PARIS — A sensationalistic report released this week by a French government office is urging immediate state censorship and broad criminalization of the adult industry in France and worldwide.
The report is titled “Pornocriminalité” and was produced by France’s High Council for 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.
A statement from HCE, accompanying the 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 non-consensual sex, acting and not acting, or even between 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 recent high-profile prosecution of the French Bukkake producers with all adult production, and alludes to unspecified cases supposedly being prepared somewhere in the U.S. against Pornhub, which it claims stands accused of “sex trafficking and child abuse.”
“These trials, we hope, will be exemplary, against an industry that thrives on hatred and misogynistic violence, in general indifference and total impunity,” the report declares.
On Wednesday, Pierre-Brossolette advocated on French radio for the total criminalization of the adult industry, stating, “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 report dismisses concerns about free speech, sexual expression or artistic expression concerning sex as “misleading semantics.”
Concluding the report, HCE calls upon French institutions “to ensure that these illegal activities are finally prosecuted and punished!”
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 report in French, click here.