Rethinking Porn.

The prudes were on the right side of history. Permissiveness has taken us too far.

Note to readers: This would be a bad tab to leave open at work. And the audio version is not something you should listen to with your mom, kids, or priest nearby.

Let us begin by grounding ourselves in a few, sobering statistics. I could detail the exact methodology by which I came by these figures, but the long and short of it is, I used AI (I know**).

• Prior to the internet, a liberal estimate for the number of Americans appearing in pornography - magazines, movies, etc. was ≈20,000.

• After the internet explosion and the widespread adoption of smartphones, that number rose to ≈150,000.

• Today, in the age of OnlyFans, it is ≈2 million.

**A lot of this might be off a little, off a lot, or off altogether. I’m not a stats guy. This was my dumbass self trying to use Grok to parse out figures we know have grown significantly. Good numbers are hard to come by in this business. They vary by definition of ‘porn,’ they don’t account for OnlyFansers who don’t make NSFW content, and all of this is subject to reporting bias. Feel free to rap my knuckles hard in the comments for having misrepresented the approach or the outcome. Fact remains though, a lot more people are doing this now than ever were before.

Putting this all in perspective, and limiting the count to women under 40 (the best represented demographic in porn):

• Before the 90s, only .036% of young women in America worked in porn.

• Smartphones and the web jacked that figure up to .25%.

• OnlyFans made it 3.2%.

Gonna go ahead and repeat that last one for emphasis.

3.2% of American women under 40 are doing porn.

Here’s another way to express this:

In 1990, you’d have had to gather more than 8,300 women together to find a single porn star. Today, every room of 30 women contains one (statistically).

Here’s a table, per Grok:

And here was the prompt:

The Demand Side

Lest we be accused of slut-shaming here, the ubiquity of smartphones, and the popularity of sites like PornHub and OnlyFans haven’t just increased porn production, they’ve positively skyrocketed porn consumption.

There are so many statistics to support this, it’s hard to even know which ones to share. In the interest of brevity, we’ll leave it with just this one:

According to AddictionHelp.com, 57% of U.S. adults aged 18-25 access pornography on at least a monthly basis.

And my bet is: that’s a low-ball.

Updating Our Thinking

Most of us don’t change our views on social and political issues very often. We might try it more. The prevalence of a thing increasing by orders of magnitude should render a new opinion of it.

.03% of a population doing something - even something disagreeable or repulsive - isn’t a very big deal. Multiply the number of people doing it by 100 though, and it becomes a very different thing.

If 1 in 8,000 commuters elected to take a dump on the subway, you probably wouldn’t even need to watch your step that carefully. If 1 in 30 did, you’d carpool.

I used to regard pornography as distasteful and low-status, but ultimately not a big deal. I regarded anti-porn agitators as prudes, and felt they were paying disproportionate attention to an issue that just wasn’t causing very much harm.

If I had it all to do over, even knowing where we were eventually headed, I don’t think I’d amend that view. Porn wasn’t a very big deal…when only a small handful of us were making or watching it.

There were also some built-in guardrails back when. On both sides.

Structural Limitations

To access pre-internet porn, you had to either buy a smut mag off the high rack, find an adult video store somewhere, or skulk into the back room at your rental place, wedge whatever tape you selected between 16 Candles and Die Hard, carry it through the store like a suitcase nuke, then try like hell to avoid eye contact with the embarrassed clerk.

These activities were universally shameful and dirty to undertake.

There were also volume constraints. Cyberspace didn’t exist yet, so pornography had to be a physical entity; a book, a magazine, a VHS.

One’s collection really had to be small enough to fit under a mattress, because you didn’t want Aunt Rita coming over and spotting your dog-eared Penthouse on the coffee table, or a scandalous movie protruding from the VCR.

A man simply couldn’t amass a substantial collection without basically dedicating an entire room to it. And the existence of such a room would render him unfuckable to anyone who happened upon it. Porn enthusiasm was a risky pastime in that way.

