If you’re a Christian reading Pornocracy, the slim new polemic from British advocates Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel, I bet you’ll find yourself nodding along.
Here’s the thesis: Pornography is bad. So far, so agreed. Yet Bartosch and Jessel make explicit that they aren’t writing from a traditional Christian sexual ethic. Their justified anger is decidedly not about the degradation of God’s good creation. It arises less from a moral framework about what sex should be and more from an understanding of what it most certainly shouldn’t be: violent, exploitative, and harmful to women and children.
That negative framework is good so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.
The evidence the two writers provide for what they do claim is familiar. But seeing so many facts thus marshaled in one place is disturbing to say the least. Highly addictive and extremely accessible, pornography websites push their gradually desensitized users toward ever-more-extreme material, recommending scenes of rape, incest, and “pseudo-child abuse” (in which young-looking adults wear braces and lick lollipops).
What users watch online seeps off the screen. In 2023, a French agency “reviewed millions of videos on the biggest international pornography websites, and found that 90% featured verbal, physical and sexual violence towards women,” Pornocracy notes. In turn, studies have documented an actual increase in choking and slapping among young people during sex. Another analysis revealed the popularity of keywords like “barely legal” or “teen.” Some men convicted of possessing child sexual assault material, Pornocracy points out, “had no sexual interest in children before using porn.” The “pursuit of variety”—a search for “schoolgirl”—eventually led them somewhere criminal.
Most porn users are men, and Bartosch and Jessel are sympathetic to their plight. “Generations raised with smartphones have now seen scenes of rape, choking, and incest before experiencing their first (real-life) kiss,” they lament. Too many young men have lost their “ability to enjoy fulfilling, respectful relationships,” instead programmed to “react to what they see on screen rather than to value and find mutual pleasure with their partners.” Porn teaches boys that “to be a man is to be impervious to intimacy and empathy.”
But the most pronounced victims of the porn industry, Bartosch and Jessel make clear, are women—exploited for “cash, clicks, and subscriber counts” online, subjected to increasingly rough sex in the bedroom, and humiliated by deepfakes. For those who argue that access to pornography is a “human right” and protest that opposition is “prudish,” the writers have nothing but white-hot scorn.
As “zombie feminists have continued to censoriously carp about microaggressions and trivialities,” they cry, middle school girls are exploited by classmates who strip them naked with AI applications. Grown women walk around with bruises on their necks.
Pornocracy is a wrathful book. Bartosch and Jessel occasionally rage at the right; they’re dismissive, for instance, of a populist conservative movement that would strip women of the right to vote as a reaction against “divisive identity politics.” But mostly, they’re mad at the left. Unapologetic members of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) movement, they draw throughlines between queer theory, contemporary sexual education in schools, the rise of gender-nonbinary identifications, and violence against women.
However warranted, disdain as a modus operandi doesn’t always serve this book well. The authors’ decision to choose the most provocative examples to make their points (like a dance troupe of drag performers with Down syndrome) or being cute with language about serious subjects (like a chapter on gender nonconformity promising to “[follow] in the high-heeled footsteps of men who claim to be women”) sometimes makes their arguments feel more like viral tweets designed to provoke than the powerful, often common-sense claims that they are.
At their best, Bartosch and Jessel evince empathy for the young people whose sexual orientation and gender identity has been deformed by pornography, saving scorn for the platforms and institutions playing on these “malleable minds.” That includes major organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), whose “sex positive” guidelines Bartosch and Jessel castigate for providing “legitimacy and a framework” to create “highly sexualized and inappropriate lessons for children.”
On these matters, perhaps too aggressive is better than too tame. Scripture is crystal clear about how Christians are to respond to wickedness: “The fear of the Lord is to hate evil,” proclaims one proverb (Prov. 8:13). “Hate what is evil; cling to what is good,” echoes Paul (Rom. 12:9).
Evangelical readers can say amen to the fierce assertion that “pornography is shameful, and by ignoring or downplaying its dangers, our society’s leaders become bystanders whose silence allows evil to proliferate.” But we can’t help but notice the absence of the rest of the biblical sexual ethic—Christianity’s positive vision of sex within faithful, monogamous marriage between a man and a woman.
Some of the book’s reform proposals are correspondingly practical and predictable, including stricter age verification for online porn consumption, vetting the private pornography use of high-ranking legal officials and politicians before they’re promoted, changing sex education curricula in schools, and making prostitution illegal.
Other takeaways are more abstract. In a closing note, Bartosch cites the work of lesbian feminist Julia Long, a separatist who believes “women should simply ditch men.” Bartosch is sympathetic. “It makes better sense for women to swear off men than to put up with a partner that uses pornography,” she writes, though she does not believe “women will ever leave men en masse” and isn’t “sure that would be a desirable model of society.”
I take her point—women shouldn’t put up with their husbands’ pornography use out of fear of being typecast as puritan moralists. But even holding up separatism as an understandable impulse strikes me as a step in the wrong direction when it comes to mending the relationship between the sexes. It also ignores the many women who watch pornography. What are we to do with them?
Jessel offers a more gender-agnostic recommendation: Shame. Not, he clarifies, “the shame imposed by hierarchs and moralists” who “until quite recently, damned people for being same-sex attracted, and women for having any sexuality at all.” He doubles down: “My objections to pornography have little or nothing to do with faith-based morality. They are strictly Darwinian: shame tells us when we’re doing something that will harm ourselves, or the tribe.” It’s shameful, he insists, to “masturbate to scenes of coercion,” to “get off on incest and misogyny and much more besides.”
Pastor, Don’t Skip the Sex Talk
Amen again! Those activities are shameful indeed. But here, the Christian must offer something more. The same Scripture that tells us to hate evil and ruthlessly root it out of our hearts is also relentless in its assertion that we’ll always fall short; that repentance and corresponding mercy, not diffuse guilt and moral bootstrapping, must proceed from changed hearts and lives.
In their acknowledgments, the writers thank “religious conservatives” for being allies in the good fight. To the force of what these two secular thinkers have presented, may we add not only our hatred of evil but our proclamation of what’s good and the extension of a vision of grace to even the chief of sinners.
Kate Lucky is a senior features editor at Christianity Today.
Related
