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Here’s the interview:
I recently interviewed Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Senior Editor at Reason and Co-Founder of Feminists for Liberty, about the Porn Wars and how they impact native-born US men.
Transcript below:
Cathy: Liz Nolan Brown, thank you so much for taking the time. I used to work at Reason, and we did not overlap, but after I left you came on and you're now a Senior Editor. You run the Reason Roundup and you are co-founder of Feminists for Liberty, which is an organization I think is amazing.
I love all your work. I especially love the work that you do on sex work and human trafficking and online censorship. And I've been writing about some of the problems facing US native-born men, things like atomization, low and declining labor force participation rates, the phenomenon of men who are NEET, not in education employment, or training, and how that might relate to declining marriage rates, declining fertility rates, resentment politics, polarization, yada, yada. As somebody who's been following the War on Sex, and covering it expertly for many years, I wanted to talk to you about how you feel like the topics relate to each other. So for example, we've got a War on Porn right now. We've got states declaring porn a public health emergency. We have a campaign to get Visa to drop Pornhub, which recently happened. And then there's this whole NoFap, anti-porn aspect of the quote “manosphere.” Rather than looking at, like, I don't know, macroeconomic trends, occupational licensure, high cost of housing, there's this idea that the NEET male phenomenon is a fault of the porn industry. And and so I'd just love for you to kind of summarize some of what you found in your reporting about the forces against pornography. Who's funding them what their motivations are. How that's impacting and being impacted by the manosphere, and things of that nature, if that makes sense.
ENB: Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting because the phenomenon that you bring up, it tips the balance in the anti-porn world. We used to just have two sort of anti-porn groups. We had the, the sort of Christian, right, who, thinks that porn and all sorts of sexuality outside of, heterosexual marriage is a sin.
And then you've got the sort of radical feminist critique where it's like, this is objectifying women, or, it amounts to violence against women, or it encourages violence against women, that sort of thing. And now you've got this third. Which is these disaffected men who are convinced that pornography is somehow at the root of their problems, that it's either why they can't find a woman, or they can't be happy in relationships because they're addicted to porn. Or another weird one, because all the women have become sluts because they become pornified.
So therefore there's no nice girls for them, but it adds this really strange third group into the mix that is fighting this War on Porn. And they really sort of lend themselves, I think, to going into the other explanations that other groups give.
They're very much like, ‘Oh yes, porn led me astray. Porn is a public health crisis.’ They sort of feed these narratives that the right and the radfems have actually leapt on, which wasn't so much a way that was fought, like that they were fighting pornography back in the eighties or nineties. It wasn't so much this like, ‘Oh, it's a public health crisis. Oh, it's hurting the viewers.’
It was more like, “Oh, it’s a sin or it's hurting women.’ And now you have everybody sort of going with this narrative that's like, ‘Well, wait a second. How is this hurting the men who are watching porn?’
Cathy: I think that's probably, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, the results of two phenomena, which would be one, it's much more difficult to argue that porn is inherently exploitative as porn becomes less exploitative with outlets, like OnlyFans. And, and even to an extent, PornHub. Creators are more in the driver's seat than they've ever been. They're getting better terms for their work than they've ever gotten in some ways. They have more negotiating power than they've ever had. It's harder to make the argument that everyone involved in pornography is being exploited. And then I think maybe another trend that's playing into this is men are really having a harder time, especially native-born white men, than they've ever had.
There's always a need when you are seeing problems to find something that's to blame. And it seems like radfems and the conservative Christians have tried to blame pornography for these problems. I'm also wondering how much power you think each camp has and how they're exercising that power.
I mean, I know Dr. Nicole Prouse studies pornography and the brain and she's done a lot of work debunking a lot of these studies on how porn warps your brain and is inherently addictive and all these things. And she says she's gotten a lot of threats and harassment from the manosphere, NoFap segment of the population. But it seems like most of the money and legislation and lobbying and PR is coming from the Christian side right now. Would you say that's true?
