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    The Politics and Perils of Pornography

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    More from our inbox:Investing in War K YoungTo the Editor:Re “The Delusion of Porn’s Harmlessness,” by Christine Emba (Opinion guest essay, May 25):Thanks to Ms. Emba for writing about pornography and its negative effect on society.I try to teach my daughter and 8-year-old granddaughter that they bring more to the table than their looks, that they are more than the sum total of their body parts. I’m breathing a slight sigh of relief that maybe this next generation will realize that.Jenny MottierCincinnatiTo the Editor:In her essay, Christine Emba writes: “As a society, we are allowing our desires to continue to be molded in experimental ways, for profit, by an industry that does not have our best interests at heart.” But I’m left wondering, what industry does?The food industry floods us with ultraprocessed products that are literally killing us. The fossil fuel industry drives us toward climate catastrophe. The health care industry leaves thousands uninsured and allows people to die if they can’t pay.Surely, Ms. Emba must see that the real problem is the current state of capitalism, where profit is the only true priority. The porn industry is just one more expression of that system.Karaca MestciLondonTo the Editor:As long as we, as a society, continue to withhold age-appropriate sex education from our young people, they will continue to seek out answers to their questions and context for their feelings anywhere they can find them. The internet has, unfortunately, become the primary source of this for many children and young adults.Withholding reliable and useful information about sex does not make the normal and appropriate curiosity that young people have about bodies, behavior and sex go away. It just encourages the naturally curious to seek out answers in other places.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      College Assistant Admissions Director Charged With Attempted Sex Trafficking

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      The authorities arrested Jacob Henriques, 29, after he had tried to solicit prospective and admitted students for sex, the Justice Department said. He worked for Emmanuel College in Boston.A former assistant admissions director at Emmanuel College in Boston was arrested Friday and accused of soliciting an underage applicant for sex, the Justice Department said.Prosecutors charged the director, Jacob Henriques, 29, with one count of attempted sex trafficking of a minor after he used his position to gain access to the personal information of admitted and prospective students, and tried to solicit them for sex, according to a news release from the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Massachusetts.In a statement, Emmanuel College said that it fired Mr. Henriques after contacting law enforcement and starting an investigation. “Emmanuel College is saddened, angered and shocked by these serious federal allegations,” it said.Whether Mr. Henriques had legal representation was not immediately clear. On April 25, Mr. Henriques found the personal information of at least three of the students after meeting with several, prosecutors said. He then contacted and offered to “pay them for some fun,” the authorities added, and sent pornographic videos or images in some cases.The same day, he began contacting a fourth victim after she committed to attending the college, according to prosecutors.One of the victims, a 17-year-old, toured the college with Mr. Henriques on April 25, prosecutors said. Mr. Henriques asked her what grade she was in, and hours after the tour, he began texting the victim on the phone number on her admissions form, prosecutors said. He offered to pay her $400 for “some fun” and told her that he had pornographic videos and pictures for her, prosecutors said. He continued to contact her that night, refusing to tell her his identity or how he had her number, they added.Mr. Henriques then sent the prospective student five pornographic videos and asked whether she wanted to engage in sexual acts with him, prosecutors said. After her multiple refusals, Mr. Henriques continued to text her, saying “he would buy her anything she wanted” if she changed her mind, prosecutors said. Over the following days, he went into her admissions profile nearly 50 times, according to the Justice Department.Mr. Henriques contacted the student through email after she blocked his number, prosecutors said.A profile of Mr. Henriques that had been on Emmanuel College’s website said that he graduated in 2021 and was an “avid Boston sports fan,” and that his favorite thing about the college was its small classes, which allowed students “to connect with peers and faculty.”If Mr. Henriques is convicted, he could receive from 10 years to life in prison, the Justice Department said. He is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Boston on Monday. More

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      Come With Me if You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction

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      Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.When college students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies.When daily newspapers and mainline Protestant denominations and Elks Lodges fade into irrelevance, when sit-down restaurants and shopping malls and colleges begin to trace the same descending arc, that’s the bottleneck tightening around the old forms of suburban middle-class existence.When moderates and centrists look around and wonder why the world isn’t going their way, why the future seems to belong to weird bespoke radicalisms, to Luigi Mangione admirers and World War II revisionists, that’s the bottleneck crushing the old forms of consensus politics, the low-key ways of relating to political debates.When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.And when, because people don’t pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that’s the last squeeze, the tightest part of the bottleneck, the literal die-off.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      I Found Pornography on My Husband’s Computer. I’m Furious!

