Pornography and the rest of us

Christine Emba is not afraid to say the quiet part out loud about pornography. In an opinion piece for The New York Times, she acknowledges that despite how many today are willing to bemoan the rampant exploitation within the adult film industry as well as its singularly negative cultural impact, barely anyone is willing to admit openly that pornography is inherently harmful to those who use it. While it is rarely touted in public for its perceived personal benefits, to condemn it wholesale would be to jeopardize the tenets of individual autonomy that lies at the heart of mainstream sexuality. The shibboleths of the sexual revolution are, in the eyes of most of the elite, simply too precious to risk.

Yet such an attitude clearly marginalizes the welfare of the countless men and women caught in addiction to internet pornography. Consumption of pornography online is practically an epidemic for men. One study from 2022 concluded that over 40% of men from the ages of 18 to 64 view it on a monthly basis at least, with 42% of those aged 30 to 49 stating that they viewed it within the last week. But even the gender gap for online porn usage is closing somewhat. As reported by Fight the New Drug, a secular anti-pornography activist group, more than 3 out of every 10 of the visitors to PornHub in 2021 were women, and women still accounted for almost a third of its online traffic in the United States alone as recently as 2023.

Emba’s indictment of progressive double-speak dovetails with what Rob Henderson has identified as “luxury beliefs.” In Henderson’s definition, luxury beliefs are “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class but often inflict real costs on the lower classes,” especially concerning libertarian approaches to sex and drugs. For example, it is fashionable within the highly educated upper crust to approve of polyamory and open marriages in principle. Yet as Henderson notes, few of its public supporters are engaging in those arrangements themselves. The projection of one’s intellectual and political openness in a highly performative, social media-driven age counts more than actually living out one’s professed truths.

Although luxury beliefs might be associated with the wealthy, they are just as much an indication of an elitist moral progressivism that knows no class boundaries. For the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st, all that is said to ultimately matter for secular sexuality is consent. So as long as nobody is demonstrably hurt either physically or psychologically in the process, anything, for lack of a better word, goes.

That is, until AI-generated pornography arrived. Already being frequently used to violate others, it has forced the national conversation to reconsider what harm means when it comes to sex. Porn’s harmlessness in the eyes of many has typically been based upon a surface-level acknowledgment that it is a “safe” way for one to explore personal sexual preferences and satisfy desires. But as Emba notes, “We are allowing our desires to continue to be molded in experimental ways, for profit, by an industry that does not have our best interests at heart,” and we “aren’t paying attention to how we’re making things worse for ourselves” for fear of having to draw lines where usually only religious conservatives are willing to tread.

Internet pornography’s main allure in its apparent offering of limitless variety also reveals its nefariousness. Some are now speaking in defense of OnlyFans as a path to freedom from professional drudgery. Yet the platform itself facilitates the pornographic mindset that virtual sexual omniscience is attainable for the financially able and willing. We were created for committed, monogamous relationships, but we are instead tempted to believe that the tree of universal carnal knowledge is now ripe for the taking with nobody around to immediately judge us.

To question porn’s worth to society is not to seek to undermine individual dignity and one’s essential freedoms; it is to remind ourselves what purpose sex is really meant to serve. Rather than retreating further into ourselves, it properly beckons us to know another in the integrity of a covenantal union in which we see each other for who we are without shame. Forgetting that we are not our own leads us to misuse sex when it is one of God’s greatest gifts to us in this life.

Iris Murdoch once wrote that love is “the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Online porn’s deceptiveness seeks to keep many of us from experiencing what sex truly offers by keeping us in the clutches of a false sexual gospel. By God’s grace, true freedom still awaits for those who recognize that things were always meant to be better than this.