The Pornographers and Those who make them Rich

It is a fact universally acknowledged that great evils persist because the good men and women who could stop them do nothing. Laila Mickelwait is not one of those who do nothing, not one to stand by while evil has its way. Instead, armed with her conscience, her compassion for victims, her moral certitude, and an indefatigable fighting spirit, Mickelwait has singlehandedly brought a multi-billion dollar business to its knees under the growing weight of lawsuits, criminal investigations, and the righteous anger of an outraged public.

This is the story told in her new book, Takedown. It is an unflinching (and at times disturbing) tale of the author’s crusade against the execrable PornHub. It reads like a hybrid memoir and crime thriller. The writing is competent for the task at hand, which is telling a story dramatically from the first person perspective. Potential readers should know that Mickelwait doesn’t hold back from describing the criminal videos she discovers in her efforts to hold PornHub accountable, and for this reason the book is harrowing to read (or listen to); it’s not for the faint of heart.

A Distinction

The book, like the law, makes a distinction between ‘regular’ pornography on the one hand and criminal pornography—content involving children or non-consensual acts—on the other. This is an important moral and legal distinction, but it was striking to see just how much and how often the author took pains to assure the reader that she was not against ‘legal’ pornography. What the typical reader might not realize however is that the legality of pornography itself has always been in question, with numerous courts adjudicating the tension between free expression and obscene materials in the US and Canada in recent decades.

This insistence on the part of the author is a strong signal as to what kind of moral compass a mass-market book can assume in its audience. It is taken as a matter of fact that pornography featuring consenting adults is perfectly fine, while the non-consensual variety is a heinous evil that should be tirelessly opposed. I agree of course with the second part of the previous sentence, but what I want to point out is how much moral significance is invested into the rather thin category of consent. Can consent really serve as the north star for our morality? And do we realize just how recently, as a society, we swapped out older and deeper moral foundations for the proverbial duct tape of consent?

My own view of pornography is that it is a poison for all involved, and that this can be established without necessarily drawing on Scripture. For example, consider the words of Roger Scruton from his book, Beauty:

The old morality, which told us that selling the body is incompatible with giving the self, touched on a truth. Sexual feeling is not a sensation that can be turned on and off at will: it is a tribute from one self to another and—at its height—an incandescent revelation of what you are. To treat it as a commodity, that can be bought and sold like any other, is to damage both present self and future other. The condemnation of prostitution was not just puritan bigotry; it was a recognition of a profound truth, which is that you and your body are not two things but one, and by selling the body you harden the soul. And that which is true of prostitution is true of pornography too. It is not a tribute to human beauty but a desecration of it.

Not only is this kind of moral clarity foreign to much of our society, there is even an inversion at work such that people who hold views like mine (and yours?) are discredited from having something worthwhile to say in the public square. Don’t believe me? Consider that the main strategy of PornHub’s apologists to discredit Laila Mickelwait was the claim that she was “one of those anti-pornography crusaders.” And this accusation was countered strategically by Mickelwait listing her pro-porn bona fides.

That is really something, if you stop and think about it.

A Criminal Enterprise

The book makes it abundantly, disturbingly clear that PornHub—and one has to assume there are many websites like it—has been involved in facilitating, profiting from, and committing crimes. For years the site has employed top-shelf PR firms and marketing companies to burnish their image and present themselves in a way not unlike Playboy did in decades past; as sophisticated and a little naughty. A knowing smile and a wink, “Hey, everyone does it, right?“

The dirty little secret was that the site was a rats’ nest of criminal child pornography and video evidence of serious sexual crimes—and that PornHub not only knew this but embraced it as a lucrative aspect of their business. Laila Mickelwait led the charge to uncover this reality, thus taking on one of the biggest and most profitable websites in the world. Unsurprisingly, the men who were comfortable getting rich off the life-destroying trauma of victims had no problem hacking, harassing, doxing, and threatening physical injury to Mickelwait and her family. The reality is that the owners of PornHub, just like its content, were more than just ‘a little naughty’—they were criminal and evil.

