Online pornography has become inescapable. Hundreds of millions of people watch it every month. The global industry makes vast amounts of money every year. Countries and governments constantly debate its practices, excesses and dangers, yet nothing meaningful ever happens. Can it be stopped or curtailed? Should it?
It is France’s turn to agonise over adult content, how it’s produced, what it leads to and whether it should be banned. The catalyst was a report launched by the High Council for Equality Between Women and Men (HCE), a government-nominated watchdog on gender equality.
Across more than 200 pages, the report, Pornocriminalité, makes the case that the pornography industry has been skirting around laws on physical and sexual abuse, promoting harmful behaviour and standards, and having “the intention [...] to make women suffer because they are women”.
Many of the facts and numbers in the report are deeply concerning. According to their research, 51% of 12- and 13-year-old boys and 31% of girls watch pornography at least once a month. The median age at which children watch pornography for the first time was 14 years old in 2017, but just 10 in 2020. In 2019, Xhamster, one of the most popular pornography sites in France, published its list of most-searched keywords. “Rape” was ninth. “Beurette”, racist slang for a young north African woman living in France, was first.
There are a number of anecdotes too graphic and harrowing to mention in a newspaper, and interviews with producers who admit that they must keep making increasingly extreme content in order to get more clicks.
According to the HCE, pornography is an inherently harmful industry, as most of the shoots are, according to them, against the law because of the real violence of the acts and the exploitation of many of the performers. But it is also a danger to wider society, as racism, sexism, rape culture, homophobia and male violence can all be traced back to pornography consumption.
The recommendations it makes are, as a result, unsurprisingly severe: all pornography should be seen, in the eyes of the law, as akin to prostitution. “Camming” or performing on websites should also be seen as a form of sexual exploitation. Pornography websites refusing to enforce strict age checks should get blocked by internet providers. The phrase “travail du sex” (“sex work”) should be banned from all government or public communications.
The report has, as a result, proved controversial. One column co-written by Florian Vörös, an academic specialising in pornography and sexual education who was once part of the watchdog but resigned, was scathing. It argued that the report lacked objectivity, failed to interview a single woman working as a performer in the pornography industry, and sought to “impose, by force, its sexual moralism and repressive politics”.
It gives, as an example, the report’s claim that “90% of online pornography contains acts of violence”, when the study focused on a sample of only 50 videos, and the definition of “violence” is wide enough to include non-conventional sex acts which aren’t inherently violent.
Elsewhere, a group of 80 people working in pornography published an open letter in the newspaper, Libération, accusing the report of “dehumanising and criminalising” them. It is, according to them, insulting to strip performers of their agency by assuming they cannot truly consent to any sex work, and to treat them as “accomplices of an industry they consider to be criminal”.
Still, they do not deny that the status quo leaves much to be desired. In the letter, the signatories argued in favour of more thorough sex education in schools, focusing on internet usage – something the report also mentioned. Speaking on the France Inter radio station, Mélanie Jaoul, who runs the sex workers’ union AATDS, called for better working rights in the industry, tighter contracts, intimacy coordinators on set, better links with occupational health and stronger union representation.
In short, everyone agrees that the pornography industry and the way people engage with pornography must change, but no one agrees on what ought to be the way forward. It is a frustrating state of affairs. Sisyphus wakes up every morning and pushes the same boulder up the same hill; anti-pornography campaigners and pornography professionals write reports, letters and columns disagreeing with each other, then nothing gets done.
It should be possible to find a middle ground. The boulder will, otherwise, threaten to start rolling down the hill again. Still, the HCE’s report thinks of pornography as a “system that massacres women for profit”. It is keen for the whole industry to be treated as inherently criminal, which would necessitate a complete legal overhaul and a wholesale shift in public attitudes.
The report’s opponents are, depending on how you look at it, either more pragmatic or more idealistic, believing that some tinkering around the edges would be more fruitful. Although the policies they suggest would probably change the industry for the better, they wouldn’t address the wider effects that pornography has had on society. Furthermore, they would do little to deal with the content already online – of which there is a lot.
In this particular instance, neither side manages to offer a way out that seems realistic and effective. They could and should work together, but their starting points are so far apart that it is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
No one agrees, nothing happens, and the people abusing women and poisoning the minds of those who watch them are the ones laughing all the way to the bank. Again.
-
Marie Le Conte is a French journalist living in London