Because of these barriers, the market for porn was also limited. It probably couldn’t have accommodated much more than a 5-figure sum of participants then. None of it was free to consume, ad revenue wasn’t yet a funding stream, and who was going to buy it all? There were only so many perverts to go

around.

FREEDOM

Today, every male over the age of 14 has access to the Library of Alexandrian Ass on a device that fits squarely in his pocket.

All free, all the time, and in complete privacy. He can get at it wherever and whenever he wants. At the market, at the post office, in the club, pub, loo, or zoo. In class and in church. No guardrails, no holds barred.

Accessibility is turning lonely boys into stunted addicts. They can’t even talk to real girls, because they don’t know how. How could they? They’re so different. They moan so much less.

If the nature of porn has changed this much, shouldn’t our opinion of it also change?

Stunt Porn

The absolute splattering of pornographic content (sorry) across our lives and society has also changed the types and genres that are most popular.

What use is vanilla, girl-on-girl tripe when Lily Phillips is over here taking down 100 dicks in a single session? Why just tug one off to Asian chicks when you can watch Bonnie Blue getting pincushioned by 1,000 dudes in less time than it takes the sun to cross the sky?

It’s not just a function of preferences either, it’s economics.

Becoming a standout in a field of 2 million requires substantial ingenuity. A hot bod isn’t enough anymore. Sure, Jenna Jameson was cute and everything. But did she ever ride the cock highway for 12 straight hours, hiding enough salami to feed the Army of the Potomac?

Nah? Well scrolling the fuck on then…

Consent Dynamics

This new brand of extreme, sexual dare-deviling has launched a wide conversation over the limits of consent, and the culpability of participants in these feats.

My wife spent the better part of an evening shaking with rage and disgust after we took in this upsetting documentary about Lily Phillips’s quest to smash 100 dudes in a day. The missus was fully yucked out, not to mention saddened, by Phillips’s choice to pursue the achievement in the first place, but her real ire was reserved for the guys.

What kind of a man would partake in an event like this? Couldn’t he see that this was a badly damaged woman? That he was taking advantage?

I have mixed feelings about this, which we’ll get to. But my wife is far from alone.

Penalties

5 former players on Canada’s World Junior Hockey Team recently underwent a catastrophic ordeal after a woman termed E.M., with whom they’d engaged in group sex, accused them of assault.

They were all ultimately acquitted, and the details of the case make pretty darn clear why:

According to witnesses, E.M. repeatedly demanded that the players have sex with her, mocked those who wouldn’t as “pussies” (p. 30) and masturbated, naked, in order to entice the yet-unconvinced. She demanded of the young men, “Can one of you guys come over and fuck me?” (p. 30), “Can I suck your dick?” (p. 34), and “Is anyone going to do anything to me or do I have to do it all?” (p. 40). The judge found that evidence for E.M.’s sexual aggressiveness was “overwhelming.”

Fellow Substacker, Janice Fiamengo has a must-read write up of this saga which is as shocking as it is confusing. You should read the whole thing, but the gist is that the young men in this case, despite unequivocally having been victimized by a false accuser, and left to cobble back together the broken pieces of their lives, careers, and reputations, are still being treated as the villains.

“They are not heroes,” and did not “handle themselves well that night,” wrote Edmonton Journal columnist, David Staples, in a piece actually defending the boys, and insisting that they should be allowed back into the NHL (many were dropped from their teams over the allegations.)

We seem to have set down some boundaries. Are there acts so disgusting that even clearly expressed consent cannot excuse them?

I shared Fiamengo’s article, wondering openly if the *taking turns* approach to sex wasn’t just trending off limits entirely, and if that wasn’t, maybe, an acceptable moral limitation for society to issue.

My post led to a somewhat contentious exchange with my friend, Josh Slocum who had the following admonishment to share with me:

And there you are. Approving of the bias against men, and praising your wife’s bias against men.

Even on an article where they were railroaded.

God alive David. Wake up.

I had to think about this a lot. I’m still thinking about this.

I’ve always been a free lovin’, Dan Savage-reading, you-do-you (and anyone else who’ll have you) kind of guy. Am I turning square in my middle age?

