Joe Bartosz and Robert Jessel dissect how the $97 billion porn industry hijacks brain reward systems to create addiction, replacing real intimacy with digital spirals of depravity. They critique "zombie feminism" for deconstructing traditional gender roles while highlighting legislative failures in Britain against American tech giants and the lack of custodial sentences for child sex offenders. Ultimately, they argue that algorithms and figures like Andrea Dworkin have turned pornography into an anti-sex force threatening the family unit, urging a conservative-liberal alliance to combat future threats from sex robots and virtual reality before love is fully commodified. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Targeting Children for Extreme Content00:15:11
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Joe Bartosh and Robert Jessel, who have written an intense and amazing book called Pornocracy.
Joe is a journalist, woman's rights advocate, and assistant editor of The Critic.
Robert is a communications consultant, campaigner for free speech and LGB rights.
And you may notice that these are not the usual credentials of people who come on the show, though I invite them often.
And what fascinated me about this book is we come at it from different perspectives.
Angles, mine far more conservative angle, and yet we seem to have complete agreement on the fact that pornography, which used to be a giggly little vice for 13 year old boys, has now become a sort of culvert gushing an amazing amount of toxin into our society, utterly destructive.
And this book is an expose of why it's so hard to get rid of something that is so destructive.
Joe and Robert, thank you both for coming on.
Thank you so much for inviting us.
I really appreciate it.
No, I'm thrilled to get to talk to you.
I just, this book, as I was saying before, the The camera went on.
I can't say that I enjoyed it because it's a very intense experience, but it's really well researched and really well reasoned.
Maybe we can start because you're in England and you're talking about a slightly different culture.
Maybe you could start by just explaining the state of play.
Where are you in Great Britain with pornography?
What is it like there for this industry, I guess we'll call it?
We seem to be taking sort of two steps forward, one step back all the time.
So there have been some really useful legislative changes recently.
So, we've had the introduction of age verification, which happened since the publication of the book.
And that's been really, really good in terms of stopping children just stumbling across pornography, particularly on social media.
We're having some problems trying to get the pornographers to actually comply.
So, I know at the moment there are sort of fines that Ofcom, our regulatory body, are processing and just trying to make the largely American tech giants sit up and take notice.
We've recently had bans on pseudo incest pornography and pseudo child pornography.
Pornography, which again is great if they make them stick.
And we've had a ban on strangulation.
So these have all taken a little while to come in.
But they are sort of steps in the right direction.
However, we have just this week actually had an MP come out and say that she wants to make it the summer of sex in Parliament.
And she has partnered with essentially a sort of sex positive, i.e., very pro porn advocate.
So I think legislatively things seem to be going in the right direction.
Whether that's actually enforced remains another matter.
There seems, I mean, as you describe pornography and as I see it, All the time, not the pornography, but the results.
Sex and pornography are not necessarily, they don't necessarily go hand in hand.
They act, actually, pornography is in a way an anti sex experience for a lot of people.
Is that a fair statement?
Yeah, I think that's entirely fair.
I mean, that's something I find incredibly frustrating about the term sex positive because so often it just means not being critical of porn.
And actually, I think, you know, pornography, it's essentially masturbating to somebody else's sexual fantasy.
There is nothing relational or life affirming or any of the things that go with sex.
I know this is one of Rob's hobby waters when it comes to the importance of love as well.
Yes, you are completely right.
I mean, the way that we put it is that pornography is in competition with sex.
And in many ways, it is winning, not just through the rapidly diminishing number of young people, Gen Z. Who are not having relationships, but the people who say that their sexual expectations and what they are bringing into the bedroom are being shaped by porn.
I would take issue with one of the things that you said that pornography isn't sex.
You're quite right, but it's important to understand that our brain doesn't really get that.
The part of our brain that makes us enjoy, Pornography and want to seek it out.
It's not the developed conscious part of the brain.
It's the lizard brain that keeps us alive and makes us seek things that it thinks is good for passing on our genes.
Now, if you are subjected to sexual imagery and you have an orgasm to that and your brain is flooded with all the neurotransmitters and sort of nice cocktail of drugs, then it doesn't really distinguish that that is different from sex with another.