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      A wife feels disgusted and betrayed after discovering a lurid image of another woman on her husband’s computer screen, and worries that he may have permanently damaged their relationship.When I went down to our basement yesterday, my husband’s computer was on. I went to turn it off and saw a naked woman with large breasts on the screen. It took me a moment to realize: This is porn. I feel so wronged! Why wasn’t he more discreet? I am usually receptive to sex with him, but I feel as if he has poked a hole in the bubble of our intimacy. I am tempted to find a picture of a well-endowed porn star to leave on his computer. He says he’s embarrassed. He should be! My cousin told me that all men look at porn, but I feel disgusted and diminished as insufficiently buxom. Why are men such self-indulgent pigs? Is watching porn a slippery slope to cheating?WIFELet’s acknowledge that you are really upset now — and that it’s healthy for you to express your anger. Be careful, though, not to let a rant become your reality: Your letter is brimming with unhelpful generalizations — that men are pigs, for instance — and logical inconsistencies. (If looking at porn is wrong, how would it have been better for your husband to have done so more discreetly?) I hope that you will feel less distraught soon and open to considering productive next steps.It is vitally important for couples to negotiate the ground rules of their relationship — even, and especially, for issues that are uncomfortable to discuss. Yet, it seems as if you and your husband have never talked about pornography. Our culture is drenched in it, and many happily married people I know look at it. Now that you know your husband does, too, it would be better to discuss the issue directly than to shame him or to upload images of porn stars onto his computer.Your sustained outrage will probably chill an important conversation about fantasy and monogamy — hello, romance novels! — and the possibility that looking at naked images of other people has no bearing on your husband’s fidelity or desire for you. It is not my place to dictate an agreement between you, but I recommend that you hash this out with him. If you need help facilitating that discussion, find a couples therapist soon.Miguel PorlanMy Glass, My BusinessI have decided to stop drinking for a while. My Dry January revealed that I’m not loving my relationship with alcohol these days. The problem: Since I stopped drinking, I’ve had to field uncomfortable questions when I socialize. When I say I’m not drinking, people ask me if I’m pregnant or an alcoholic, or wonder why I don’t want to drink. Any tips?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Top Aides Resign From Embattled North Carolina Candidate’s Campaign

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      Most of the senior staff members on Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign for North Carolina governor resigned on Sunday, dealing a seismic blow to the embattled Republican who has faced widespread criticism after an explosive CNN report that he had made a series of disturbing comments on a pornographic website.Among the resignations was his top campaign consultant, Conrad Pogorzelski III, who for years had been one of Mr. Robinson’s most loyal confidants and who had been the only consultant to take a chance on him during his run for lieutenant governor four years ago.Mr. Pogorzelski confirmed his resignation in a text message on Sunday evening, saying he and seven other campaign staffers had resigned on “our own accord.”The other resignations included Chris Rodriguez, the campaign manager; Heather Whillier, the finance director; and Jason Rizk, the deputy campaign manager. Two political directors, John Kontoulas and Jackson Lohrer, and the director of operations, Patrick Riley, also resigned.The 11th-hour shake-up in the campaign less than 50 days before the election will only exacerbate the troubles already plaguing Mr. Robinson, the fiery Trump acolyte who has been widely criticized for comments perceived as racist, antisemitic, transphobic and hateful.CNN reported on Thursday that Mr. Robinson had written on a porn site years ago that he was a “black NAZI,” that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography and that slavery was not bad. He also recounted on the site how he went “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a teenager. Mr. Robinson has denied that he wrote the posts and ignored calls from some fellow Republicans to withdraw from the race.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Heads to North Carolina as Mark Robinson’s Campaign Reels