ENB: Yeah, I think definitely. So like you said, a lot of the online energy and, and unfortunately online abuse and stuff is coming from the manosphere side. The feminist side sort of gets pulled in when people wanna be like, ‘Look, we're consulting women about what hurts women.’
But they don't really have as much organizational power and yeah, I think you're totally right that the ones like helping make the laws and influence things are the Christian right. But what's interesting though, is that this has only happened once the Christian right started trying to make their arguments seem more feminist. Like, obviously you've written a lot about it, but the uber-example of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which used to be Morality in the Media and used to be like, purely focused on like, ‘These are things that are sins, they're corrupting our morals, blah, blah, blah.’
And then in 2015, they changed their name to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Now they're all like, ‘No, no, no, we're not concerned about porn and prostitution and all these other things because it's a sin. We're concerned about it because of exploitation. And we're concerned about the women.’ And it's interesting how much that's really got them traction, not just with conservative politicians or whatever, the groups that used to historically listen to them, but with mainstream media.
I mean, it's just, again, you've written about this so much too. It's just so frustrating to see again and again and again, mainstream media get almost duped by these groups and write about them as if they are just very neutral sources who want to help women, help children, things like that.
When really they have the agenda that they wanna like ban all sex work.
Cathy: Right. Right. And as somebody who works full-time in journalism, I'm wondering, it would seem to me that a mixture of like, just kind of being under a time crunch and the stigmatization, could explain why journalists are, like you said, quoting these extremely biased, extremely ideological, extremely dishonest organizations as if they're trustworthy neutral information sources and for the most part, not speaking to people in the industry impacted by the legislation working on the “other side.” But is there anything else at play, any systems or tendencies that are exacerbating this problem in your opinion?
ENB: I think you kind of nailed the big one, which is that, a lot of times, and this applies outside of this realm too, this applies to everything in journalism, when they talk about bias in journalism, they assume it's like intentional bias. Like a person is like, I have this viewpoint and I wanna get it across, or just a reflection of the journalist's personal politics. But I think that the bias is mostly toward convenience and sensationalism. And these groups are putting out a lot of press releases. They're very easy to get a hold of. They're constantly lobbying journalists to include their perspective on things and their voices.
So they make it very easy for journalists to quote them and tell their side of the story, as opposed to, sex workers who, even though they're everywhere, online, but still it's a little harder to find or a little harder to reach out to for journalists. And then the idea that women are like, people, but more women, are making some money doing some things that they like to do that are sexy online is like not a sensationalist story anymore. But the idea that they're being exploited, that they're being pushed into it, that there's these vast networks whose strings are being pulled by sex traffickers or evil pornography websites and things like that is really just, the same old bias in journalism that has been around for centuries, towards the lurid and the extreme. And the way to get eyeballs is through portraying this as something that is a huge problem that needs attention right now.
Cathy: Totally. And one thing that bothers me about the claims that men's problems are the result of easily available pornography, besides the fact that there's absolutely no evidence for that idea. I mean, it is true at least according to some time use studies that a lot of NEET men are spending a lot of time watching porn. But it doesn't seem like there's any evidence for the causal relationship being the porn is causing the NEETness.
I think it's more the NEETness. And then what are you gonna do with your day? But besides, that it's bothersome to me that there are actual reasons why we have these problems facing native-born us men. And the more time we talk about pornography and masturbation, that sucks the air outta the room to talk about the things that could actually be useful to them. But then I wanted you to talk about if you could, about why we should care about this issue, besides that it's taking the air outta the room to talk about things that are actually more impactful, some of the threats to, everyone's online, freedom, everyone's safety, everyone's civil liberties.
ENB: Yeah. I think you were right. And maybe just today I read your newsletter and you are obviously involved in porn. You write about it a lot, but you don't particularly, like you said, you don't particularly like porn or something like that.
Cathy: I'm not like a fan.
ENB: I’m the same actually. It's funny, cuz people always assume, especially people on the right, are like ‘Oh, like she's some libertine, who's just obsessed with porn and blah, blah.’ And I'm like, no. I mean, I got into writing about about sex worker rights because I was a sex worker when I was younger. And I was interested in that. But I also got interested in writing about this because it impacts so much more than just people who watch porn or people who are making porn or anything like that, or people who are doing sex work.
