The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, pornography is exploitative, harmful, and too easy to access. It’s time to ban porn.

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

It’s a $97 billion global industry that has made its way into mobile phones, video games and laptops. Never before has porn been more accessible, and offered more variety, than the present day. And yet, some feminists want to revisit the question of whether it should exist at all. They say pornography exploits young women and creates unrealistic expectations in the bedroom. So many of society’s worst problems – from pedophilia, to sexual assault, to gender inequality – are amplified by porn use. And with the advent of the internet and video streaming, children are able to access hardcore porn with few guardrails, leading to a generation of young men who are getting their sex education from unrealistic and exploitative sexual relationships portrayed onscreen. On the other side of the debate are those who see value in porn: research shows that men who watch porn value female pleasure more, couples who watch porn together have better sexual relationships, and LGBT folk report a greater sense of community acceptance. Porn, its defenders argue, is being used as a distraction when many of the problems related to the industry are already systemic in our everyday lives. And finally, attempting to ban porn would only drive it underground and increase the risk of exploitation. In their view, it’s time to put the decades long debate over porn to bed, once and for all. Arguing for the motion is Meghan Murphy, she’s a writer, journalist, and founder of Feminist Current, a feminist website and podcast Arguing against the motion is David Ley, clinical psychologist and sex therapist, and author of The Myth of Sex Addiction SOURCES:  3 GIRLS 1 KITCHEN The host of this Munk Debates podcast is Ricki Gurwitz Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Every episode, we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. Pornography is exploitative, harmful, and too easy to access. It's time to ban porn. Hi, I'm your guest moderator, Ricky Gurwitz. Well, it's a $97 billion global industry that has made its way onto mobile phones video games, and laptops.

Never before has porn been more accessible to young people than it is today. And while there has always been a desire from religious groups to ban porn, some feminists are now speaking out against an industry which they argue amplifies and monetizes sexual assault, gender discrimination and pedophilia. Here's former porn star Lana Rhodes talking about why she left the industry. During my short stint and porn, they're really extreme acts were what was popular, and that's why being the number one performer in the industry at the time, everyone wanted to make money off me, so they pushed me to do these things. And it just gets really extreme. On the other side of the debate are those who see a benefit to porn.

Research shows that men who watch it value female pleasure more, couples who watch it together have better sexual relationships, and the LGBT community reports a greater sense of acceptance due to the normalization of same-sex porn videos. They argue that attempting to ban porn would only drive it underground and increase the risk of exploitation. In their view, it's time to put the decades-long debate over porn to bed once and for all. On this installment of the monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be resolved, pornography is exploitative, harmful, and too easy to access. It's time to ban porn. Arguing for the motion is Megan Murphy. She's a writer, journalist, and founder of

feminist current, a feminist website and podcast. Arguing against the motion is David J. Lay. He's a clinical psychologist, sex therapist, and author of The Myth of Sex Addiction. David, Megan, welcome to The Monk Debates. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having me. So, Megan, you are arguing in favor of a resolution today, be it resolved. Pornography is exploitative, harmful, and too easy to access. It's time to ban porn.

I'm going to put a couple of minutes on the clock for you. Let's have your opening statements. In the past, porn was something that you really had to go out of your way to find, often in kind of embarrassing ways, sneaking into like red hot video after dark, or buying a plastic wrapped magazine from behind the counter at the corner store. That's no longer the world we're living in. You really can't exist online without porn being pushed on you in one way or another, whether that's on Twitter, on Instagram, via porn bots in your DMs or the comments on YouTube,

pop-ups on Torrance sites, and then, of course, just simply as part of our pop culture, the music industry, YouTube streamers, social media influencers, et cetera, et cetera. Only fans isn't taboo. It's cool. It's an empowering way for women to get theirs. The overriding message is that porn. is a normal, even a healthy part of men and boys' lives. And for girls, it's kind of like, if you can't beat him, which we're told we can't, uh, join him. So girls and young women

learn early on that pornifying themselves to gain attention or love is necessary. It's how all women operate. And those who don't engage are just, you know, uptight fruits. But the reality is that porn is an industry that profits from the exploitation and abuse of hundreds of thousands of women and girls worldwide. And men profit from this abuse. And of course, men masturbate to this abuse. Kids are watching porn at every younger ages, whether they want to or not. Social media has made porn totally unavoidable. And the moment a child goes online, he or she is vulnerable to exposure. Many kids are seeing porn as early as 11 nowadays, and sometimes even earlier. I've talked to a young man who started watching porn at seven years old.