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      With somewhat awkward timing, former President Donald J. Trump plans to campaign in North Carolina on Saturday as his pick for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, faces accusations of making disturbing posts on a pornographic website.Mr. Trump’s visit to Wilmington, N.C., for a rally will take place two days after CNN reported that Mr. Robinson had once called himself a “black NAZI!” and defended slavery years ago on a pornographic forum.Mr. Robinson, whom Mr. Trump endorsed in March, has denied the report and vowed to stay in the race. But both parties are looking closely at the fallout, which could have a spillover effect in the presidential contest, given that North Carolina is a key battleground state that Mr. Trump won twice but that Democrats see as competitive.The lieutenant governor, who has a long history of making inflammatory and offensive remarks, is not expected to attend Mr. Trump’s rally on Saturday, according to a person familiar with the program’s details. Mr. Robinson was also absent when Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, visited the state on Wednesday, the day before CNN released its report.A spokesman for Mr. Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. The Trump campaign avoided weighing in on the controversy when asked for comment on Friday.Democrats, who last carried North Carolina in the 2008 presidential race, are seeking to remind voters in the increasingly competitive state about Mr. Trump’s past praise for Mr. Robinson. Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign released a television ad on Friday, “Both Wrong,” highlighting Mr. Trump’s past warm words for Mr. Robinson and some of Mr. Robinson’s past polarizing statements. At least nine electronic billboards around the state will display ads on Friday and Saturday paid for by the Democratic National Committee linking the two Republicans.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The far right’s crusade against porn is a crusade against progress | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Project 2025’s porn problemThe lines between art and obscenity aren’t always clear; pornography can be hard to define. “I know it when I see it,” the late US supreme court judge Potter Stewart said in his famous non-definition of the term.The far-right knows it when they see it as well. And they see pornography everywhere. Experts have noted that worries about pornography among social conservatives seem to go up and down over time: right now we seem to be at a high-point of porn panic. The Republican Missouri senator Josh Hawley, for example, has repeatedly claimed that feminism has driven young men to “pornography and video games”. And the Republican party has called porn a “public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions”.Porn also plays a big part in Project 2025: a Christian nationalist manifesto and list of desired policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation that has been described as “a wish list for a Trump presidency”. (Donald Trump has said he knows nothing about it.) The 900-page plan proposes policies like mass deportations, extreme abortion restrictions, and the dismantling of climate change protections. It also says that pornography should be outlawed.On the surface the conservative obsession with porn doesn’t seem overly problematic. There are, after all, plenty of serious issues with the porn industry. It’s often exploitative and it’s helped to normalize violent acts like strangling during sex. The problem, however, is the incredibly broad way in which Project 2025 Mandate talks about porn. No definition of porn is provided; rather, it’s talked about in the context of things like transgender rights and non-normative gender expression. Porn, we are told is “invading [children’s] school libraries”. The word has been weaponized as a useful way to attack LGBTQ+ rights. See, for example, this extract from the foreword of the Project 2025 Mandate:“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology … is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”What does this mean? Well it seems to mean that the far-right want to define a book that features a same-sex couple as illegal pornography and throw the author of the book and any distributors of the book in prison. It seems to mean that a book talking about sexual violence could be classified as porn and banned. It seems to mean that talking about the existence of trans people would be “porn” and criminalized. In short: anything that goes against normative gender roles and hierarchies, or interrogates those hierarchies, could be considered obscene and criminalized.Project 2025, it can’t be stressed enough, isn’t some sort of hypothetical dystopian possibility. The scariest part of all this is that it’s very much under way. Republicans are already classifying anything they don’t like as obscene pornography and finding ways to ban it. There’s been a surge in book bans in American schools, for example. From July to December 2023, PEN America found that more than 4,300 books were removed from schools across 23 states. Many of the targeted titles feature LGBTQ+ characters. Work that address rape and sexual assault are also increasingly being targeted. So don’t be fooled by Project 2025’s preoccupation with porn. The far-right aren’t interested in the exploitation of women, they’re interested in controlling exactly what it means to be a woman. This isn’t a crusade against porn, it’s a crusade against progress.Katy Perry is getting backlash for Woman’s World, her new ‘feminist’ anthemWoman’s World is Perry’s first solo single in three years and, the singer explained, the first thing she’s done “since becoming a mother and since feeling really connected to my feminine divine”. Unfortunately, however, the single isn’t getting a divine reception. The Guardian’s Laura Snapes gave it a one-star review and described it as “Bic for Her of pop, the pink Yorkie for girls (get your lips around this!), a song that made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it”. Perry is also facing criticism for working with the controversial producer Dr Luke on the single. In 2014 pop star Kesha accused Dr Luke of sexual assault and he then sued her for defamation. In 2023 a legal settlement was reached in the defamation suit.Elon Musk denies volunteering his sperm to help start a colony on Mars“I have not … ‘volunteered my sperm’” wrote Musk in a post on X after the New York Times reported he had. Can you imagine a planet populated entirely by mini-Musks? It would be full of so much hot air it would be unbearable.The all-women patrol team protecting Sumatra’s rainforest“We have to remember that conservation is only necessary as a result of colonialism and the forced displacement of Indigenous people who have stewarded the land for thousands of years,” says an Indigenous female ranger in this beautiful Guardian photo essay.Canadian serial killer Jeremy Skibicki given life sentence for murders of Indigenous womenSkibicki appears to have been motivated by white supremacist beliefs and targeted vulnerable women in Winnipeg’s shelter system. The “jarring and numbing” murders helped draw attention to the broader crisisof missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAttempt to ease Poland’s strict abortion laws defeatedIn Poland anyone convicted of aiding a woman in getting an abortion faces up to three years in jail. On Friday a slim majority rejected legislation that would have decriminalized abortion assistance.Death at US women’s prison amid heatwave sparks cries for helpThere’s no air conditioning in the cells at the California’s largest women’s prison and there are worries there may be even more preventable heat deaths.Etsy sellers say imminent ban on sex toys is a betrayal“Bans like this one also further the idea that sexual health and pleasure is somehow taboo or something to be ashamed of,” one seller said. “It has broader impacts on society as a whole.”Israeli forces used US-made bombs to murder kids playing soccer in a Gaza playgroundJust another day in the graveyard that is Gaza! Meanwhile pundits in the Western media and politicians keep saying Joe Biden is a “good man”. Biden is facilitating one of the worst atrocities we’ve seen in modern times–if you think he is a “good man” then what you’re really saying is that you don’t think Palestinians are people.The week in pawtriarchyThe latest status symbol for the paranoid 1% isn’t a bunker with a safe room, it’s a Svallin. This is a “an undisclosed mix of Dutch shepherd, German shepherd, and Belgian Malinois”, bred to be “beasts that could rip out an attacker’s trachea yet also function as pets.” The top dogs cost $150,000 each and only 20 are sold a year after an in-depth vetting process. More

