Early in Pornocracy, authors Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel tell an anecdote – not a case study – before noting: “Case studies like those above will be dismissed by pornography’s promoters as unconnected anecdotes.” It is meant as a warning but inadvertently offers the most accurate critique of their own work. They are right: these are unconnected anecdotes, nowhere near rigorous research or statistical relevance. Pornocracy announces itself as an investigation into the harms of pornography but delivers agenda in drag as scholarship, a book built from contradiction, moral panic and logical fallacies rather than research.
The authors’ method is to conflate. Women become children; sex becomes child abuse; pornography becomes paedophilia, rape and trafficking; and the entire morass is held up as proof that watching adult content leads men inevitably toward the depraved. They refuse to distinguish between filmed abuse and consensual sex work, or between the impact of porn and the influence of patriarchy. They never consider how the conservative moral order they defend sustains the conditions they claim to deplore.
Within three pages the book reveals its anti-trans stance, collapsing gender into an immutable binary while blaming pornography for misogyny. There is no recognition that transphobia itself reinforces the patriarchal hierarchies they pretend to critique. Queer theory and sex positivity are misrepresented to encourage silence, while the authors note the ethnicity or religion of some abusers but omit others, signalling to their desired audience – one unlikely to discern between evidence and indignation.
Whenever Bartosch and Jessel make a valid point – about algorithms pushing extreme content or the sexualisation of “barely legal” youth – they immediately smother it with unsubstantiated fearmongering. They quote porn-addiction experts while simultaneously claiming no one takes porn addiction seriously, and cite a man who only discovered empathy for women “after becoming a father” as if that were enlightenment rather than confession of prior indifference.
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Michel Foucault observed that modern societies never stop talking about sex, only regulate how we speak of it. Pornocracy exemplifies that impulse. It cannot stop talking about pornography, yet does so only in its constricted vocabulary of moral panic.
The authors note the rise in misogyny, of boys’ sexual harassment of girls, and men’s growing sexual entitlement, but refuse to situate these within the wider resurgence of patriarchy, fascism and white supremacy, or the backlash to #MeToo, reproductive rights and trans rights. Their world has room for a single culprit, porn, and none for the structures of power that make its worst expressions possible.
