LONDON — The inaugural issue of Spectator USA, a recently launched spinoff of ancient U.K. right-wing publication The Spectator, has published an essay by British anti-porn crusader and serial outrage-monger Julie Bindel entitled “The Horror of Big Porn.”
Bindel, who calls herself a “radical feminist,” is known for ill-informed contributions to British debates about sexual expression, consistently conflating all porn with “human trafficking” and drumming up a phony “public health crisis” in league with religious fundamentalists.
For several years, Bindel has traveled to the U.S. to lend her voice to the various anti-porn campaigns by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), a religiously funded and motivated lobby previously known as Morality in Media, which has been advocating for censorship since 1962.
NCOSE is one of the groups lobbying Google, Instagram, Twitter and many other companies to stop listening to sex workers. One of their recent victories, which they publicized with joy, was to make drugstore chains have to hide the "pornographic" Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
Bindel’s appearance in the inaugural issue of Spectator USA is not surprising. Although supposedly progressive media outlets like The Guardian regularly publish her attacks on sex workers and the adult entertainment industry, Bindel’s ideas are much more at home with social conservatives and religious fundamentalists.
"The Horror of Big Porn," selected as one of the "Editor’s Choices," appears in the Spectator USA alongside essays with titles like "Boris Johnson is More Like Bill Clinton Than Donald Trump" and "Please America, Take Meghan Markle Back."
After absurdly comparing porn to tobacco (“the tobacco giants once peddled propaganda about how cigarettes were glamorous”), Bindel writes that “today, we are led to believe that porn stars are cool, that acting in pornographic films is empowering, and that masturbating to those films is a healthy way of expressing oneself.”
“But is that true? Is it really progressive or ‘pro-sex’ to support this massive industry? Is it anti-sex to oppose it?” she asks.
Spoiler alert: she doesn’t think so.
“These are lies,” she writes, echoing the talking points of Mormon-inspired groups like Fight the New Drug and unscientific propagandists like Your Brain On Porn’s Gary Wilson. “Here are truths: like tobacco, porn is highly addictive. It ruins lives. It doesn’t cause cancer or heart disease, but, worse than tobacco, it exploits people and damages relationships.”
Bindel endorses the bizarre conspiracy theory that “these truths are suppressed because a few groups are making enormous sums of money.”
Suppressed? In fact, it is Bindel’s and the religious lobbies' peculiar notions which are enshrined in federal FOSTA legislation, 16 states (and counting) declaring porn "a public health crisis" and most mainstream media accounts of sex work, which at the very least "two-side" the issue and give the deceptive "porn is bad" propagandists equal time (see our recent coverage of Lisa Ling’s "This Is Life").
As for the “few groups" which "are making enormous sums of money" part, perhaps the Spectator USA editors might want to consider whether publishing this dangerous notion they are helping Bindel dog-whistle internet advocates of a disgusting anti-Semitic conspiracy regarding the “real ownership” of the porn industry ("Among Some Hate Groups, Porn Is Viewed as a Conspiracy,” New York Times, June 2019).
Bindel also feigns labor concerns for the average porn performer, allegedly exploited by these shadowy “few groups.”
“Pornography’s famous stars get rich,” she writes, “and producers and website owners certainly do. But the vast majority of its workers don’t. The women (and most performers are women) don’t get royalties, on the whole. Massive competition for clicks drives down pay and forces people to perform ever more extreme and physically harmful acts for ever more demanding audiences. One man closely involved in the business told me: ‘The women don’t enjoy it. They have to take a load of painkillers. Of course, they just do it for the money.’”
Who is this all-knowing man with an intimate knowledge of every performer’s enjoyment? Bindel doesn’t say. She also mentions a "Chloe" who supposedly came and went from the industry after making $2,000 for eight days of work. Is there even a real "Chloe?" Who knows?
Of course, Bindel then trots out discredited propagandist Gail Dines, whom she describes as “a sociologist and expert on the business side of porn,” who provides the supposedly shocking revelation (which anyone can find in the business model of any paysite) that “much of the content on free porn websites acts as a teaser to get viewers interested so that businesses can then ‘monetize’ the free porn with advertising and by diverting the consumer to paid sites.”
“Free porn is the same as the tobacco industry handing out free cigarettes to kids to get them hooked, without fear of prosecution,” says Dines, continuing the strange tobacco analogy.
But this rehash of the "porn is like an addiction" narrative is just the appetizer. Bindel then really gets going:
“Porn is a kind of slavery,” she writes, echoing Victorian anti-sex-work propaganda linking slavery abolitionism with “social health” and eugenics. “It’s also more racist than most people realize.
Bindel mentions “one of the best-selling porn video series is called ‘Oh No! There’s a Negro in My [Daughter/Wife/ Sister],’” referring to a short-lived, marginal title from 2008 to 2009 that is not a “bestseller” by any stretch of the imagination, purely to scandalize her readers.
And then Bindel mentions the XBIZ awards, which apparently she attended in 2015.
“As porn performers made their way down the red carpet — they were ordered to show as much tit and ass as possible to the waiting photographers,” she writes.
[Writer's Personal Note: I’ve shot black-and-white red carpet photos at XBIZ for years, even before becoming News Editor. I have never, ever seen anyone “ordering” performers how to pose. We do tell them to keep moving, though, so that we can get to the awards ceremony and the wine bar faster.]
“What was striking about the XBIZ awards was not the absence of any shame among those who peddle and profit from porn. It was their pride,” she writes, in what might very well be the first accurate statement in her Spectator USA essay.
To read Bindel’s essay “The Horror of Big Porn,” click here. Or if you don’t want to give Spectator USA your click and reward them for running anti-porn propaganda, click here instead to check out XBIZ’s ongoing coverage on the War on Porn.
