Troubling issues of consent and pleasure — and the role of pornography — need to be approached more critically and more explicitly. And as an upright suburban mother with two pairs of Uggs and a self-imposed curfew of 10pm, it is surely more appropriate for me to be exploring such topics as ideas for leftover porridge and the best heated clothes airers than, for eg, the ethics of violent porn.
The third reason came as quite a surprise. On the set of a porn film an actor lost his erection mid-scene — to coax it back, he turned away from the woman, naked below him, grabbed his phone and searched Pornhub. Which struck me as vaguely apocalyptic, but even so, I attempted to offer a nuanced argument against burning the whole sex project down.
Little did I know this piece would open the floodgates to a new kind of troll, a community that believes Jews control the porn industry and are using it to enslave men, destroy society and break down families.
They said I was, as per, on the payroll of Big Israel, promoting pornography while jangling my chains. Something is rotten in the state of sex. But murder is at one end of a wedge that sharpens to a blunt edge, where thousands of women meet thousands of men online, and go home with them to have sex that, due to the proliferation of violence in porn, veers in seconds from confusing to traumatic.
There are groups, spanning left and right, who continue to argue it should be banned. But technology never goes backwards and sexuality is cryptic and layered, its tentacles stretching beyond the internet. The answer will be more complicated than turning porn off at the wall. Combatting this draw towards violent porn will surely involve a serious cultural push to dismantle ideas about the place of women in society and a reckoning with what it tells us about the anxieties running darkly through our shared hard-drives.
