No Taboo Is Safe

The sexual revolution rests on consent, but porn monetises its violation

This is late coming out - it was my daughter’s birthday over the weekend and I’ve been unwell since. But if I’m honest it also took a while to process this news story, and find a way to respond that wasn’t just rage or weeping. Because sometimes a case comes along that is so profoundly, unfathomably wicked it’s difficult even to know how to write about it: and the crimes of Dominique Pélicot, 71, currently on trial in France, fall into this category.

In a case that has shocked the public in France and beyond, he has admitted repeatedly drugging his wife of 50 years, Gisèle Pélicot, while men he recruited via a porn website raped her. As others abused his unconscious wife, according to allegations, Pélicot would watch and film. There are no words adequate to the depths of monstrosity needed to embark on a calculated betrayal of intimacy on this scale. I can only hope that justice is done in the trial and the victim and her children can find some closure in the process.

What I want to focus on here is the degree to which the atrocities themselves are bound up in and emblematic of the porn industry’s central operation: the monetisation of taboo.

Though pornographic art of course predates the sexual revolution, its large-scale form is a direct byproduct of that revolution. Central to this, as I’ve often noted in these pages, was the technological de-risking of real-life sexual intimacy through contraception. Though, again, the sex industry existed before the Pill, it was only with the advent of fairly reliable contraception that it became possible to imagine that who you have sex with, when, and how, is a purely private matter. And as night follows day, the privatisation of sex produced libertarian defences of buying and selling sex, including to produce porn.

Did the overall benefits of the sexual revolution outweigh the tradeoff of a mushrooming sex industry? Reasonable people may differ. But wherever you stand on this, it’s not a coincidence that after the Pill was legalised in the 1960s, it took barely a decade for the porn industry to explode to a scale that triggered feminist protest - and, in due course, also libertarian feminist support. The feminist ‘sex wars’ of that era are complex and merit a post or three on their own, but turned in essence on a conflict between those who saw women’s interests as best served by a defence of sexual freedom, including to make or consume porn, and those who argued that porn was structurally misogynistic and both enacted and legitimised violence against women. In the end, the libertarians won.

But the radical feminists were onto something. For the central mechanism of porn is the transgression of taboo. The most obvious of these is seeing people have sex, at all: even today, in our now very sexually liberal culture, everyone understands that it’s forbidden to rut in public. Porn makes money out of breaching this basic omertá, in a dynamic where the thrill of seeing forbidden things is at least as much part of the stimulus as the stimulating effect of watching or imagining the acts themselves. In turn, this interacts paradoxically with the ongoing drive behind the sexual revolution: the liberation of sexual expression and desire from social constraint. For, having uncoupled sex from procreation, there is no theoretical reason save perhaps the force of habit for any normative boundaries to be placed on sexual expression whatsoever. Given that sex is a private matter you should, in this view, be free to do literally anything you want, our post-revolutionary consensus asserts, provided it’s safe, sane, and consensual.

But the difficulty with this is that for many people - paraphiliacs especially - the thrill of eroticism lies precisely in the forbidden nature of a desire. Logically, then, the more desires are normalised, the more difficult it becomes to find something sufficiently taboo to give you the tingles. And this is wildly accelerated by the smartphone revolution.

A little while back I argued in the WSJ that the trade-offs implied in the Sex Wars’ libertarian victory were probably, for most people, acceptable within the specific media environment of the 1980s. Here, it was relatively easy to control access to forbidden material: specialist shops, top-shelf magazines and so on. So while it was understood that a certain amount of exploitation happened, it was on a small enough scale to be, after a fashion, tolerable. But smartphones have radically changed that calculus, by making pornographic material so much more readily available. As a result, the taboo-violating mechanism of porn has been turbocharged beyond all recognition, and spread beyond anything the sex libertarians of the 1980s could have imagined.

Research suggests the behavioral conditioning accomplished by the cycle of pornographic stimulus and orgasmic dopamine spike is similar to drug addiction. In turn, some studies suggest heavy porn users become desensitized over time, driving a search for ever more extreme content in order to replicate the same ‘high’. Meanwhile the technology itself incentivises the production of extreme or grotesque material, via a competitive attention economy that rewards clickbait. These neurological, technological, and commercial incentives drive sexual desensitisation and abuse on multiple axes: 90% of online porn features verbal, physical, and sexual violence toward women.

And lest it’s not bad enough that we should be normalising violence against women on this scale, its deeper impact comes into focus too: the fact that this is not a state but a vector with force and direction. Taboo-violation is a process: once enough people are conditioned to eroticise taboo-violation they will begin to run through, and gradually to exhaust, the tingles to be gained from even the “permitted” taboos, that are viewed as just edgy rather than outright illegal. And we are running out of ‘licit’ taboos (such as merely slapping, choking or urinating on women) and hearing a steady persistent tapping upon the sexual revolution’s foundational taboo: consent itself. In particular, obvious violations of “consent” such as assaults on animals, children, or obviously unwilling or unconscious victims.

Dominique Pélicot was one such. He met the men who abused his wife on a chat forum titled “A son insu” (without them knowing), at a now-closed website that also hosted pornographic material. The website’s specific focus was sexually violating the unaware: non-consensual by definition. He was initially caught by police while using a camera to peer up some unsuspecting woman’s skirt, and it was when they searched his computer that the decade of abuse against his wife was discovered. The common theme in both kinds of violation was the victim’s remaining unaware. A similar urge to find new taboos to violate stands behind the case, currently subject of an ongoing lawsuit against Pornhub, of a 12-year-old boy who was drugged and raped, with videos of his abuse then published and monetised on Pornhub. As with Gisèle Pélicot, the violation of consent is the point.

The central claim of the sexual revolution is that we can make sex “safe” and therefore need place no guard-rails on the specifics save individual consent, which is sacrosanct. But those who act as though we can safeguard against sexual wrongdoing, simply by emphasising consent in this way, are at best woefully naive. For the driving impetus of the porn industry that revolution also unleashed is monetising the exposure of taboo: a direction of travel that always ends in violence, violation, and atrocity.