Cometh the Hour, Cometh The Furious Ageing Porn Star

(Here's a picture of me being furious. You just can't tell, cos of all the Botox)

To be perfectly honest, I’m not especially well-qualified to write on this topic. I don’t know what would actually stop under-age people viewing pornography, but the UK is in the process of bringing in age verification laws, in an attempt to at least mitigate the situation a little. On the face of it, that seems a perfectly reasonable idea. After all, we check people’s ages when they buy tobacco products and alcohol, and we try not to let children watch 18 rated movies. Obviously, we fail spectacularly at all of these things, and children who want to smoke, get drunk and watch age inappropriate entertainment, do so. But the attempt to curb this seems admirable. Why not try to stop kids watching porn, too?

There are all sorts of privacy issues that this brings up, and which bore me to death so forgive me, I’m going to be brief in addressing that particular point. Adults don’t want to give up their personal details when they’re looking at content that’s deeply personal to them. Even I, as a shameless professional pornographer, would rather the porn that I look at for my personal viewing pleasure is kept private. I’d be mortified if anyone found out that I love Hucows dot com, and that I’m not at all averse to watching porn that I appear in. I’m taking that information to my grave. The problem is, that as the Ashley Madison scandal proved, sometimes people kill themselves over being outed for their private sexual behaviour. Urgh, protecting children versus stopping horny adults from killing themselves if their porn details are leaked. Do you see the complexity?

Someone cleverer than me is going to have to figure this out — I don’t know the answer. It seems perfectly reasonable to check the ages of people who want to view porn before they gain access, but it’d need to be at least as secure a system as personal online banking. Possibly more so, IDK. I mean, maybe I do, but I can’t be bothered to write more about it RN. God. I’m not suddenly an actual journalist just cos I’m on Substack.

What I do know, is that while all of this is being debated on TV, the way it was on BBC’s Newsnight on 22/07/25, there’s a startling absence. Generally, if you want to debate the safety standards or the ethics of an industry, you’d include some representation of that industry. That’d be normal, wouldn’t it? And it’s not like Newsnight is opposed to platforming sex workers when they feel like it — they just did a full-scale interview with Lily Phillips. But in a serious discussion about pornography, there wasn’t a single performer, producer, or customer featured. I mean, that’s obviously not true. There were four people in the discussion, and 52% of us report viewing pornography when asked anonymously. So at least one of them is a customer, but obviously no one was going to admit to it.

I wasn’t invited on Newsnight, FFS, even though I have at least 20 TV-appropriate outfits, but someone like me should have been. Here’s what I’d have liked to say if they’d had the courtesy to invite me:

“GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWDDDDDDDDDDDDDD SHUT UP AND LISTEN.”

Literally no legitimate pornographer wants kids to view their work. Even if we were all total psychopaths with no children we cared about, and no morals whatsoever, what would be the point? It’s not like children are going to pay us — you need a credit card to purchase our content.

There probably are platforms that don’t really care whether or not kids see porn, but they’re not owned by individual producers, and they’re not pay-per-view services (like OnlyFans or Clips4Sale). They’re tube sites. Do you know what I mean? Of course you do; you’ve visited them. They’re like YouTube but for porn, and they make money not via individual sales but via advertising, so the more people click on their videos the better, irrespective of whether the viewers are of age, and whether or not the content is appropriate for them. I’m talking about Pornhub, and XHamster, and any number of other nauseating platforms that gained their massive audiences by hosting stolen versions of legitimate producers’ paywalled work and then giving it away for free without a protective paywall in place. Essentially, small-scale pornographers (like me, and many of my friends) have been victimised twice as a result of this conduct. First we’ve suffered financially as a result of having our work (which we’d carefully paywalled in order to protect both children and our profits) stolen. Then second, a decade or so later, we’re being scapegoated for the fact that kids have been watching our work, for free, on platforms that don’t give a damn about who’s watching. Pornhub finally added a landing page with a warning in 2025, having been in existence for 18 years. Until this year, typing ‘Pornhub’ into your search engine would see you arriving on a front page that featured the most hardcore of hardcore porn, with not a single warning, not so much as a box to tick in order to agree that you were of legal age. Just a flood of stolen porn, freely available. If the government had actually cared about this issue, they could have taken action against the tube sites a decade ago. If you ask a person in their twenties about their underage porn use (I do this a lot) they won’t tell you about stealing their dad’s credit card, searching out a carefully curated, paywalled producer like Erika Lust or Restrained Elegance, and purchasing a few judiciously chosen videos before waiting for the inevitable parental wrath when their purchase is discovered. They’ll tell you about surfing Pornhub. Of course they will. It was anonymous, and it was free. Politicians are still talking earnestly about producers as though we’re the reason kids are watching porn. The briefest conversation with someone who actually works in the industry would disabuse them of that if they asked a few sensible questions, but they don’t and I cannot understand why.

