can breathe and eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Now, though, writing a book is just part of the “media mix”. Where fame used to be a means of getting your message out, now messages are a means of getting your fame out. In September, CBS launched The Activist, a show that turns political activism into reality TV — and where successful activism is measured “via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input”. Never mind making a tangible real-world impact: like successful writing, successful activism is measured in clout.

And once you’ve attained enough of it, you can pivot effortlessly from reality TV to book-writing, perfume launches, politics or whatever. The only condition is that, like Harry and Meghan, you continue to feed gobbets of personal tragedy, emotional intensity, marginalised identity or some other kind of emotive content to the clout machine.

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Do this, and the whole media mix is yours. It’s not just the raft of celebrities flocking to write children’s books. The 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman made history earlier this year as Biden’s inauguration poet, as much for her look and ethnicity as her aggressively bland poetry. Shortly after the inauguration, she signed a modelling contract.

And this pipeline works just as well in reverse. Transgender model Munroe Bergdorf has a threadbare literary track record, having attained clout mostly for being photographed wearing clothes, or for public rows with corporations and gender-critical feminists over identity politics. And yet Bergdorf received a six-figure advance from Bloomsbury for the “memoir and manifesto” Transitional.

The true message of Kidneygate, then, is not about art but what art now serves. It signals that if we allow it, the world of letters will irrecoverably join cinema, music, politics and activism as mulch for an online economy of attention.

And the Faustian nature of the bargain is increasingly clear. A culture powered solely by the hunger for intensity will devour any form of culture that isn’t already literal pornography. For in a raw economy of attention, the aesthetic or moral value of your work is irrelevant: what matters is emotional intensity and the power to generate discussion. Whether it’s politics, art, literature, music or simply people’s personal lives, the clout economy will transmute it, by a kind of reverse alchemy, into pornography of the self.

Before pivoting to YouTube emotional exhibitionism. Nikocado Avocado dreamed of being a concert violinist. Before pivoting to organ donation for clicks, Dawn Dorland dreamed of being a celebrated author. But there’s little clout to be gained through working hard at creating beauty for a common cultural domain. No wonder one in five British children want to be social media influencers when they grow up. And when everyone’s so busy crafting their online selves, no wonder there’s no creative energy left to dream new shared stories, leaving us nothing but zombie franchises crudely gingered-up by the culture wars.

Will we rediscover an ability to resist donating everything — even our organs — to the clout machine? I hope so. If we don’t soon regain a measure of digital self-restraint, the endpoint of every aspiration will be emotional porn. Or perhaps we could call it Kidneygate culture: a never-ending livestream of lost and miserable souls self-defining, fighting, crying, binge-eating or quite literally eviscerating themselves, all for our voyeuristic pleasure.

The ensuing trial would see Anderson and Heap convicted for obscenity and the serialisation of Ulysses discontinued – perhaps the most famous overreaction to a wank since God killed Onan. The trial took place almost exactly a century ago and, inevitably, our conception of “obscenity” has shifted beyond recognition. By modern standards, Joyce’s imaginative elision of Bloom’s ejaculation on the beach with a nearby firework display seems euphemistic rather than obscene:

“And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!”

In the early twentieth century, however, such imagery was always bound to upset the censors. Ezra Pound, the man most responsible for persuading the editors of The Little Review to publish the novel, acknowledged the risk in a letter to Joyce: “I suppose we’ll be damn well suppressed if we print the text as it stands. BUT it is damn well worth it.”

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Today most of us would regard the very notion of obscenity to be as hopelessly subjective as taste in music or sense of humour. But even 40 years after the aborted Ulysses serialisation, the judge and chief prosecutor in the 1960 trial against Penguin Books — who had just published D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover — were left bewildered by the jury’s disposition to acquit. Much was made during the trial of lead prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s opening statement, in which he asked the jury to consider whether the novel was something “you would wish your wife or servants to read”.

The defence understood something that Griffith-Jones could not: that this was a trial about incomparable social values. For a certain class of citizen, Lawrence’s novel was an unambiguous attack on British morality. But this did not square with the lived reality of a population on the cusp of a sexual revolution. For Griffith-Jones, the appearance of the words “fuck” and “cunt” in the pages of a book surely disqualified it from the possibility of literary merit. What he would have made of the appearance of “Cunty Kate” in Chapter Fifteen of Ulysses is anyone’s guess.

