Pornographic Escalation

On our tastes in erotica, and WHERE IT ENDS

There’s a theory that I hate. It’s shared a lot on social media, and anywhere the anti-porn position is being discussed in an environment where it’s not being challenged by anyone who actually knows anything about porn. The theory goes a bit like this.

A young man seeks out erotic content online. He has no pre-existing fantasies of his own, obviously. He is an entirely blank canvas, other than being (probably) heterosexual. He finds lots of sexy stuff. He doesn’t spend any money on it, of course, he just mindlessly surfs tube sites. At first, he finds all the female nudity very arousing. Then, nudity isn’t enough. He wants more explicit poses, perhaps glistening closeups of genitals. He saves his favourites on his phone, and stares at them for more and more hours each day. They stop working so well for him. He seeks out something more titillating. He gets into watching hardcore boy/girl porn. At first it’s wildly arousing, and then it isn’t. So he watches gang bangs, and eventually becomes desensitised to it, too. He begins to seek out more violent content. He discovers he can no longer become aroused unless the female performer is being degraded in some way. Maybe spat on, maybe choked. He becomes obsessed with ass-to-mouth. Then that’s not enough. He starts to seek out content featuring younger performers. He likes the hashtag #firsttime and then starts searching for #teen as well. That works great for a while. Then it’s not enough. He boots up the dark web, because of course he does. Why not? And next thing he knows, the only kind of content that he can be aroused by is images of child abuse. This whole process, from viewing professional content of consenting, adult women in the nude, to being addicted to illegal videos of child rape, all takes about six months. It’s a one way journey, of course. No one ever finds themselves helplessly seeking out ever-more-tame content.

The theory isn’t always illustrated exactly like this, of course. Sometimes the hypothetical consumer gradually becomes a pedophile, but sometimes he becomes addicted to seeing women penetrated with larger and larger objects instead, or sometimes he wants to see bigger and bigger breasts, or penises, or feet. The point is that everybody escalates. This theory, unchallenged, makes it very easy indeed for anti-porn activists to argue for an outright ban. However harmless your starter-porn might be, it’s the gateway drug for something so much worse, and the consumer will have no control over what that worse thing might eventually become. And I can certainly see why it’s an appealing theory to reach for, if you find yourself caught out, consuming the sort of porn that it’s hard to defend. The idea that you’ve been corrupted by the things you’ve watched, rather than having naturally aberrant tastes, would be a comforting one if you were trying to avoid taking responsibility for your own desires, your own viewing habits.

In my experience, both personal and professional, the whole theory is nonsense. First, personally. When I was a child, I thought I’d one day rather like to be tied up and spanked, by a cruel and ruthless gentleman. At twenty five years old, I finally had the chance to try it, and discovered I liked it quite as much as I’d expected to. Twenty five years later, it’s been my job for quarter of a century and I still like being tied up and spanked. My interest in being tied up hasn’t escalated into a desire to be buried alive in coffins, or suspended by my eyelashes. My desire to be spanked hasn’t developed into a need to be beaten with police batons or swords. A cruel and ruthless man is still a prerequisite, but I still only want one of him at a time. My tastes have become a little more refined, because I’ve tried some things out and discovered I don’t like them, but they have in no way escalated.

WAIT, I hear you say. THAT MIGHT JUST BE BECAUSE YOU’RE SO IMPRESSIVELY MENTALLY WELL ADJUSTED, AND ANYWAY YOU’RE A WOMAN. WHAT ABOUT THE MEN? AND THE WEIRDOS? I appreciate the flattery, obviously, but if you’re a frequent visitor here, you’ll be aware that I’m not especially mentally stable myself. And surely if anyone was going to become desensitised to BDSM and to need more and more of it to achieve the same effect, it’d be a (not very stable) person who specialises in doing BDSM for her literal job, and is an enthusiastic recreational participant too?

A sample size of one isn’t very compelling though, is it? No, of course it isn’t. I just like writing about myself, sorry. So let’s briefly look at one of the most notably successful porn sites in the UK, instead. It’s called OnlyTease, and has been open since the early 2000’s. “We specialise in the erotic, not the extreme” warns its tagline, and I can attest to that. I’ve been working for OnlyTease since 2003. On the first shoot, they dressed me in a series of short-skirted outfits paired with stockings or tights, and I stripped out of each, leaving the leg-wear on. They’re primarily a hosiery fetish site, you see. On my most recent shoot, things were very different. They shoot from a large house in Kent now, instead of a small apartment, and have a staff of three regular photographers, a stylist, a booker and a back office staff who run the technical side of the site. But just like in 2003, they dressed me in a series of short-skirted outfits paired with stockings or tights, and I stripped out of each, leaving the leg-wear on. Because that’s what its customers want to see. Despite the challenges of monetising online content over the last two decades, as a result of recession, industrial piracy and a consumer base who’re increasingly resistant to paying a recurring subscription fee, OnlyTease hasn’t felt pressurised to start shooting explicit images. They haven’t introduced hardcore elements to shoots, haven’t started booking younger-looking models or writing more tabloid-style copy. Part of the reason for this is, I’m sure, that it’s not something the production team would be comfortable with. But a large part of the reason is that’s not what the customers want either. I know some of these customers. In 2003, they liked softcore images of young women stripping out of their lingerie and showing off their stockings. In 2026, they like the same type of images, except that their idea of a ‘young’ woman has changed as they’ve got older. Thank God. That’s why I still have work. For many customers, their pinups age as they do, and I will never stop feeling grateful for this. Reassured, too, to know that none of these people have needed OnlyTease to become more extreme. It remains one of the UK’s most prolific, and most successful production companies. Its content is not what the anti-porn campaigners are talking about, because it’s difficult to make a case that content like this is in any way harmful, but the fact that your average porn scene is much more like an OT video than a borderline illegal choking scene from the darker recesses of the internet, should probably be factored into the discussion.

Then there are my photographers, and my custom video customers, and the people who buy my pay-per-view content. I’ve got thousands of these customers, and I’m familiar with their viewing habits. If they started off by buying my striptease content in 2015, when I started self-producing, that’s what they still tend to buy, eleven years on. The spanking fans continue to buy spanking content. The bondage fans buy bondage. They really don’t tend to change much when it comes to their fantasies, and they definitely don’t tend to escalate. I started shooting more explicit content in 2020, and advertised it enthusiastically. Six years on, most of my customers are nevertheless still booking non-explicit scenes. Even when I offered them escalation of a kind, they mostly didn’t want it.

So, the theory’s nonsense, but perhaps my most compelling evidence for why I think I’m right about this, is that when a customer comes along who does want to escalate the extremity of the content I shoot for him, I react very badly indeed because it happens about once a decade, and it can be incredibly jarring. I shall tell you the story, in my next post, cos this got unexpectedly long and I don’t want to cause you undue SubStack Reader Fatigue. Also, this sort of counts as edging, doesn’t it? Which is, I’m reliably informed, terribly terribly hot.