And today, the majority of youth have seen porn by the time they're 13 years old. This is a form of child abuse. These kids and teenagers don't even understand what sex is, but they're seeing imagery that degrades women that's often violent, that's racist, that's misogynist. And also, it's all a lie. Porn is a lie. It's fundamentally what sex is not or what it should not be in any case in an ethical society. Porn isn't about pleasure. It's not about human connection. It's not about bonding or love or intimacy or creating a family. It's not about letting go and allowing yourself to be completely vulnerable and trusting of another person.

It's not about desire. It's about the opposite. It's a performance. It's patient. It's patient. It's pay. It's humiliating. It's coercive. It's punitive. And it's made only for the pleasure of the viewer, who really has no idea what's happening on the other side of the screen. All right. Thanks, Megan. David, it's time for your opening statements. I'm going to put a couple of minutes on the clock. You are arguing against our resolution today, be it resolved. Pornography is exploitative, harmful, and too easy to access. It's time to ban porn. Take it away. So in 1919, the United States banned alcohol, and we initiated a prohibition largely for moral reasons. There was a small, vocal, moral minority that opposed alcohol. And they claimed that alcohol was causing things like mental retardation, divorce, and crime. Ten years later, prohibition was repealed because it turns out that alcohol's role, just like pornography and sexual,

is much more complicated. There are easy, seemingly simple solutions like banning alcohol or banning pornography, but the situation is much more complex. In 2017, the Canadian Parliament Standing Committee on Health investigated the science around the impact of pornography. They found, and I'll quote, that their research has not established any of, causal relationship among the general population between negative sexual attitudes and behaviors and the viewing of pornography. They went on to say the impact of sexually explicit material on sexual health and behavior cannot be separated from how sexuality is addressed in society more broadly through education, political, and social structures. Megan, you and I agree,

actually, on a couple of important points. We absolutely need to listen to the voices of porn performers, both those who support porn and those who oppose it, so that we can ensure that this entertainment industry is ethical and responsible. Secondly, we absolutely need to make sure that young people who watch pornography understand that it is not a realistic depiction of sex, because it is those young people who don't understand that pornography is fantasy, who are the ones who are most likely to learn unhealthy lessons, who are most likely to learn unhealthy lessons, who are most likely to learn poor sexual behaviors from watching pornography. We need to help those kids, but we can't help them by banning pornography.

Instead, we can help them most effectively through accurate, comprehensive sex education. Okay, thank you, David, for those opening remarks. Megan, is your turn now to rebut to David's opening remarks? Is there anything that he said that you would take issue with? Yeah, I mean, I often hear, you know, we should listen to the voices of women in the sex industry. We should listen to so-called sex workers. I don't use that term.

But I mean, if you think about who is able to tell the truth and able to have like a real, genuine, accurate reflection on the porn industry, it's women who are out of the porn industry. Women who are currently working in the porn industry are very unlikely to tell you that they hate their jobs and that they hate the sex that they're having. and they don't want to sleep with these men or that they think that the viewers are like disgusting pigs. They need to sell themselves while they're in that trade.

It would be like going up to somebody working at Starbucks and being like, do you hate Starbucks? Like they're probably not going to stand in front of you at the counter and be like, yeah, I hate my job. I really hate Starbucks because they'd get fired. And, you know, with regards to the kids factor, like I totally agree we should be talking to kids about porn because unfortunately this is a reaction.

You know, kids are going to see porn online, and we have to talk to them about what that is. But at the same time, I mean, kids shouldn't be looking at porn, period. Like, these are traumatic images for a kid to see. And the only way, I'm sorry, but the only way to stop kids from seeing it is to make it illegal. So taking it off of social media. Like any kid who's online, as I said earlier, who's on Instagram, who's on Twitter. You know, like, I get porn in my Twitter feed all the time. I don't want to see porn.

