Do we now live under Pornocracy? Here is a frightening wake-up call

‘Pornocracy’ doesn’t arise simply because increasing numbers of people make and view pornography. The influence of porn can be seen everywhere, having seeped into the mainstream.

“Just as once ‘wife beating’ was considered a domestic problem that happened behind closed doors,” they write, “today, pornography is commonly understood as a private choice rather than a social and cultural harm.” This is something they believe must change.

Over nine tightly written chapters, covering, among other things, the horrifying rise in men viewing child abuse, feverishly addicted to more extremist material to get their kicks, even the initially sceptical may concur with the authors that the effects of pornography use be viewed as a public health crisis.

The book’s foundational argument is people must understand the exact nature of the industry they defend when they say making and accessing pornography is a ‘free expression’ issue.

The authors stress that when talking about the harms of pornography – particularly its “traumatising” effect on young people first encountering it – we’re worlds away from what many might’ve encountered as kids in the 1990s or earlier.

Back then, natural curiosity might’ve led young teens to pore over the lingerie section of Kay’s catalogue, or giggle nervously when finding torn pages from porn mags, devoured illicitly then discarded – probably a little shamefully – in the woods.

Present day pornography, however, is the most extreme sex acts human beings could ever imagine, being readily viewable, including by minors, and “as far removed from your grandad’s centrefolds as a petting zoo is from an abattoir.”

In the interests of your start-of-week happiness, I’ll spare the goriest details. But I frequently winced reading about the utter depravity of perfectly legal but abusive pornography, widely consumed, and ever more extreme. Difficult to read, too, is the experiences of porn actors themselves. A 2024 study revealed 88 per cent of 120 surveyed had experienced abuse as children. 69 per cent had attempted suicide.

My late teens and early 20s were characterised by the noughties ‘ladette’ culture – women urged to be promiscuous, lairy, party hard. The internet was in its infancy, but porn already had an online stranglehold. Meanwhile ‘lads mags’ like Loaded arguably honed men’s ‘pornocratic’ mindset. Things were confusing enough then, pre-PornHub, which launched in 2007. Learning a feminist analysis about what ‘sexual empowerment’ actually is was a lifesaver.

The lie of the ‘empowered ladette’ was, I believe, extremely damaging for many women. As Jessel argues in his part of the book’s conclusion, we need to “reforge the link between sexual intercourse and love.” But the disconnect is now wider than ever.

“I hate that she even knows who Bonnie Blue is,” a friend with a teenage daughter told me recently, miserably. 26-year-old Blue has gained fame and riches by performing extreme sex stunts: sleeping with 1000 men in a day; touring university campuses with a ‘bang bus’.

Her extremism has encouraged copy-cat actions by other ‘content creators’ on Only Fans, while she was recently the subject of a rather fawning Channel 4 documentary.

‘Pornocracy’ weaves together many concerning trends that as a society we’ve been depressingly incapable of discussing, tracing their origins to porn. I’m hardly alone in having long felt repelled by our increasingly hyper-sexualised culture, where porn is accepted as inevitable, even natural, alongside crude misogyny, and sexually explicit music videos that are difficult to avoid.

I logged on to social media site ‘X’ on Saturday, between finishing reading Pornocracy and writing this column. I was immediately confronted with a clip of award-winning singer Sam Smith wearing a corset, simulating anal sex on a stage with a dancer, replete with demonic imagery and harsh red lighting.

The very next post I saw was a picture of a placard at Saturday’s trans-activist protest against feminists that read “Biological sex is what I had with your mother last night.”

It felt ironic seeing both. In their chapter ‘Pornified Progress’, Bartosch and Jessel explore how, as the pornocracy grew, drag has exploded in boring-but-offensive ubiquity. Intertwined with this, other extremities of male desire, whether to be women, own them, mock, exploit, control, or abuse them, are everywhere.

Both veterans of the ‘gender wars’, the authors couldn’t fail but recognise the shared misogyny of porn advocates and male genderists, both of whom view ‘woman’ as a malleable category that can be performed, as women are objects. The idea that ‘female’ means submissive and ‘f***ed’ is ubiquitous in certain online trans-activist forums.

What to do about pornocracy is something the authors diverge on. Bartosch favours regulation and legislation, Jessel argues self-responsibility would be more effective. Ideas for how to address the problems this book highlights will vary. Naysayers will undoubtedly continue defending the porn industry despite its malign influence. Many men in particular will continue to believe they’ve a ‘right’ to maintain two-clicks-away access to the sweetie jar pornocopia, even as it damages them and their relationships.

This book is both true crime horror story, and frightening wake-up call. It’s to be hoped open-minded readers will conclude as the authors do, opposing a dehumanising, traumatising industry causing damage to so many.