Successive governments have been under pressure to control children’s access to pornography and, after years of wrangling, something is to be done soon. Next week an announcement is expected on when regulations will come into effect that make age verification compulsory on commercial pornographic websites. No one under 18 will be able to access them legitimately. That, at least, is the theory. In practice the regulations have been attacked both for being too onerous and too easy to evade. The requirement that users prove that they have verified their age disturbs privacy advocates.
One of the chief suppliers of such technology is a subsidiary of Mindgeek, a company best described as the Facebook of the online pornographic industry, and just as keen to use algorithms to manipulate its users. Although the company says it will have no access to the data collected by its subsidiary, such undertakings don’t inspire confidence. Beyond these practical objections lies a philosophical swamp. As a society we have very confused ideas about pornography. It is a growing blight of uncertain reach. One survey concluded that people in the UK had spent a total of 2,600 years watching porn online in the month of December 2013 alone, an accomplishment that required the efforts of nearly a quarter of the adult population.
One orthodoxy holds that it is nothing to be ashamed of but very few people actually believe this, which is why no mass market web browser comes without a “privacy” mode that is intended to conceal the habit of which no one is in the least ashamed. Should they be? Some feminists claim pornography would be all right if it were not centred around male desire and gratification; others that it is inherently exploitative – and that is only the straight stuff. Almost everyone agrees that it is damaging to children or adolescents just to be exposed to it and unforgivable for them to be forced to act in it. Yet at the same time there has never been any society where it has been more freely available and with less social control.
There is not, and can never be, reliable scientific evidence of the effects this has on us. It is not a question that can entirely be handed over to experts. Scientists can only rely on anecdote. Politicians must rely on their own moral reasoning and so must the rest of us. One further difficulty is that the pornification of society has gone so far that perhaps we are all now ignorant of whether what we’re watching is porn. On terrestrial television there are programmes such as Naked Attraction, Threesome Dating, and The Sex Testers. None of these titles would be out of place on Mindgeek’s sites. The commercial exploitation of sex is often damaging both to the producers and the consumers.
Like all forms of commercial exploitation it tends to dehumanise people and treat them as means to others’ ends. It supplies adolescents with unrealistic expectations of what is involved in sexual intimacy at a time when their sense of their own worth – and that of others – is uniquely fragile. Instead of understanding sex and relationships as a mutual and tender acceptance of vulnerability, they see a fantasy of omnipotence and overwhelming desirability. The disappointment that follows produces lasting and avoidable suffering, whether they take it out on each other or on themselves. The new regulations will by themselves accomplish very little. But if they are the first signs of a society that is reconsidering its attitudes to the uninhibited consumption of pornography, they are very welcome.
• This article was amended on 21 March 2019. An earlier version implied that the regulations on compulsory age verification will come into effect on 1 April. To clarify: a date is yet to be set but an announcement is expected at the beginning of April.
