Introduction
What is pornography in this age of ever-present technology? How does it work and what does it do? What does it mean for our hopes for young people? How does it affect our potential for what we might call a fully human existence? These are the fundamental questions about porn that Fully Human Issue #1 seeks to explore.
There now exists a robust body of research evidencing various effects of pornography on both young people and adults, and this is critical to our ability to find answers to these questions. Alone however this research is insufficient – here we look beyond individual ‘impacts’ of porn to explore what lies beneath, joining up these studies with research on the core qualities of human flourishing, as well as the essential aspects of the porn complex and experience – always asking what one means for the other.
One backdrop to this report is the long-standing heated debate about pornography, with people divided broadly along liberal, conservative and feminist lines, and the arguments centred on whether pornography should be censored given (contested) harms to women and the family, or whether in fact that constitutes an infringement of individual rights and freedoms. The analysis here and the position we come to does not neatly sit within any of these camps, nor indeed this debate as a whole. First our focus is on today’s mainstream online porn. Second, the different views in this debate arise from people giving more or less weight to different values (for example, some emphasising individual freedoms versus others prioritising equality), yet we see each of these as core to a fully human existence and seek to foreground them all – perhaps at their most fundamental these core ‘goods’ being autonomy, connection and justice. Third, our focus here is largely on surfacing the fundamentals at play, rather than presenting the case for specific ways forward – this exploration being a necessary basis for those subsequent discussions.
And its impact on viewers and wider society – note that, whilst important, this analysis does not focus on the impact on individuals in videos on porn sites. Recent activism and media coverage has highlighted how porn sites have been hosting and profiting from videos of abuse: girls and women (in the main) suffering the severe trauma of images of their abuse being seen by thousands and having no means to prevent it which, when taken as a whole, differs in some fundamental ways from earlier pornography.
The themes of visibility and invisibility run throughout. What do viewers see and what don’t they? What do those behind the algorithms see, and what do they hide? What are the elemental qualities of being human that are both profoundly ‘known’ but all too infrequently articulated, and in what ways might they be quietly chipped away at by today’s online porn? By bringing all of this to the surface, we can more clearly think about what porn means for our children and young people, and for all of us, and what we can do in the effort to chart a fully human course forwards.