The fact that it has taken such a Herculean effort to get the authorities to treat PornHub like a criminal organization is a sad reflection on our culture’s moral confusion. And yet the book focuses in on those people who decided to do something rather than looking away, and that is a heroic act. I wholeheartedly applaud them for that, and hope that many others rise up to join them. People are clearly hungry for moral clarity and a worthy cause to fight for—here is one where even at this point in our divided culture we can still find a general consensus.

The Enablers

But what is also clear from the book is that we cannot expect corporations to do the right thing, no matter how black and white the case looks. Consider the example of the credit card giants, VISA and Mastercard. It was not enough for the VPs of these companies to be given direct evidence that PornHub was hosting illegal content, that the site was knowingly doing this, and that they were prioritizing making money off the illegal content—the traumatic sexual abuse of minors, lest we forget—over the frantic requests of those very same victims to have the videos taken down. No, all of that was not nearly enough, because large corporations tend to function like sociopaths. If there is a good chance they might get away with something immoral, even illegal, they will tend to do it, guided by the profit motive.

Don’t underestimate the almost limitless ability of people in these corporations to rationalize their behaviour away. In order for them to do the right thing, only one thing must be clearly demonstrated: that they will lose far more money or face criminal prosecution if they continue than if they stop. In VISA and Mastercard’s case, they had to be pressured intensely and relentlessly not only by customers through petitions but also by power brokers: billionaire hedge fund managers like Bill Ackman, Pulitzer-prize-winning New York Times columnists like Nicholas Kristoff, and elite lawyers armed with track records of billion-dollar settlements like Michael Bowe. These companies do not deserve any credit for “doing the right thing.”

A Failure of Education

The experience of reading this book got me thinking about what kind of people become pornographers, profiting on the exploitation of vulnerable women and boys. This question is especially poignant because of my geographical proximity to many of the people working at and leading PornHub. I grew up in the English community in the greater Montreal area, and many of my friends (and some family) have studied at Concordia, where two of the founders of PornHub first met and got their start. This reflection has connected in my mind with the larger theme of education and moral formation, which I’ve written about recently. Here is what I mean.

It’s become clear to me that as a society we have lost the ability to educate young people in a way that would have been recognizable to the great thinkers of the past: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, etc. Modern education is focused on pragmatics, utilitarianism, and increasingly aligned with the radically nominalist ideology of the LGBT movement. The goal of the modern educational approach has been: helping students get a good job and succeed in the world. That’s the pragmatic utilitarian side. Increasingly even this has been jettisoned for progressive activism in the classroom. But in contrast to both of these modern approaches, the older approach to education was about the cultivation of the virtues, forming not just the mind but the chest (to borrow from C.S. Lewis); not just right thinking, but right feeling.

Today we have almost totally lost the idea that one’s emotions and affections need to be trained, but this is something the best of our forebears knew. We tell students to look within themselves to discover what great wonderful uniqueness is just waiting to come out. A properly educated person in centuries past was trained to know and to love the good, the true, and the beautiful. We utterly abandoned this approach to education in the late 19th and early 20th century, and I would argue that this goes a long way to explain the moral decrepitude of the obviously intelligent and well-educated (in computer programming or whatever discipline) men and women working at PornHub. But in the deepest sense, these people are not educated, they are not properly formed. There is a corruption deep in the soul that is at odds with the moral fibre of the universe.

I went to school with these guys, and I recognize the type. Cut adrift from a clear moral foundation to build upon, and with all that modern life and the internet makes available within easy reach, it’s not surprising to me that so many today think nothing of consuming violent pornography or working for a company that exists to peddle and get rich off such filth—even if some of it isn’t technically illegal. It’s a toxic cocktail of nihilism, cynicism, and ennui.

