(LifeSiteNews) – Earlier this week, I noted in a column that for the first time in years, digital porn giants are under fire — and teetering. That isn’t the only good news in the escalating war on porn. Public recognition of porn’s dangers is growing. Consider this news out of the United Kingdom:
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has pledged to crack down on porn sites and other adult-only services to ensure they are taking steps, such as verifying users’ ages, to prevent children’s access, the regulator said Friday. The new enforcement plans are a reversal for the ICO, which had previously maintained that services aimed at adults weren’t subject to the Children’s Code or Age Appropriate Design Code, a set of rules that guide how the UK Data Protection Act should be applied to digital services for children…Companies that break the rules can face fines of as much as 4% of annual global revenue.
Four companies are already being investigated by the regulator and other nine are being audited. Millions of minors regularly visit Pornhub and xHamster, creating addictions that drive them back to these digital caverns over and over again. If Pornhub — which is already reeling from scandal — and other major porn sites are actually forced to verify age and can be held accountable when they don’t, it will be a massive blow. It remains to be seen, of course, that this will be the case — but this is certainly a step in the right direction.
What is even more interesting is the fact that the elites — the very folks who lived and lauded the sexual revolution — are beginning to recognize that porn is poison in the cultural groundwater. A couple of years ago, Bill Maher — yes, the comedian who was famously friends with Hugh Hefner — decried digital porn as “rapey” and dangerous for kids. This past weekend, he and the panel guests on his HBO show discussed porn again. Wynton Marsalis, an American jazz musician and teacher at the Lincoln Center, noted that when he asked his students what the biggest difference between their generations was, they didn’t hesitate: “Pornography.”
“I could not agree more,” Maher replied. “Whoever told you this about porn is onto something…and is one reason [men] are in crisis…now a ten-year-old can see [vile porn category] on the Internet.”
Scott Galloway, a clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, who researches the impact of the digital age on culture, responded: “We are engaged in the largest unsupervised experiment of young men in history, and it’s porn. The problem beyond creating unrealistic expectations of what it means to be in a relationship with a woman, it quite frankly takes your mojo to get out of the house and meet someone and develop the skills to actually have your own sex — it takes that away. Stop the porn. Get out.”
There’s plenty the guests said that I disagree with. Maher stated that Playboy is “benign” — I see it as the beginning of a continuum that has brought us to this place, and morally wrong to boot. Galloway would like men to get out and “make their own bad porn,” which would be replacing one wrong with another. But the fact that on an HBO show hosted by a famously promiscuous bachelor, a discussion on how porn is poisoning and destroying young men can take place—this is an indication of two things. First, the Overton Window on porn’s harms is visibly shifting. And second: things are now so bad that even those who heartily welcomed the sexual revolution and lived it to the fullest can no longer deny the damage it has caused.
