Beyond the transgender controversy, JK Rowling does have a point about male misogyny

Pornography is more visible than ever, so why is it so difficult for people to admit the dangerous role it plays in our culture?

Following JK Rowling’s sharing of that blog post, of all the thoughts that popped into my head, the most surprising was an unexpected alliance with one particular paragraph which has gone largely under the radar of the widespread coverage.

It read: “Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls,” she writes. That sentence caught my attention.

I was at a hen night late last year when talk turned to sex. The women in their late 30s and early 40s were shocked to hear that anal sex had almost become the norm among those of us in our 20s. The younger women felt that now there was an expectation not only to go as far as the women do in mainstream porn, but also to pay thousands in pounds and pain on hair removal each year to meet the standard. It’s a literal uncomfortable truth for most women. But this isn’t about morally assessing sex acts; it’s the context.

When the government announced the UK lockdown in March, Pornhub reacted by making its premium content free for all. Now we could all watch even more porn, pick up terrible habits and essentially bypass any genuine female pleasure. Porn is more visible than ever, yet it’s also invisible when it comes to admitting the role it plays in our culture. There needs to be an open discussion from government ministers who currently can’t speak about sex without using the word “bubbles”.

Of course, not all porn is created equally. Erika Lust, for example, makes fantastic, sex-positive, feminist porn – but it comes at a premium. It’s the private school of porn – available to the few. This means the inequality is vast, and the majority of porn is encouraging new habits of misogyny barely imagined a generation previous. Log on to any mainstream tube site now and choking, forceful penetration, slapping and hitting will all be commonplace – with lashings of symbolic violence, themes of oppression, and female subjugation. To quote Rowling: “Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now.”

These depictions don’t exist in a vacuum. One third of UK women below the age of 40 have experienced unwanted slapping, choking, or gagging during consensual sex, suggesting that these easily accessible sites reinforce and promote the deep-rooted structural problem of male sexual entitlement. A study found 95 per cent of men orgasm vs 65 per cent of women during sex.

We know Hollywood, like Hogwarts, is a fantasy: not real, fiction. But if that fantasy predominantly involved encouraging racism, misogyny, abuse, and violence, the impact it might be having on culture would likely be pondered.

There were a total of 176 million cinema admissions in the United Kingdom in 2019; Pornhub received 115 million visits every single day. That’s the equivalent of the populations of Canada, Australia, Poland and the Netherlands all visiting in 24 hours. Yet, the most consumed and arguably problematic entertainment is the least openly discussed. Regularly indulging in such fantasy inevitably leaves the real lived experience in the realms of mundane, and boredom isn’t proving a turn-on.

In 2016, sexual psychotherapists at Nottingham University Hospital found that there are now as many British men in their teens and 20s with erectile dysfunction than men in their 50s and 60s.

I’m not denigrating sex work and pornography, per se, isn’t the problem, rather the bulk of porn that’s being consumed. It’s left us a generation of men who learned about Christmas by watching Die Hard.