While children are not morally pure, they have a beautiful innocence that can mature into a love for what is good and a hatred for evil. But the appetites are malleable, and our hearts can be drawn away towards evil in all kinds of directions, not only from outside influences, but by the evil that grows naturally in every fallen human heart. And let’s not forget the Biblical testimony about the spiritual beings who prey on the sinful human heart and lead it to ever darker domains of depravity; indeed the depth of evil and cruelty one encounters in this realm is difficult to explain without reference to the demonic.

The Troubled Conscience

One interesting theme in the book is the role of the whistleblowers and insiders, former and current PornHub employees who reach out to Mickelwait to help her. When some of the early stories about PornHub came out a few years ago, I went to a popular employer-rating website and looked up what employees were saying about PornHub. I was fascinated by the people who would admit to working there. I remember reading many complaints about the management, but the most fascinating were those who were complaining about the soul-crushing nature of the work, especially content moderation (which involves watching the worst flagged videos for 8 hours a day).

One has to wonder what kind of person agrees to this work in the first place, and then what kind of reflection takes place—some flowering sense of morality, guilt, and shame—such that they turn against their employer and partner with Mickelwait in her efforts to take it down. This offers us a lens into the human conscience. Even after it has been seared and suppressed for years, it can be awakened by the suffering of innocent people and by the proper human response: righteous moral outrage. We might even say such people are taking their first steps in their true education.

Something Dark was Let Loose

As encouraging as it is to see these criminals get their comeuppance as the lawsuits and investigations pile up, I confess this book has left me with gloomy thoughts. Why? Because by all available evidence the problems of child sexual abuse and the prevalence of pornography, especially of a violent nature, are getting worse, not better. The reason we’re talking about this is because there is an endless and insatiable market for this material, a black teeming mass of abusing and abused souls, perpetrators and victims—the pornographers and those who make them rich.

The sexual revolution promised to set free the repressed love and desire that was making unfulfilled people miserable, but considered from this vantage point, it delivered instead a spirit of unbridled desire that commodified and objectified the human person, a spirit which too often revealed itself as desiring not just the bodies of others but the suffering of others. And once set free, it has proven impossible to bind that spirit of lust and destruction. PornHub’s empire was but one large and visible manifestation of what is a far more pervasive and profound moral rot.

When the only forbidden thing is to forbid, it is the weakest, the women and children, who inevitably suffer the most. One can be forgiven for wondering if the sexual revolution was such a good idea after all, whether consent can really be the guide for our morality, and whether that older morality was not altogether better than what we’ve got now.

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Pornography and Our Anthropological Crisis

I recently had a piece published over at The Gospel Coalition Canada called Pornogaphy Poisons Everything.

I like the image of the bright green snake picked out by the editor, but the title I proposed fell a bit flat. I’m no expert in marketing or anything, but it seems there should be a little twist of intrigue in the title of a piece that piques the interest of the prospective reader. In my case, I just bluntly stated the thesis of my piece in three words and left it at that. No mystery. Upon further reflection, even adding a single word would have helped: How Pornography Poisons Everything. Ah, that’s better. Well, lesson learned.

Despite the title I’ve been very pleased with the engagement the piece has received, as it was linked to by the main TGC website and Twitter account as well as Tim Challies – major boosters of traffic! Such was their reach that I’ve now got a little radio interview scheduled to discuss the topic further with the fine folks at Moody Radio Florida. I expect this will consist of me trying hard not to say anything spectacularly stupid and my wife trying to keep the kids quiet while I talk into my computer.

I have been reflecting on the themes in the article for a number of years, so I am grateful that people seem to find it helpful, or at least confirming of some intuitions they held. What I tried to make clear is some of the subtle ways pornography influences individuals, families, churches, communities, and societies. I found it helpful to use a combination of Scripture and Natural Law reasoning (also known as common sense) to make this case.

