The site appears not to care one bit for our laws or for the safety and rights of women and children
There is one thing that the Labour Party could do tomorrow to improve your sex life. I know no one wants to bring Sir Keir into the bedroom but hear me out: the time has come to ban PornHub.
Outlawing free porn aggregator sites is the right thing to do to protect children. But it would also make adults healthier and happier – and if the Prime Minister stands up to the free porn industry in this way he might even be able to extricate himself from a revolt on his back benches.
This week Number 10 told Labour MPs to vote against an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that would ban porn depicting sex between step-relatives. Its argument is that to do so would criminalise representations of acts that are legal between consenting adults in real life.
Naturally a number of MPs have made it clear that they will vote against the Government when the issue returns to the Commons. This is clearly an issue of confidence because, as Baroness Bertin of Battersea pointed out when she introduced the amendment, abuse by step-parents accounts for half of child sex crimes.
The Government’s position is also nonsensical; it has already moved to ban porn that depicts choking on the grounds that it leads to real-world harm.
And since when did the Labour Party care about staying out of our bedrooms? It has required adults, for example, to hand over their IDs and submit to facial age recognition tests to access online porn in an attempt to prevent children from being bombarded with it.
To meet the rules, many porn sites have contracted ID verification companies that are widely used to carry out pre-employment background checks. That’s enough to make even those with the most mainstream proclivities sweat.
But PornHub appears not to care one bit for our laws or for the safety and rights of women and children. In 2018 it launched its own “VPNHub” app. In practice this would allow users, including children, to dodge the age verification rules in place at that time. (Although PornHub stated it launched the VPN to protect the privacy of its users). PornHub has faced claims in the past that it failed to, or outright refused to, take down child sex abuse content as well as videos uploaded without the consent of the people in them.
And it and other aggregators stay free because people can upload their own content and monetise it. This system facilitates and encourages abuse in itself because the algorithmic nature of these sites leads people towards illegal material by serving them increasingly titillating (read: extreme) videos.
All this suffering, and for what – so that people can continue to get their rocks off for free to the benefit of sites that openly harm their users? The Government should ban PornHub and proscribe free porn sites just as strictly as PirateBay and sanctioned Russian news sites.
Porn should be something we pay for, just as we all pay for non-explicit entertainment through Netflix and Spotify.
Making this the norm would protect adults from being dragged down rabbit holes that could put them in jail. It would also more effectively protect children – who don’t have bank accounts and are hardly going to ask their parents for access – from getting ahold of the content in the first place.
We would be healthier if we got comfortable paying for porn we actually want, just as we did when explicit content lived only in top-shelf magazines and cassette tapes: this was a time when porn addiction, an issue now thought to affect one in 20 people, was so rare as to be anomalous.
Of course the priority must be to protect children and the victims of sexual exploitation. But we should also spare a thought for the many young men suffering from erectile dysfunction. One survey has found that one in three 16-to-24-year-old British men experience this in more than half of their sexual encounters. It is difficult not to imagine free porn has played some role in this tragic state of affairs.
For these sites have robbed so many people of their full sexuality. At a recent event on the impacts of porn on young people, held at the Lords, I listened to one young man in his twenties bravely describe how he was repeatedly exposed to explicit content at the age of just eleven.
In his teenage years, as he began to use porn compulsively, and the initial confusion and fear he first experienced matured into crippling guilt and shame. He admitted that he began to see women merely as objects, and still has difficulties in intimate relationships to this day despite the fact he has given up on porn.
The disappearance of free porn would surely do much to reverse the sex drought afflicting Britain. Its constant availability has seeped into every aspect of our culture. It has turned music, art, TV shows and films – not to mention our social media feeds – into tedious horny slop where everything is oversexed and nothing is genuinely erotic.
Far from being puritanical or anti-sex, a ban on free porn sites would be the most pro-sex policy any government could introduce. It would also protect a new generation from a cycle of harm. There is no reason not to rid ourselves of this stuff for good.