Georgia L Gilholy is a journalist.
“Pornocracy” by Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel is not the most festive of reads. This short but informative new book excruciatingly details how, “from rewiring our brains and normalising sexual violence, to shaping new protest movements, the pornographic revolution has achieved a stunning and near-total victory.”
Anyone who has spoken to teachers, parents, or teenagers knows that pornography is no longer a marginal vice. It is generally the first type of sexual education children receive, delivered by dodgy algorithms , and rarely challenged in public.
For years, our politicians have treated this phenomenon as awkward but untouchable. There is some half-hearted attempt to mitigate it via school assemblies, trigger warnings and the occasional safeguarding poster. In some cases it is even celebrated, with third-sector education services being welcomed into classrooms where they tell children that porn is simply an option and a matter of private choice.
As Bartosch and Jessel explain, modern pornography is not about titillation so much as escalation. The most extreme material is often the most profitable, and platforms make so much money from encouraging these compulsions that we have no clue just how much wealth this pseudo “industry” has amassed. The younger the user, the longer the customer lifespan, and these profiteers know this.
This is why legal intervention matters. We already have the tools, or at least the outlines of them. The Online Safety Act gestures in the right direction on age verification and platform responsibility, but enforcement remains timid. Ofcom has been handed sweeping powers, yet has shown far more enthusiasm for policing conservative speech than for confronting an industry that exposes children to explicit material at the click of a button. Regulation without teeth merely reassures ministers while leaving incentives untouched.
More serious reform would accept a basic truth: demand drives harm. This is why the logic of the Nordic Model, criminalising the purchase of sex while decriminalising those sold, deserves proper consideration in the British context. It recognises that exploitation is sustained by buyers, not abstractions. The same principle applies to pornography. If you want less harm, you must make it harder to buy, sell and profit from it at scale.
Critics will inevitably cry nanny state, but we have already tried their way, and it does not work. Non-intervention is not neutral. The law already shapes behaviour; it simply does so in favour of the most powerful commercial interests. Refusing to act is an active decision to permit Silicon Valley and offshore payment processors to dictate what British children see and absorb.
Still, it would be dishonest to pretend that legislation alone can fix this.
Internet pornography did not expand merely because Parliament ignored or embraced it. It flourished alongside family breakdown, the loss of shared social spaces, and a culture increasingly unwilling to speak in moral terms at all. Teachers are now expected to double as social workers and mop up the consequences managing warped expectations around sex and consent while simultaneously being told it is not their place to judge.
This is why law must be seen as a necessary starting point, not a magic solution.
Past moral reforms like the fight against Atlantic slavery succeeded not just because rules changed, but because attitudes did. Exploitation became shameful rather than chic. The same mind shift is required here, once again on an international scale.
What is striking is how selective our outrage has become. We obsess over language and “microaggressions”, while tolerating an industry that eroticises domination and humiliation. We talk endlessly about safeguarding, while allowing children to encounter explicit material at the click of a button.
We need to firmly and unapologetically change incentives, reduce exposure and draw lines. But unless we also recover the confidence to defend restraint, dignity and responsibility as public goods, regulation will always lag behind reality. Pornography did not win because the law failed alone.
It won because we stopped believing that limits were worth defending, especially if what ought to be beyond the pale can be monetised.