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Last week, in its dogged commitment to a free and open internet, the UK has instituted a criminal prohibition on certain pornography in England and Wales. It is now a criminal offense to view or possess pornography that depicts "strangulation" including choking or "face sitting", incest including depictions of step siblings, and any depictions of underage roleplay. The penalty for viewing or possessing any of these categories is a prison sentence that ranges from 2-3 years. Publication of these materials has a punishment of up to 5 years in prison.
Before a conservative cheered the prohibition of pornographic materials as a buttress against the immorality of modernity I'd remind him it is worth keeping in mind the context. The UK has been on a tear the past couple decades when it comes to regulating the internet. These efforts did not go without results, culminating most recently in the Online Safety Act of 2023 which pushed an age-verification regime. The OSA is not limited to porn sites to ban minors, but also potentially hits app stores, vendors, payment intermediaries, and more that extends the tendrils of the state into the internet.
Feminists and Labour politicians who hate violence against women, think-of-the-children conservatives, Christian organizations, and Ofcom the regulatory agency which, surprisingly, tends to voice support for more regulations-- what do these constituencies all have in common? It's not the weirdest coalition to lock arms in solidarity, but it's strange bedfellows. Public choice theory stays winning. Many are saying.
I can't claim abstinence, but I am not a big fan of porn. I don't think productions involving toasters are a social good and children should not watch porn. However, what I suspect laws like this to be in practice is to function as a carve out for a censorious state with neurotic apparatchiks to punch up criminal charges whenever they feel like. The next time Tommy Robinson gets picked up for violence they can hit him with the lude pornography laws. There will be no reduction of Violence Against Women when so many report sexual choking as consensual and pleasurable.
If you peruse internet commentary on the Crime and Policing Act 2026 you will find a lot of people who agree with me. From reddit to X, everyone has criticisms that this is selective or ineffective. If you stopped there you wouldn't know that some surveys indicate the majority of Brits support the ban, if not the criminalization. To properly do this experiment Brits must go full bore with social taboos, reverse the sexual revolution, and enforce criminal statutes to that effect. Reinstitute sodomy laws. The cowards will never.
Just legalize prostitution. It’s healthier than porn. A person going to see a prostitute is reinforcing all sorts of prosocial behaviors before obtaining his desired primary reinforcer: making money, scheduling, dressing up, heading to town, participating in the economy, conversing, being polite, connecting with another human, and then the nitty-gritty mechanical things. All of these are great micro-skills for when he one day has a wife. He’s reinforcing the right things. A person watching porn is usually just reinforcing scrolling, distraction, avoidance, all sorts of bad things. In my utopian head canon we would subsidize prostitution somewhat but require a prelude of flirtation before consummation. This is ideal.
Prostitution also takes the sluts out of the dating market (a plus), gives sluts a positive sense of life purpose attuned to their nature (a plus), takes away the imho excessive social privileging and monopolization of women today (a plus), eliminates entire industries of vice which ruins lives like clubbing (a plus), and reduces the number of women participating in the less-regulated pornography industry (a plus). The only bad thing I can think of is disease, but perhaps a regulated prostitution industry would actually reduce the general disease prevalence, because sluts don’t get treated regularly.
These two things can be true at the same time:
Morally, ideally, no one should see a prostitute, and it should not be promoted
Morally, practically, prostitution is better for society than porn
Retarded. Not only are they just throwing vast hapless Britbongs into the strangulating thighs of Mossad or the Central Casting Agency’s COINTELAMATEUR (good look keeping secrets Romeo), but they are going to be sending men to jail for enjoying the things that women also appear to enjoy. Just really stupid. What’s wrong with the British?
Funnily enough Hanania made almost exactly the same suggestion.
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