Despite his noble intentions, Griffith-Jones was not blessed with a literary instinct, and was clearly unfamiliar with the ways in which obscenity has always been an important tool for writers. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for instance, “the Miller’s Tale” is offered as a direct response to that of the Knight, which is why the high style of courtly love gives way to phrases such as “prively he caughte hire by the queynte”. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare mocks the puritan Malvolio by having him inadvertently spell out the word “cunt” while examining the handwriting of a forged love letter: “these be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s”. (The “N” was marked with the word “and”, a commonplace abbreviation). If obscenity has the imprimatur of the great bard, might this not give even the staunchest of prudes pause for thought?

In practice, obscenity laws do little more than codify a sense of disgust, an experience that we all share to some degree but that cannot possibly be universalised. It was not until the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and the trial of Regina v. Hicklin eleven years later that the legal test of obscenity was established as whether the material has the potential “to deprave and corrupt”, an amorphous formulation if ever there was one. Yet the Hicklin test was retained in the Obscene Publications Act 1959, legislation that remains on the statute books today.

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But just as many are arrested in the UK every year for “grossly offensive” statements under the Electronic Communications Act 2003, the way in which material might “deprave and corrupt” has never been satisfactorily defined. During the so-called “video nasties” panic of the 1980s, videos of films such as The Evil Dead and Driller Killer were seized on the grounds that they, in the words of the director of public prosecutions, had the capacity “to deprave and corrupt, or make morally bad, a significant proportion of the likely audience”. No evidence for this assertion was ever forthcoming.

Like the pornography restrictions brought in by the UK government in 2014 – which included bans on the depiction of various consensual adult activities such as “caning”, “humiliation” and “facesitting” – the benchmark for what might “deprave and corrupt” is probably best paraphrased as “things we don’t like”.  These are standards that cannot be applied with any degree of consistency, particularly when it comes to literature. Is it obscene, for instance, to write that “Egyptian men have members the size of donkeys, and ejaculate violently like wild stallions”? And, if so, should the Book of Ezekiel be excised from the Bible?

At its heart, the very concept of obscenity seems to be based on a distrust of the masses, an elitism which would prefer bawdy talk to be confined to the smoking rooms of private members’ clubs. We see this mentality in the early editions of the Loeb Classical Library series, in which offensive phrases in ancient literature were invariably left untranslated. Flicking through an early rendering of the Roman poet Catullus, for example, one might have happened upon the line ‘Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo’ (‘I will sodomise you and fuck your face’) still in the original Latin. Of course, the effect of this kind of academic paternalism, designed to restrict certain passages to those sufficiently educated, simply made it easier for curious schoolchildren to locate the filthiest passages.

While it may seem contradictory to be worried about the Great Unwashed being exposed to a little more dirt, such is the chief concern of those who set themselves up as the public arbiters of good taste. When the British Board of Film Classification decreed that The Exorcist was unsuitable for home viewing, they were effectively acting in loco parentis over the entire nation, implying that they were able to stomach imagery that would corrupt lesser mortals. Similarly, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was deemed not so menacing when it existed solely in limited Italian and French editions, or in its expurgated form. When Penguin Books decided to publish the full version in 1960, over thirty years after it was written, the ruling classes saw this as an existential threat to the foundations of societal respectability.

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It was under this lingering cloud of paternalism that Norman Douglas published his book Some Limericks in November 1928, five months after the Italian publisher Pino Orioli had brought out Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  Douglas felt that Lawrence had usurped the aristocrat’s privilege of lewd indulgence, and had democratised a sub-culture in which, to quote Douglas’s biographer Mark Holloway, “gentlemen of discretion could be relied upon to keep their filth in its proper place”. To take a typical example:

“There was an old fellow of Brest,

Who sucked off his wife with a zest.

Despite her great yowls

He sucked out her bowels,

And spat them all over her chest.”

Obscene? No doubt. But the puerility is offset by the author’s pseudo-scholarly annotations and, in any case, he had explicitly written this book for the “dirty-minded elect”. Douglas had rushed through the publication of Some Limericks having read Lawrence’s novel in draft form, feeling that its impact would be lessened if the taboos had already been broken.

The implications are somewhat paradoxical. While censorship is an affront to artistic freedom, obscenity as a literary device loses its potency where there are few boundaries of social decorum. So perhaps we need the Mervyn Griffith-Joneses and the Mary Whitehouses of this world as much as we need those artists who are willing to provoke them. At the same time, we should be aware that today’s outrage over scandalous books and movies is often no more sophisticated than those early critics of Ulysses who failed to see any distinction between Joyce’s masterpiece and the kind of vulgar scribblings one finds on a toilet wall. Disgust has the effect of destabilising our critical faculties; like rage or sexual arousal, it actuates our passion at the expense of our reason. Just because we find an artist’s work obscene does not mean it lacks value. We would do well to remember this even as we recoil.