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      Stormy Daniels Tells of Her Encounter With Trump in Tahoe

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      Stormy Daniels on Tuesday told jurors her account of a sexual encounter with Donald J. Trump in 2006, an episode that ultimately resulted in the former president’s criminal trial.Despite the objections of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Justice Juan M. Merchan ruled that it would be up to jurors to decide on the credibility of the porn actress, whose $130,000 hush-money agreement with Mr. Trump before the 2016 election is at the heart of the charges against him. Prosecutors said she would not, however, describe his genitalia, as she did in her book “Full Disclosure.”Mr. Trump denies they ever had sex.The fateful meeting of Mr. Trump and Ms. Daniels nearly 18 years ago took place at a celebrity golf tournament on the banks of Lake Tahoe in Nevada. Mr. Trump was competing there, and Ms. Daniels was working at the event to promote a porn studio, Wicked Pictures.This account is drawn from versions of her story that Ms. Daniels has told in the past. She first described her interactions with Mr. Trump in a 2011 magazine interview. The magazine, Life & Style, agreed to pay her $15,000 for her story, but she never collected because Mr. Trump’s then fixer, Michael D. Cohen — who is now expected to be one of the prosecution’s primary witnesses — had the story killed before publication.The interview was eventually published in a related publication, In Touch Weekly, in early 2018 after The Wall Street Journal revealed her hush-money deal. She described the episode again in her book, which was published later that year.Ms. Daniels has said that at the tournament she rode with Mr. Trump in a golf court while he was playing, and he later asked for her phone number and invited her to dinner.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Woman Who Tried to Make Porn Safe for Feminism

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      How the archive of Candida Royalle, a porn star turned pioneering director, landed at Harvard — and inspired a new book challenging the conventional history of the sexual revolution.Harvard’s Schlesinger Library is the nation’s leading repository for women’s history, home to the papers of suffragists and social reformers, poets and politicians, the collective behind “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and iconic figures like Amelia Earhart, Angela Davis and Julia Child.But in its basement vaults, carefully preserved in a box, you can also find a rather different artifact: a costume from the 1978 pornographic comedy “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls.”The movie, starring John C. Holmes as a pimp who oversees a prostitution ring masquerading as a pizza delivery service, was history-making in its own way, as one of the earliest examples of what became a classic trope — porn with pepperoni. But the costume is at the Schlesinger because of another name on the bill: Candida Royalle.Royalle, who died in 2015, was a minor celebrity in her day. She was a porn star from the 1970s golden age who moved to the other side of the camera, producing feminist erotica that focused on female fantasies, and female audiences.During the so-called sex wars of the 1980s, Royalle faced off against anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who dismissed women in the profession as stooges of the patriarchy. And in the 1990s, she became a godmother to the mediagenic sex-positive feminists riding feminism’s third wave.Today, Royalle’s name may ring few bells. But her voluminous archive is now housed at Harvard, where the trove of diaries, letters, photographs, scrapbooks, videos and memorabilia is opening up a new window onto the sexual revolution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More