All porn is ‘violence against women,’ U.K. parliamentary committee says

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An All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) studying sexual exploitation in the United Kingdom says that not only is porn a major contributor to real-world violence, it is violence. The group is calling on U.K. lawmakers to enact a bevy of new laws regulating porn.

Their concerns are not just about coercion in the porn industry, porn’s availability to minors, or other common worries. Rather, the group echoes old radical feminist tropes about pornography—that there is no such thing as ethical porn, that it’s all “exploitation,” and its mere existence is “a form of violence against women.”

Sigh.

All-Party Parliamentary Groups “have no official status within Parliament,” according to the Parliament website. Nonetheless, “these groups can sometimes be influential,” it says. A 2022 report from the House of Commons Committee on Standards called them “a vital part of how Parliament works.”

So it’s worrying to see statements like these from Diana Johnson, a member of Parliament and chair of the APPG on Commercial Sexual Exploitation: “It’s now high time that Government acted and recognised the damage caused by the pornography industry to the lives and the safety of women.”

The committee calls for things such as mandatory age verification for porn websites (a scheme that may sound good but is almost impossible to implement—and has tons of privacy concerns, since it means all visitors turning over identification—in practice) and also more vague changes, like addressing porn “as commercial sexual exploitation, and a form of violence against women, in legislation and policy.”

The group also calls for giving all performers a right to veto their images being online at any time, even if they have previously consented and been paid for their work. This would not only create major problems for porn producers and distributors but be completely unworkable in practice, since something uploaded to the internet has a way of traveling even if folks later wish it wouldn’t.

The committee’s new report—Pornography regulation: The case for Parliamentary reform—repeats a number of unfounded or debunked theses about porn, like the idea that it’s a major driver of off-screen violence against women and sexist attitudes.

In fact, there’s research showing that people who watch porn may hold more egalitarian views than those who don’t.

And while some research has shown a potential link between high levels of sexual aggression and high levels of porn consumption (among both women and men), there’s nothing proving that this is causal (that is, that porn consumption drives aggression). Aggression could drive people to watch more porn, or some third factor could drive both.

And if pornography were really fueling real-world violence, we would expect to see violent crime rising as the internet has made porn much more widely accessible over the past three decades. Instead, this is a period in which murder, sexual assault, and other violent crime rates have largely decreased.

Some research has shown that people who commit rape actually consume less porn than those who aren’t rapists. And the failure to find links between viewing porn—in the olden days or now—and committing violence goes way back.

“Exposure to pornography during adolescence had little effect on persons who later became rapists and child molesters,” the Associated Press reported 53 years ago on the findings of a presidential commission on pornography. Rather, “sexual deviates generally came from homes where pornography was restricted and sex was never discussed,” and “most deviates had been severely punished as teenagers by their parents when caught with pornographic material.”

Taken together, evidence suggests that banning pornography or severely punishing people who watch it could even lead to an increase in violence against women. Meanwhile, cracking down on internet porn platforms could not only hurt the livelihoods of many independent performers and content creators, it could also drive people into riskier avenues of sex work.

Perhaps the U.K. porn commission would know this if they actually talked to anyone in the porn industry or to a variety of researchers on porn, sexual violence, and media effects. Instead, the committee concluded its inquiry after hearing “from leading figures in the US Christian anti-porn lobby but no sex workers,” notes Vice.

“The inquiry did hear from individuals specialising in children’s safety,” points out Vice‘s Sophia Smith Galer. “But the inquiry also heard from prominent figures in anti-porn advocacy, such as Dr Gail Dines, and figures associated with the Christian-backed anti-porn lobby in the US.”

These are not figures taking a cool-headed look at the effects of pornography but people—like Laila Mickelwait of Traffickinghub and Haley McNamara of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Morality in Media)—who explicitly call for abolishing all sex work and say all sex work is sex trafficking, even when participants do not claim to be forced or coerced. (See Reason‘s May 2022 cover story, “The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet,” for more on these crusaders.)

