PORNOGRAPHY is a vice which in today’s hyper-sexualised society adults assume they have a licence to use. Even those who don’t like it tend to accept the argument that whatever adults choose to do behind closed doors is no-one else’s business as long as neither children nor animals are involved.
So unassailable is this shibboleth that when former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries moaned in the Daily Mail about how her Online Safety Act had been hijacked and twisted into a weapon to restrict legitimate free speech she felt it necessary to qualify her intention to protect children from the ‘terrible things’ they would see online by saying: ‘I don’t care if grown adults want to look at pornography; not my cup of tea, but not my place to judge.’
But surely as a politician Ms Dorries had a responsibility to exercise her judgment on matters which are gravely harmful to the common good, and she would have had compelling grounds to scream from the rooftops that ubiquitous and extreme internet pornography is one of the greatest evils of our times.
It should have concerned her that a hell of sexual violence may be released at the mere push of a button wherever an iPhone and internet service exist together. As Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel reveal in their new book, Pornocracy, this is a world where women are filmed being choked, beaten, spat upon and sodomised in fantasies frequently involving incest, child abuse and rape. The ways in which performers are routinely violated are indeed so brutal that it is hard to imagine a more diabolical inversion of the truth and meaning of human sexuality, the dignity of women, the beauty of marriage and the role of the family. Nor does anyone have to search for online pornography. It is designed to seek people out. It is also designed to be addictive, which is all the more worrying when the average age that a child views it is estimated to be between 11 and 13 years, with some schools even encouraging children to look.
How did everyone forget that pornography depraves on contact and that such material is constantly associated with violent and sexual crimes against women? One only has to consider the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 by the police officer Wayne Couzens, a voracious consumer of pornography, to understand that its use has consequences which go far beyond a question of taste.
Ted Bundy, one of America’s most notorious and prolific serial killers, even directly acknowledged the role of pornography in his kidnap, rape and murder of dozens of women between 1974 and 1978.
‘I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence just like me and without exception every one of them was deeply involved in pornography – without question, without exception – deeply influenced and consumed by an addiction to pornography,’ he confessed in a video interview on the day of his execution in Florida in 1989.
That Fred West, the Gloucestershire builder who murdered at least 12 women between 1967 and 1987, also amassed a huge library of hard-core pornographic films should, in this light, surprise no-one.
These and the vast number of other cases suggest therefore that legislators and authorities who turn a blind eye to pornography consumption by anyone – whether children or adults – are failing by omission to protect the public. They also suggest that politicians like Labour MP Samantha Niblett, who seems to think that it is the job of the Government to actually promote pornography (which she admits to using as an aid to masturbation), are manifestly unfit to hold office.
The ineluctable fact is that pornographic depictions of violent rape result in precisely that and worse. It is a scandal that as such crimes become more prevalent, their news and shock value drop and they are scarcely reported at all, even when children are groomed and raped on a massive scale, as Danny Lockwood observes here.
Crown Prosecution Service data reveals that the UK is now in the midst of a national rape crisis of great enormity since reports of rape have trebled in the decade from 2014, when there were 20,000 complaints, to 2024 when there was an astronomical 68,000. The highest number of reported sexual offences in the history of the UK was in 2022 when a total of 193,566 complaints were made to the police. Perhaps it is a coincidence that the country is in the grip of an epidemic of rape at a time when extreme pornography has never been so readily available. Or does the prima facie evidence imply cause and effect?
Consider the distinctively pornographic element in the case of the two boys, aged 13 and 14, who in 2024 and 2025 raped girls in Fordingbridge, Hampshire – one at knifepoint – while laughing, encouraging each other and ‘brazenly filming’ the offences on their phones so they could put the content online. They were convicted at Southampton Crown Court but spared jail by Judge Nicholas Rowland who did not wish to criminalise them ‘unnecessarily’. The subsequent outcry against his leniency placed pressure on Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, to intervene, and Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, has since ordered a review the case.
In comments reported by the Daily Telegraph, Jess Phillips, the former Home Office minister who resigned this month, saw the significance of the offenders ‘essentially raping for content in order to put it on social media and share it to their friends’.
These children were not acting in vacuo but in the context of an environment in which violent pornography normalises rape. They were perhaps what the pornography industry euphemistically might call ‘content creators’, or manufacturers of ‘user generated content’. They are part of a seedy digital world in which making pornography is all the rage, driven by sites such as OnlyFans through which customers pay to watch ‘content creators’ exposing themselves and having sex of one kind of another. The company takes more than £4.5billion gross revenue a year, with the leading (and most extreme) performers also becoming wealthy while the vast majority make peanuts.
According to Louise Perry, the author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and A Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, there are 280,000 content creator accounts in the UK, meaning the country has one of the highest concentrations of DIY pornographers in the world. In an article in the Spectator, she estimated that about four per cent of British women aged between 18 and 34 have OnlyFans accounts, which looks suspiciously like speculative prostitution on a vast scale.
It is hardly surprising that therefore that the general perception of women is changing for the worse while simultaneously a backlash is stirring against how women are being accordingly treated by men and boys who think they are sexually available and that violence is the norm in sexual encounters. This response is led unsurprisingly by women with the guts to swim against the tide, a bit like those who opposed the transsexual seizure of women-only spaces. Bartosch, for instance, decries what she calls the ‘zombie feminism’ of those women who claim it is somehow liberating to be violated and defiled for fiscal gain, while Perry breaks ranks with generations of feminist academics to bravely advance traditional marriage as exceptionally good for women.
Another important new work of this emerging genre is Girls: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything by Freya India, a courageous exposé of how women have been horribly exploited by the digital revolution and its accompanying ideologies. India concludes with an idea which is truly radical and revolutionary and increasingly gaining currency among other people of her generation: that religious faith upholds and defends the dignity of women and is therefore liberating.
It is women such as these who are at the spearhead of an emerging resistance to the rape culture that the British establishment at present has no apparent desire to address. Their voices deserve to be heard.
