From Bonnie Blue and conversations about ‘barely legal’ content to age-verification, conversations about porn are everywhere. But what are laws like the Online Safety Act actually trying to address, and will they work?
Megan Warren-Lister
If you have ever had the pleasure of scrolling through the home page of a large online porn site like Pornhub, you’ll be aware of the general vibe: sex depicted from the male perspective, with the camera often quite literally functioning as the male viewer’s eyes. In these male-gazey frames, women are objects, a status reinforced by titles such as ‘dirty sl** takes it’ or ‘petite girl gets ‘destroyed’. In other words, sex is something done to a woman (object), by a man (agent).
This language has become so naturalised that there is a clear socio-cultural script for what sex between a man and a woman looks like. In a never-ending feedback loop, which is reinforced by a culture which teaches young people that male desire is king. From the films which depict men bragging about scoring, to discourse around the idea (cough, myth), that men get blue balls. Men like this. They don’t like that, and sex ends when they finish. If you’re a girl? The purpose of your existence as a sexual being is to satisfy male desire.
There is a subtle homage to this in the iconic Mean Girls scene in which the P.E teacher warns that if you have sex you will ‘get pregnant and die’. In the UK this sentiment is mirrored by sex education classes which talk of the mechanics, STIs, and if you’re lucky - how to put a condom on a banana. There will likely be no mention of the clitoris, or the female orgasm.
Violence against women and girls is currently at epidemic levels, and we cannot ignore the fact that harming women has become not only normalised, but eroticised - to the extent that it has become the foundation of mainstream porn. In the last month, a Home Affairs Select Committee report warned that the government won’t meet its pledge to halve VAWG without a strategy for tackling online violence, and matched funding.
Already, pornography has been targeted as an area needing policy reform. As set out in the recently published Independent Pornography Review by Baroness Bertin, violent, harmful, and misogynistic pornographic content is ‘rife’ on major platforms - which, given the overwhelming evidence to suggest pornography can be an influence on sexual behaviours, Bertin describes as ‘hugely concerning’.
At the end of July, new rules requiring tech companies to introduce age-verification procedures came into force under the nascent Online Safety Act. It seems facile to praise the notion of preventing children from watching porn, but when young people are learning about sex primarily through porn - and on average accessing it for the first time aged 13 - this is not insignificant.
On 28 July, the BBC reported that VPN apps had become the most downloaded on Apple's App Store in the UK after sites such as PornHub, Reddit and X began requiring age verification of users on Friday, allowing you to use the internet as though you are in another country. One app maker told the BBC it had seen an 1,800% spike in downloads.
Despite this positive step forward, it has been less than two weeks since the rules came into force and already, Ofcom (the regulator responsible for enforcing the act) has announced investigations into more than 30 companies which appear not to have complied. The Online Safety Act has been repeatedly criticised for lacking teeth, with the regulator frequently limited by non-binding provisions and inadequate powers for enforcement.
In theory, the regulator has the power to issue fines, shutdown platforms and commence criminal actions, but whether these powers are utilised will be key - along with the speed and frequency with which they are. On top of blatant non-compliance, there are widespread reports of users reverting to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to overcome the geographical restrictions of the age-verification measures.
On 28 July, the BBC reported that VPN apps had become the most downloaded on Apple's App Store in the UK after sites such as PornHub, Reddit and X began requiring age verification of users on Friday, allowing you to use the internet as though you are in another country. One app maker told the BBC it had seen an 1,800% spike in downloads. While loopholes are to a degree inevitable, what matters is how they are tackled. The imperative to make profits means it’s not in any tech companies interest to start preventing users from VPNs - if they even can. This points to the inherent structural conflict between regulating VAWG when it’s something that companies actively profit from.
Another tactic the government is pursuing is a planned ban on strangulation in porn. The government’s announcement that “choking” in porn would be criminalised was also inspired by Bertin’s review. Despite legislation affirming that a person cannot consent to being harmed for the purpose of sexual gratification and non-fatal strangulation being a criminal offence under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, strangulation during sex has become increasingly common both in real life and in online porn, commonly featuring on the landing pages of mainstream porn sites.
A representative survey of UK women undertaken and reported on by BBC 5 Live, found that 38% of UK women aged 18-39 have experienced choking during consensual intercourse. Other estimates put this even higher, and one US research paper found that 64% of female college students had been choked during sex. Another BBC survey of 2,049 UK men aged 18 to 39 found that 71% of the men who took part said they had slapped, choked, gagged, or spat on their partner during consensual sex. It’s a common misconception that choking can be done safely, but according to experts this is a myth and there is no safe way of choking someone.
Using basic searches on some of the top ten most visited sites in the UK, the autocomplete for searching “cho”, generated the following options: ‘choke her’, ‘choking fetish’, and ‘choke me daddy’, the review reveals. It goes further by concluding that choking is ‘perhaps the starkest example of where online violent pornography has changed “offline” behaviour.’
