YES Because the practicalities of porn are so unpleasant, its defenders tend to resort to either broad free speech arguments or narrow technicalities about the impossibility of a ban. Porn, we are told, may be dismaying, but it is part of the great commonwealth of utterances that must be permitted in a democracy; and in any case, the internet renders censorship futile. Both may be true. Neither is relevant, however, because pornography is not an utterance. It is a video record of act. That act is exploitative, deeply misogynistic, profoundly racist, routinely abusive and, if consent means anything at all, largely coerced.
What is shown in porn is not simply sex. In pornography, women are “sluts” and “whores” to be “destroyed,” “forced” and “taught a lesson”—that is, deep-throated until they choke, slapped and roughly sodomised. Black men are fetishised as violent, black women as a hypersexualised stereotype, Asian women as a submissive parody, and white women as the privileged bitches against whom male rage can be justifiably unleashed. And what is recorded must be done. As the campaigner Kat Banyard has argued, the presence of a camera does not diminish the violence it captures, and nor does the fact that participants are paid. In fact, purchased consent is no consent.
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