Diabolical Lies - July 27, 2025


The Internet Has a Porn Problem—Just Not the One You Think


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

194.65

Word count

4,448

Sentence count

233

Harmful content

Misogyny

10

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.540 Today's episode of Diabolical Lies is brought to you by a new and deeply beloved sponsor,
00:00:05.480 Love Island USA. Katie, I made you watch an episode or two. I don't know how many you ended
00:00:12.500 up watching, but I made you watch an episode of Love Island in advance of the conversation we're
00:00:16.400 going to have today. And I would just like to start out by hearing just some top-level thoughts
00:00:20.680 of what your experience was while watching it. It was so loud and so neon.
00:00:26.620 on i i could not get over just how uncanny the set felt like i was like what am i looking at
00:00:35.280 thomas came home from work towards the middle of the first episode of season six and he was like
00:00:41.680 wait they all sleep in the same room yeah and i was like i actually cannot think of something that
00:00:48.060 i would dislike more than sleeping in a full-size bed with a stranger in a room full of other
00:00:54.640 strangers sleeping in full-size beds. That is my personal hell.
00:00:58.780 So I'm going to describe the show at length later on in our conversation today for anyone
00:01:03.020 who hasn't watched it, but just a little tidbit. The show airs every night and it basically airs
00:01:07.240 live. So they are over there recording and like some sweatshop of producers is editing this
00:01:12.980 content so that you get six fresh episodes a week, which is pretty wild. Basically, yeah,
00:01:17.660 by the end of each season, which is like episode 25 or 26, you see that all the contestants are
00:01:23.140 wearing like little earbuds that they don't listen to each other having sex so oh my god
00:01:30.380 no I just think I literally had a stomach ache watching that I was like the way that I would
00:01:35.080 just be so nauseous in that room at all the way that I was really pushing your and my internalized
00:01:41.680 Catholicism during our Lily Phillips episode is going to happen again today to great degree
00:01:45.980 I texted Kara when I said this show is going to make me a conservative and it's going to be your
00:01:51.080 fault. It's so funny. Also, someone pointed out, I don't know if you've checked Instagram,
00:01:55.140 many people have pointed out that if you can watch Love Island, you can find time for Veep.
00:01:58.920 So think about it. Think about it. I have a very important announcement to make to everybody.
00:02:07.740 Shut the fuck up. Last night, I finished season two of Veep. Wait. So I'm on the Veep train,
00:02:14.060 guys. I'm so happy to report back that I have been watching Veep. Wait, how have you not told
00:02:18.660 me. How funny is it, hoisted by your own retard? I'm allowed to say it there. It's a crucial joke,
00:02:28.460 I think, in episode one or two, Aviv. I can't believe you started watching it without telling
00:02:32.300 me. We talk about everything. Well, I wanted to announce it on air, like a good podcaster does.
00:02:36.980 I wanted to capture your reaction live. Okay, tell me, what do you think of it? Is it as good
00:02:40.400 as you imagined? It's so funny. It's so fucking funny. I love, okay, so the Gary character. I know.
00:02:46.160 I can't help but call him Buster Bluth. I still just always refer, I'm like, oh, is Buster Bluth in this scene? But the episode we watched last night was the one that got memed into oblivion when Biden dropped out of the race of her in the supply closet. Like, yes! So I was like, I feel part of the culture now in a way that I didn't before.
00:03:04.620 Okay. So today, we are returning to a conversation that we started earlier this year. We're talking about the porn industry. And I have been wanting to have this conversation for a long time, Katie. And I was trying to figure out the way in because I hold, and I know you hold, a very high standard for the show. People pay $8 a month to support this podcast.
00:03:27.520 Let's not remind them.
00:03:28.880 And as such, you and I are in the pursuit of blowing their fucking minds as frequently as
00:03:35.100 we could manage. And so I just really wanted to take the time to figure out how I could bring
00:03:39.820 this into a bigger conversation. I agree with very basic beliefs about the porn industry that
00:03:45.120 I think most people would agree with. Like, I think the industry is exploitative. I think it's
