Should governments support “nice” porn?

Like it or not, Pornhub is the sex education of a generation. Take a look at it and you'll see what that means for Gen Z’s ideas about sex, relationships and what it means to be happy.

There's nothing wrong with porn if it's consensual and non exploitative. But way too much Pornhub content has power imbalance as the central narrative (step parent / step child / boss / maid / secretary / blackmail / dominance / trickery).

There definitely is a problem with porn that teaches young people that sex is a transaction; something to be bought or won or leveraged.

So if governments and civil society want to change the norms that young people are getting from porn (and tackle increasing alienation, mental health issues and sexual violence) what can they do?

Banishing popular vices, whether by stigmatization or criminalisation, means dodgy people step in and control the space. It's not exactly criminals that are controlling porn, but they're not the kind of people that most parents would want educating their children either.

Instead of being squeamish, a far more sensible policy would be to accept that a LOT of people (a majority) use porn and stop ignoring it – stop letting people with marginal values control the space.

So, the same way many governments support film, music and popular culture, they could support healthy porn too.

Because quite simply, the only way to compete with bad ideas is to put better ideas out there and let people decide for themselves. Whether in fashion, culture or human rights, ideas spread through traction. Traction is what changes things; the way that ideas flow and grow through society is what shapes the future.

So the more people who watch and normalize and reproduce the language of unhealthy porn, the more people will follow them - and vice versa.

People won't watch boring porn of course (I can’t think of anything more cringe than a ministry of health directed sex scene). And people won't watch didactic content telling them what they should be watching. Funding strategies would need to be balanced between ethical vision and market forces. I guess getting that right would be the tricky part.