The Human Costs of Pornography

Some years ago while viewing pornography I unexpectedly noticed something I did not want to recognize: subtle signs of self-harm on part of the woman’s body known only in intimate contexts. There are different kinds of self-harm that imply different things about the sufferer’s mental state; vertical slashes up the wrist indicate active suicidal ideation while horizontal cuts, unlikely to be fatal, imply a cry for help. But, scars that are neither conspicuous nor lethal imply a desire for solitary suffering. Secret suffering, presumably hidden from those closest to her, but not her online voyeurs.

This heady mix of sex and self-mutilation proved such a potent concoction as to quickly render all porn irrepressibly repugnant, not unlike Alex’s fate in A Clockwork Orange. In the wake of my suddenly permanently altered thinking, new insights about what makes porn so bad began to emerge; instead of an isolated problem, the pornification of society seems increasingly central to the crisis of disintegrating relations between the sexes. One starting point to examine these issues is Elayne Allen’s Public Discourse piece “Sex Work is Scaling,” which references an “unintentionally revealing” interview between Reason magazine and Aella, a prominent sex worker, data scientist, and internet personality.

In her interview, Aella highlights the economic opportunity afforded sex workers by selling their bodies – opportunity without which she and numerous other women would be far worse off. Though Aella is a libertarian, her views are echoed by leftwing outlets who charge that restricting sex work effectively steals money from the most vulnerable, since poor women are the most likely to sell sex. Interestingly, when asked to “explain the class differences in types of sex work,” she responds:

I did a survey of a bunch of escorts and found that the amount of bad things they encountered, like sexual assault … was pretty strongly correlated with their price range. Basically, the more money you charge, you’re pricing yourself out of more sketchy clientele. The people who are going to be paying you $1,000 an hour are not going to sexually assault you. They’re a lawyer or a doctor or a politician or someone who just doesn’t want to mess with that.

Both the parallels between her own libertarian thinking and progressive views on prostitution as well as Aella’s description of the variance in violence against sex workers warrant further analysis.

Continue reading at Mere Orthodoxy here.