00:03:48.380 dangerous. I think it doesn't educate you about the realities of adult sexual relationships.
00:03:53.080 I agree that porn is inherently patriarchal, but at the same time, I find most of those arguments,
00:04:00.340 if that's as far as you take them, to be relatively boring and well-trodden territory.
00:04:04.380 And so, I've been waiting for a while. And it was when I watched this season of Love Island.
00:04:09.240 So, that's one season ahead of you, but I've also watched season six. I watched the full
00:04:12.740 season of Love Island, and I started writing out my thoughts about what Love Island tells us,
00:04:19.280 because it is a very new form of reality show, okay?
00:04:22.420 There is a lot about the show that feels like it is breaking our brains into the next iteration,
00:04:28.440 not just of how we talk about sex, but also how we engage with the internet.
00:04:32.580 And so I basically developed like a grand unifying theory of the internet in advance of this conversation.
00:04:39.100 Well, I, when I was watching, I mean, I probably made it through one hour of the first episode.
00:04:43.920 And then I pause it and I'm like, how fucking long is this?
00:04:46.620 96 minutes is like this is a diabolical lies episode it really felt ai generated like there
00:04:54.160 were there were segments of it where i was like this feels like you fed a an ai model like a bunch
00:05:01.600 of seasons of like old survivor and bachelor and this is what it spit out it feels so uncanny are
00:05:07.400 we going to talk about the fact that there's a cash prize because that to me also felt very
00:05:12.220 dystopian. When they were like, and you win $100,000, I was like, you have got to be fucking
00:05:18.580 kidding me. Is that more dystopian to you than our standard set of reality shows where women 0.98
00:05:23.060 are forced to marry the man that they met like nine days ago? Yeah, fair point. I guess this
00:05:29.500 was just so overt. Usually, it's like the underlying themes of something like A Love is
00:05:34.820 Blind is like, and The Bachelor, too. You hear that constant phrase, are you here for the right
00:05:39.600 reasons. And it's like, no, everyone is here to launch an influencer career, but to make it so
00:05:45.380 overt, like, no, we're actually just going to give you money if you win. I was like, oh, okay. So
00:05:49.800 we're just, that's, that's what we're doing now. Cool. Yeah. We're going to talk about that hard,
00:05:53.660 but first I'm going to make you talk about porn. So Katie, what do you know about porn?
00:06:01.240 You can take that question however you want. I know there's something for everyone out there,
00:06:05.920 No matter where you register on the sick fuck meter, there is a porn for you.
00:06:12.160 There is a porn.
00:06:13.420 I know that, like, I feel like recently, or the more zeitgeisty conversation about porn right now, it's okay.
00:06:20.520 Porn is something that I think has always driven a moral panic, but I think the moral panic has shifted over time.
00:06:27.160 And right now, it feels like your kind of classic navigate to www.pornhub.com.
00:06:33.280 that feels almost anodyne compared to the conversations that we're having around things
00:06:39.040 like OnlyFans and the quote-unquote democratization of porn. It's not something I spend a lot of time
00:06:45.760 thinking about. Sure, sure, sure, sure. I know, I was like, should I tell you my favorite category?
00:06:51.580 Should we get into my weird proclivities? That's only for founding members, so.
00:06:56.560 Okay, so the really fun thing about you and I just sharing a brain and having no new thoughts
00:07:04.420 is that you always segue me perfectly into the next section of the conversation I want to have.
00:07:08.780 So something that I want people to understand is that porn and sort of like erotic imagery
00:07:14.220 has always been a driving force behind both technological and internet advancement.
00:07:18.280 We can't understand how the internet came to be today without understanding how porn has
00:07:22.940 infiltrated these advancements time and time again. So I found this 1993 piece in Wired where
00:07:29.160 they were, surprised, talking about how porn was ruining the world. So I'm going to have you read
00:07:33.600 this. Okay. Sex, as we know, is a heat-seeking missile that forever seeks out the newest medium
00:07:39.960 for its transmission. William Burroughs, a man who understands the dark side of sexuality better than
00:07:45.400 most, sees it as a virus that is always on the hunt for a new host. A virus that almost always
