Julie Burchill on Pornography

It’s the weekend before Christmas and you are all getting ready to make merry. So, what does Julie Burchill offer up in her Spectator column, as a special Christmas gift, but a screed against pornography.

One understands, because one has long since been paying attention, that women do not like pornography, especially the kind that appears to be exploiting female sexuality. When feminists called for the liberation of female sexuality one suspects that they were not thinking that women should be freed of their clothing and their inhibitions. But, apparently, that has been the case.

But, if you think that videogames are a néfaste influence on developing brains, what about pornography? What influence does it have on the mind of an eleven year old, one who has just acquired his or her own iPhone.

Of course, Burchill is an excellent writer. She takes no prisoners. Perhaps she overstates her case, slightly, but still, someone needed to make the case, so at least she gets your attention. Anyone who knows her personal history knows that she is anything but a mid-Victorian prude.

She begins with a paean to someone named Billie Eilish. Apparently, everyone knows who that is. I, however, not being everyone, do not. For those of you in the same category Eilish is a very popular Gen Z chanteuse. 

So, apparently, it echoed through the empty heads of the Gen Zers when Eilish had the unmitigated gall to denounce porn. It got Burchill’s attention:

You could have knocked me down with a snowflake when Billie Eilish slammed pornography on the Howard Stern Show this week. It is a strange paradox of Generation Woke, to whom Eilish is an idol, that while everything from brunch (the actor Alan Cummings said it reminded him of ‘white privilege’) to Brum (the mischievous TV toy car ‘who may reflect the language and attitudes of the 1990s’ as the BBC warned us) is deemed offensive, truly offensive things such as under-privileged women earning a living by being used as sexual meat puppets for the entertainment of men is now being framed as a perfectly wholesome pursuit. (Unless it’s your own daughter or mother, of course – they’re Special.)

Does pornography exploit women? Does it exploit liberated women? The enquiring mind wants to know. 

Apparently, the eleven-year old Eilish’s foray into porn-generated sex education was not entirely salutary. She wrote this:

As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace… I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much… the first few times I had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that's what I was supposed to be attracted to… I'm so angry that porn is so loved, and I'm so angry at myself for thinking that it was okay.

But, you want to know whether her experience is unique to her or whether it typifies what the culture has been purveying to girls:

Still only 19, Eilish is a product of a society so porn-sick that American Teen Vogue published a guide to anal sex and one Sunday Times journalist suggested that ‘entry-level pornography’ should be produced for schoolchildren.

And we have not even gotten to grooming girls to be sex slaves in Rotterham England, or to the grooming that persuades girls to want to be boys.

Burchill considers it all to be a reactionary thrust:

It’s no mistake that this latest offensive in the war against women has risen alongside Woke culture, which (as I explain in my book, Welcome to the Woke Trials) while masquerading as revolutionary is actually reactionary. It believes that racial segregation is desirable, that the working classes are white trash/gammons and that the sexual perversions of men override the rights of women.

In the matter of hygiene, Burchill wisely points out that parents who are agonizing over the purity of every alimentary morsel that through Esmerelda’s lips have no problem handing an iPhone to an eleven year old, so that she can have her brain programmed by the sex industry:

When a proud mum or dad presents their child with what we call a ‘smartphone’ at the age of 11 – as with Billie Eilish, when she and far too many children first see hard-core pornography – they are basically handing their child’s brain over to the sex industry. It’s ironic that this is a generation of parents who will insist that every morsel of food which passes their little darling’s lips must be pure in origin while effectively presenting that child the key to a chamber of horrors disguised as a gadget. 

But, hasn’t our culture been purveying openness and honesty toward matters sexual. Why would pornography not be the ultimate in openness and shamelessness. Of course, pornography creates expectations, and children try to put them into practice.

And has such openness served to make this generation have a happier and healthier attitude to sex? Sexual attacks by boys on girls now regularly occur even in primary schools. Meanwhile the endless hysterical demand for no single-sex toilets in schools has, according to teachers and parents, led to a number of girls no longer using school toilets, thus harming their health. Is it surprising that girls are increasingly reacting to being treated as sexual objects by binding their breasts and begging to become boys?

It’s not just girls who are being damaged. Burchill notes that males are suffering from their overindulgence in porn:

But in the long run, it’s not just females who suffer from the normalisation of pornography. Around a third of young men (and they’re just the ones owning up to it) now experience erectile dysfunction; young women talk frequently of how they prefer vibrators to men. Pornography, not a third person, is increasingly cited in divorce cases. Older women seek artificial insemination rather than tie themselves to a man who may become a porn-addled zombie; younger women cling on to their virginity far longer than their mothers did, and repulsion at pornography is probably partly responsible. In Japan – a society which has long sanctioned extreme pornography while oppressing women – the government has forecasted an ‘imminent national catastrophe’ as nearly half of young women are ‘not interested in, or despise, sexual contact’ leading to a whopping one third plunge in the country’s population by 2060.

Women do not just hate porn. They do not want to deal with men whose attitudes toward sexuality have been defined by porn.

And the porn industry, like Silicon Valley, has gone all-in with cultural wokeness:

The slyness of the sex industry in seeing through the pure-hearted pronouncements about human dignity which cover the age-old desire of many men to view and/or use women as masturbation objects produced an amusing situation when during the Black Lives Matter riots, Pornhub declared their support for BLM while having over-looked such choice items on their menu as ‘Black Slave Punished By White Master’ and ‘White Cops Bang Black Chick.’ No sooner had this been put right than Pornhub agreed under pressure from credit card companies to remove all unverified content which might feature underage and/or trafficked females and non-consensual sex – thus reportedly losing 80 per cent of their material in one fell swoop.

In the matter of sexual violence, proponents of porn insist that wankers are less likely to be rapists, but, in truth, wankers tend to have a more lenient attitude toward sexual violence. If porn desensitizes men to sexual stimuli, they might well try to plumb another level of sensitivity, the kind that can be enhanced by violence:

… one study found that men who habitually use pornography are more likely to be desensitised to sexual violence and be more lenient towards rape, their porn-addled minds having come to believe that all women secretly crave violent sex with strangers.

And women have been persuaded that they ought to enjoy being choked during sex. Say what? Where is the feminist outrage?

Take an interest in your boyfriend’s hobbies’ was once the advice of agony aunts to teenage girls and while this used to mean getting one’s head around the offside rule, now it involves pretending to enjoy being choked during sex until the blood vessels in one’s eyes burst. This is what it takes to be The Cool Girl. And this is why it’s so vivifying that Eilish – the coolest of Cool Girls – has broken rank and pointed out that girls are now being actively groomed to enjoy their own torture.

Despite her use of blue hair dye, Eilish may well turn out to be the JK Rowling of her generation, pointing out the poisonousness of a Woke Culture which while instructing women to ‘BE KIND’ seeks to reduce us to a permanent underclass of violated semi-humans.

How will this end? Burchill is not optimistic:

Or maybe not, and the sexes will become ever more alienated, with men preferring women they will never touch and women preferring plastic penises that don’t demand rough sex.