Another person, and that's why pornography is such a dangerous thing because it actually ends up replacing sex in our minds.
In fact, in the book, we go so far as to say, in terms of the neurotransmitters that we emit, regular heavy users are almost literally falling in love with porn.
You know, one of the things you talk about in this book that I actually did not know or did not realize I've always known that people who use porn.
Go into darker and darker corners.
And I've always just assumed that that was something that happened to them naturally, like with any kind of addiction.
You want the hits start to wear off and you want more and more stronger and stronger stuff.
But the way you tell it, this is actually a strategy on behalf of the industry that they are feeding people purposely not just sadistic sex, but also child porn.
Is that a good description?
Yeah, I think that's entirely fair.
So, yeah, obviously, users become rapidly desensitized.
So, they sort of will seek out more and more extreme things.
And we are seeing in the UK over the past sort of decade, there has been an explosion in the numbers of men who previously never would have looked at or had any predilection to be aroused by children.
And they are finding themselves looking at images of child sexual abuse.
Um, so much so, this is now such a problem that eight out of ten of them, um, who are convicted, and obviously it's a minority who even end up in court, eight out of ten don't even get a custodial sentence, they walk out the courtroom.
It is that common, um, and frankly, I don't think our justice system can keep up with it.
Um, and these aren't men who you know immediately gravitated there, it's something that has happened as a result of the sort of increasing extremity.
And you know, we understand that, um, with other forms of social media, the way that algorithms work, you know, essentially.
They're designed to keep you online, to keep you clicking, to keep using your data.
And it does seem to be, and I'm sure Wubb will talk more about this, it does seem to be that pornography companies are designed in exactly the same way to sort of lock you into sort of spirals of increasing depravity in order to keep you there.
Because obviously, it's not something that you can satisfy in the real world, particularly.
So it's, you know, there's a market benefit to keeping you hooked.
You know, Robert, you were talking about the effect of this on the brain.
And one of the things that puzzled me about this is I can see, I think most people, if they're honest, can see the continuum that goes from normal sex to maybe rough sex.
I can sort of see how that plays out.
But I actually can't see the connection between having sex with an adult and having sex with a child who doesn't have the usual shape or attraction that a grown person has.
How does that work?
I mean, what are they doing to people that makes that work?
The first thing to say is I don't think there's a strategy from the porn companies specifically to take you users on to watch real footage of child abuse.
But at the same time, they do host a lot of content of actors who may be overage, but who are doled up to look like children.
And I use the word doled up advisedly.
They will have props, they will have pigtails and lollipops and teddy bears to make them look.
Young, there has to be somewhere else for a user to go.
If you've exhausted your, you know, the type of pornography that you have happened to be into this month, the thing that the porn companies really fear is that you'll open the laptop, fire up your favorite homepage, look at videos, and feel bored.
That's the worst thing.
It's not like the porn companies want to take you to the extreme for.
The sake of doing it, it's just because more and more extreme is the only place you can go.
People do not go to pornography to sort of get tips on how to have fantastic real world sex.
They are, let's be frank about this.
And I think one of the problems is language.
People, you always hear people saying, you know, I watch porn.
No, you don't.
You mass debate to it.
And what people are looking for is not just the release that you get when you have an org.
Gasm, gasm, but it's the sense of arousal, the state of wanting to find the perfect bit of porn, the hunt for it.
And this tickles one of the parts of the rear wars system in our brain that wants to go out and hunt for things.
And that's what the porn industry hacks.
It knows very, very well how the brain works.
Whirlpool towards extremity is all to do with keeping the user on the screen.
You know, another thing that's in the book that startled me, it didn't surprise me, but it did startle me, was that they seem to be purposely targeting young people for this and sort of winking at people that they should come on even if it's illegal or they should come on even if they're underage.
How does that get past the authorities?
How does that get past parents?
How does that get past the culture as a whole that nobody is protesting that?
I mean, or if they are protesting that, they seem to get shot down as being uptight or prigs.
How is that happening?
How is that unfolding?
I think, in part, there's probably a generational divide in that I think for a lot of older people, perhaps they don't understand actually the extremity of what is being marketed and pushed to kids.
You know, they probably think it's a little bit like Playboy magazines without realizing that actually it's, you know, it's a million miles away.
