Another day, another article published attacking pornographers in the name of “protecting children.” This week’s latest sex worker hate-a-thon comes in the prestigious pages of The Atlantic from Pulitzer prize-nominated Christian socialist Elizabeth Bruenig.
If you’re not a Patreon subscriber to Chapo Trap House, here’s the 411 on Bruenig. The millennial grew up Methodist in Texas and then studied theology at Brandeis University and Cambridge. After reading Augustine’s Confessions, she converted to Catholicism. She then embarked on a journalism career, writing splashy Washington Post and New York Times op-eds that mixed AOC-style Democratic socialism with Catholic sermons. Bruenig might be a Catholic married to her high school sweetheart, but she wants you to know she’s a different type of Catholic. She disavows right-wing culture politics. She’s leftist. She goes on Red Scare. She loves the poor, children, dirtbag leftist podcasters, and most everyone else on planet Earth.
Well, except sex workers. In the Atlantic, Bruenig launders far-right Christians’ anti-sex worker talking points in a feature debating the best way to educate teenagers about porn. Bruenig builds each section out of her flawed logic. The whole feature is so fucked-up, it’s hard to know where to start, but I’ll go over the highlights.
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Bruenig poses a fair premise: How should we educate young people about porn? Not that Bruenig asked me my opinion—like the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof and Kara Swisher, she didn’t interview a single working porn star—but I believe pornographers aren’t educators. It’s strange for teachers to use porn, which is not instructional material, in a sex-ed setting. We create videos for adults. Of course, we know kids may sneak behind their parents’ backs and watch porn, but underage high schoolers also watch R-rated movies and buy liquor. Nobody is protesting Budweiser because a few kids stole beer from a 7-11, and I don’t think high schoolers need to enroll in alcohol education classes where they drink liquor samples as an educator lectures them about how not to black out.
Bruenig and I both believe parents should teach ethics to their children. She, though, posits that it’s impossible to watch “ethical” porn because porn is unethical. To make this argument, Bruenig leads with a claim that “victims’ advocates” have argued Pornhub “allows users to share content depicting actual sex crimes in progress—including child pornography, material made or stolen without victims’ knowledge, and recordings of sexual assaults.” Although she doesn’t name these so-called experts, she does link to an op-ed by the author Laila Mickelwait, who founded Trafficking Hub and was the “Director of Abolition” at Exodus Cry, a non-profit committed to outlawing porn and strip clubs. Exodus Cry began as an offshoot of the controversial International House of Prayer Church, which pushed Uganda’s law that made homosexuality a death sentence.
It might be shocking to see aw-shucks, nice-Catholic Bruenig laundering information from homophobes. But deep dive into Bruenig’s archives, and you’ll find other examples of homophobic talking points. In a 2015 book review titled “Is There a Christian Way to Be Gay?”, Bruenig deemed heterosexuals socializing with homosexuals “a moral hazard” because their friendship could “coalesce into sexually realized relationships.” Bruenig writes with elevated, academic language but she might as well have asked, “Do you become gay if a homosexual sneezes on you?”
The book review and Atlantic story both position humans as deviants who will repeat whatever they see on a computer screen. Her essay concludes with a discussion with a teenager who wondered if she should expect to be “choked” because she saw it in a porn video. It’s a clever device because who will argue with what a teenager claims porn made them think?
But Bruenig relies on anecdotes without data. How many teens are choking each other because of PornHub? I’m skeptical this is an epidemic. After all, teens watch violent films, but we don’t blame movies for teen violence. Bruenig positions that if you see something in porn, you will try it. I don’t know what goes on in Bruenig’s Christian mind when she digests sexual content, but just because I watched Basic Instinct last weekend doesn’t mean I suddenly want to stab a man with an ice pick while riding him.
Bruenig, though, sees porn as separate from Hollywood because, in her eyes, it’s unethical and dangerous to children. The first part of this argument relies on numbers of illegal child porn and rape videos on Pornhub. The footage described is vile. It should be banned, and whoever created them should rot in prison. Bruenig neglects to mention that months ago, Pornhub began requiring users to upload age verification documents with videos, a move that pornographers had been demanding for years. Even before PornHub enacted this policy, they removed and scanned for illegal videos far more effectively than Silicon Valley companies such as Facebook. According to the National Center for Missing Children, Facebook had 20.3 million cases of child porn or trafficking in 2021 compared to 13,229 cases on PornHub and its sister sites (XTube, RedTube, etc.). In Bruenig’s essay, there’s a lot of talk about “protecting children,” but little talk about what really threatens them.
Bruenig makes Pornhub an example of the entire industry. But in fact today, pornographers hold a complicated view of Pornhub. For years, we opposed the company because it was the Napster of porn; it stole our content and distributed it for free. Pornhub has stopped this practice in recent years, but it’s still just a part of the industry, not the entire business.
Of course, bad actors do exist. Bruenig points to California sentencing pornographer Ruben Andre Garcia to 20 years in prison for various crimes. Still, she leaves out that the porn industry attacked Garcia’s company, GirlsDoPorn, for years before prosecutors targeted him. Porn stars led the charge against Garcia.
The problems in Bruenig’s eyes go beyond Garcia and Pornhub. All pornographers, she argues, are pushing unrealistic beauty standards. She quotes sex educator Justine Ang Fonte: “It’s not a Playboy magazine anymore… It’s bodies in motion—amplifying certain beauty standards that are harmful.” But even Playboy famously pushed white blondes on the public, according to founder Hugh Hefner’s tastes. And it was hardly a more innocent time. In Playboy’s heyday, competitors like Hustler sold magazines filled with pictures of women pissing on each other.
The internet, meanwhile, allows for a variety of porn stars. Go on any tube site, and you’ll see overweight women, thin women, trans women—all types of women. One of the industry’s most successful girls, Karla Lane, creates big beautiful women’s porn. Porn companies (including PornHub) display a far more diverse range of beauty standards than mainstream media. If Bruenig is so concerned with mixing up American beauty standards, she may want to write more about Anna Wintour and less about porn.
But I’m not sure Bruenig cares about beauty standards, women, or children. Porn performers are improving the industry, but Bruenig relies on cherry-picked examples of bad actors and right-wing Christians’ dubious data to present us all like predators. Painting porn as one big pedophile ring because of those bad actors is like saying all Catholics rape children because thousands of priests are pedophiles. I would never slander or stereotype a Catholic like Bruenig, so she should stop defaming us.
