The Cool Girl monologue in Gillian Flynn’s 2012 thriller Gone Girl is a masterpiece of the sort often claimed to “define a generation” because it observes something previously unarticulated that immediately feels true. “Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex,” Flynn’s protagonist, Amy, says. “Cool Girls are… hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind.”
Men think Cool Girls are real, says Amy, because so many women pretend to be them. They do this because they’ve watched “too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists”. I disagree. Women pretend to be the Cool Girl, and men believe the Cool Girl exists, because of porn. The Cool Girl loves (or pretends to love) threesomes and anal sex, pliantly embraces any sexual practice that might be labelled a kink, because porn teaches her and her partners that this is what sex should be. Women who dare to question the Cool Girl’s sex-positivity are puritanical prudes.
My liberal instincts once led me to think that whatever two (or more) consenting adults got up to in privacy – including watching porn – was none of my business. But today, I find it increasingly difficult to believe that porn is a reflection of, rather than a shaping force in, our culture; that consuming it is a private act, rather than one that has real-world consequences; that consent can be formed and given entre nous, magically untouched by our environment.
In July last year, porn sites were compelled by the Online Safety Act to introduce age verification. That summer, the government announced its intention to ban choking in porn, and on 2 March the Times reported that this would be extended to simulation of incest, rape and child abuse. The Gisèle Pelicot case, with its cameras, echoes the “sleeping” porn trope, and throws up difficult questions about the line between fantasy and reality. So, too, does the fifth anniversary of the murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens, who had a well-documented predilection for violent porn. Then there are the Epstein files, in which he responds to a girl expressing her reluctance to watch porn that he told her to do so “so you could learn , see . new things and pleasures. not for enjoyment [sic]”. He recommends others visit Pornhub for “instructions” or “ideas”. Taken together, these horrors begin to feel like a reckoning.
The debate about porn’s impact on culture was last had in any serious way in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Women Against Pornography movement found unlikely allies in conservative Republicans, fundamentalist Christians – and serial killer Ted Bundy, who claimed he became a murderer because of porn. The movement was opposed by sex-positive feminists, who held that porn had a positive role in sexual liberation, and that to censor it was a dangerous affront to free speech. There was also a lack of evidence of a link between porn and real-world harm.
These challenges to any anti-porn argument remain. For every study that suggests a link between its use and increased violence against women, or reduced relationship satisfaction, or higher prevalence of erectile dysfunction, there is another that suggests no effect. Even when links are found, it is impossible to establish that they are direct and causal. One study, for instance, showed that porn users had reduced grey matter in the striatum, the part of the brain responsible for reward – but this could be a condition for, rather than a result of, porn use.
We can, however, observe that what is depicted in porn does have an effect in the real world. Heterosexual anal sex, for instance, frequently depicted in porn, is now also common outside it. Such porosity is not always harmless. Last year a review by the peer Gabby Bertin reported that non-fatal strangulation – a criminal offence under the Domestic Abuse Act – is commonplace in porn. Polling for the BBC in 2019 found that 38 per cent of women surveyed had experienced choking during sex; over half said it had been unwanted.
There is something that feels instinctively true about thinking of porn as we do junk food or social media – a poor imitation of the real thing, designed to be addictive, to hold your attention by pushing you to ever greater extremes, for profit. It is no accident this debate is recurring at the same time we are having a similar conversation around smartphone use among children. The porn industry is an early adopter of technological innovation – VCRs, online payments, deepfakes – and porn’s ubiquity is in no small part due to the explosion of smartphones and social media, through which children are often first exposed.
The objections to a porn ban may not have changed much since the 1980s, but the way porn is disseminated has been transformed. In the mid 2000s, the creation of websites like Pornhub, which pirated videos from paid-for platforms, made porn easily accessible for free. It is on such websites that regulation, if it is to happen, should begin. Today, porn users object to having to verify their age. But entering credit card details was once a necessary part of accessing adult content. This created a natural barrier for young people, and to the search for extreme content. Make porn expensive again. After all, if you truly believe it is sex-positive, there is no shame in owning that, literally.
[Further reading: Louis Theroux stares down the manosphere]
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This article appears in the 11 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great British Crisis
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