I’m not usually one for people’s bedrooms, but a feature of Britain’s Online Safety Act (OSA) kicks in today, meaning that mandatory age verification is required to access online pornography – and I find myself nodding in approval at my enemy, the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.
There are just too many wankers in the UK. Fourteen million to be precise. Fourteen million who spend over an hour every day watching porn. Fourteen million people could overthrow the world. If a serious – not fake – virus swallowed 99.9% of humanity tomorrow but spared the wankers, you could make enough farmers, librarians, pilots, engineers, fishermen, and policemen from the survivors to create civilisation again. There’ll be enough women too. They’re just as much interested.
What rugby is to South Africa, porn is to the UK. Soft power. An item of unified national interest. It is said that when ISIS erupted in Syria and the Levant in 2014, the first thing that UK homegrown Jihadis did when they arrived on the scene was to log on.
At the same time, civil servants in the UK charged with monitoring them were also watching porn, albeit at more agreeable broadband speeds.
What’s going to happen?
I can already see what’s going to happen today. Porn sites have been warning patrons: get your act together and register for an age verification badge. Of course, nobody has actually done this – so when sites are blocked there’ll be a 14 million-heavy rush toward these third-party authenticators, and because most of these are led by eminently punchable bros who get caught cheating on their wives at pop concerts and whose technical operations involve a bunch of engineers in India screaming around call centres sticking plasters on crappy systems, the whole thing will go offline.
At the point of being unable to access routine sites, the annoyed wanker or wankeress will – hopefully – look at him or herself in the mirror: “is it really worth being such a wanker?”
I’m in the minority, but I’ll concede defenders of porn usage do make a fair point. If you deprive 14 million people of their habit, then there’s a chance our modern simulation would stutter. I would estimate that there are at least one million in that 14 million who are white, educated, middle-class, “anti-racist” and pro-Palestine. Separating this sort of UK specimen from one of its crutches could have violent implications for wider society – soon you could see arts students self-immolating at bus stops, or suburban boomers biting the heads off grey squirrels in the park.
Porn in Parliament
There have been a few incidents where legislators have been bust watching porn in the Houses of Parliament. One guy admitted to this in 2022. He claimed he was looking at tractors, then got…distracted. A former Home Secretary’s husband, a hulking great bearded wanker, once ordered porn then tried to claim it on expenses.
The gay dating app Grindr has been responsible for the departure of at least one high-ranking Tory party official. Then Deputy Chairman of the Conservative 1922 Committee, William Wragg, got a message from someone on the app, so he responded with a photo of his privates. “Well…now you’ve gone and done that,” the guy on the other end said, “…I’m afraid I’m going to have to take this to the press, your party and constituents – unless you give me x, y and z”. That was the end of William.
In a decade of exceptionally bad takes, one of the worst involves the Only Fans phenomenon. Here women can supposedly be “liberated” from their desk jobs, and create fan bases to which they can offer their own x-rated material – for cash.
From earning minimum wage, these women go on to purchase pink Bentleys and houses in Marbella. However, it doesn’t take long before self-reflection, ushered in by unnerving curiosity, traps them: “hang on…why does no man want to spend longer than seven minutes in my company?”
A decade ago, a sensible guy in the Conservative party raised the alarm. Lord Michael Farmer set out on a moral regeneration exercise when news of events in towns and small villages emerged. These events involved patients, mostly girls – some as young as twelve – admitted to urgent care with injuries consistent with rough sex.
Lord Michael laid the blame on access to pornography – and his findings were instructive.
Degrading
Most porn accessed in these groups featured more than two participants. Much of it was degrading. But he failed to include a wider truth, something everyone should know: meaningful sex can be complicated, awkward. What the kids were watching was, over and above, fatally unrealistic.
It’s not nice to be mean about the wankers here, partly because the government issued them licences in 2020. Three weeks to flatten the curve became two years to pleasure the nerve; sites like PornHub gave free access to Italian users, and sustained furlough payments. 75% of monthly wages sent Only Fans subscriptions through the roof.
This was wildly daft insofar as declining fertility was concerned: one in five men in the UK were already experiencing a shortage of swimmers, so, a waste. If you add to this the present horror of economic inactivity sitting at levels worse than those before the financial crisis of 2008, the recommendation could not be clearer: people in the UK need to stop watching porn and get back to work.
The two generations that appear to be most miffed about the OSA age verification are boomers and millennials – both white. Fortunately. both are losing influence rapidly. The most un-woke profile you’ll discover in the UK today is the 12 or 13-year-old white boy.
These don’t care about previous generations’ free range, net zero, love-is-love, Lime Bike obsessions. They sense how difficult it will be, come the time to enter work. They’ve got no time to listen to some overweight white boomer with hairy palms interrupting his own pro-Palestinian protest to read poems about George Floyd.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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