Are Porn Movies Responsible for the Male Gaze?

Much was made of the Online Safety Act last year, which covered self-harm and suicide materials, misinformation and disinformation, and social media algorithms. Perhaps the most hotly discussed point was the requirement for porn site users to verify their identities, the major reason being to prevent children from accessing harmful material and improving their internet safety. 

The influence, in particular, of misogynistic or extreme acts found in some porn films nowadays, has been played up by UK government ministers. The logic goes that the young man watches pornography and increases content extremity over time, becoming more enamoured with harmful fantasies presented onscreen. The viewer cannot distinguish fantasy from reality and develops a “male gaze” of ordinary girls and women, which permits misogynistic violence. 

That is a handy excuse, as the solution becomes to restrict access to pornography or ban it altogether. Yet having witnessed porn, either by accident or on purpose, is now a normative experience, including for young adults, and not all young adult viewers are misogynists or enjoyers of harmful materials. The exposure to pornography is not what causes more risky behaviours, but rather the pre-existing “short-term mating orientation” (a preference for casual sex) amongst those who seek out pornography. 

That preference manifests usually as a desire to “improve” sexual performance to attract a “high quality mate”, to fit in with their friends or the crowd, or because of quite poor psychosocial relations. In all of these cases, the pornography is not the problem, but rather the social and cultural dynamics existing around the viewer. 

Baroness Bertin touches on this complex reality in her report on pornography legislation when she recommended that adequate resourcing and direction needed to be given to schools and community programmes for boys and young men to discuss positive masculinity and countering misogyny together. Samantha Niblett MP similarly initiated a programme “Yes Sex Please, We’re British!”  aimed at encouraging lifelong sex education and highlighting alternative porn sites which exclude harmful videos altogether. 

Those types of programmes are typically ignored or shot down by media outlets like the Telegraph, the Spectator, or GB News. They may cite an “inherent” unseriousness in this issue during this really “serious” geopolitical time, government overreach into individual sex lives, targeting the “wrong” type of violence, or indeed causing detriment to the safety of darling children who have supposedly never heard of a VPN service. 

It is fairly obvious to critical thinkers that without those kinds of programmes, the “male gaze” dynamic will continue existing within our societies. Even with these kinds of programmes, the bigger causes of the “male gaze” – religious authoritarianism and authoritarian neoliberalism – still remain. This “rock and hard place” is the biggest roadblock to these social programmes working successfully; not the caricature of the porn industry.  

Religious fundamentalisms of all kinds seek to keep their society’s extant social class, gender roles, and ethnic hierarchies frozen in carbonite. The new, neoliberal, markets in sexual relations comprising online dating platforms like Tinder, sex work platforms such as OnlyFans, and reproductive healthcare like PrEP and surrogacy businesses, turn societal relations into transactions which encourage objectification and often unhealthy beauty standards. 

The first answer to these two extremes, which spur on and aggravate the male gaze, is to limit the ability of religious authoritarianism, itself often at odds with British values, to influence the cultural, legal and economic lives of citizens. The second answer is to restrict the ability of markets to transform sexual relations from genuine human intimacy and self-expression into a mode of corporate profit-seeking. 

When we consider how these answers work administratively, it requires an ability to enforce and maintain ensuing regulations, devise them in a fair and proportionate manner, and to ensure that we can collect enough useful evidence in a timely fashion to back up the need for and design of the regulations. 

These administrative steps are made more difficult when the proponents of religious authoritarianism actively seek to reverse sexual and gender rights gains, be it abortion access or legal transgender identity or same-sex marriage. The steps are further stymied when the proponents of authoritarian neoliberalism seek to erode the state’s ability to enact societal governance and replace it with “free” markets. 

None of that is easy. It raises the age-old question of systemic change. There is one step we could take quite easily: we could intrusively ask for identity verification when someone tries to access Andrew Tate’s content, instead of run-of-the-mill porn?

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress (US News & World Report, one of: Warren K. Leffler (WKL); Thomas J. O'Halloran (TOH); Marion S. Trikosko (MST); John Bledsoe (JTB); Chick Harrity (CWH))

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