*Pornocracy, *the new book by The Critic’s Jo Bartosch and child rights and freedom of speech campaigner Robert Jessel analyzes contemporary pornography and its implications for the fate of civilization. It is therefore by necessity something of a jeremiad. This is because there is nothing positive to say about pornography, dominated as it is now by violence, and ubiquitous to the point of saturation. A detailed description of its contemporary iterations could only amount to an accumulation of horrors. The book is short and lean, measured, never hysterical. Bartosch and Jessel back up everything they say with data and statistics, and Pornocracy has skilfully condensed a huge amount of research whilst maintaining a lively style.

If anyone can read Pornocracy and, by the end, still blithely describe pornography as “liberating”, “empowering”, or “a bit of fun”, or talk of it in terms of “sex-positivity”, then that reader is a moral imbecile. Persisting in such blindness can be likened to eating cheap sausages and putting out of one’s mind what goes in them. But instead of turning an expediently blind eye to pigs’ rectums and carcinogenic additives, one ignores rape, sex trafficking, exploitation, torture, abuse, kidnap, paedophilia, addiction, premature sexualization, social atomization, and the death of affect.

Pornocracy tells the grim “story of how pornographers came to dictate the moral, social and legal codes that govern our lives”, and is necessarily also a story of technology. It’s the most important book on the subject since Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography (1981). It is in fact a more important book because it’s intended for the general reader, and because Dworkin was an activist who admitted that she had exaggerated. Above all, we’re in a much more egregious situation than we were in 1981, so a book to rub our faces in the horrors of pornography and in our moral diminishment is timely. Pornography is not merely ubiquitous: it is inescapable; the world is saturated with it. In Dworkin’s time, one had to seek out pornography. Now it seeks *us *out; worse, it quite calculatedly seeks out our children. The pornography of Dworkin’s era, although its societal harms were clearly identified at the time, was nevertheless of a kind that would now be described as relatively harmless.

Pornocracy** tells the grim “story of how pornographers came to dictate the moral, social and legal codes that govern our lives”. It’s arguably the most important book on the subject since Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography (1981).**

Shortly before his execution, Ted Bundy, who had nothing to gain by it, warned of the dangers of violent pornography, saying that it had inspired his fantasies of rape and murder. Now, the violent and the degrading are standard: women are spat on, choked, slapped, and the sex is always aggressive and brutal. Early exposure to pornography has been proved to be psychologically and physically traumatic. Yet, as Bartosch and Jessel write: “Generations raised with smartphones have now seen scenes of rape, choking and incest before experiencing their first ‘real life’ kiss”.