Because as Mistress Matisse, a dominatrix in Seattle, says, sex workers are the canaries in the coal mine for stealing civil liberties. And it's just so, so true. Every time the government wants to do something where they're going to censor people or grab more control of the internet for themselves, or do more surveillance of people they're like, ‘We're doing this to stop exploitation of sex workers, stop exploitation in the sex industry.’ And then nobody really wants to question it. They're just like, ‘Yeah. Okay. That sounds good.’ Like who's for sex trafficking? Do whatever. And then we end up with things like SESTA/FOSTA, which incentivizes websites to crack down on all sorts of sexual content. We end up with things where Homeland Security is going around, telling hotel staff to spy on single women in their hotels because they might be sex workers. You just end up with all these things that touch so much more than sex workers or people who are using their services.
Cathay: Totally totally. And, it's sad because in trying to root out this phantom exploitation of adults choosing to engage in sex work or make or consume pornography, which, there's nothing inherently exploitative about that, according to all the evidence. To the extent that it's exploitative, it's exploitative like all work under capitalism is exploitative. And it's extra exploitative because it is stigmatized and criminalized. But in trying to root out this phantom oppression, we're creating more oppression where women are less free to travel by themselves without being harassed. When we talk about sexual content, we're not just talking about things that are entertainment, we're talking about sex education. We're talking about consent training. We're talking about information on STIs, these things that make everybody less healthy and less safe when we don't have access to them. So I think that's a really important thing to harp on.
I'm curious as well about, if you have any thoughts on ways to help US native–born men that aren't necessarily around sex. I know one thing that I've read is that men who purport to have an addiction to porn or have a problem with porn are more, one of the biggest predictors of that is feeling ashamed of watching porn and believing that it's morally wrong to do. So, if we want less porn addiction one thing we could do is destigmatize porn consumption. But if there are any other regulatory or cultural fixes that you support for the kind of problems that I outlined at the top…
ENB: First of all, it just helps to accurately identify the problem. I'm writing right now, a piece for Reason about algorithms and defensive algorithms. And a lot of the things you hear with people condemning algorithms are the same thing you hear with people condemning porn, which is just this focus on the medium it's like, ‘Oh, like people are, having mental health issues. They're depressed. They're anxious. They're not forming good relationships. It must be because pornography has warped their mind and ensnared them. Or it must be because these social media algorithms have caught them up.’ When instead, whenever there is research on this stuff, like you said, it shows that there are underlying issues. Like maybe shame around watching porn, or maybe just like underlying depression or social awkwardness or whatever that leads them to consume more pornography and use social media more often rather than these things being cause of their things. So I think we misunderstand that a lot and then that lends a lot of support for the people that are like, ‘Oh, we can just ban ban algorithms, ban pornography,’ things like that.
Or, give the government more power to regulate them. Which is of course what the government wants. They want people to think that it's the problem of these mediums, because like every time we do that, they get more control over speech. And I don't think the government really wants to, like be running Pornhub. But the laws that we pass under the guise of doing stuff about that will give them more control over the internet and search results and things like that in general.
Cathy: Well, it's also just easier, right? Like, okay. All the information indicates that depression, anxiety, loneliness, atomization, lack of meaning and purpose these cause drug use, excessive porn use, being NEET. These things are fundamental causes. But it's very difficult to try to, especially as a government, tackle those kinds of problems.
And so it's just like, ‘Let's ban drugs. Let's ban porn. Let's ban algorithms.’ Because it's an easy win. It gives them more power, as you said. Certain segments like those solutions. That's a great analogy.
ENB: I just read some books I'm doing a triple book review of. This one, Kelsey Burke's the pornography wars, just does a really good job of getting into all the different sides of it, past, present, and future. But also I just read this book, Rethinking Sex by Christine Emba. Have you heard of it?
Cathy: I just bought it. Yeah, I haven't read it yet.
