Fear of Pornography

Why pornophobia began as an accusation

Wiktionary defines pornophobia as an aversion to pornography and collects citations from 1968 onwards. The first of them coins the word in the act of applying it:

Fear of pornography, or 'pornophobia' as I choose to call it, is a terribly unbalancing mental condition.

That is the suffix doing what it usually does in political vocabulary, which is to move the argument from the merits of a position to the mental health of the person holding it. Later uses keep the frame. A legal writer titled an essay of 1995 on the perils of pornophobia. A memoir of 2004 remarks that pornophobia is not quite a recognised social ill at this point, which concedes that the writer wishes it were.

Wiktionary records a second and unrelated sense as well, sourced to a book of 1994: pornophobia meaning the fear of prostitutes. The Greek porne means a prostitute, so that reading is the literal one and the familiar sense is the derived one.

Why opposition to pornography is several separate arguments

What the word covers is several distinct arguments that happen to reach the same conclusion.

Religious objection rests on human dignity, modesty and chastity, and cites scripture directly: the Sermon on the Mount, the Catechism's charge that pornography offends against chastity and does grave injury to the dignity of its participants by making each one an object of base pleasure and illicit profit, and verses of the Quran directing both women and men to lower their gaze and guard their chastity.

Feminist opposition rests on exploitation and on complicity in violence against women, in production as well as in content. A third strand rests on claimed harms including addiction and erectile dysfunction, and there the evidence is weaker than the claim: pornography addiction is not a condition recognised by the current diagnostic manuals of either the American or the international classification.

The definitions do not hold still either. What counts as pornography varies between countries and movements, many people distinguish between pornography, which they oppose, and erotica, which they accept, and some treat certain forms as worse than others while others draw no distinction at all.

What the polling on pornography shows

A Gallup survey in 2018 found 43 per cent of American adults describing pornography as morally acceptable, seven points up on the previous year. By 2025 that figure had fallen to 35 per cent.

Underneath that, a longer trend runs in two directions at once. Between 1975 and 2012 the gap between the sexes widened: women became increasingly opposed, and men's opposition declined faster.

What the Longford Report did to the pornography trade

The most closely documented episode is the Longford Report, instigated in 1971 by the Labour politician Frank Pakenham, better known as Lord Longford, and published in 1972. It appeared at a moment when other countries had legalised the distribution of pornography or were questioning its illegal status, and it is usually treated as a failed attempt at policymaking.

The trade it addressed had grown in the gap left by a liberal law. The Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was intended as a liberalising measure, meant to separate works of artistic merit from low-grade material, and its vagueness produced loopholes. Those loopholes were exploited by the unit charged with enforcing it, the Obscene Publications Squad, known as the Dirty Squad, which ran a protection racket with a corrupt licensing system under which a monthly payment let producers and distributors operate with minimal risk of arrest. An alliance between that squad, the pornographers and London's criminal underworld had supported the growth of Soho's bookshops from 1950 onwards, and attempts to expose it were brushed aside, including an investigative reporter's discovery of police involvement in 1959.

The exposure, when it came, was a newspaper front page on 8 November 1970 headed with a claim to have named guilty men in a boom in blue films, followed by a four-week Sunday investigation. The story that started it was a light aircraft from Denmark making an emergency landing in Belgium with 777 boxes aboard wrapped in Christmas paper, which turned out to contain hardcore films being smuggled into Britain.

Drawing on six years of archival research, the study of that episode argues that the Longford Report inadvertently had a significant effect on the British hardcore trade, and that the activities of moral entrepreneurs can have lasting consequences for how pornography is controlled. The aversion, in other words, changed the thing it opposed without abolishing it, which is a more interesting outcome than either side claimed at the time.