00:07:51.000 infects new technology first. Different genders and psyches have different tastes, but the overall 0.65
00:07:56.620 desire seems about as persistent over the centuries as the lust for bread and salvation.
00:08:01.620 We could go back to Neolithic times when sculpture and cave painting were young.
00:08:05.780 We could pick up the prehistoric sculptures of females with pendulous breasts and very wide hips,
00:08:11.300 a theme found today in pornographic magazines that specialize in women of generous endowment.
00:08:16.400 We could then run our flashlight over cave paintings of males whose members seemed to
00:08:20.240 exceed the length of their legs. We could travel forward in time to naughty frescoes in Pompeii
00:08:25.200 or across continents to where large stones resembling humongous erections have for centuries
00:08:30.280 been major destinations to pilgrims in India or to the vine-choked couples of the Black Pagoda
00:08:35.380 at Angkor Wat, where a Mardi Gras of erotic activity carved in stone has been on display
00:08:40.820 for centuries. We could proceed to eras closer to our time and culture and remind people that
00:08:46.440 type not only made the Gutenberg Bible possible, but that it also made cheap broadsheets of what
00:08:51.300 could only be called real smut in Elizabethan English, available to the masses for the very
00:08:56.240 first time. Is this like the fairy sucking and fairy fucking that we've all come to know and
00:09:00.980 love? I mean, honestly, yes, romanticity, baby. You see, printing not only made it possible to
00:09:07.380 extend the word of God to the educated classes, it also extended the monsters of the id to them
00:09:12.760 as well. Oh, that's good. Printing also allowed for the cheap reproduction and broad distribution
00:09:17.960 of erotic images. Soon along came photography, a new medium, and one that until recently did
00:09:23.620 more to advance the democratic nature of erotic images than all previous media combined. When
00:09:29.180 photography joined with photolithography, the two together created a brand new medium that many
00:09:34.340 could use. It suddenly became economically feasible and inherently possible for lots of people to
00:09:39.500 enact and record their sexual fantasies and then reproduce them for sale to many others.
00:09:44.580 Without putting too fine a point on it, the Stroke book was born. It feels like when you
00:09:49.600 told me, Katie, there were cave paintings of people fucking in Pompeii. Not the, like, devil's
00:09:55.160 advocate here, but I do think that something that came out of that conversation last time that has
00:09:59.240 stuck with me is that the accelerating nature of that technology ups the ante. Like, there is such
00:10:06.060 a difference between a static image painted on the wall of a cave and like, you know,
00:10:13.040 high definition 4D gangbang. They are different in nature because of the technology that is
00:10:20.180 producing them. I actually think they're not as different as we would think, but
00:10:23.400 so I want to kind of take a moment to talk about this. I also want to highlight there's a novel
00:10:27.940 called The Pretender that came out this year. I came across it because my imprint, Knopf,
00:10:32.620 publish it and it's so funny and it's basically about like an Elizabethan king who comes to power
00:10:38.220 but it's so horny and so funny and they make so many sex jokes and the author Joe Harkin
00:10:42.760 has talked about how she basically came upon the voice for this book by learning about just how
00:10:48.020 horny this culture was so anyways read that book if anyone's interested I loved it one of Thomas's
00:10:52.640 favorite things to do is anytime he sees people acting in a in a particularly randy way he like
00:10:58.360 pretends he's banging a gavel and he goes horny that's good thomas i like that so porn is a vanguard
00:11:07.060 in technological innovations because mass drives are the most profitable things to capitalize on
00:11:12.740 so you think like housing food sex money two of those urges are only ever temporarily satisfied
00:11:18.260 okay food and sex and food has a limit for how much you can charge so sexual desire is infinitely
00:11:23.540 replenishable, which means that it is infinitely monetizable. That is largely why porn has always
00:11:28.720 been kind of like flooding through the cracks of every advancement. Someone who is in like their
00:11:33.480 peak sexual age could want to engage with porn every 30 minutes, hypothetically. And there's