There's nothing I can do about it. I get comments on my YouTube channel constantly for advertisements for porn. And the only way to get rid of porn is to make it unprofitable. David, do you want to rebut to anything you heard from Megan? So currently, most professional porn that's produced in the United States is actually produced by female producers. Most independent female performers are producing their own material. Unfortunately, when porn was illegal in the past, it involved far more exploitation and far less independence by performers, because that was when organized crime was involved and forcing women

to perform. I think the real challenge, and I know people always laugh, this, but it is an important consideration whenever we talk about trying to ban porn, how do we define porn? Because that becomes an incredibly challenging difficulty. Because otherwise, you potentially end up, as in the United Kingdom, banning access to sexual education material, banning access to art. Unfortunately, most of these conversations start becoming extremely heteronormative, focused on controlling access to female sexuality predominantly. They ignore the role of gay performers and gay male performers and lesbian performers who are making material for other women. Unfortunately, we can't currently distinguish pornography from

Game of Thrones. And how do we ban the... things when we can't do so consistently, when we can't do so accurately or easily. Finally, pornography is information. It's sexual information. And whenever we start talking about banning information, we need to question why. And we have to be very careful about the intrusion of morality into those decisions, where we're making decisions because we don't want other people to behave in a certain way. How do we make those decisions and who do we put in charge of

making those decisions? Because historically, that is how we end up in highly conservative autocratic states unfortunately that have higher rates of sexual abuse. Access to pornography historically correlates with a decreased rate

of sex crime. Consistently in every research study across the country. If we want to keep people safe, banning pornography is not the answer. Thank you, David. So, Megan, I want to pick up on something that David just said, which is, how would you even define porn these days? He's right. There's lots of shows that show very explicit content.

These women are being paid, obviously, as actresses. So would you ban it in certain shows? I mean, where do you draw the line? So the difference between something like Game of Thrones and porn. is that in pornography, those sex acts and that violence is really happening, is really happening to real women, which is why so many women in porn suffer physical injuries, you know, vaginal tearing, inal prolapse, obviously things like bruising, injuries from being choked, and, you know, things like pink eye and all sorts of other infections, including STIs, of course.

And I think, you know, my approach to pornography and legislation around pornography that I think would work and that I think makes sense is to treat pornography as prostitution. You know, we're selling the body. We're selling access to another body for profit. Again, the sale, I think, is really key here. So my, what I advocate in terms of legislation around prostitution is commonly referred to as the Nordic model. And what happens is that men who pay for sex and pimps and brothel owners and, of course, traffickers are criminalized. And the women who are selling sex are decriminalized so that they're not punished for being exploited essentially. And I think that we could take a similar approach to pornography. So these companies, which are, again, making billions.

I mean, David mentioned that, like, female producers are really common now. days. But I think when we're talking about female producers, what we're talking about is things like OnlyFans and those women are making very little money. And of course, OnlyFans takes a huge cut from that. So they're functioning really as a pimp in a lot of ways. But, you know, we hear a lot about women who are like making millions or hundreds of thousands or whatever on OnlyFans. And that's like a time and tiny line. Before, I just want to stop right here because some of our audience don't actually know what OnlyFans is. Oh, okay.

So why don't we describe it? And then I could ask you what you think about OnlyFans as compared to other types of pornography that's available online. Sure. So OnlyFans is a website where men can pay a subscription fee to access the photographs or content, pornography in a lot of cases, of the mostly women, but not all women who are on OnlyFans as producers. Let's call them content creators. and, you know, I think that the statistic is that most, the average woman on OnlyFans is making like $70 a month. So it's really not much, especially considering what you've had to do to make that $70 a month.

And again, that those images are now out there, like people can be screenshoting them, et cetera, et cetera. You don't have any control over these images once you put them online. But yeah, like back to my approach. I mean, I think that if we made it illegal for men to profit from the, I'm saying, I'm saying, men, but for anyone, it's just mostly men, to profit from the sale of women's bodies, from the profit of the sale of women's sexually explicit imagery, from access to their bodies. I think that would cut out so much of the exploitation. I mean, I think that we all know, or maybe we don't, that sex trafficking is a huge,

massive, really, really, really profitable industry around the globe. And sex trafficking exists because people can make money off of it, because these men who are trafficking, these women can make money from it. So in December 22, just a few months ago, researchers Lippmann, Lawler, and Leisner actually published a study of viewers of Onlyfans. And they found that viewers reported mostly positive influences of Onlyfans on their sexual lives. They learned new things in terms of sexual practices. and it improved their relationship, including their exploration of their own sexuality and gender identity.

And this included both males and females. Megan, I think the concern I have is that I hear you identifying a lot of things as facts. But research and the research that the Canadian Parliament Committee looked at was not able to substantiate a lot of the things that you're asserting. the relationship between, for instance, you know, STIs. Adult porn performers are actually less likely than the general public to have an STI because they get tested for more frequently.

