Why Banning Pornhub Doesn't Actually Address the Greater Issues at Hand

In a world where comprehensive sex education is threatened and stifled, porn fills in the gaps, providing sex education that it was never intended to provide.

I’ll give this warning up front. Our topic for the week, pornography, is controversial. And for good reason.

For starters, a quick definition. Pornography is an artistic form of sexually-explicit content. Theoretically, many things are considered pornographic, including written content, the reading of aural stories, and the visual representation of sexual acts.

Also pornographic. The beauty of this scene from Salzburg, where Julia and I spent Christmas two years ago.

When the public refers to porn, it’s usually reflecting on visual content (i.e. film and images), completely forgetting about smut, erotica, and romantic novels and comedies. So for the sake of this week’s Substacks, when I use the term “pornography”, I’m specifically alluding to visual content.

Pornography (especially on aggregation sites like PornHub) reflects and reinforces larger cultural narratives about what bodies and acts are sexually valued. Expectations for IRL sexual experiences are often drawn from pornographic scenes, leading to significant sexual challenges and anxieties. These expectations also reinforce misogyny and misandry (I would argue that the favoring of larger penises during pornographic scenes is an act of misandry and misogyny), both during and after partnered sexual experiences.

With that said, it’s important that we are able to talk about pornography without our own moral discomfort or disgust shutting down the conversation for the following three reasons.

1. Pornography is an accessory that many folks use to masturbate. And masturbation, or to use the Cleveland Clinic’s definition, “the self-stimulation of your genitals or other sensitive areas of your body for sexual arousal or pleasure”, has been linked to numerous physical and psychological health benefits, including stress reduction, sleep assistance, pain relief (especially for menstrual cramps), and prostate health. We’ll do a Substack series at some point about the unhelpfulness of No-Fap and other anti-masturbation movements that I won’t get into during this series. For today, masturbation has positive health benefits.

2. Pornography becomes sex education only because our nation refuses to invest in comprehensive nationwide sex education. In reality, pornography is sex entertainment. The sex education that our government funded during my millennial childhood, courtesy of the 1996 Title V-Abstinence Only Until Marriage Act and similar ongoing policy, such as the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, assumes that sex is inherently dangerous when not practiced in a marital context between a man and a woman, as we talk about in last year’s article “What is Purity Culture”. Teaching someone not to do something (i.e. sex) is not the same as equipping people with the communication, physiological, pleasure-based, and ethical decision making skills required to do something (i.e. sex) and trusting that with all of that information, taught by trusted professionals, people will be highly likely to make healthy decisions. Nonetheless, porn fills the void created by abstinence only sex education. If you want to disarm the unhelpful elements of the pornography industry, invest in nationwide comprehensive sex education.

   What is Purity Culture?

3. Pornography provides a window into larger cultural trends, both in terms of what’s culturally pleasurable and what’s culturally taboo. Remember: Eroticism is attraction plus obstacles. Pornography portrays the physical and political things that we don’t want to talk about, as well as the pleasurable, fun-filled experiences that we crave. Pornography reflects the objectification of women’s bodies (and men’s penises), and the public is correct to admonish the porn industry for the way that it does that. However, many of the people who object to porn’s practice of female objectification are the same people who promote policies that objectify and repress the female body in other areas. Going after porn doesn’t actually address the deeper systemic misogyny.

So why the hell did I pick the week before Christmas to write about pornography?

Last week, Pornhub released their 2024 Year in Review. In a move that’s simultaneously scientific gold and ethically questionable (as are all forms of surveillance capitalism), Pornhub compiles data about people’s erotic blueprints. They aggregate terms that folks use to search for videos, the amount of time a person spends on the website, and common times of day that people watch porn.

(They also provide hilarious cultural commentary. For instance, they predict which countries have the best New Years Eve celebrations by how much Pornhub traffic diminishes from 7 pm-1 am. As someone who lived in The Netherlands for two years, I can confirm that their NYE celebrations are way doper than anything that happens in the US.)

Each year, I include Pornhub’s Year in Review data in the class that I teach on erotic fantasy at South Shore Sexual Health Center’s sex therapy program. I’m especially mindful of the opening section, “The Searches That Defined (insert year here)”. They write:

“One of the best parts of doing our Year in Review Insights is gathering all the data and sifting through billions of visits to see what defined the tastes of the year. Often these tastes are defined by pop culture, world events, and changing attitudes toward sexuality.

What you will find here is not strictly a Pornhub thing; it is synonymous with mainstream media as well. The way people interact with external factors of their lives inevitably trickles into their porn consumption, and looking at these trends speaks to a year ripe with cultural shifts.”

It’s not lost on me that the two biggest trends that they noticed, “demure desires” (or sexual scenes depicting modesty and/or mindfulness) and “the secret lives of Pornhub wives” (or sexual scenes involving wife, tradwives, and Mormon wives), existed in a year in which conservative movements have invested countless money and resources to market a traditional form of femininity.