In The Seven Ages of Man: How to Live a Meaningful Life, James Innes-Smith writes that “Today, masculinity itself has come under attack, relentlessly maligned in the media”. The book glances wistfully back to an era of sturdy men and sturdier moral certainties, a time when gender roles were more clearly defined.

The 20th century was characterised by a surfeit of meaning. Everyone from Bolsheviks to National Socialists to Cold War liberals had a clear and discernible idea of what a good and fruitful life entailed. All were willing to spill blood (usually other people’s) to bring that vision to life. Yet barely three decades after the official termination of the conflict between East and West, we are awash with angsty books admonishing us (and by us I mean men) to “quell our deeper yearnings”, as Innes-Smith puts it. Bursting from every self-help bookshelf one now finds the gruff, rugged-bearded traditionalist rallying men to eschew materialism and seek out what Innes-Smith calls “deeper truths”.

The book guides us didactically through what he describes as the “seven ages” of man. These are childhood, adolescence, relationships and parenthood, work and providing, middle age, old age, death and legacy. The taut compartmentalisation of life is a giveaway in terms of the author’s broader moral outlook: a man’s life should be defined by “fundamental truths”. The author believes his interpretation of the good life — marriage, discipline, deferred gratification, strict child rearing, age-appropriate dress codes — is a universal one, which when you think about it is quite a large claim for a journalist to make.

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This is unusual for a British author too, for it tends to be American readers who seek out guidance in everyday matters (the self-improvement industry in the US was worth $10 billion in 2016). But Innes-Smith forges ahead in the guise of the sagacious older male, proffering advice on every topic under the sun. Deep fulfilment in his moral universe is derived from putting oneself at the service of others. And getting married. The author is extremely keen on men getting hitched; younger readers are encouraged to settle down as soon as possible (he even marshals the claim, which worked to frighten me at least, that middle age begins at 35!).

Like other moralists Innes-Smith is keen to let you know that “recreational copulation soon loses its appeal”. This recalls something once said about Malcolm Muggeridge: that he was against everything he had grown tired of doing himself. Innes-Smith similarly counsels young men to abstain from sex for 12 months during the quest for a spouse and in the process to avoid the “pouting sirens” who are “fighting for your attention on every street corner”.

We’ve heard some of this sort of thing before. It is 30 years since Robert Bly published Iron John, an earnest Jungian treatise encouraging men to go off into the woods with other men and get in touch with their wild nature. Bly interpreted the allegorical fairytale of Iron John as a call for men to locate within themselves the “deep male” — and with it to reassert patriarchal authority. “Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community,” wrote Bly. Women’s role was to submit to this “energy”, with their reward coming later on in the bedroom.

Yet the earnestness of Bly’s endeavour set it up for mockery. Martin Amis (who might have been writing about Jordan Peterson) remarked on Bly’s “impregnable humourlessness”. His fellow poet Charles Upton described Iron John as “utterly devoid of irony”. Ploughing through Innes-Smith’s short book (it is just 198 pages long) I too found it hard not to snigger as earnest prescriptions on erectile disfunction, strict portion control, and how to wear flat-fronted trousers rolled off the authorial pen.

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But he’s right that men are in a pickle. The #MeToo movement, the decline of marriage and traditional forms of masculine work, as well as “gender fluidity” — all have discombobulated the contemporary male. In one ear we hear feminist complaints about gender pay gaps, toxic masculinity and the predatory sexuality of the Harvey Weinsteins of the world. In the other, we pick up grumbles from female contemporaries about the lack of “real men” amid the conformity and sterility of the commute and the office nine to five.

Male discomfiture is increasingly audible today on YouTube, where Bly’s ideological descendants mix Spartan asceticism with entrepreneurial uplift. It is traditionalism with a softer edge, in which self-development, stoicism, pseudo-scientific “life hacks”, and tips for developing rippling musculature sit alongside a new-age willingness to talk about feelings and vulnerability.