I mean, STIs are rampant in the industry, and we do know that sex trafficking happens all the time in porn, and Porn Hub is being sued over this. Mind Geek, the company that owns Porn Hub, is currently being sued because there were so many trafficking videos, so many rape videos, videos of underage girls on Pornhub that they knew were there and didn't care about because they were making money off of it.

You know, there's women who have come out and said, my videos are there on Pornhub and I can't get them taken down. Pornhub won't do anything about this. There's trafficking that happens on OnlyFans. There's underage girls on OnlyFans. You can search for DaddyDot or Claim on OnlyFans. So whether or not this material is teaching the viewer so much interesting stuff about sex, I don't really care. if the woman behind the screen is being trafficked or abused. I care about what, I mean, and you know what?

I actually do care about what that imagery is teaching men and boys because boys' sexuality is being hijacked by this hardcore porn. And we're now hearing about teen boys and young men who have erectile dysfunctions because they've been using porn for so long that now they can't get turned on by a regular girl and by regular sex. That is a complete and total internet myth. There is not a shrink. No, it's not an internet myth.

There's not a shrink. With all of these boys, we're using porn and men were using porn like I have. There is scientific evidence that this is not happening. And that these facts aren't true, but they are true. And there is research that shows this. Let's just give David a second to her butt. So, Megan, I, we have to distinguish what is scientifically supported versus what we morally believe. I understand.

I hear your moral. opposition to pornography and the sexuality that it reflects. And I support that. You're allowed to have those beliefs. You're not allowed to have your own facts, though. And things like

the idea of porn-induced erect to all dysfunction. There's no evidence for it. There's lots of anecdotes. There's lots of anecdotes. But those anecdotes come from highly anxious men who can get erect while they masturbate to pornography because it's easy to turn

the internet on, all you have to do is push the button. You'd have to buy it dinner or pay attention to your partner. But when they're with a partner, they struggle with sexual performance. Now, the challenge is they blame pornography for their sexual problems rather than dealing with the internal issues that they're actually struggling with, things like anxiety or relationship or sexual skills. The problem, Megan, is that when you talk about pornography, you are distracting from dealing with the much bigger sexual issues. This is what the Canadian Committee said. We have to deal with these larger sexual issues. And when we chase pornography like a shiny object, we distract. We lose sight of sex education. We lose sight of

egalitarian sexual values. We lose sight of helping people to understand how to have healthy sexuality in their lives. I mean, porn is not just a shiny object. That's I said, this is a multi-billion dollar industry. And it's not teaching egalitarianism in sex. It's not teaching healthy sexuality. It's teaching the opposite. And I mean, you keep saying morals and morality. And I know why you're doing this, because I've been talking about pornography critically for a long time, and I'm always accused of moralism. You know, like, I grew up as a leftist. I don't have a religious background. I'm not a conservative. I've been a feminist for my entire life. I've I was a socialist for most of my life.

And this moralism accusation and this like, take your feelings out of this and take morals out of this. I mean, can you imagine a society where we ignored ethics and morals? We're talking about other people and we're talking about other people's lives and we're talking about an enormous level of abuse and trauma that women and girls all around the world are being subjected to every day. We do have to talk about morals. isn't just about research. And we can talk about research and we could argue about research forever because some research shows that there's no correlation between pornography and increased rates

of sexual violence and other research shows that there is a relationship between pornography and sexual violence and that young boys are sexually assaulting and raping young girls because of what they see in porn and because they're emulating what they see. Well, David, would you concede that this is? is affecting the intimacy between couples, that porn creates an unrealistic expectation of what sex is or what it should be of how women should look?

So where one or both partners feel ashamed around pornography and masturbation, or where one or both partners disagree with pornography and the sexuality that it reflects, if one partner is watching porn in secret, it is unhealthy for the relationship. But that is, is a complex relationship between the pornography and the person, their personal values, their

history, and their relationship. We can't make this stuff simple. Couples that watch pornography together tend to have healthier sexuality in their relationships, healthier relationships in general, and are more likely to engage in novel sexual behaviors. Most people report positive experiences with pornography. It is the people who are ashamed of pornography or ashamed of pornography. ashamed of their sexuality who struggle with it. What about young boys? Does it create unrealistic expectations for boys who are going through puberty and who have not experienced any kind of sexual intimacy?

