Porn, Curiosity, and Why Shame Isn’t the Answer
The porn debate never disappears
The debate around porn never really disappears — it just rebrands itself.
One year it’s about morality, the next it’s about safety, and now it’s about verification. Yet the conversation almost never asks the one question that matters.
Why do we keep pretending human curiosity can be legislated?
At a glance
- Porn laws often confuse morality with safety.
- Banning or restricting content rarely reduces harm — it drives it underground.
- Voyeurism isn’t new; it’s a core part of how humans learn and connect.
- Policy without psychology creates privacy risks and false security.
- Therapy focuses on meaning, not moralising.
- Honest discussion protects more than censorship ever could.
The Paradox of Control
The latest wave of restrictions under the Online Safety Act tries to draw lines between safety, censorship, and morality. On paper, it looks sensible — protect minors, reduce exploitation, improve consent. In practice, it muddies the water.
Banning categories, blocking content, and forcing ID checks don’t remove risk; they just drive it underground. When you make curiosity forbidden, you don’t erase it — you intensify it. The more something is hidden, the more attention it attracts.
It’s the oldest psychological loop in the book: tell people they can’t look, and they’ll find a way to look harder.
Voyeurism Isn’t New
Humans have always been fascinated by watching. From cave art to cinema, curiosity about bodies and behaviour has been part of how we understand ourselves. The difference now is scale — billions of eyes, one click away.
But voyeurism doesn’t just live in porn sites. It lives in property listings, celebrity culture, and “clean” reality shows. We want to see inside each other’s lives because we’re social animals who learn through observation.
The moral panic comes when we pretend some kinds of looking are virtuous and others corrupt.
When Policy Ignores Psychology
Regulation without insight always fails. Age verification laws might sound protective, but they also create new privacy risks: massive data collection, surveillance creep, and the illusion that filtering equals safety.
And then there’s the strangulation ban — a law that outlaws depiction rather than education. The assumption seems to be that if we never see it, no one will do it. The truth is the opposite. When realistic content disappears, curiosity moves into unsafe, unregulated spaces.
The lesson sex educators have known for decades still holds: information protects; secrecy harms.
Therapy’s View
In therapy, porn isn’t about morality or law — it’s about meaning. What does it soothe? What does it say about control, connection, or curiosity?
That’s why good therapy doesn’t tell people to stop watching. It helps them understand why they watch, what it gives them, and whether that still serves them. Legislators could learn from that nuance.
A Cultural Mirror
Porn doesn’t corrupt culture — it reflects it. The search terms of any year show us what society craves, fears, and hides. It’s an unfiltered record of our collective psyche.
Regulating that mirror without understanding it is like censoring dreams for being too revealing.
The Real Work
The problem isn’t that porn exists — it’s that we’re terrible at talking about it. We mistake silence for protection and panic for virtue. If we could approach it with honesty instead of hysteria, we’d do far more to prevent harm than any algorithm ever could.
Porn isn’t going anywhere. Curiosity isn’t the enemy. Ignorance is.