Deeper down this rabbit hole are the “neo-patriarchs” of the manosphere. These self-proclaimed alpha males rage against society’s feminisation of “soys” and “betas”. Covid-19 denial is rampant in the manosphere, where face masks are viewed as synonymous with emasculation and enfeeblement. Academics who recently surveyed nearly 2,500 American adults found that many men considered them “shameful, not cool and a sign of weakness”. This attitude — part insecurity, part bombast — goes to the very top. When the Trump White House announced in October that the President had “defeated” Covid-19, it was difficult not to read into it the corollary — that those succumbing to the virus were somehow being cast as weak and inferior.

Innes-Smith’s book also offers a more benign set of prescriptions for masculinity in the 21st century, though he does enjoy summoning the odd penis-shrivelling vision of a world in which men are “pacified, submissive and emasculated”. Most of the book is given over to encouraging readers to improve themselves through rigorous exercise and the imbibing of higher knowledge derived from authors such as Dostoevsky. Though readers are sternly warned to avoid popular culture where “pornography and funny animal videos” are corrupting young minds and where “triviality is the order of the day” (presumably those “pouting sirens” again).

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The world needs Jordan Peterson more than ever

By Douglas Murray

The author is right to flag the uncertainty that surrounds the role of the traditional male breadwinner in the 21st century, especially among the working class, where identity has historically been wedded to productivity. Moreover, women show markedly less interest in pairing off with men who occupy a lowly position on the status hierarchy, compounding the misery for working-class men. The result is a growing mass of resentful, low-status men who are forming angry online subcultures that come marinated in misogyny and bile. Suicide rates among males are at record highs.

Nor should it be taboo to say that boys require male as well as female role models. This needn’t be about demonising single mothers; however we should perhaps look more judgmentally — a deeply unfashionable word these days — upon those weak and selfish men who refuse to take responsibility for the lives they bring into the world.

Innes-Smith wants men to find deeper meaning in the universe. Yet like so much of the Calvinist-inspired self-improvement oeuvre, this unrelenting search for betterment — the author fixates on “discipline”, “meaningful tasks” and “true fulfilment” — conflates suffering with a higher morality. He urges readers to cycle to work in a downpour. He warns against giving children access to computer games that provide “instant fun” and are thus “addling young men’s minds”. But where is the virtue in contracting pneumonia? And while there is something to be said for moderation in all matters, computer games have been shown in numerous studies to be beneficial for cognition.

I ought to confess that I spent most of my own youth railing against this broad-shouldered, unyielding masculinity. Innes-Smith is the type (because he says so) who believes you can “tell a lot about a man by the way he behaves on a sports field”. Which is to say he would not have thought much of me: one of my school reports contains five solitary words appraising my desultory performance in the sporting arena: “Not seen on the pitch!” Sloping off behind the bike shed for a fag – rather than putting my scrawny frame through a brutal pasting on the rugby pitch — may have been a moral failing yet somehow I don’t quite believe it.

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The dark side of rural England

By James Bloodworth

It’s not that I view physical prowess as an irredeemable expression of “toxic masculinity”, as some contemporary feminist authors appear to. It’s more a question of everybody being different. Indeed, I’m pleased to discover that my first conscious political belief — a bastardisation of the harm principle: you should leave a person well alone unless they’re hurting you in some way — remains the most enduring one a quarter of a century later.

But invariably this works both ways. If you believe — and the overwhelming evidence suggests this — that gender is a product of nature as well as nurture, then reframing every male pursuit as toxic will surely have a detrimental effect on young minds. Amid rising levels of involuntary celibacy, pretending that going to the gym and increasing one’s social standing will do nothing to improve a young man’s chances of finding a mate does him a horrible disservice. And I suspect there is something to be said for stoicism, courage and risk-taking over the narcissistic emoting that prevails among today’s ultra-woke.

However, I doubt younger readers will recognise Innes-Smith’s gloomy depiction of contemporary Britain as a “broken society [that] is crying out for a return to meaning and an appreciation of… deep, life affirming truths”. Not because alienation, frustration and malaise don’t exist. But the author’s impression is too bleak and his prescriptions too rigid.

There is an abundance of potential paths to the good life for men. Some involve ancient traditions, “new warrior training”, marriage by 35, flat-fronted trousers and restorative sex once a week in the missionary position. But other paths will — and really ought to — feature self-criticism, openness, adaptability and gender fluidity. Some may even have sparkly outfits and fluffy unicorns. Though we should expect this sort of thing to bring out a steely grimace in the deep male, who would prefer us to be rigging up a tent and marching off into the woods to do some yodelling.