In research by Paul Wright at Indiana, if those young, if those boys think that pornography is a realistic depiction of sex, it does create negative attitudes and beliefs about sex. If they know that pornography is fantasy, if they, you know, we watch the, you know, we watch the the Marvel movies, and none of us think that we can fly. It's a fantasy where we suspend reality. Unfortunately, pornography is a fantasy as well, but when we have people that have poor sex education,

they don't know that this is a fantasy. They don't know that there's a lot of negotiation, consent, preparation, safety issues that are being taken behind the scenes. That's what we need people to understand. Emily Rothman in Boston has developed a porn literacy program that actually is evidence-based and demonstrates that by teaching young people what pornography is and isn't, they're able to mitigate the harms that Megan and I are concerned about. I mean, yeah, I think that this idea that like most partners, I don't know who these most people are, most partners have a positive relationship to porn is totally bunk. I mean, most women don't want their male partners watching porn. And a lot of women will talk about feeling like traumatized, certainly feeling betrayed,

feeling really shocked and upset to discover that their partner is using porn. And men are often using porn behind their partners back. And I think that we should think about why that is. You know, why is he keeping that secret from her? And why does she feel so upset upon discovering what he's looking at? at online. I mean, I'm glad that you brought up partners because I think this is really under-discussed. I think that watching pornography is a betrayal. If you're in a monogamous relationship, you're engaging in sex acts with other women, either, you know, on something like OnlyFans and you're literally

engaging with and chatting with these women or even just masturbating to these women and, you know, maybe girls. Hopefully not, but, you know, likely. There's a lot of underage girls and porn. And that's cheating. That's a form of cheating. And I find it so troubling that we as a society have decided to normalize this and that people who are advocates for pornography and advocates for this industry who work in this industry are normalizing that kind of betrayal and gaslighting women into thinking that there's nothing wrong with it because there is something wrong with it. Charles Negi is a colleague of mine, psychologist in Florida. And he actually researched this question. He looked at, do women in the United States compared to women in Europe view watching pornography as a form of infidelity? Across the board, women in Europe did not view it as a form of infidelity. Women in the U.S. did. Predictors, though, in the U.S. of women viewing pornography as infidelity were a religious background, that they were single and that they were insecure about sexuality.

So we have to look at people's attitudes around sexuality to, in relation to their attitudes towards pornography. Pornography is a canary in the coal mine. And our beliefs and our views about it are driven by our social struggles with sexuality. Now, I will point out, Europe and France, for instance, has lower rates of infidelity than the United States. United States does. They worry about it less and they don't get as worked up about it as we do. Unfortunately, you know, the more taboo we make pornography, the more taboo we make these sexual fantasies that we don't want people to have, the more exciting and energetic they become. The more we, you know, it's never in the history of the world worked to change an adolescent's

behavior by telling them that something is bad and scary. they shouldn't do it. Instead, it increases the excitement. I'm not insecure about sex, and I don't want my partner watching porn, partly because I view it as cheating, but also partly because I know what porn is. Like, we can have all these conversations, again, about data and research. Just look at what porn is. Like, do we think that this is ethical? Do we think that the way that these women are treated is healthy? Do you think that this is about creating healthy, idea? about sexuality, about treating women and girls with respect. It's not. These women and girls are being abused. Friendly reminder to our monk debate supporters and curators. Right now on our website,

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supporter or curator. We'll also throw in advanced ticketing privileges to all of our in-person debates and other great perks and privileges. Again, you can do that right now on our website, triple-w monkdebates.com. Now back to our program. Megan, don't you think that if we ban porn and push it underground, the risk of exploitation goes way up? Well, no, because the Nordic model, which I mentioned earlier, this approach to prostitution where we criminalize pimping and we criminalize men who pay for sex, we criminalize brothel owners, we criminalize traffickers. That was implemented in Sweden in 1999 and it's been really successful because what it does is it targets demand. So there's a lot less men. I mean, we can't, I'm not delusional. I know that we can't completely get rid of things like prostitution.

pornography. But I would love to reduce demand. I would love to make it less profitable. So there's less incentive to pressure and force and coerce women into doing this. And yeah, so there's a lot less men in Sweden who are paying for sex. And so I think, again, you know, pornography already exists underground. Unfortunately, that's like where the most horrific pornography exists. But making it much more difficult for men, for these companies to profit pornography would reduce incentive by so much. And I think that would be a really important way to intervene in this. So I'm not an expert on this, but sex work activists that I listen to, and these are women activists arguing for freedom around sex work, they have real.