One of the infographs that Pornhub creates is a United States Top Relative Search. So what do residents of Rhode Island, where I currently live, tend to search for that nobody else searches for? And most importantly, what might that say about residents of the state of Rhode Island? Often, the answer is “Nothing”. (By the way, Rhode Islanders apparently search for “weddings” more than other state.) But sometimes, the answer can be revealing about that state’s culture.

In this year’s graph, however, 14 different states did not have data: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. Again, because sex is a metaphor for other parts of the relationship, be that a dyadic partnership or a country, it’s not surprising that these states are all run by Republican legislatures, many with high volumes of Christian Nationalist adherents.

These 14 states have created some variation of age verification law around pornographic sites, which requires people to authorize that they are over the age of 18 before entering the website. Some states, required websites to post warning disclaimers that their (conservative) administrations wrote. Here’s Texas’ draft (and forgive the capital letters):

“TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function.

TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Exposure to this content is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses.

TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography."

None of this has actually been proven.

A huge shoutout to journalist Eglė Krištopaitytė for her December 2023 Healthnews article “Warnings on Adult Sites Due to Texas Law Are Unproven”, where she interviews woman I want to be when I grow up Nicole Prause, founder of the neurological research center Liberos. She writes:

“Prause says that there are no known risks with extensive exposure to pornography because this would require an experiment in which people were randomly assigned to view "extensive" pornography or not over time.

She explains that pornography activates the same brain areas as other intense, pleasant emotional imagery, so it likely has similar effects to those stimuli, including absorbing attention and difficulty disengaging attention.

Prause adds, "These are not pathologies, but signs of a functioning emotion system that may be problematic in situations where a person needs their attention for other tasks, such as completing work or being present during conversations at home."

I’ll talk more about Prause’s work when we talk about the problems with the concept of “porn addiction”, although Krištopaitytė did a decent job summarizing it.

But for the sake of today’s article, Pornhub opted out of providing their website to these 14 states. I love their response to Texas users:

“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas's stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.

While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk.”

Also, a shout out to readers in those 14 states who are using VPN programs to quite easily get around these restrictions.

Project 2025 expert

Andra Watkins

assumes (accurately, I believe) that a Trump administration will attempt to ban Pornhub and other pornography sites nationwide. In her article, How Christian Nationalism Will Ban “Pornography” Nationwide, she writes:

“Given my extensive reporting on Project 2025, I expect an executive order enforcing the Comstock Act on Day 1. Republicans will use the Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide. But Comstock was also an anti-obscenity law: It could be used to aggressively ban and prosecute anything the regime defines as porn.”

I support Andra’s recommendations to protect digital collections, buy hard copies of favorite pornographic items (so long as they don’t involve children), and to stock up on sex toys, lubes, and vibrators, and other items that the Project 2025 leaders might deem pornographic in the next six months.

Project 2025 treats sexuality the way that the Anti-Saloon League, backed by conservative religious fervor, treated alcohol in the 1900s, relying on religious support to coerce Congress to create the 18th Amendment and prohibition of alcohol.

History lesson: People still found a way to drink alcohol. And people are still going to find a way to access pornography. And sexual health problems will develop because sexual exploration will be forced to go even further underground.

But I’ll still have a job, I guess? Assuming that I and my other sexual health colleagues don’t get incarcerated along the way.

Because in the midst of state-sanctioned sexual repression, WE ARE STILL NOT TALKING ABOUT SEX.

We are still not having honest conversations with people about how they want to masturbate, and how they might ethically determine what forms of assistance work best for them.

We are still not having honest conversations with people of all age about their bodies, their physiology, and the pleasure that bodies are capable of experiencing.

We are still not having honest conversations with people about fantasy, the importance of fantasy and desire, and social and economic policies that might help Americans better access their desires, including the financial and social safety required to have fulfilling sexual relationships.

We are still not having honest conversations with people about the myriad of ways that a person might transition into a sexual experience, the myriad of variables to consider for creating a positive sexual experience, and the myriad of options for sexual pleasure that do not involve a penis entering into a vagina.

We are still not having honest conversations with people about the role of dialogue and negotiation in sexual conversations. Once a person figures out what they might want to experiment with, how do they communicate that in an effective way? How do they find other people who might share those values? And how do they control their emotional responses if/when their potential partner might want to do something different?

Okay. Focus, Jeremiah. Deep breaths.

This week, we’ll have two additional articles about pornography and relational health. There’s a lot of different directions that we could go, but given this is the first time that we’ve spoken about porn on Relationship 101, I want to keep this week high-level.

• Thursday: Porn use in long-term committed relationships

• Sunday: Porn use, moral incongruence, and Evangelical communities

Sex, be that sex in general, or something more specific, like pornography or masturbation, can be extremely vulnerable to talk about. If you’d like help developing strategies to talk about sexuality, desire, fantasy, and play in your relationships, Julia and I would love to help. Feel free to email us!

Jeremiah: jeremiah@letshealtogether.org

Julia: julia@letshealtogether.org

Let’s heal together!

Jeremiah and Julia