It is so much darker.
And then I think there are, we now have sort of several generations in, if you like, to the experiment.
Sort of what I know Andrew, what's his name, Haight, he calls it the, Jonathan Haight, he calls it the great rewiring, doesn't he, with regards to social media.
Obviously, we've had the same thing with pornography now for a couple of decades.
So into schools are young sex educators who obviously have also been brought up on pornography.
And they think it's totally normal.
So I think it sort of bypasses them because they don't know any different.
It bypassed their parents because their parents had no bloody idea what they were looking at online.
And now, with sort of this next generation, to say finally, we have age verification in place.
So I think that will make a difference, but it's kind of too little, too late.
So, you know, I think the experiment will roll on.
How it's got away with it to date.
I think nobody, I think it's just not a popular subject for politicians to tackle.
I think they're very scared of looking prudish.
I think it's, yeah, I think it's fear of being seen to be judgmental.
And I think that's sort of closed down where we really needed to have discussions.
You know, there's a show here that was on for a while.
I don't know if it ever made it to the UK called Silicon Valley, where it was a very funny show about the high tech world.
And one of the, episodes was about how almost all the money that was being made online was coming on from pornography.
How is that money affecting lawmaking?
How is it affecting the culture?
And what are the people in the porn industry doing to lobby for their cause?
Well, I can talk about how the porn lobby has infiltrated the school curriculum in the UK and presumably in the US too.
The money aspect, more widely, is a very hard thing to know, even how much the sector is worth.
The figure we use in the book is $97 billion, but we do cast some doubt on that because that figure is quite old.
And there's no particularly good sources for it.
So I think it is an industry that thrives in darkness and exerting its power very, very, very much behind the scenes.
And one only really sees it when it pops up in places, weirdly and shockingly, like the school curriculum.
We've seen teaching resources about how to teach children about sex and relationships and specifically porn that have.
Egregiously pro porn arguments, such as porn is a treat to be enjoyed in moderation, like cake, that says that you should pay for porn because it's always important to support sex workers and so forth.
And the complete lack of oversight of these materials is essentially allowing porn into the classroom at a time when playgrounds are full of porn and kids' apps are, again, full of not.
Zombie Feminism and Pro-Porn Arguments00:03:18
Not just porn, as Joe said, in terms of, you know, when I was a kid, you might get a look at a girly mag and be a bit shocked by it.
Now you have 11 year olds or 12 year olds, which is the average age of first seeing porn.
They are showing acts that would be illegal if they were in real life choking, violence, rape, incest, and so forth.
So this lack of ability to have even the most cursory, basic, Conversations about porn and to have a culture where watching and masturbating to pornography is seen as a moral failing, as seen as shameful.
Until we can have that, we're not going to make any progress at all, especially not against such a powerful industry that has God knows how much money, but you can bet your bottom dollar they are influencing people at the very highest levels of government and beyond.
Thank you.
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It's K L A V A N. You know, I mean, I was going to just add to that.
I think, yes, the money is important, but I also just think the fact it's colonized people's minds is probably even more of a concern in a way than the financial elements.
So, you know, the fact that they don't even know what consent is anymore, I think that to me is more frightening.
Yeah, no, it is frightening.
Understanding Overlap in Human Behavior00:13:53
One of the things I just leapt out of the page, we're talking to Joe Bartosz and Robert Jessel, author of the book Pornocracy.
Which is a terrifying read and an intense read, but really worthwhile.
Joe, you list your credentials as being a women's rights advocate, but you write about something you call zombie feminism, which is part of what we are talking about that is work to make this acceptable to people, this truly destructive, psychologically destructive thing.
What does that mean, zombie feminism?
So I use the term to suggest that we've got this once great women's rights movement that was fighting for.
Genuine things that needed to be done for equality, for to not be discriminated against at work, to not be fired because you're pregnant, to have maternity leave, those sorts of things.
And today, sadly, it seems to mean any choice or decision that a woman makes must be celebrated because it's been made by a woman.
It has been totally stripped of any meaning.
And this sort of, these really harmful ideas.
So, Core to old school feminism, if you like, used to be an understanding of male violence.
It used to be understanding that the sexes are different and that men, as a class, as a whole, there's a risk to women.