ENB: I found it to be a highly frustrating book. But I think it kind of relates to what you were saying. And a lot of the things that she gets at is how young women are upset in their relationships these days, or youngish women, and they're finding that they wish they could be in more fulfilling relationships.
Maybe more romantic relationships, serious relationships. But instead they're just having hookups or they're having sex with people who don't care about their pleasure or they're having sex with people who don't like call them afterwards. Very sort of, retro concerns here that we've heard for a long time that people are still upset with today.
But she blames things like dating apps and pornography. She tells a big story about how someone came up to her at a party and was like, ‘My boyfriend, or this guy I've been dating, choked me during sex without asking me. And I didn't say anything. But like, is that okay? Like, am I allowed to?’
And she's like, ‘Oh my God, like, of course you're allowed to say something. What is wrong with our culture, where men are learning from porn that they need to choke people during sex and the women don't wanna speak up about it?’ And then she talks about like, porn being the problem and men being the problem.
Very clearly the problem here is lack of communication and lack of teaching people, men, and women, that they need to be better at communicating with their partners, that they need to be more assertive. I know that this is sort of a tangent, but I just think that a lot of the times when we're talking about stuff like this and men and women's interpersonal relationships and why there's such a sad state of affairs, we like to have all these proxy battles, when really it's just more about teaching people to be open and honest about what they want. Especially when it comes to women, we try to come up with all these things. Like men need to do all these things different. Technology needs to be different.
All these things need to be different, as opposed to women being more assertive. And I know that's unpopular. We shouldn't just blame women all the time. But also, that's the only thing you could have control over, is how you react and how you communicate with people. And I just wish that it was, I don't know, more of a norm to say like, ‘Okay, let's figure out why young women feel like they can't be open and honest about their wants and needs, as opposed to trying to make the whole world change to accommodate them.
Cathy: Yeah. I mean, I think it's both. The whole world does need to change. And a lot of the reason that we are not having these conversations and people aren't going into relationships prepared to have them is because they're so stigmatized and they're so censored. And it's hard to learn how to have these conversations because our parents don’t. I agree with you that one thing that's bothered me in the last decade I feel like is we're having conversations about the downsides of dating men as a woman, which is good, we need to have those conversations. But it's like in recognizing women's vulnerability in heterosexual relationships, we've almost gone too far into an infantilization of women. And that's what really struck me about the Aziz Ansari story in babe.com. And this is just one woman.
In my opinion, if you are not prepared to tell a date no, and mean it and be ready to get your clothes back on and leave if he acts like a bore, then you're not ready to date. You're not an adult. Being an adult requires, and this is one thing I love about the sex positive community is that it's own your yeses and your nos. You're required to say no when you don't like what's going on and mean it and be clear in that. And so I think I agree with you that there's an extent to which I would like to see women empowered to get out of situations in which they're uncomfortable or, or feel unsafe. And say to the guy who's choking them, ‘I don't like this. Stop.’ And this is part of the problem. We know we have the studies that show when kids have comprehensive, medically accurate sex education rates of sexual assault decrease. When you teach people what consent means and that everyone is responsible for their yeses and nos, less stuff like this happens. But for some reason in this country, we've just decided that we don't want anyone to know anything. And that's unfortunate.
ENB: Did you have sex education growing up in Alabama?
Cathy: I did. It was like once a week for a semester. Something like that. All I remember from it is there was a poster on the wall with a drawing depicting how you get HIV from anal sex. Like they had drawn semen and anal tears. I spent a lot of time looking at that. And then I remember one of the girls in my class told a story about hooking up with one of our other classmates and him leaving skid marks on her sheets. And I thought if that had happened to me, I would never tell it. I mean, obviously we didn't learn about consent. Obviously we didn't learn about pleasure. Obviously we didn't learn about harm reduction. And that's the way it is to this day for a lot of kids, is that the sex education, if they get it is, can be incorrect and it's woefully inadequate. With sex ed you get fewer STIs, fewer unintended pregnancies, and less sexual assault.
