I remember the first time I purchased pornography. A 14-year-old raging mess of hormones, I headed to a corner shop, stood on tip-toes to grab a copy of Club International and went to pay. The lady at the counter gave me a hard stare and asked my age. I handed over my fake ID, almost choking with embarrassment, and scurried away with my treasure wrapped in a brown paper bag.
This long-forgotten episode came flooding back last Friday, when the UK government’s age-verification mandate for porn sites came into force under the Online Safety Act. The new law displays an almost touching naivety about the nature of teenagers, completely disregarding the lengths to which boys will go to satisfy their curiosity about sex.
I cannot have been the only child of the mid-1990s to design an unconvincing ID (no photoshop or internet in those days), and give it a gloss of authenticity with the school laminator. Today’s kids don’t even have to do that – they can easily get around age verification by downloading a VPN (virtual-private network), which allows users to hide their location. Some browsers even include one for free when you sign up to them.
The UK’s new ‘pornwall’ is, therefore, almost entirely pointless. Indeed, its sole purpose is seemingly to distract us from politicians’ inability to grasp the scale and depth of the pornography epidemic, and its consequences for society.
As Jo Bartosch and I detail in our forthcoming book, Pornocracy, today’s porn is far removed from the naked ladies I studied in the privacy of my boarding-school cubicle. Online pornography is a charnel house of misogyny and abuse – it normalises sexual practices that, if enacted in real life, would earn the participants lengthy jail sentences. What was once niche is now mainstream: popular categories include incest and pseudo-child pornography (PCP), where teenage performers are made to look underage with the addition of freckles and props (teddy bears and lollipops are also popular).
It’s not just the content that has evolved, but also how kids find it. In 2023, the Children’s Commissioner for England reported that more young people saw porn on Twitter (now X) than sought it on dedicated porn sites. Pornography is not something children necessarily choose, then – it has become ambient, infecting platforms and games, from Snapchat to Roblox, which parents presume are safe spaces.
It’s difficult to see how age verification will have any meaningful impact on children’s exposure to pornography. Some say we have to begin somewhere – but what’s the point in a start without a strategy?
At no time in the past 20 years has our political class shown it understands the nature of the pornographic revolution. Take the recent proposals to outlaw pornography depicting sexual strangulation. Choking is a perfect example of a fringe practice becoming normalised, and a dangerous one, too: it’s thought to be the second-most-common cause of stroke in women under 40.
How do you outlaw it, though? If porn sites did agree to filter out videos tagged with ‘choking’, uploaders would simply develop new, coded search terms like ‘breath play’. Indeed, this is exactly what they’ve done with PCP, which can easily be found on mainstream platforms.
If this sounds like defeatism, you’re bang right. When schools are teaching kids that pornography is a ‘treat’ rather than an ‘everyday thing’, when sexual strangulation becomes a TikTok meme, porn’s victory over society is clearly complete.
The recourse to prohibition seems quaint in a world of technological and political decentralisation, where the efficacy of laws and institutions is declining as precipitously as the public’s confidence in them. An effective strategy to counter the dominance of porn would therefore begin not with laws, but with reaching a consensus: first, on the nature of modern pornography, and then on its harms. Politicians should acknowledge that porn can not only be addictive, but is designed to be so, too. They might warn that a whole generation has had its sexual scripts shaped by violent imagery. Where young girls learn that sex is inseparable from pain, humiliation and coercion – for example, by being shamed as ‘frigid’ for refusing to have anal sex.
That would be a beginning. Even better, they should start with a brutal truth: we’ve lost the War on Porn. Successive governments slept while pornography crept into our children’s bedrooms. Repressive measures like the Online Safety Act will not work to turn things around. It’s we, not Westminster, who will have to form the resistance. The strategy? To take responsibility and turn our backs on porn.
Rob Jessel is co-author of the upcoming book, Pornocracy. Pre-order it here. Follow Rob on X: @robjessel16.
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