That's not to be cruel about all men.
It's just if you look at the prison statistics, in the UK, I think it's 98% of those in prison for sexual violence are men.
That men are more violent than average.
And that used to be the sort of what underpinned feminist analysis.
And now we're seeing lots of young women who are being told that everything from makeup to doing OnlyFans to so called sex work, which is obviously prostitution, is empowering.
And they are essentially being groomed, I would say, into considering themselves as products of marketing themselves.
And one of the young women I spoke to, a young woman called Mila, Who did she end up in the sex industry?
She genuinely thought that in doing that, she was somehow, you know, sticking it to the man and taking on the patriarchy.
And then, you know, funnily enough, a few months later, she found herself doing lots of drugs and all the rest of it to try and cope with the dissociation, with the bodily dissociation that she and the trauma from unwanted sex, which is entirely normal.
That's what happens.
So, yeah, I think a particular.
You know, there were as many different sort of forms of feminism as there are of Christianity.
It's not fair to brand it all, but there was a particularly vicious and destructive form of feminism that I think has had a role to play in this.
Yeah.
And the same with you, Robert.
You say you're for free speech and LGB rights.
And first of all, I notice here, I assume this is true in the UK as well.
Here we go, LGB is just the first of like about 15 letters.
And I noticed that you never get to T in your advocacy of rights.
And that you talk a lot about.
Queer theory as a destructive force in this?
Yes, queer theory for anyone who's not familiar with it is a rather vague, I would say purposely vague and niche academic discipline, which is about undermining great central truths around which our whole civilization is based and to blur boundaries for no other purpose than I can see.
Than because it sounds like fun.
And porn fits in very, very, very well here because it's all about undermining.
Basic boundaries that people have erected around themselves for thousands of years, not just in the way that we have sex with each other, but the way that we think about each other too.
I'm not going to, I think it's possible to get a bit too deep into the academic side of this, which is where I'm less interested.
But I think the greatest.
Perversion for me is the one of thought and the one of language, too.
Joe's just mentioned with zombie feminism how degrading yourself and selling yourself is seen as empowerment.
I could come at that from a male point of view.
Men are told that the porn platforms cater to their every whim, that they can explore their sexuality, find out what they like, that it's liberating in a way for men.
This is a very queer theory way of thinking about things because it's Orwellian.
It's not true.
It's not empowering.
It's not liberation.
It's actual enslavement.
As Joe said at the beginning, we're letting young men have their own sexual tastes and interests, and in some cases, even their sexual orientation, being shaped for them before they've even had the chance to pass a note to a girl they fancy in class or have their first kiss or hold hands.
Pornography is.
It's a mental prison, which is designed just to keep you looking at a screen instead of a human being.
I saw that there was a very interesting article in the London Times a couple of days ago about Generation Z's not just towards sex, but to talking about sex.
And if you don't mind, I'll read a short quote from one of the people interviewed there.
He said, I thought sex was like it was on Pornhub.
I thought women liked it when you called them a whore.
The first time I had sex wasn't anything like that.
And to be honest, I found sex underwhelming for years.
I only realized that porn was to blame when I stopped watching porn.
And I think this is, you know, the male equivalent of the prison that women find themselves in, too.
Yeah.
I want to run by you.
So, I mean, I'm a conservative and I read an American conservative, which is actually different than a UK conservative.
I don't at least do blood and soil.
It's just I want to preserve the constitution and the freedoms that are in it.
That's what I'm trying to conserve.
But But I had this reaction reading parts of the book where you quoted people that I genuinely dislike on your side, one of them being Andrea Dworkin.
And I don't say this personally, by the way.
I know someone who knows her and says she's a lovely person.
Is she still alive?
I think she is.
No, she died a while ago.
Who knew her and said she was a lovely person.
But as a philosopher, the other one was Catherine McKinnon.
Have I got the name right?
I think I have, yeah.
And one of the things that I felt as I was reading that.
Is these were people who not only stood up for women's rights, which I, of course, support, or for gay rights, but actually kind of deconstructed what I think is the natural relationship between men and women, which marriage was invented to sort of protect and control.
And in doing that, maybe left people with nothing but porn in a way.
I mean, if you tell men that they are toxic, if you tell women that marriage is oppression, where do you leave them?
