I’m so over Exposed
The attempt to find a middle ground on porn leads to pinched, unsatisfying compromises
This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Clare McGlynn wants you to know that she’s not anti-porn, she’s anti-“patriarchal porn”. To an unreconstructed radical feminist like me, this sounds like a vegetarian making an exception for chicken. Yet the distinction is central to her argument. Pornography, she insists, is not inherently harmful, only the kind that eroticises violence, humiliation and inequality. This is undoubtedly a more palatable message for the nearly 14 million Britons who use pornography than simply telling them to stop.
In Exposed, McGlynn argues that the alliance between Big Tech and Big Porn is eroding gains that generations of feminists fought to secure. She explores how extreme pornography has come to define the sexual scripts of a generation, and what this means for both sexual liberation and equality. “Pornography has become a cultural authority on sex and sexuality, it gets in our heads and it’s difficult to get out,” she writes.
Gruelling but not gratuitous, her description of strangulation, “barely legal”, incest and rape porn, which make up the bulk of what she terms “patriarchal porn”, are for the most part necessary and strong. She outlines how users and platforms develop new terms to circumvent search bans, with rape porn rebranded as “forced”, then “foced” [sic] to evade moderation.
She is also pleasingly scathing about the cynical techniques used by Musk and others to frame regulation of extreme content such as rape porn as a restriction on freedom of speech, warning astutely: “Watch out for when they remove far more content than they need to, making claims of forced censorship.”
No contemporary analysis of sexual politics would be complete without mentioning the lure of the manosphere and how this has steered the politics of young men toward the right. Curiously, she avoids criticising the parallel path of young women towards a warped form of progressivism.
McGlynn’s writing is most powerful when she gets angry and confronts the lazy assumptions forced down our throats by the porn lobby. Deftly picking apart the lie that what is good for Big Porn is good for freedom, she points out that pornography is pushing women out of public life, constraining their speech and encouraging them to accept unfulfilling sex.
But there is a rose-tinted naivety about the early days of the internet, when people (overwhelmingly men) began masturbating to online content for the first time. McGlynn claims, “Free porn websites began to drown out the activity of independent, ethical porn creators.” Yet the “creators” which survived were the ones that adapted.
So-called “feminist pornography” remains niche because masturbating to content arising from “a political vision, a social movement challenging mainstream racist, sexist, heteronormative and ableist portrayals of sexual activity” has all the appeal of watching snails copulate. Sure, it might do it for some people, but it is not where market forces lead.
McGlynn’s assertions are cautious and defensive. She doesn’t want to “kink shame” women who are aroused by spitting or being spat on, dodges the question of what should be banned and interrogates herself for using the phrase “incest porn”, because she frets putting the word “incest” alongside what is seen as a “consensual, legitimate activity” might make it, incest, seem respectable.
Attempting to find a middle ground is admirable. But it also leads to pinched, unsatisfying compromises; the result is an oddly legalistic morality and the sense of an institutionalised academic. Every assertion that something is harmful to women is followed by a nervous twitch that, of course, “Black and minoritised women have it worse.”
Big baddies Trump and Musk come in for criticism, but the left’s longstanding embrace of pornography does not. Disappointingly there is no acknowledgement, or perhaps understanding, that the trans epidemic has been turbocharged by pornography.
My disagreements with McGlynn are substantial, but they should not obscure the fact that Exposed is an important book. For full disclosure, I was never destined to love it. Pornocracy, the book I wrote alongside Rob Jessel, did not lead to a slot on Woman’s Hour, an interview in The Times or a launch hosted by Glamour magazine. Consequently, I have approached this well-received work with the objectivity and generosity for which embittered writers are renowned.
Nonetheless, Exposed reveals more than the horrors of the porn industry. It exposes the poverty of ambition that now afflicts much academic feminism. After 250 pages cataloguing exploitation, degradation and violence, the boldest conclusion a mainstream scholar can reach is that pornography should be curbed and reformed. McGlynn has written a powerful indictment of porn, but the most revealing thing about her book is how little she feels able to demand.