I mean, who am I to stand between the gang and the bang, provided everyone’s of age, and everyone’s given the green light?

Josh is right to have his hackles up over what those hockey players experienced. Consent was supposed to be the watchword of the post #metoo era. Enthusiastic consent, specifically. E.M. didn’t merely consent to the sex she ended up having, she commanded it. She taunted her suitors for hesitating. That’s not enough now?

Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips actively recruited scores of men to come have sex with them, filmed it, then leveraged the events for massive paydays. Paydays that, so far as we know, were not shared with the gents who made it all happen. And they’re the bad guys?

Granted, we’re talking about extreme cases here (one hopes). A 1,068 person speed-orgy is a lot for anyone to process. The revulsion felt toward these men is at least partly explained by our now having to picture such a hot, sticky mess and really wishing the mental images would go away.

But the fact remains, consent was unambiguous in these cases. However repellent the outcome, the rules, as these men understood them, were all followed. Have those rules changed? Is securing enthusiastic consent no longer sufficient in cases where the sex being had shocks the public psyche?

I think the theory of mind for this is as follows:

“You wouldn’t actively harm someone just because they’d asked you to. Queuing up to be #472 on a 1,000-man train is harming the person on whom that train is going to be run. Ergo, consent is, if not invalidated, at least irrelevant. And you’re a sick fuck for accepting the offer.”

Do we think that’s true? Or once there’s a thumbs up, is everything and anything consented-to fair game until the safe word drops?

What To Do?

I have no idea where we go from here. I continue to think that banning porn is unworkable, and probably unnecessary. But shit, man. 3% of under 40s???

Fucking hell.

The porn surge probably doesn’t complicate the thinking of folks like Meghan Murphy, who’ve always been resolute on this matter. Porn was dangerous and exploitative before, it’s dangerous and exploitative now, and its grotesquely bulging popularity is yet more proof of how far away it needs to go.

From Murphy’s Twitter:

“Honest question: Why keep porn? So many of society’s worst problems are connected to or amplified by porn use and the porn industry, from pedophilia to sexual assault, to plain bad sex. Why not just make it illegal, full stop?”

Swear I’m not trying to bait Meghan here, but the other side of OnlyFans - you might even call it the positive side - is also worth some discussion.

I was never persuaded that porn, or any other sex work, should be forbidden. I think when you legally prohibit an activity in which people are certain to engage no matter what, you just invite a black market. Workers are then less safe, vulnerable to both threats within the industry and law enforcement alike. So keep it legal, but limit risk. And anyway, who else’s business is it?

If exploitation is the problem, let’s worry about the directors, not the actors. Where there’s coercion, focus on the pimps, not the girls. Make it about workplace safety.

OnlyFans turned out to be a useful vehicle for that. By moving the market into a virtual space, it allowed creators to earn, while avoiding direct interaction with sleazy johns and greedy hustlers.

But have we just bulldozed Chesterton’s Fence?

We never considered - or at least, I never considered - that making this work safer would lead to so massive an upsurge in its popularity. Of course it did though. It was only natural, literally, that it would.

In nature, when a predator population is reduced, its former prey flourishes. Sometimes, that flourishing can become invasive. The prey may become its own kind of predator. Did safety for sex workers come at the expense of social virtue and healthy sexual function? Even if we decide we aren’t so bothered by that particular trade-off, the ostensibly safer nature of this business has exposed millions more women to it.

We can’t be glib about this. Sex work isn’t just risky in some nebulous, moral sense. For many women, it’s lethal. OnlyFans may have lowered that risk for a great many of its members, but it hasn’t eliminated it. More targets is still more targets, no matter how you frame this.

Obviously, there’s a difference between selling sex and selling nudie pics, particularly for the sellers. But the societal implications may not be so easy to distinguish as once they were. And the wider moral umbrella remains the same.

This enterprise isn’t going anywhere. They don’t call it the world’s oldest profession for nothing. But we’re plainly past the tipping point at which our porn priors require reevaluation, and at which our attempts to contend with sex work more broadly should take on an air of greater urgency.

Fight me in the comments.