00:11:38.620 really nothing else like that in terms of how you can market and capitalize on it. And what's more,
00:11:44.700 as was noted in that Wired article, the writer said, sex is, quote, one of the drives most
00:11:49.540 commonly stimulated by approved above ground media. So when you think about perfume ads,
00:11:55.360 when you think about action movies, when you think about rom-coms, music, all of it is playing
00:12:00.900 on sexual desire and it's a feedback loop. So you have this industry that is poised to directly
00:12:06.060 engage with a form of perpetual and also deeply stigmatized human craving and one that can never
00:12:11.860 be fully satisfied, which is, pun intended, a wet dream of a financial proposition in the age of
00:12:17.340 capitalism. And so as the internet has like grown and advanced and proliferated, so too have grown
00:12:22.780 the competing two sides of the same coin, which is the money to be made off of porn and the moral
00:12:26.980 effort to tamp down the urge to access porn. Something that I'm sure you have seen over the
00:12:32.540 last several years, but in particular the last, basically our whole lives, the last several
00:12:36.020 decades is that our obsession with porn right now is related to our obsession with the children,
00:12:41.020 with saving the children. Some people say that children can access porn and choose to access
00:12:47.540 porn as early as eight years old, 11 years old. And something I just want to note at the jump
00:12:52.560 here is that I understand the impulse to be terrified of that, and we're going to talk
00:12:56.240 about that. But this is also, as you pointed out in our last episode, the age that sexuality
00:13:00.120 onsets. And I think that that is something that we really don't like to think about with children,
00:13:05.240 but also something that kind of has us showing our ass with how we engage with porn, is that
00:13:10.340 this is an age where people are starting to feel sexual desire, sexual urge, sexual pleasure. It's
00:13:16.200 very common for children at that age to basically just start, like, rubbing against things because
00:13:20.700 they're like, I don't know why this feels good, but it does.
00:13:23.800 Do you watch Big Mouth?
00:13:24.960 No. The Hormone Monster. Yes, I do. I do. When I watch that show that for a moment,
00:13:29.120 I forgot that. I've watched every episode.
00:13:31.780 There's a character named Missy Foreman Greenwald. I love that she has a double S name.
00:13:35.600 and she one of the plot lines for her that I really think is like kind of some of the stuff
00:13:41.080 that Nick Kroll is referring to when he says like they could not make Big Mouth today like they
00:13:47.920 started making it eight years ago or 10 years ago and it was it's like now the longest running
00:13:52.520 series on Netflix it just ended but he was like there was no other time or platform that we could
00:13:58.800 have made that show on because of some of the stuff that we were doing yeah one of the things
00:14:02.700 that Missy does is she essentially like humps one of her stuffed animals it's funny but it's also 0.99
00:14:08.440 like oh she's like 10 and so they engage very directly in that show with how horny like early
00:14:14.960 puberty makes kids right and it's funny and it's it's like but it's also uncomfortable like you're
00:14:21.380 kind of laughing at it being like should I be laughing at this this feels inappropriate to me
00:14:25.960 but like everyone has been a 10 year old kid before but you're right it is such a taboo still
00:14:31.500 Right. And I say that at the beginning of this conversation because I think it's really important to view porn basically as functioning like one of those candy coin machines. Like, you pull a lever, and instead of receiving, like, your little shitty toy in a plastic ball that's going to, like, sit in a landfill for eternity, you basically receive access to your own range of sexual feeling. It helps you access pleasure. That is how erotic imagery functions.
00:14:53.400 Like, if you look into marriage education courses or marriage classes, fun fact, these are deeply intertwined with porn addiction courses, the thing they will tell you is that sometimes it's a good way to stimulate arousal with a partner you've been with forever.
00:15:06.260 Like, it is a very commonly used form of access to your own feelings. And children don't seek out porn simply because they just want to understand and they don't know what sex is. They seek it out because they want to have the exchange take place that adults want to have take place.