And the academic researchers the committee talked to were not folks actually studying porn effects themselves but, largely, men who have made a name for themselves being Good Male Feminist Allies, talking about things like “toxic masculinity,” or women whose work is focused on defining all sex work as exploitation.

There are definitely discussions to be had about best practices for preventing children from viewing porn, the (unfortunately outsized) role of porn in sex education, how best to prevent exploitation and coercion within the porn industry, how to best help people who feel “addicted” to porn, and things like that. But these are complex topics that require nuanced discussion and viewpoints, and none is helped by a simplistic “all porn is bad” narrative.

FREE MINDS

The SAFE TECH Act is anything but safe. A new proposal from Democrats in Congress would upend the internet as we know it. Dubbed the “Safeguarding Against Fraud, Exploitation, Threats, Extremism and Consumer Harms (SAFE TECH) Act,” the bill—introduced by Mark Warner (D–Va.) in the Senate and Kathy Castor (D–Fla.) in the House—is a redux of a bill first introduced in 2021. Techdirt Editor in Chief Mike Masnick called the earlier version “a dumpster fire of cluelessness.” And this year’s bill doesn’t appear to be any better:

The SAFE TECH Act is yet another stab at undermining Section 230 of federal communications law. As it stands, Section 230 protects tech platforms—large and small—and their users from civil liability for content created by others.

[…] The first change the SAFE TECH Act would make is to say [Section 230] doesn’t apply when “the provider or user has accepted payment to make the speech available or, in whole or in part, created or funded the creation of the speech.”

This would open up a huge range of tech companies to more liability. Blogging platforms like WordPress and newsletter and podcast distributors like Substack would be vulnerable, as would any social media platform that provides a paid tier level (like Twitter Blue).

So would all sorts of web hosting services—creating huge incentives for providers to cut off web hosting access to any person or group even slightly controversial.

And this change “would also threaten liability on any service that shares its advertising revenue with creators, for instance as YouTube does,” as law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh pointed out when the SAFE TECH Act first came out. This would create incentives for platforms to cut off or severely limit creator monetization schemes, meaning “creators would thus be less likely to earn money from their works.”

In addition, “the section would threaten liability whenever any providers provide grants to support local journalism or other such projects (something like the Google News Initiative),” noted Volokh. “Providers would thus become less likely to directly or indirectly support journalism and other expression.”

So, already, the SAFE TECH Act would usher in an array of negative incentives—and that’s just with its first change. Alas, the bill would also change a lot more.

Read the rest here.

FREE MARKETS

Do young conservatives still care about the free market? A depressing dispatch from the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, courtesy of Reason‘s Emma Camp:

Of the dozen young conservative voters Reason interviewed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a significant majority voiced waning support for free market values, instead favoring regulation, protectionism, and cultural war zeal to battle abortion, “wokeness” in schools, “cancel culture,” and globalism. 

“There has been a rethinking throughout the movement of the laissez faire–style economics. And that rethinking is to use more regulation toward things that Republicans feel are targeting them,” said Zachary Wanuga, a senior at Salisbury University. “So, for instance, Republicans are for free markets, they’re against breaking up businesses and regulating them. However, they’re taking a different approach now to the issue of Big Tech censorship, and they would like to see more censorship, they would like to see regulation.”

Jacob Ashley, a 19-year-old student at Ohio Northern University, repeated the sentiment. “I tend more nationalistic and ‘America First’ than opening up the free market completely,” said Ashley. “Globalization has done some damage, particularly to our culture and national identity.”

See also: Conservatives at CPAC Criticize—and Misunderstand—Section 230

QUICK HITS

• The U.S. is expected to announce even more aid for Ukraine today. The new military aid package will be “worth roughly $400 million and comprised mainly of ammunition,” Reuters reports.

• Documents released by Arizona’s new Attorney General show that “former Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich declined to publish investigative findings by his office that disproved 2020 election fraud claims.”

• “A government watchdog has found that the Secret Service and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit repeatedly failed to obtain the correct legal paperwork when carrying out invasive cell phone surveillance,” reports TechCrunch.

• TikTok is introducing a 60-minute screen time limit for minors.

• Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wis.) attempts some dairy industry protectionism once again:



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