I noted in the piece a shifting tide of opinion in some quarters on the question of pornography. The libertarian laissez-faire approach of “do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t hurt me” has proven disastrously inadequate for helping our society, and especially impressionable youth, deal with the wave of pornography that has multiplied proportionally with the spread of Wi-Fi and high-speed data-enabled cellphones with HD screens. And this all the more given the fact that foolish parents anxious to be liked by their teens are pushovers and give them these devices with absolutely no guardrails. Disaster.

So thoughtful people are waking up to the fact that this is noxious and dangerous stuff which is harming a whole generation recently come of age, and that wise leaders will no more allow this to go unrestricted and unregulated as they would let drug dealers open up booths in our community high schools and at local parks. Why? Because young people do not have the moral or even biological resources to muster up a strong defense against the open availability of such powerful stimulants. It’s been interesting to see secular people coming around to this realization and starting to make moral cases against not only open access to pornography for minors but the industry itself.

Another fascinating angle is the growing activism and legal challenge to the frankly criminal behavior of PornHub, the world’s biggest porn site. The lawsuits are huge, and well, money talks. It’s no exaggeration to say that there is a large amount of content on that site which not only depicts heinous crimes but is criminal itself; freely available images and videos that may someday soon be entered as incriminating evidence in a trial. Outrage over that fact should be widespread and non-political, and I have hope that awareness is growing. While we’re on the subject, perhaps you want to sign the online petition over at Traffickinghub.com.

I hope to write more about this in the future, but in the meantime I need to write the promised Part 2 where I try to offer some help for those still ensnared and enslaved to porn. Stay tuned for that in coming weeks.

This brings me to a related topic: anthropology. I know, I know – another big word which we’ve all heard before but aren’t really sure what it means.

“What is man? What is anthropology?”
Photo by Max Duzij on Unsplash

And for my most faithful readers, this will feel like a re-run of a previous post, but I’m firmly convinced that it is a necessary word to understand the nature of the rapid transformations taking place in our time. One of the most helpful thinkers in this regard is Carl Trueman, who has made the transition from church historian to cultural critic with great success. And boy can he write. Consider for example this article just published today over at First Things, where he responds to the same controversy I alluded to in my piece, namely the statement made by Dennis Prager that pornography use and lust are not necessarily morally wrong.

Prager’s statement reveals that he lacks a real grasp of what is causing the social and political problems that he claims to abhor: We live in a time of anthropological chaos, where the very notion of what it means to be human is no longer a matter of broad social and political consensus.

Pornography is a great example of this. Behind the problems that should have been obvious to Prager—the objectification of other people, the human trafficking, the transformation of sex into something that is self- rather than other-directed, the reduction of the participants to instruments of pleasure for the spectators—lies a basic philosophy of life that sees me, my desires, and my fulfillment at the core of what it means to be human. Pornography is thus part of an anthropological shift that manifests itself most obviously in sexual mores but is far more comprehensive in its significance.

Later, he adds:

Now, sex and pornography are the most dramatic examples of where this plays out, but they do not exist in isolation from broader considerations of what it means to be a human person. Therefore those, like Prager, who see pornography as having a legitimate function are complicit in this shift. And this change underlies no-fault divorce, gay marriage, and (in its subordination of the body and its functions to the individual’s sense of well-being) even transgenderism. It is foundational to the progressive cause. To concede here is to concede everywhere.

I do encourage you to read the whole thing. This analysis goes much deeper than the moral outrage of an offended conscience and gets at the roots of what is driving a multitude of bewildering cultural phenomena. We do not need the momentary heat of Twitter-depth indignation which tempts us to feel morally self-righteous. That is cheap. But we do need the light of historically-informed thinking that sees through the chaos and confusion of the day and makes clear the deep tectonic shifts happening in our culture. That is “men of Issachar” type stuff.

I hope, in some small way, to continue making contributions to that good work. As always, thanks for reading.