This may be a surprise but it’s also the logical consequence of the world we live in. A culture which teaches young people that women are objects, and that violence against them is normal, is the perfect breeding group for pornography that replicates this by eroticising strangulation as part of a much wider normalisation of violent sex. As part of the feedback loop, research has found links between people seeing choking depicted in pornography and engaging in it themselves.
A representative survey of UK women undertaken and reported on by BBC 5 Live, found that 38% of UK women aged 18-39 have experienced choking during consensual intercourse. Other estimates put this even higher, and one US research paper found that 64% of female college students had been choked during sex. Another BBC survey of 2,049 UK men aged 18 to 39 found that 71% of the men who took part said they had slapped, choked, gagged, or spat on their partner during consensual sex. It’s a common misconception that choking can be done safely, but according to experts this is a myth and there is no safe way of choking someone.
Blocking the jugular vein (a major vessel carrying blood away from the head) requires less pressure than opening a can of coke and evidence suggests that strangulation is now the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40. In just seconds it can cause loss of consciousness, a marker of brain damage, inducing long-lasting cognitive and memory impairments which sometimes may not present for weeks after the relevant incident as well as physiological impacts including anxiety and incontinence.
Bertin’s review argues that following the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, non-fatal strangulation needs to be included in illegal pornography offences by explicitly moving it from the ‘legal but harmful’ category to the extreme (illegal category) to reflect ‘how deep its impact on young people and sex has already been’.
While state interference in sexual preferences is nothing to be taken lightly, as Bertin points out, this is not a neutral sexual behaviour. We cannot ignore the fact that choking in a sexual context is predominantly enacted by men on women’s partners - both in porn and more often than not, the real world. In any event, neither of these policies are any kind of silver bullet and Bertin’s review makes a total of 32 recommendations including banning “degrading, violent and misogynistic content”, as well as content which might encourage an interest in child sex abuse.
The same Online Safety Act also gives Ofcom powers to impose fines charges and blocks on companies which fail to protect under-18s from post promoting ‘harmful content’ beyond porn - but already BBC Verify has found that a range of public interest content, including parliamentary debates on grooming gangs, has been restricted on platforms such as Reddit and X. This included a video post showing a man in Gaza searching for the dead bodies of his family among the rubble of buildings destroyed by war. Despite not showing any graphic imagery or bodies, the post was restricted.
This creates an interesting vacuum in terms of how this harmful content is defined - something which Bertin is pragmatic about, noting in an interview with Politics Home that while censorship isn’t to be thrown around lightly ‘we can’t boil the ocean. We've just got to try and come up with something that knocks 70 per cent of this stuff out.” Halving VAWG has to involve prevention, and a vital part of this is ensuring that online content is not causing real world violence. Censorship might be a clumsy instrument, but in the case of violent pornography and a culture dripping in misogyny we are dealing with a horse that bolted long ago.
Amid these conversations on censorship it’s difficult to ignore the parallel issues relating to coverage about the genocide unfolding in Gaza. The same Online Safety Act also gives Ofcom powers to impose fines charges and blocks on companies which fail to protect under-18s from post promoting ‘harmful content’ beyond porn - but already BBC Verify has found that a range of public interest content, including parliamentary debates on grooming gangs, has been restricted on platforms such as Reddit and X. This included a video post showing a man in Gaza searching for the dead bodies of his family among the rubble of buildings destroyed by war. Despite not showing any graphic imagery or bodies, the post was restricted. Users who hadn’t verified their age received this message: ‘"Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age."’ BBC Verify say that X removed the warning after the company was approached for comment.
Relatedly, the Open Rights Group has warned that ‘crucial public debate about Gaza is being threatened by vague, overly broad laws that could lead to content about Palestine being removed or hidden online.’ This, say human rights groups, could be exacerbated by self-censorship if people worry about breaking the law by sharing posts related to Gaza, particularly with the recent proscription of Palestine action.
Censorship is always an unwieldy tool which has an innate risk of being disproportionate to the harm it is seeking to protect against. In our Orwellian world, it is essential that we do not shy away from questioning its limits and scrutinising both what constitutes harm and who decides what is harmful. There is no perfect solution to the problem of online safety, but a good starting point is ensuring that any Ofcom guidance or legislation sets out specific definitions of any given harm, rather than making broad sweeping generalisations about what is harmful. Rights groups and experts should be consulted at every stage, with rigorous processes to ensure transparency.
Censorship can never be a silver bullet, and political dog-whistling about shiny new bills and rule changes should not detract us from the fact that harmful content, including misogynistic and violent pornography, cannot be addressed in a vacuum. Sites like Pornhub are just a microcosm of a culture of misogyny and investing in prevention, and specifically education - is key to breaking the cycle of objectification and eroticisation that our online worlds mirror back to us.
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