The College Fix

David Cameron has been waging a war against violent pornography in the UK of late, and has sought especially to curb access to child porn and porn that simulates rape. These aims ought to have unanimous support. Instead, they have inspired no small amount of controversy.

Predictably, some have raised protest against government censorship–all in the name of freedom of speech.As the Daily Mail reported, “Preposterously, some even say his default block on obscene sites would filter out educational material on sexual health – or works of fine art such as Rubens’s Rape of the Sabine Women. This is all smokescreen and sophistry.”

Of course opponents of censorship are using “sex education” as a smokescreen. How will the poor children learn how to put on a condom without access to rape porn? Give me a break.

But even among those who genuinely desire to eliminate or else reduce the bane of hard core pornography, there are many who doubt whether Cameron’s efforts will do any good.

A former classmate of mine at Yale, Kate Maltby, who is British, wrote an opinion piece for The Telegraph expressing her support for the intention behind the ban, but her doubts about whether it can really make a difference.

She recalls the encounters we students had with the porn industry during the infamous Yale Sex Week.

“By the time I’d arrived at Yale for my first Sex Week in 2008… the event had morphed into a hundred-panel festival, including sex parties and fringe events, sponsored by global pornography companies with deep pockets…

Halfway through Sex Week 2008 was a screening of pornographic films. …There was no pretense that all the characters were having a jolly good time. The first few images were of extreme bondage and sexual submission: whips, chains, Gothic dungeons…”

What Ms. Maltby is describing was reported elsewhere as a screening of “fantasy rape.” And it’s one of many such troubling episodes I recounted my book, Sex and God at Yale.

So far, Maltby and I agree–this sort of thing is intolerable. Where we disagree, however, is on the point of what should be done about it. “Porn, of all kinds, never goes away when it’s banned. It just finds new hiding places. And if Yale taught me anything, it’s that deviant sexuality always finds a place to go,” she writes.

I, on the other hand, think we must do what we can to fight back against the ever-more extreme filth of hard core pornography–even if we can never utterly rid society of it. There are many evils, after all, which we cannot effectively prevent in society, but which we nevertheless ought to criminalize. Sexual crimes, in particular, are often difficult to police and hard to prosecute. Yet we all agree that the government must do all it can to bring justice in those cases. Likewise, the fact that we can never fully abolish things like child porn or so-called “rape porn” should not dissuade us from doing all we can.

The mainstreaming of the most extreme and violent kinds of pornography is one of the chief forces shaping this generation of young people. It is a problem unique to the internet age. Images that are almost unimaginable in their perversity are a couple clicks away on the computer. This simple fact is shaping an entire generation’s views on sex and gender.

Never before has pornography been so violent, so misogynistic, so widespread, so difficult to avoid, and therefore so addictive and dangerous. The consequences are dire. And if I needed any convincing of that fact, I got it recently when I learned that someone I knew as a youth is now in prison for possession of child pornography he obtained online. What a shock that news was. But, then again, hardly anything feels all that surprising anymore.

Bottom line: We have a moral responsibility to do all we can to eliminate child porn and violent, simulated rape porn from society. Even if we are not successful, we are still obliged to do what we can. British citizens ought to be pleased with David Cameron’s efforts, despite their understandable doubts about the long-term effectiveness of those efforts.

And for those who want to raise a banner for free speech on this issue, I suggest you reconsider. The freedom of speech is a principle based on a respect for the worth of each individual person–that’s something that is utterly at odds with the way people are debased and abused in by the hardcore porn industry.

Nathan Harden is editor of The College Fix and author of the book SEX & GOD AT YALE: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad.

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