Actor Russell Brand makes anti-porn appeal but Google isn't buying it

Fifty Shades of Grey has earned nearly $130 million since its Feb. 13 debut, while drawing criticism for its graphic sexual content, corny lines, and woody acting. And last week, the film drew criticism from actor Russell Brand for trivializing sex and adding to the cultural trend of mainstreaming soft-core pornography.

Brand’s anti-porn rant went viral and helped add fuel to an effort to make sexual content harder to find on Google’s popular blogging platform. But facing backlash from users who claim explicit material is part of their personal expression, the internet giant backed away from a new policy that could protect people from accidentally stumbling across graphic content.

In a video published on his YouTube channel, Brand argued the soft-core porn presented in Fifty Shades, and even common product advertisements, mars attitudes toward relationships and sex by extracting sex from the context of love and healthy relationships.

“Our attitudes towards sex have become warped and perverted and have deviated from its true function as an expression of love and a means for procreation,” Brand said. “Because our acculturation—the way we’ve designed it and expressed it—has become really, really, confused.” Brand, known for raunchy comedy and films like Get Him to the Greek, didn’t address sexual morality in marriage.

Brand said porn consumed him as an adolescent. Porn accessibility then was limited largely to the dirty magazine shelf at gas stations and grocery stores. Today, the internet has made porn ubiquitous.

“Now there’s just icebergs of filth floating through every house on Wi-Fi,” he said. “It’s inconceivable what it must be like to be an adolescent boy now with this kind of access to porn. It must be dizzying and exciting, yet corrupting in a way we can’t even imagine.”

The internet is a tempting source for porn because it’s private and often free through sources like Google blogs. Though Google policy prohibits commercial porn, some bloggers still publish sexually explicit content.

Early last week, Google changed its policy so blogs containing sexually explicit content would only be visible to the blog owner and those granted private access. But the company reversed the policy Friday due to backlash against retroactive enforcement and claims that some users post sexually explicit content to “express their identities.”

“So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn,” said Jessica Pelegio, Google’s social product support manager.

Google already categorizes blogs with sexually explicit content as “adult” and places them behind an “adult content” warning page.

But the problem with porn extends beyond commercial porn sites and free sexually explicit blog content. Male-targeted advertising has become increasingly sexualized and appears everywhere from mobile phones to computers to TV, according to Fight the New Drug, an organization dedicated to fighting pornography and porn addictions. These ads can act as a gateway to hard-core porn and porn addictions, the organization notes.

“Our generation is the first one where people can unexpectedly (and casually) see an almost-naked woman just by simply turning on the TV or scrolling on their phones,” the organization wrote. “It’s becoming more and more apparent that these oversexualized ads and magazine covers are the beginning, the gateway so to speak, to the harmful ideals about sex and porn in our society.”

Pornography addictions share similar characteristics to drug addictions, including the tendency for escalation. About 1.9 million people use cocaine, and 2 million use heroine. But about 40 million Americans regularly view porn. Eventually, regular porn viewing creates trails in the brain that shape the default perspective on sex and relationships to pornography’s mold and the resulting sexual expectations.

And whether it’s hard-core or culturally acceptable soft porn, pornography causes men to objectify women—viewing them as objects rated by their sexual attractiveness rather than relational human beings, Brand said. Pornography also reduces trust between couples, hyper-sexualizes society, and can cause some people to abandon hope for sexual monogamy and accept promiscuity as natural, all affects Brand admitted experiencing.

“It’s making it impossible for us to relate to our own sexuality, our own psychology, and our own spirituality,” Brand said. “Porn is not something I like, it’s not something I’ve been able to make a long-term commitment to not looking at, and it’s affecting my ability to relate to women, to relate to myself, to my own sexuality, to my own spirituality.”