The Moral Panic over 'Sexualisation'

When I was running a streaming adult movie site in 2007, two business threats appeared almost simultaneously—one from the market and the other from the state. The first was the arrival on the scene of YouPorn and a plethora of similar “tube” sites, which provided free streaming content. Within a couple of years, the tubes had ravaged the global pornography industry and put most players out of business. With their retail base annihilated, many of the big production studios were snapped up by Manwin (which later became Mindgeek), the owner of the biggest tube sites, and it gained a near-monopoly over what remained of the industry. My business limped on for a few more years, but from the autumn of 2007 onward, we saw a consistent month-on-month decline in sales.

The second threat came from what are euphemistically called British media regulators. Ofcom—a huge state-funded body with a wide range of responsibilities—maintained a tight grip on TV and radio, and the British Board of Film Classification or BBFC (a private business) enjoyed a government monopoly on censoring cinema and DVD releases. Video-on-demand broke a system of British state censorship that had been carefully constructed over decades. Using an obscure EU directive—the Audiovisual Media Services Directive or AVMS—as an excuse, regulatory bodies began trying to justify Internet censorship (note that AVMS was not designed to censor the Internet, and was implemented in most EU countries without any attempt to censor online content). The mechanism they seized upon was to mandate age verification of all visitors to all porn sites, arguing that whilst adults should have the right to watch smut, children should not. This was clever positioning and quite different from the earlier position of the British state that pornography posed a threat to anyone who watched it. To oppose this draconian new mechanism would involve defending the idea that teenagers might watch adult material. Read Full Article »