Words: Elliot Bourke (he/him)
Pornography now sits at a wild impasse: opposed to societal ideals on “purity”, yet rampantly more exposed than ever.
Has porn, soaring in its hedonistic glory with wings of sexual secrecy and exploitation, been shot down “duck hunt style” by bullets built by its own convenience? Has it ballooned too much to be unavoidable? An anti-Icarus: too heavy to fly from the conspiratorial moon it spawned from? Porn has seeped its way into most eyes from every device, with all ages and minds building a respondent image towards the titan of the porn process. From the stereotypical shifty-eyed and sleazy ritual of sneaking playboys under beds, to the plethoric noise and vast belly of online erotica stretching deep below, attitudes to porn have shifted erratically in the transition from physical to digital; from a private and tepid shame to a torrid late-stage capitalistic nightmare powered by the same noise shaping addiction that pervades modern media. With evidence from CEASE (Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation) showing alarming correlations between pornography, misogyny, and children, online porn sites have recently received legislation in the UK that calls for online legal age verification security in an attempt to protect children, a move that has received criticism and support across the political spectrum – similar effects now entering the EU. Pornography now sits at a wild impasse: opposed to societal ideals on “purity”, yet rampantly more exposed than ever.
In the wildness of this model my mind jumps to Jackie Treehorn – the antagonistic 1990s adult filmmaker in The Big Lebowski – speaking in his Malibu home with the bygone hippy figure of The Dude about the future of adult entertainment: ‘100% electronic’. His forward-thinking intuition betrays his direction of the evolution of his industry, an abandonment of the material for the digital. For discretion I will not quote The Dude’s response, though rest assured in its (then) modern spirituality, crudely rejects capitalist convenience in the world of adult entertainment.
It is easy to pair digitisation with automation; entertainment is easier than ever to access and consume. If we sink our teeth into some raw data, the 4 horsemen of Pornhub, xVideos, xnxx, and xHamster all received more global monthly visitors than Amazon, LinkedIn, Netflix, Zoom, and eBay combined during the 2020 lockdown. Though hard to accurately track, the uptick in porn consumption is often mapped directly with the increase in online activity, especially among young males. Interestingly, the 60s/70s male cohort that spawned people like The Dude expose themselves in figures that show only a very small decline in their porn consumption in the same period; post-”manual” (Jeff Lebowski’s indiscrete retort). Additionally, in young women porn consumption has seen a tripling in viewers from the demographic following the advent of the internet. Studies have speculatively attributed this increase across the board to the anonymity enabled by online porn services. The assumption, unsurprisingly, can then be safely made that more people than ever are consuming porn in a digital age.
Mounting research in Australia sheds light on a darker envelopment to the over exposure of online pornography. Young people in Australia consistently see pornography years before their first sexual experience. Similarly Dignify, a UK charity, have found that 32% of children have seen porn, with the average first view at 12 years old. CEASE’s evidence displays pornography’s entrenchment in “misogyny”, with research indicating 94.4% of aggression in pornography targets women, highlighting, in my opinion, the key factor in the addictive rise of digital pornography, besides its convenient sexual pleasure – algorithms. CEASE states the misogynistic nature of porn feeds the algorithms of younger people into the arms of “hypermasculine”, radical figures like Andrew Tate, who build echo chambers based on sexism and toxic masculinity. The recent Online Safety Act has attempted to protect children from the harmful distortion that digitised porn facilitates and feeds off, requiring a government Digital ID as proof of age in accessing adult websites. However, this move has been criticised by considering the nature of the Digital ID program.
The Digital ID is marketed by the Tony Blair Institute as a ‘new system that brings fairness, control, and convenience’ in peoples ‘interactions… with the state.’ Heavily funded by Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, who now currently runs TikTok’s operations in the US, the Tony Blair Institute’s Digital ID plan has created a space within porn sites that now requires extremely sensitive information to be held by third-party porn websites, and, importantly, an account to be created that will track every millisecond of porn viewing, further cementing an algorithmic connection to the viewer and the media. The government’s own guidance touches on evidence of algorithms facilitating addiction; what is being created might increase porn addiction in those who are already past the digital gates.
Lesser-known porn websites have seized the opportunity to completely ignore these laws to gain more traffic. As of writing, these sites have refused to respond to formal information notices – whether they face the £18 million fine or a 10% worldwide revenue tax if they refuse to comply with government regulations, well we will have to wait and see.
This raises two important concerns: first, that media corporations may profit from cross-platform algorithmic traffic generated by government-regulated porn accounts capable of more effectively tracking user behaviour; and second, that the government itself may be financially benefiting from websites whose popularity has increased by making porn more accessible to children.
Perhaps this is a journalistic spin, one can accurately hope that underage traffic on adult sites will plummet thanks to these new laws. OnlyFans has already been fined £1 million after failing to provide accurate age regulation in March of 2025. The journey taken in our interaction with pornography has been marred by many of the same problems facing media, addiction, sexism, and late-stage capitalistic practice in the digital age. I only hope that through forms of regulation and education, the misogynistic, addictive, and exploitative nature of modern porn can be broken..
