PARIS — A sensationalistic report by a French government office released this week is urging immediate state censorship and broad criminalization of the adult industry in France and worldwide.
The report is titled “Pornocriminality” (“Pornocriminalité”) and was produced by France’s High Council for the Equality Between Women and Men (HCE).
The report is being promoted in the press by Sylvie Pierre-Brossolette, a former journalist and anti-sex work advocate, who served in the HCE between 2019 and 2021.
The HCE statement accompanying its porn criminalization proposal states that the report has been a year and a half in the making.
According to the HCE, “90% of pornographic content presents unsimulated acts of physical, sexual or verbal violence” against women.
“In these millions of videos, women — caricatured with the worst sexist and racist stereotypes — are humiliated, objectified, dehumanized, violated, tortured, undergoing treatment contrary to human dignity and… French law,” the HCE proclaims, making no distinction between consensual and unconsensual sex, acting and not acting, or even fiction and reality. “Indeed, some of these violent contents meet the legal definition of acts of torture and barbarism. The women are real, the sexual and violent acts are real, and the suffering is often perfectly visible and at the same time eroticized. Pornography is not cinema.”
Outlandish Claims of a Vast Worldwide Criminal Conspiracy
According to the HCE report, the adult industry is a nefarious conspiracy that ties together every imaginable social and personal evil.
Pornography, the government report claims, “is at the intersection of all hatreds and is part of the continuum of violence,” including “rape culture, dehumanization of women, apology for incest, racism, child crime and LGBTphobia.”
The HRE report conflates the high-profile prosecution of the French Bukkake producers with all adult production, and alludes to unspecified “trials are also being prepared against Pornhub, accused of sex trafficking and child abuse” somewhere “in the U.S.” hoping that “these trials, we hope, will be exemplary, against an industry that thrives on hatred and misogynistic violence, in general indifference and total impunity.”
Sylvie Pierre-Brossolette advocated on Wednesday on French radio for the total criminalization of the adult industry, stating that “this school of sexism, this school of sexist violence that pornography has become must stop — both for the women and for the people who watch.” She also called all adult content “a factory for future rapists, future killers of women.”
The HCE also dismissed any arguments about Free Speech, sexual expression or artistic expression concerning sex as “misleading semhcantics” that should be criminalized.
HCE “calls on French institutions to ensure that these illegal activities are finally prosecuted and punished!” the report concluded.
The HCE report was submitted this week to Bérangère Couillard, Minister Delegate to the Prime Minister, responsible for Equality Between Women and Men and the Fight Against Discrimination.
To read the HCE “Pornocriminality” report (in French), click here.