We know they will fail. We know, furthermore, that half a century later, the country they believe they are remaking will still have no paid maternity leave. Women’s earnings will still lag behind men’s. Men will still be raping and killing women. Pornography will be more pervasive than ever, and more misogynistic too. The abortion rights established by Roe vs. Wade will have been rolled back, state by state. The USA will still not have had a female vice-president, never mind president. It will, however, have put its first self-confessed groper to the White House.

But back in 1972, Republican activist Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks) clinks a mug of bourbon with Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), the Democrat congresswoman who was both the first black and the first female candidate to seek the presidential nomination. “Mother of the movement” Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman) smiles at rising feminist celebrity Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne). The ERA seems assured. Legalised abortion is within reach. Sisterhood is powerful. One joyful moment of bipartisan, intersectional unity, before the long slide begins.

There are other frustrations besides that of the ERA. We see Chisholm’s run end in expected defeat, compounded by betrayals and recrimination. The black caucus refuses to back a woman, while the women’s movement peels away to press its demands on the successful (and uninterested) McGovern campaign. Across the aisle, Ruckelshaus watches her party leave her behind and give itself over to the culture wars. In fact, of all the details in Mrs America that feel quaintly historical, from the incessant smoking to the idea of magazines having popular currency, nothing seems so strange as the fact that there was ever such a thing as a pro-choice, feminist, mainstream Republican.

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Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

What’s coming to eat Ruckelhaus’s lunch? Anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, portrayed with powerhouse iciness by Cate Blanchett. It’s fair to say that without Schlafly’s efforts, the ERA would be law by now. It’s arguable that without her, American politics would never have taken the savagely partisan turn it did over gender and sexuality. And it’s fascinating to see that, as portrayed in Mrs America, the great homemaker’s first interest was never women.

Schlafly’s subject is defence, on which she’s ultra-hawkish. Her problem is getting men to listen to her when their default assumption is that any woman in the room must be there to fetch coffee and make notes. When Schlafly reinvents herself as the leader of the STOP ERA lobby group, though, she immediately becomes someone men pay attention to and other women obey. Her campaign might rest heavily on scaremongering about the ERA forcing women into the draft against their natures, but Schlafly is, you can sense, a born general.

Yet the women’s movement underestimates her. Informed that there’s a cohort of housewives out to frustrate reform, the feminists’ first impulse is dismissive. “Revolutions are messy,” says the Steinem character. “People get left behind.” It’s a moment that lays out one of feminism’s most intractable contradictions — a movement for all women that, ultimately, has to tell some women they’re doing it wrong. And who has ever been converted to a political cause by the news that their life is a mistake?

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How the Left betrayed feminism

By Sarah Ditum

Committing yourself to what Schlafly called the “privileges” of life as a housewife means committing yourself to dependency on a man. He might be a good man, or he might be the sort of man to stymie your ambitions and cut you off from friends and rape you when he feels like it: the trouble is, without a safety net, you won’t know which until it’s too late to get out. The women of the Schlafly persuasion get the message that feminism isn’t for women like them, when women like them have as much need of it as anybody.

The same is true now as it was then, although today feminism finds itself at odds with the women of porn culture as much as it does with the women of the moral majority. What answer is feminism able to give to the woman who avers that she loves her “kink” of being choked and beaten and it’s her right to pursue it, just as much as Schlafly’s army swore down that they loved being the breadmakers to their breadwinners and it was their right to stay that way? Truly, there isn’t much you can say, beyond: we’ll try to be here when you need us.

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And this is why feminism hasn’t done better. When a group is as large as 50% of the population, there will always be more conflicting interests than one movement can reconcile, and greater individual rewards for breaking rank. In Mrs America, the black feminists hear that their racial struggles can come later; Black Panther women talk about ditching the lesbians, because the Black Panther men won’t have it; and Friedan’s commitment to the cause never can quite reconcile her to Steinem’s precedence.

Easier for Schlafly: her movement exists in the service of a particular kind of woman only. With its demographic clearly defined, and its leadership unambiguous, STOP ERA could push on without the strain of sustaining a fractious coalition. Feminism in the twenty-first century has been recast as a kind of all-purpose social justice movement, the correct demand that it be for all women twisted into a requirement that it barely be about women at all. It has become too big to succeed, and if there’s any lesson in the failure of the ERA, it’s that politics is more than a numbers game.