Recently, everyone seems to have become especially worried about porn that involves ‘extreme’ acts, like choking. Never mind there’s not a single reported case of a performer dying as a result of being choked on-set. I can see why people would worry — the idea that violent porn might encourage people to do violent things to each other during real life sex is a disturbing one. No one on TV confesses to watching porn, but all of them seem entirely convinced that your typical porn scene involves five brutish men, one tiny, trafficked woman, a whole lot of choking and slapping, a fountain of bukkake, and an audience made up mostly of wide eyed, horrified 12 year olds who found it by accident when they were just trying to surf Pinterest.

As a pornographer, this makes me want to scream. The average porn scene is SOLO, for God’s sake. There’s no choking, there are no rivers of jizz, there’s no violence at all. The average porn scene is likely to be of a young woman, alone in her bedroom, shooting stuff that she thinks is sexy, on her phone. The vast majority of porn is this — the overwhelming preponderance of porn performers don’t do hardcore at all, let alone violent hardcore.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m against hardcore — I’m not in the least — but making laws about all erotic content while pretending that the front page of Pornhub represents what most people are producing (and what the majority of customers are purchasing) is absurd. The way it’d be ridiculous to treat all mainstream movies as though they were part of the Fast & Furious franchise. WE MUST STOP PEOPLE FROM WATCHING FILMS IN CASE THEY START DRIVING DANGEROUSLY. You can see why Merchant Ivory, for example, or M Night Shyamalan, might have felt a bit beleaguered by being exhorted to STOP USING SPEED AS A WEAPON OMG NO MORE CAR CHASES. Pornography covers at least as wide a spectrum as Hollywood movies, or YouTube content, and the pretense that porn = misogynistic hardcore is exhausting. Treating an OnlyFans bikini model as though her product is going to influence what anybody does in the bedroom is ridiculous. She’s not responsible for some idiot trying to strangle his girlfriend because he’s somehow managed to learn that some people like that, but not to have understood the basic principles of consent and safety. She doesn’t deserve to have her livelihood threatened because everyone’s scared to input their private personal information as well as handing over their credit card (which is, remember, already proof of age) when they buy erotic content.

Protecting children is, of course, important. I first saw some pornography when I was 14, and it horrified and disturbed me. I’m on the same page as the UK government when it comes to that. I’m always impressed when I meet parents who monitor their children’s internet use, and use parental controls. It doesn’t work, obviously, but the attempt is laudable. But protecting the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of performers is also important. By and large, they’re shooting totally legal acts and uploading behind paywalls — they don’t deserve to be treated as though they’re part of some kind of criminal underworld conspiracy. A disproportionate number of porn performers come from somewhat disadvantaged backgrounds, and gravitate towards this industry because it’s possible to succeed without formal qualifications, or spending a lot on start-up costs, or being possessed of impressive professional contacts. Moreover, pornography is currently one of the only industries in the world where being female gives you a distinct commercial advantage. Watching a line of middle class women who benefited from excellent educations, sitting on a TV sofa and talking about trying to shut down a ‘high harm industry’ they seem to know almost nothing about is infuriating. Not least because they’re talking over a group of people (the majority of whom are also women) who’ve not enjoyed their advantages, but who have flourished nevertheless. They could at least invite one of us to sit with them for a while, couldn’t they?

?