#FreeTheNipple, Love Island, Andrew Tate, Oscar Wilde and why we’re getting Porn SO VERY WRONG – (again)
Pornography has fascinated me for over a decade now. Not in the ‘I’m sneaking off to the bathroom with my phone’ sense, but in the way it has so fundamentally altered our relationship with and perception of sex. If you grew up and had some sort of sexual awakening and experience pre-internet, the impact of porn is going to be far less than those who grew up in a digital age and had an entire sexual relationship with the screen before you’d ever touched a boob or seen genitalia IRL. In 2012, as a young graduate teacher I wrote a cover story op-ed for the TES called ‘Porn, the Shocking Truth’ https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/porn-shocking-truthcalling out how much extreme and violent pornography was already being consumed by teenagers and how quickly this was going to distort the sexual and mental health of young people.
Though a bit clunkily written, every single prediction in this over a decade-old piece came to pass and more gallingly, absolutely nothing material has been done to protect increasingly young (on average boys first see a porn clip aged 9, and girls aged, 11) from accessing hardcore material. I was a bit baffled to see Dame Rachel De Souza speaking on the news about this just last week as if it was something new and shocking, when you consider the time stamp on my original article.
But – again – the most recent coverage of young people’s consumption of pornography and indeed the proposed Online Safety Bill (https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137) misunderstands SO MUCH about what pornography has become and why we – and young people in particular – consume so much of it and are so addicted to watching online sex.
Much of the coverage of pornography states that the vast quantities teens watch online sex in is indicative of a generation hopelessly addicted to sex, but that is 100% entirely wrong.
Porn is one of the few things that isn’t really about sex at all and is actually a kind of grim, inevitable and dark response to a world awash with sex, and if we want to figure out how to fix the ‘porn problem’ we ought to get our heads around something so cognitively dissonant pretty quickly.
Let’s back up a little (if you’ll excuse the phraseology….)
Oscar Wilde once famously said ‘Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.’
There is still a great deal of truth in this statement, but we’ve added another layer to power, particularly when we aim sex at young people. Sex is inextricably linked with power, but we’ve also added empowerment into the mix, meaning sexual behaviour is framed as empowerment of the self. Interestingly, this sexual empowerment idea has been hoisted by both ends of the political spectrum, meaning opposing sides are often speaking the same message.
There was some fanfare this week on Instagram’s decision to rethink it’s ‘nipple policy’ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/17/free-the-nipple-meta-facebook-instagram following years of #freethenipple campaigning from high-profile and self-proclaimed sexually empowered celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Emily Ratajkowski. They have long been critical of the Meta/Instagram policy to essentially ban pictures and videos of naked breasts with the nipple (breasts with the nipple often saucily hidden have confusingly long been OK) claiming it to be retrograde and censorial of the sexually liberated and empowered. If the rumours are to be believed Instagram is about to lift the nipple-ban policy, meaning the site is sure to be awash with freed nipples from the sexually empowered - and will no doubt enjoy more traffic than it’s seen in over three years.
And then there’s Love Island. Love Island (to the few people living under a rock for the last decade) is a popular show where hot older teens and twenty-somethings couple up and are encouraged to (tastefully) get it on under the guise of being in love with a person they met precisely eleven minutes ago. Despite the many well-founded misgivings about the show – the overtly sexual nature of it, the bullying, the racism, and the frankly appalling track record of serious mental health issues and suicides of past contestants – the producers have managed to dodge most of these accusations by hiding under the banner of empowerment. The contestants aren’t exploited or sexy lambs to the slaughter (an accusation that’s often and justifiably levelled at the porn industry and the treatment of its performers) but empowered – sexually, financially, and professionally (they get lots of followers and if they’re one of the lucky ones, lucrative endorsement deals.)
To Andrew Tate. All the pearl-grabbing about him has missed something vital about his appeal to boys: he is preaching male sexual empowerment. Not the nice kind, or the liberated kind, or even the consensual kind, but the kind you see over, and over and over again in pornography than involves choking, slapping, dominance and most crucially, the male subjugation of the female.
Which brings us back to pornography and why it’s not at all about sex.
For all our saturation in sex, young people are having less sex than previous generations and at a later age, and though there are many complex factors behind this, it’s empirically true that the vast consumption of pornography is a significant factor in our modern sex drought.
I recently surveyed thousands of young people (13-20) about sexual attitudes and porn, and for many pornography has become a kind of hassle-free replacement for sex, where you can get some gratification without the risk and fear that comes from person to person sexual intimacy.
Davey (18): Porn is definitely less hassle and less expensive than pulling a girl. There’s none of the risk of being accused of rape or assault, none of the confusing stuff over consent, but also none of the headache stuff of relationships, or getting your heart broken, or her liking you more than you do, or the other way around. Porn is easier than sex, for sure.
Pornography is causing us – and young people in particular – to have less sex, but the reasons for watching porn – even when it results in quick gratification – are depressingly unsexy, dark and absolutely mired in confusion about how sex intersects with power and empowerment.
Anon (Male, 18): Girls are always talking about how they are sexually liberated they are and will flash everything on social media, but in school debates say that porn is offensive to women. Honestly, I find this really confusing. What’s the difference, really?
Cassie, 19: I’m on OnlyFans and make quite a bit of money and have a lot of subscribers. I get a lot of pushback and slut-shaming from my friends, my Stepdad and even my sisters who say I’m going to regret this and I’m going to wreck my life. How is my content any different to models on Insta or the stuff you see on Love Island? I don’t see any difference. Is my stuff porn? There’s degrees, but I don’t see much difference between lots of social media and porn. The way I see it, I’m having a good time and making money. Where’s the harm? Do I feel empowered by OnlyFans? Yes.
Adriano, 18: Honestly, if you ask a lot of straight guys, they watch porn for the dominating aspect of it. Watching a woman be dominated by men is a big attraction – more than the sex. It’s why people watch porn with rape or some violence in it, more than they’d watch a man and woman have straight sex. I think it’s the same reason guys like Andrew Tate. He’s not a hypocrite. He just lives what most men secretly watch.
Layla, 17: Guys think that if women want to go nude or #freethenipple on Insta or whatever, that means they want to have sex or are giving permission to be sexually harassed. It’s not the same thing. One is about female sexual agency, the other is about male sexual agency.
If you like, porn has become a terrible set of answers to some of the most complex questions we’ve raised for young people, then run away from answering – or worse, displayed serious hypocrisy over.
Portraying Love Island as fun, light entertainment but telling young people OnlyFans is morally wrong is confusing - and hypocritical - as hell.
Saying some degree of exhibiting one’s sexuality – say #freethenip or Kim Kardashian’s social media content because she makes $$$ is empowering – but too much is humiliating or slutty or something to be ashamed of – is utterly baffling because how much is too much, and who makes the rules anyway?
To make sex all about power and empowerment, but to say one individual or group gets to say what that looks like, but not another is NOT going to work, because one person’s empowerment looks like another’s subjugation or humiliation.
Porn – for millions of young people – is not really about gratification, but about figuring out really difficult questions about sex, power, empowerment, violence, body, beauty and personal agency and if we want to lessen some of the confusion, we need to start providing some better answers than ‘stop watching porn.’
#pornography #teens #OnlyFans #FreetheNip #AndrewTate #LoveIsland #GenerationZ
Listen: You Don’t Know Me, Pornography: https://audioboom.com/posts/7798611-porn