ENB: Yeah. It's crazy to me that we're fighting so much about sex education again, too. Like, it felt like a very off thing. This was a thing that was just constantly in the news and in battles. And then it felt like it went away for a little bit. I'm sure it didn't. I'm sure on some level it was just media focus on it. But I do think that for a little bit, there was a detente.
Like just like let it, sort of be. And now Republicans have decided that anything in sex education that mentions LGBTQ people is terrible. And we were fighting over this again. It's just, it's so baffling.
Cathy: Yeah. The backlash is just, it's so baffling because it's like, okay, you made all these arguments about gay acceptance. If we accept gay people, marriage will crumble. Everybody will be gay. Anarchy in the streets. And it's like, marriage is kind of crumbling. But there's no evidence that's the result of the gays. That's a real hard case to make. And everything else that they've predicted, like didn't happen. And so now they're doing the exact same thing with the exact same arguments with the trans debate. And it's like, how has no one learned anything in the last 50 years about how any of this works?
ENB: I think it just shows how much a lot of this, at the elite level, is not driven by actual concerns about these things but by needing a culture war. I think so much of this is people who, at the high levels, don't actually care. They just know that this is good for drumming up angry supporters and being able to tell people that their way of life is being threatened.
And I think it's a lot of people not really caring.
Cathy: Right. I think that when you look at Republican legislators, they're very fringe.
ENB: I thought you said cringe.
Cathy: Yes, they're both. They're cringe and fringe. But it's almost like a mood affiliation where it's like, I probably wouldn't have pulled out of my ass to care about pronouns at my kids public school, but you seem to care about it a lot. And you're making arguments that seem to make sense to me having no information other than what you're telling me and what Fox News says, and you're clearly on my side. And so, I'm gonna support you in this matter that like, wouldn’t be important to me otherwise.
ENB: Right. I think most people in their day-to-day lives wouldn't really care unless they were being told about it. And like also, another thing I've been writing about a lot, reading a lot about, is effective polarization, which is polarization that isn't like, oh, my side is right.
That's more like the other side is wrong and I hate the other side. And so, yeah, I think it's a lot of that too. Like they're just being like, like, I wouldn't normally care about this, but if liberals care about it, like, then therefore it must be something that is bad.
Cathy: If you don't think it's media and you don't think it's algorithms, what do you think is driving it extremism, polarization?
ENB: I mean, I guess my cynical thing is that it's just politics. It's just politicians. It's just the need to keep feeding the machine with more hate and division in order to maintain power or win power.
Cathy: It seems though, I mean, from my perspective, like it changed in the time that I've been paying attention. Do you feel like that's true?
ENB: I feel like there was a lull. I feel like there was this period where, and it was mostly because I think, and again though, I could be just full of shit here, but it feels like something driven from a top where it was like, okay, Republicans, like your average person probably had the same opinions now as they did 10 years ago or whatever, like, or 20 years ago, like there's not a lot of change.
And I think that public opinion kind of shows that to some degree. But like, Republicans during the Obama years thought a lot of the stuff about gay marriage, a lot of this stuff is like, that's over. We have to get with the times. Young people's views are changing. We need to stop this. We need to reinvent ourselves. Remember the libertarian moment? It was like, Republicans are going to be more in the libertarian model than the old, like George Bush, religious conservative model. And so I think they were really, playing that up. Maybe that's where the Republican party would've gone, if we wouldn't have had Trump come along and then that changed everything.
Then, they all saw like, oh look, we don't have to pretend to actually care about gay rights or, all of this stuff. And actually in fact that might be a liability. Instead we should just go full-on culture war again, except in slightly updated terms. Yeah, I don't know.
Cathy: Yeah, hard to know. Well, I am about out of time, but I wanted to thank you so much for your time and your insights and your work. And where can people read and follow you online?
ENB: Yeah, you can read my work at reason.com. You can find me online at ENBrown and also check out feministsforliberty.com and feministLiberty on Twitter.
Cathy: Awesome. Thanks Liz.
Liz Nolan Brown on the Porn Wars