concerns about the Nordic model and about the experiences of women there. So I encourage listeners to look at both sides of this. I will say, you know, Megan as a therapist, I see lots of couples where they come in and the wife is concerned and complains that the husband is watching pornography. And it's always just the tip of the iceberg. There's always other issues. And one of the issues is that the relationship has decreased sex frequency compared to the desire or interest of the man of the husband. And when we have a safe conversation, the husband typically will say he's watching pornography to enhance his masturbation and so that he has a satisfying sexual relationship and doesn't cheat on his wife. The pornography is always just the start of the conversation. It's not the cause of any of

issues. And unfortunately, when we focus on pornography, we miss with these couples, we miss dealing with the actual problems that they're dealing with. Which they probably could be dealing with if he wasn't watching pornography. I mean, using pornography might not be the whole problem, but using pornography is really significant and really revealing because it signals that she can't trust him, that he's doing something behind her back that's hurting her, that she feels disrespected by. And I'm really troubled by the fact, again, that we're treating this. Like, why don't these men care about their partner's feelings? Why don't they care that their partner is upset about them watching porn? Of course, that would create problems in your relationship, because your partner's doing

something that you feel super disrespected by and super betrayed by. As a therapist, working with those couples, Megan. I will simply tell you it's a lot more complicated than you think. Everything's more complicated. This has been an incredibly informative and lively discussion, but we are going to go to closing statements. We're going to do this in the reverse order this time. David, you are arguing against our resolution today, be it resolved. Pornography is exploitative, harmful, and too easy to access. It's time to ban porn. Let's have your closing statements. This is a complicated conversation where we have to be able to deal with and examine our sexual attitudes, our approach to sex education, issues of misogyny, and egalitarianism in our society.

And we also have to make sure that we don't let heteronormative values take over this conversation. Unfortunately, research study after research study and political investigation in the United States and Canada, in the United Kingdom consistently finds no solid evidence linking pornography with negative behaviors, criminal behavior, or negative sexual attitudes. Unfortunately, those attitudes exist in people, including some men who are dangerous, and then they go to pornography. We need to deal with how those negative sexual sexual sexual. attitudes get into people. And we deal with that most effectively by having open, non-shaming,

educational, accurate, scientifically based conversations about sex. We have to deal with the places where the research disagrees with our beliefs. And we have to listen to what that data say, those data say, because otherwise we can end up enacting rules, policies that don't work, just like in 1919 when we thought that banning alcohol was going to take care of our country's problems, and it didn't. David, thank you for your closing statements. Megan, we're going to go to you. You are arguing in favor of the motion, be it resolved.

Pornography is exploitative, harmful, and too easy to access. It's time to ban porn. Let's have your closing statement. So often that comparison to the banning of alcohol is made when we talk about banning pornography, but I just want to remind people that women are not a product, they're real life human beings who are being hurt and abused and exploited within pornography. And this is such a common thing in pornography that I think that if we talk about the idea of an ethical porn industry, it's not really.

I want to talk about reality, not what could be, what an ideal situation might be. I want to talk about the truth and what's happening in the porn industry. David's mentioned many times that, you know, he doesn't want heteronormative values to overtake this conversation, but I think that we probably should let heteronormative values overtake this conversation because primarily what's happening is that men are watching women in pornography. These are heterosexual men. who are looking at women in pornography. And this is shaping heterosexual relationships and heterosexual sex. Like we're seeing the prevalence of things like choking, you know, young men are asking and trying to push girls into things like choking into things like anal sex. These things that they're seeing in porn that they want to emulate in real life. And that does play out in the research. I just, I think that we have to be realistic about what's happening in porn. And the lack of empathy I find really troubling, but I actually think that it's very much related to these men who are watching porn and they're training themselves not to have empathy for those girls who are like being choked and who are crying and have mascara running down their faces.

And you can see in their faces that they're in pain. And then at the same time, they're saying, I love it, I love it. And the title of the pornography is like, you know, dirty slut gets destroyed and loves it. I mean, this kind of messaging is really unlearning empathy. Okay, Megan, I'm going to stop it there because we've reached the end of the debate. But I just want to thank you both. You really brought fresh arguments to a decades-old debate. It was a lively exchange.

So thank you both for coming on the Monk Debates. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for having me. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Megan and David. You've given us a lot to think about. If you have any feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email at podcast at monkdebates.com.

A reminder that our weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus, comes out. You guessed it every Friday. Join hosts Janice Stein and Rudyard Griffith as they delve into the big news stories of the week. And you can access that podcast on our website, triplew.munk debates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm Ricky Gerwitz. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk charitable foundations.

Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.