You leave them in this kind of world.
Without a shape and without a moral framework.
And I just, I guess I want to just get your reaction to my reaction, basically, because I understand people see things differently, but it just struck me that maybe after the basic rights are achieved, the deconstruction of normal relations was maybe a mistake.
I mean, is that unfair?
No, I mean, I understand what you mean.
I think probably where I would differ.
Is when it comes to like the idea of gender as opposed to sex.
So, gender in a sort of an old school feminist sense was a set of sexual stereotypes.
So, it was women being submissive, it was men being dominant, it was men being violent, it was, you know.
So, these were sort of the, and at the far end, they are harmful.
And I think actually what those early feminists were trying to do was to take the edges off them, to sort of open things out, to show women that actually they could.
Go out and be fighter pilots should they so wish to do so, and meant that they could be caring and stay at home.
Not that they should, not that everybody should, not that it was entirely a social construct, just that actually the way we treat the sexes does differ in ways beyond our biology.
And I think, for example, one of the sort of feminist arguments against transgenderism is that if you take away the social elements to gender, there is nothing to transition into.
So, you know, that's like one sort of thought experiment, if you like, with regards to how feminists have traditionally understood these things.
So I think, yeah, there is some truth to it, but I don't think it was ever as rigid as it's perhaps.
Caricatured as.
I think it was more about just understanding that people differ and that, you know, even within our two distinct sex classes, there's probably more overlap than there is difference in terms of behavior.
Yeah.
And I have to say the same to you, Robert.
I mean, I've been a friend to gay persons since it was actually dangerous to do it.
And many of my good friends and people I've worked with and truly loved have been gay people.
But it did seem that when here, for instance, when they declared That gay marriage was a constitutional right, which I just think isn't true on the legal merits.
I mean, it's just not in the Constitution.
There seemed to be this uprising of advocacy for the perverse.
I don't know how else to say it.
Is that inherent in gay thinking or is it something that is an add on, do you think?
Oh, gosh.
I'm not really a spokesman for gay people so much.
In fact, the book itself is mostly, well, almost entirely focused on the hair.
Heterosexual aspect because you know that's that by far, far the um biggest uh you know uh sex section of um the pop population.
But going back to what you asked Joe, you said you know obviously you are you are a conservative.
I would say that everybody is a conservative about the things that they really really care about.
Yes, I agree with you.
Yeah, um, and and and I would say that.
We might have very different ideas about the importance of marriage or same sex, sex marriage, or sex before marriage.
I'm a product of growing up in the 1990s.
I think I have a slightly more flexible view of that.
But what I'm talking about, the thing that I want to conserve, and that I think everybody should be able to get on board with, is just forget sex, forget marriage, it's love, it's having a relationship with some other person and to.
Be able to relate and to give your whole self to them.
And the idea that pornography is a threat to this most basic fundamental glue holding society together at all levels.
I'm sure, as a conservative, that you would agree that there is nothing more important than the family unit.
That is what porn undermines.
And it's about to get so much more worse.
We think of porn as being bad because of the things that it shows.
The next generation of porn, which is coming online, is about removing, is about deembodying sex completely.
We're talking about sex robots, virtual reality, augmented reality, which is being sold as better than sex.
And I don't think anything really underlines how pornography attacks something that liberals, conservatives, people of any political persuasion who believe in.
Who believes in love and believes love is the bedrock for everything good in this world?
We should be united across the political spectrum against pornography.
Yep, yep.
Well said.
And just a terrific book, Pornocracy.
The authors are Joe Bartosz and Robert Jessel.
Thank you guys for coming on.
Really interesting conversation.
And I hope a lot of people buy your book and it makes a difference in the UK.
And then you can move over here and help us.
Lovely speaking.
Thank you so much for inviting yourself.
Thanks a lot.
Really interesting conversation and amazing how certain things just bring us together.
It's so obvious to me that this is a torrent of toxic trash that is ripping apart the minds of the young for money.
And I think pornocracy shows a lot of how that works.
It's a good book, Joe Bartosz and Robert Jessel.
The book is Pornocracy.
Come to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday, where there will be no pornocracy or pornography, but I'll be there and I hope you'll be there as well.