“We must continue to tolerate the existence of an industry that generates such violence and mistreatment of women, that promotes a system of domination and commodification of women’s bodies and that can have disastrous consequences for the formation of sexual identity, in especially young people?” This is the question posed by the authors of a report by the French Senate on the pornography business, after describing the abuses it commits and the damage it causes.
The report, published last week, came made public after six months of work, including closed-door hearings with women who worked for pornographic production companies. The title they gave, Porno: l’enfer du décor, plays with the expression l’envers du décor (equivalent the “other side of the coin”) to say that hell is hidden in the pornographic production chain. The authors intend, with their work, to “finally open everyone’s eyes to the systematic violence” that this “toxic industry” inflicts.
Traditionally, a certain tolerance has been applied to pornography, which consists of restrict it more or less, without prohibiting it in general. But the four senators, from different political persuasions – from right to left – who drafted the report say that pornography today is so violent and dangerous that it is fair to question its practices “and its very existence”.
Massive and Early Consumption
Pornography is no longer a type of film confined to niche cinemas. The internet has radically changed the way it is produced and consumed.
In the middle of the first decade of this century, pornography sites appeared, based on your business in massive traffic, by offering free materials, to sell advertising space. This is how the great porn giants grew, of which the world number one is the Canadian multinational MindGeek, owner of sites such as Pornhub, Redtube or YouPorn.
In the following decade, diffusion increased even more because social networks (Facebook, Instagram…) and messaging applications (WhatsApp, Telegram…) became channels of links ) to pornographic sites.
As a result, according to Arcom’s estimates (the regulatory body for audiovisual and digital communications in France), 19 millions of French people consume porn monthly, of which 12% are smaller: 1.1 million with to 18 years of age and 1.2 million who did not reach the .
Exploitation of women
This audience expansion was accompanied by a major change in the production system. To feed the sites of massive distribution, there was an explosion of producers on the fringes of traditional companies. A huge amateur or semi-professional sector has emerged that manufactures low-cost porn in immense quantities.
This phenomenon, the report says, has led to a tremendous moral degradation of the products. In search of a massive audience, they gradually added higher doses of brutality and violence. As porn, like drugs, generates tolerance, in order to continue attracting the addicted public, it is necessary to continue the spiral. Today hard porn (hardcore, gonzo) is the most consumed.
Assim , pornography in general has abandoned all artistic pretense. The argument remains: to show bizarre and violent sexual scenes (they are 18%, says the report), you don’t need to tell any story. Those who pay the price for this upsurge are mainly actresses, who, in the case of low-cost videos, are not usually professionals. The new producers exploit young, economically or psychologically vulnerable women. Some, who testified before the four senators, recounted the procedures used with them to subjugate and dehumanize them, so that they would lend themselves to aggression and aberrations – because there are no special effects.
“The porn industry is toxic in the way it is produced and consumed. It colonizes the brains.”
These actresses, the report adds, rarely practice their profession with labor protection. Often they are just forced to sign a contract for the assignment of clearly abusive image rights. If they ever want to cancel the assignment, they will be asked from three to five thousand euros, a sum that is ten times what they earned for the work. This converts the right of retraction into a dead letter… Apart from that, once a video circulates on the internet, it is very difficult to remove it.
A toxic industry
In light of all this, one of the authors of the report, the vice president of the Senate Laurence Rossignol, a socialist, gives this diagnosis: “The porn industry is toxic in its production and of consumption. It colonizes the brains”. The report points out some of the damage it causes in young people: trauma, sleep or attention disorders, distorted and violent view of sexuality, difficulty in having normal relations with people of the other sex, premature sexualization… And it warns that adults too suffer similar damages .
If you add to this that “the exhibition of rapes and the eroticization of sexual violence” serve a “system of domination and violence against women”, there are reasons, according to the report, to consider pornography a public policy problem. The authors’ recommendations follow this line.
For example, they propose to classify sexual violence committed in the production of pornographic materials as a crime. It also insists on making it easier for exploited actresses to denounce the producers (there are now two cases in French courts) and on enforcing the right to be forgotten, forcing the free removal of videos when a filmed person withdraws consent.
How to protect minors?
Another chapter of recommendations is dedicated to the protection of minors. One of the main ones is to establish and demand an effective age verification system, as mandated by a French law of 2020. This is a difficult point, as seen in Arcom’s ongoing lawsuit against Pornhub and four other porn distributors online.
An effective age verification system has not yet been found to block minors from accessing porn on the internet.
Arcom accuses them of breaking the law by not effectively blocking access to minors. But it is not clear that they can do so, as so far no system has been found that proves the age of the Internet user and, at the same time, does not identify him. This incompatibility between efficiency and privacy led the United Kingdom to finally renounce the project to implement a measure such as the French one: the Children’s Code only requires the application of some procedure, albeit fallible, and reporting it to the authority.
The problem is that the law of 2022 orders to verify the age, but does not say how to do it. This allowed Pornhub to oppose the complaint with a prior questioning of constitutionality: it alleges that the offense it is accused of is not clearly defined, which is contrary to a general principle of law. The court accepted the previous questioning to the Court of Cassation, which now has six months to decide whether to refer it to the Constitutional Council. Thus, the case came to an impasse.
The senators’ report argues that a safe verification procedure can be found. Specifically, it recommends the proposal of the CNIL (the French agency for the protection of personal data): verification by an independent entity, acting as an intermediary and operating with a double barrier system of anonymity (in front of the verification and site porn). But that hasn’t been tried yet.
Anyway, the key may be in the last part of recommendations, which boils down to “educate”. The senators stress that citizens and institutions must become aware of how harmful pornography has become. It is no longer a private vice: it is a real public problem to be taken seriously. “You need to stop looking away.”