Liberalism’s favourite battles defend what feels good. Drugs feel good, bumping the Tube barrier feels good. Paying a prostitute to relieve you of sexual frustration or the shame of virginity feels good. Hiring a surrogate’s womb keeps your own body pain-free and supple; that feels good too. But the best way liberalism makes us feel good, the cheapest, least risky, most private way it shoots dopamine into brain cells and colour into sallow cheeks, is by providing us with infinite porn. Any damage to the watcher and his or her peers or society at large — however alarming, however tragic — is but a tedious, prudish impediment to the liberated sex-positivity stan’s journey of self-expression. In an idiocracy, the id wins out: the pleasure principle is progressivism’s untouchable red line. Let’s prod it anyway.
Some years ago, I was reading Philippa Perry’s agony-aunt column in The Guardian. That week, a woman in her sixties had written in, riven with disgust because she’d walked in on her husband watching porn. Perry drew on the woman’s “teenage trauma” as a possible reason for what she patently believed to be an overreaction. She ended her response with this sentence on porn which has played in my mind ever since, and which I for a long time used to settle my own discomfort about some guy or other I dated compulsively watching it: “Porn is what the genitals enjoy in private. This might be very different to who we each are with each other.” I even remember repeating this line to a pal with similar worries. It’s not who he is, I told her. It’s just what men do. They all do, and they can’t help it.
I no longer think this. If my peers are anything to go by, I am not alone. Porn destroys sex and nukes relationships. It makes ordinary men strange, twitchy, impotent losers, and it endangers and repels women, leaving us unsatisfied. Watching it, or being with someone who is addled by it, is an active choice. I finally accepted this when I dumped a boyfriend who, as a result of his porn addiction, was both violent and absolutely abysmal in bed. I know so many women who have been through the same thing. Many are learning to leave at the first sign of pornsickness. Either that, or squander your youth on someone who would attempt to conjure manipulative justifications (“you’re just a prude!”) as a way never to have to even try to stop.
That pornography is a growing social ill is somehow still controversial, but anyone who reads Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel’s new compendium of horror Pornocracy cannot fail to be convinced. In it, one interviewee remarks how “extraordinary” it is that “women are expected to love, sexually service and live with men who are excited by images of their degradation and violation”. The book proposes that straight women would do better to “swear off men” rather than put up, shut up and put out. It also tells us that married men who started watching porn during their marriage doubled their chances of divorce — and that, in the words of one “porn widow”, the habit is “a staggering waste of connection, a waste of humanity”. Feminists have long been blamed for the so-called male loneliness epidemic; in light of the horrifying escalation in the volume and extremity of porn the men we’re supposed to save from loneliness are gobbling up, it might well be time for a name change. The “male consequences epidemic”, perhaps?
The cheerful prospect of having sex with a porn-addicted partner is laid bare in Pornocracy, which describes what many an ex-girlfriend knows to be true: “These men no longer have mutual sex; they masturbate inside their partner; and sometimes, as porn teaches, onto them. She becomes little more than a flesh pocket; a dehumanised sex doll into which he thrusts while replaying porn scenes in his mind’s eye.” And that’s when they can get things going: another deflating fact is the hidden epidemic of erectile dysfunction, in one study affecting 60% of men who watch porn. Before blaming women with careers, those wringing hands over birth rates should first take account of these miserable developments.
Clearly, defenders of porn do not listen to feminists; the Seventies activism of women including Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon has never cut through to those who had long ago sacrificed serious adult lives and arguments for compulsive masturbation. But these same men may be starting to realise that it is not just feminists whom they disgust; it is the women who block them on Hinge for asking if “it’s pink”, the ones who decline second dates after you spend hours wanging on about your rarefied and special fetish, the ones who avoid eye contact at work when gooner slang slips into your daily verbiage. Repulsing feminists has never been the porn guy’s concern (the feeling is mutual), but at a time when throbbing flesh on screens has not yet eclipsed the appeal of a real girlfriend, repulsing women in general might be.
Why do so many women put up with partners stupefied by pornography? One very forceful reason is that the language of progressive toleration is, like other areas of feminism in 2025, baldly used to intimidate women out of saying no to men. To paraphrase one of the most prominent and courageous victims of porn-powered rape culture, Gisèle Pelicot, shame has changed sides — from the red-faced chap scuttling to the adult section of the video rental store to the woman who now finds herself opposite him at a bar, trying in earnest not to laugh or recoil in horror when he brags about his predilection for cross-eyed, writhing e-girls lest she be called a bigot. It is now shameful to shame a man for his venerable kink — but what counts as “shaming” in this case? Rejecting him? Refusing to do what repulses her?
In the gender debacle, the other major feminist bunfight of recent decades, we have seen how refusing to roleplay objective falsehoods, to maintain the fantasy, is cancellable in itself. In both transgenderism and the kink community, the influence of porn is manifest: Bartosch and Jessel inevitably quote Andrea Long Chu, the transgender Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote that “the essence of femaleness” is “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes” — laying bare porn’s grip on male-to-female transitioners. It is difficult not to see the weaponised shame of gender ideology playing out in the bedrooms of coercive “cis” men too, where partners who decline to do certain sexual acts are reprimanded for being intolerant, narrow-minded or, inevitably, “unkind”.
“Hentai addicts, feet guys and furries are smirking themselves into solitude, and the partners they compel to fulfil pornographic fantasies do so with a grimace at best, however well they hide it.”
Sod that. If you ever need permission: it is OK to find things disgusting. It is OK, on a date, to sneak out the back, leave him staring into his cider. You don’t need to tolerate his weird desires; you don’t even need to see him again. It’s OK, in a drought of nice and normal men, not to date anyone at all. Nothing is worse than having to comfort a boyfriend who can only get aroused by the pyrotechnics of porn. There, the humiliation is total.The porn lobby may have duped credulous queer theorists into enveloping socially malignant interests into identity politics (“I’m into consensual non-consent”; “I’m into age play”; “I’m a choker”) but being proud of your desire to hurt women or children won’t improve your chances of having a good relationship. Hentai addicts, feet guys and furries are smirking themselves into solitude, and the partners they compel to fulfil pornographic fantasies do so with a grimace at best, however well they hide it. At worst, they’re out the door, consigning you to a growing dossier of dinner-party stories. Them’s the breaks, fellas.
Porn is a vengeful Reaper, a pestilence growing more visible as the sexes grow apart and young men disappear into moaning, grunting vortices on their phone screens. Porn is in a death spiral; the accelerating superstimuli of “gooner” material — the subject of a recent viral Harper’s article — can no longer be ignored. Things are getting worse — they can only ever do that, because the more extreme the content, the more hooked the users, the more likely they are to stay on the site, to pay, to return.
Porn feels good until it doesn’t — until the afterglow is gone, until you see the bruises on your girlfriend’s neck, the rings under your eyes from another night’s sleep lost to watching strangers on all fours, the news reports of industry darlings who killed themselves. There’s nothing liberated about this. Once, self-discipline was a virtue. Once, shame provided guidance about how much we could expect others to tolerate or participate in our fantasies. Now, gratification is the means and the end: it flattens all moral values, tramples on women and deflates your dick. Top-down legislation can only do so much — this week’s announcement of a ban on choking porn is a start, and anything that stops 12-year-old girls being strangled during their first kiss is a good thing. Ultimately, though, it’s up to men to pack it in. So stop, for all our sakes.