Not that I really have to search. In the homepage thumbnails, everyone is white, unless their race can be sold as a kink. Japanese wife. Chocolate. In the sidebar, I can click on the category “interracial”, because this is 2020 and apparently two people of different skin tones getting down is still as niche an interest as “babysitter” or “smoking”. “Female orgasm” is also a category, for that subset of men who are interested in whether a woman actually enjoys it. Have I mentioned, I hate PornHub.

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But I am a brave journalist, so I press on. (Is this sex? Do people like this? Are women people? No, we are sluts and milfs and bitches, according to PornHub.) Will PornHub let me search for racist porn? Spoiler: it will. I put the word “racist” in the search bar, and am served multiple videos, all of which are definitely racist.

Some of them, though, have a veneer of woke, which is very heartwarming. I search for Black Lives Matter: I get a video tagged “black cocks matter”, and one “ebony slut”. All this should be a surprise, because PornHub was recently vaunting its progressive credentials. “Pornhub stands in solidarity against racism and social injustice”, the company tweeted, along with links to Black Lives Matter-adjacent campaigns that followers could support. It’s not a surprise, though, because PornHub is horrible.

If I wanted to be chippy, I would call this a perfect example of the indulgence model of modern liberal mores. Pay your tithe to the bail fund as directed, get back to whacking off over racism with your conscience salved. But actually, I would probably be being both chippy and incorrect, because does anyone really feel bad about their porn? The generally agreed position is that porn exists somewhere outside morality. Things which, at a tenth of the strength, would be instant cancellation offences in any other medium are granted licence in porn because someone, somewhere got an erection from them.

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Why is the Left so hypocritical about sex?

By Sarah Ditum

The porn industry’s success in positioning itself beyond petty questions of good and bad is one of the great marketing triumphs of modern times. If it feels good, watch it. Heck, watch it at work if you want to. Here, I run into some tricky terrain, because what happens in the dark between our own heads and hands is really no one’s concern but our own, and if you want to think about that particular woman bent OTK in a lace chemise then what does it have at all to do with me. Hectoring our fantasies seems a spectacularly fruitless endeavour.

But porn is not fantasy. Porn is business, and a profoundly exploitative one. I don’t mean that in the no-doubt tiresome feminist sense that it exploits women, although it does. I mean it in the sense that, in its modern form, pornography is an industry where the capitalist rinses out the worker, then puts up a blogpost to mark International Sex Workers’ Day, which aims to “honor sex workers” and “push for better working conditions”. The fact that PornHub is a major driver of those working conditions is, well, wouldn’t you like to look at some tits instead of thinking about it?

PornHub belongs to the conglomerate MindGeek, which also owns multiple other “tube” sites for watching free porn. Where does this porn come from? From production companies, many of which are also owned by MindGeek. In many cases, if a performer wants to defend their royalties on a clip, they’ll need the help of the copyright holder, which just happens to also be the company drawing down a profit by serving it for free, so good luck with that. Another group of people have also struggled to get PornHub to remove content that violates their rights: victims of “revenge porn”, whose abusers upload their images to the “amateur” category.

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Just how harmful is porn?

By Tom Chivers

At this point in the argument, people like to say: but what about ethical porn? Here’s what’s about ethical porn: it doesn’t matter. It makes up such a tiny proportion of the industry, it’s like putting a chicken in your back garden and claiming you’ve fixed factory farming. Apologies to those who twist themselves into astonishing shapes to produce the kind of porn they think should exist, but at best all they’re doing is providing a talking point for people who want to stall the discussion by saying “what about ethical porn?” so they can get back to their vertically integrated faux-incest.

If you want to talk about ethics in porn, let’s discuss why the industry has yet to have its #metoo moment. There was a possibility of one in 2015, when the performer James Deen was accused of on-set assault by multiple female costars; but the reckoning failed to come. (Deen denies any wrongdoing.) Journalists with an interest in the porn industry proved surprisingly incurious about following these allegations up. For example, writer Emily Witt met Deen during a set visit for an article published in n+1. The abuse claims emerged while she was revising that piece for inclusion in her 2016 book Future Sex: rather than address them, Witt cut him from the copy.

Now another porn celebrity has been not just accused, but charged: the performer Ron Jeremy faces three counts of rape and one of sexual assault. And perhaps this will, finally, be the occasion for a conversation about the attitudes inculcated by an industry which makes a show of brutality against women. Probably not, though. The porn industry could hardly survive if it went in for any self-reflection at all. But, then the hollowness of PornHub’s ethical credentials is obvious. It’s the credulousness of porn’s defenders that’s the really shocking thing.