You can call me ‘Citizen XXX.’
I am an ordinary gay man in my fifties living in so-called Australia and working in a starchy job in health policy (which is why I’m anonymous here).
I’m an Internet porn ‘prosumer’ which means I consume online adult content (‘Internet porn’) and occasionally produce it as well (though not for money).
I started the Citizen XXX initiative because I am frustrated by the way porn is being regulated — fast and slow. Fast, through a rapid and highly visible series of moral panics about the crisis du jour. Slowly, through a deliberate and mostly invisible campaign targeting platforms and payment processors to make it impossible to produce, distribute and consume adult content.
You’re welcome to quote me without asking permission:
Accessing online porn as an adolescent was the first time I ever saw intimacy between men. Not just sex but same sex desire and affection. It was illicit but it was life-changing.
But it wasn’t just kissing and hugging:
Online porn showed me interracial partners, diverse kink and fetish interests, leather sex and bondage — departing in all sorts of delightful ways from the insistence on reproductive marital intercourse that dominated sex education in my Catholic upbringing.
Here’s something really important:
I don’t advocate young people accessing porn online, but research is really clear that they do, so my question is how can we ensure young people can place the porn they watch in context and develop the skills and knowledge they need for consensual, mutually pleasurable sex.
About my politics on sex and porn
My politics are as lefty as they come but in the debate over porn regulation I often find myself falling back on a kind of critical liberalism — this is a centrist position that emphasises that in sex and porn consumption, we’re all into different things, and what matters is (a) whether the practices involved cause harm (b) to other people who (c) haven’t given consent to being hurt.
When it comes to sex and online adult content, we’re all into different things, and what matters is whether the practices involved (a) cause harm (b) to other people who (c) haven’t given consent to being hurt.
What do I mean by ‘critical’ liberalism?
Classical liberalism emphasises a picture of white, educated, middle-class male rationality as the basis of bearing rights and freedoms.
Western liberals were more than happy to tolerate the political and bodily subjugation of anyone who didn’t fit that picture, be that a person of colour, women, homosexuals, physically disabled or mentally ill folks, you name it.
What I’m calling critical liberalism involves showing respect for diverse interests, needs, identities and experiences, limited by the harm principle:
Sexual practices we might find personally off-putting should be permitted so long as they don’t cause injury to any person who lacks competence to consent or does not give consent to the practice and the risk.
For a self-described liberal, I interpret injury quite broadly — I recognise forms of symbolic violence that classical liberals often dismiss as ‘woke’ concerns. My own personal sexual ethics are informed by historical and political awareness of the symbolic and material politics of sexual practice.
But in liberal societies, a competent adult can consent to being injured.
People do this in sex all the time — consenting to sex knowing it could lead to unwanted pregnancy, transmission of disease or just unpleasant social and emotional sequelae. Sex inevitably comes with risks of different kinds, and the goal isn’t necessarily eliminating all the risk from sex, but rather ensuring consent is valid and informed, and that risk is offset by mutual pleasure, and that people who experience injury during sex receive aftercare and support.