00:15:22.480 which is watching something that triggers a feeling that is new or pleasurable inside of you.
00:15:27.740 Kara's like, I'm talking about this now because I'm going to talk about kid fucking today, you guys.
00:15:31.820 A lot of you are going to be uncomfortable with it.
00:15:34.500 Look, I think we all know that Katie's episodes are extremely well-researched with a clear point,
00:15:39.740 and mine are just like what's making me feel weird at the moment.
00:15:44.680 It's good to have a balance, yin and yang, you know?
00:15:47.060 So, as with everything on the internet, the porn industry has had to compete with itself more and more over time. You have had countless websites. The primary one right now is Pornhub. Now we have OnlyFans who are basically competing for the same gargantuan level of traffic. And in order to meet that basically insatiable demand, you can imagine how this trickle down functions.
00:16:06.000 Okay, you know, in the external way, we have labor exploitation, you have unsafe workplace issues, sexual assault issues, consent issues, financial issues. You have the porn industry basically flowing like water through every possible crack in the internet to meet new users where they are. So think X, Instagram, Facebook, Craigslist. These are often places where people can claim that they didn't necessarily want to access the sexual content that they stumbled upon.
00:16:28.920 And you can also have the end result of the ungodly mashup that is SEO land with content creation land, where sex workers are pushing or being pushed towards the more outlandish and dangerous scenarios in order to one-up the competition.
00:16:42.220 So this is where you get into the conversation of a creator like Lily Phillips or Bonnie Blue.
00:16:46.880 And then you also have this push and pull between porn and popular culture.
00:16:49.680 We've talked about Sophie Gilbert's Girl on Girl.
00:16:51.780 She makes an argument that this happened specifically starting in the 2000s, and I'm not convinced necessarily that that's true.
00:16:58.260 I would argue that porn—
00:16:59.900 I don't think that's true.
00:17:00.920 I think porn has always been deeply impacted by culture.
00:17:04.080 And before we called it porn and thought of it as porn websites,
00:17:07.220 the promise of the erotic is really what we're talking about here.
00:17:10.760 I want to spend a moment to discuss the pro and anti-porn feminist arguments.
00:17:14.240 Again, I think that having these in our minds throughout this conversation is going to be helpful. 0.76
00:17:18.380 I mentioned Andrea Dworkin in our Lily Phillips episode. 1.00
00:17:21.720 She is kind of believed to be like the mother of the anti-porn feminist movement.
00:17:25.220 She's having a moment, too.
00:17:26.640 She is having a moment.
00:17:27.500 That's how you know we're in a conservative swing.
00:17:30.480 She and lawyer Catherine McKinnon were basically, you know, the leaders of this movement, and they framed pornography as a violation of women's civil rights. So I want you to read a section from an anti-porn essay that Andrea Dworkin wrote in 1993. Again, apparently there was a porn panic in 1993.
00:17:47.260 For 20 years, people that you know and people that you do not know inside the women's movement,
00:17:52.920 with its great grassroots breadth and strength, have been trying to communicate something very
00:17:57.440 simple. Pornography happens. It happens. Lawyers, call it what you want. Call it speech, call it
00:18:04.320 act, call it conduct. Catherine A. McKinnon and I called it a practice when we described it in
00:18:09.400 the anti-pornography civil rights ordinance that we drafted for the city of Minneapolis in 1983.
00:18:14.140 but the point is that it happens. It happens to women in real life. Women's lives are made
00:18:20.680 two-dimensional and dead. We are flattened on the page or on the screen. Our vaginal lips are 1.00
00:18:27.640 painted purple for the consumer to clue him in as to where to focus his attention such as it is.
00:18:33.080 Our rectums are highlighted so that he knows where to push. Our mouths are used and our
00:18:37.860 throats are used for deep penetration. I am describing a process of dehumanization,
00:18:42.420 a concrete means of changing someone into something. We are not talking about violence
00:18:47.440 yet. We are nowhere near violence. Dehumanization is real. It happens in real life. It happens to
00:18:54.140 stigmatized people. It has happened to us, to women. We say that women are objectified. We hope 0.76
00:19:00.140 that people will think that we are very smart when we use a long word. But being turned into an
00:19:04.580 object is a real event, and the pornographic object is a particular kind of object. It is a
00:19:09.940 target. You are turned into a target, and red or purple marks the spot where he's supposed to get
00:19:15.480 you. This object wants it. She is the only object with a will that says, hurt me. A car does not
00:19:22.300 say, bang me up, but she, this non-human thing, says, hurt me. And the more you hurt me, the more
00:19:28.280 I will like it. When we look at her, that purple painted thing, when we look at her vagina, when we 1.00
00:19:33.580 look at her rectum, when we look at her mouth, when we look at her throat, those of us who know her
00:19:37.920 and those of us who have been her
00:19:39.280 still can barely remember that she is a human being.
00:19:42.640 Thoughts?
00:19:43.680 I think the thing is that Dworkin is a good writer.
00:19:46.220 Very good writer.
00:19:46.940 I think that she is a persuasive writer,
00:19:49.700 but I still think that having read some of her earlier stuff,
00:19:54.800 she used to be far more expressive of female sexual desire
00:20:01.520 and the fact that sex is something that women can want too.
00:20:04.920 And it feels like over time, you see her writing kind of shift toward this tone of like sexuality in general is a man's domain. And anytime a woman is participating, there is an objectification that is taking place. It is something is being done to her.
00:20:19.860 but in general I think that my broad critique of this maybe is that not to like ring the capitalist
00:20:28.400 bell again because I feel like that's always the bell that I'm ringing but like under capitalism
00:20:32.900 everyone is being objectified all the time like sexual objectification to me is such a
00:20:39.320 not a minor I'm not going to say it's a minor problem because it's certainly like there are
00:20:45.000 real harms that are downstream of that, but it feels like a strange place to focus all of your
00:20:53.120 energy if your chief complaint or your chief concern is exploitation. I would also note that
00:20:58.980 it's worth framing Dworkin's arguments in the context of a feminist who spent most of her
00:21:04.420 career during the sex wars, where it really was a new frontier in terms of talking about women
00:21:09.320 and talking about subordination. So I do want to lend her that credibility. It's also worth noting
00:21:13.140 You and I have both read Sophie Lewis's Enemy Feminisms, which we're going to talk about later.
00:21:17.960 In her essay about porn, she revealed that Dworkin's shift from profound sex positivity to what I think you and I would both describe as a more reactionary position coincided with her entering a relationship with a man that ended in a profoundly abusive situation.
00:21:33.840 So I don't want to draw a causal connection there.
00:21:36.360 That's not my place, but it is worth noting.
00:21:38.640 I think it adds a lot of color to this perspective.
00:21:41.380 Well, I think she herself will say, like, I used to be a utopian thinker.
00:21:46.160 Mm-hmm. And now she knows.
00:21:48.060 Now she's, like, a realist, or I don't think she classifies herself that way, but she essentially says, like, I'm practical now about essentially the biologically determined nature of men's violent tendencies.
00:21:59.420 And I think that there are a lot of feminists today that still agree with that.
00:22:02.920 Like, I was speaking with somebody not that long ago who has a prominent platform and, like, is a very outspoken progressive woman.
00:22:10.700 And she essentially says, like, I believe in biological determinism.
00:22:14.080 I think men are inherently violent and that we have to protect women from them.
00:22:18.180 And I was like, oh, that's interesting.
00:22:19.380 Like, I don't feel that way, but I think it is actually a more common position today than it may have even been back then. 0.97
00:22:27.040 I think generally speaking, Dworkin is, once you are entering like the literature of feminism, she's essential. Like she contributed a lot of really important ideas. And I don't disagree with a lot of what she is saying here. I do think that porn is a form of objectification. I want to highlight some of the inherent arguments that she's making because we are going to address those throughout this conversation. So first and foremost, porn leads to real life consequences. That's really important. 0.93
00:22:50.020 And secondarily.