WESTMINSTER, U.K. — A senior Labour MP on Tuesday launched an attack against adult websites, saying they are “characterized by lawlessness,” and called for further criminalization of all sex work.
Tonia Antoniazzi — who has also recently been widely condemned by LGBTQ+ activists as a TERF (trans-exclusive radical feminist) — made her broad claims about adult content during a special House of Commons adjournment debate to discuss “the prevention of commercial sexual exploitation,” The Independent newspaper reported.
The debate also addressed the current political and media campaign to specifically address deepfakes.
“Lawlessness characterizes the online pornography trade with films featuring child sexual abuse, rape and trafficking victims found on some of the UK’s most heavily visited sites,” Antoniazzi told the House of Commons. “Illegal content is freely accessible on mainstream pornography websites.”
Antoniazzi referred to a controversial 2023 report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation (APPG-CSE) to justify her anti-porn generalizations.
As XBIZ reported, the APPG-CSE report, titled “Pornography regulation: The case for parliamentary reform,” repeated myths and stereotypes peddled by anti-porn activists and recommended a wide-ranging state crackdown on sexual expression online.
Group chair MP Dame Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North) tweeted at the time, “The APPG-CSE has today published its report on pornography. Its findings are stark. We call on the government to urgently review laws on pornography to start to combat violence against women and girls.”
APPG-CSE is an informal cross-party group with no official status within Parliament. Although run by Members of the Commons and Lords, it also involves activists outside Parliament.
The report cited by Antoniazzi to justify her attack makes the blanket assumption that all adult content consumers are cisgender males and that all performers are cisgender females, as well as questionable claims that pornography fuels sexual violence and racist stereotypes, and that “sexual coercion is inherent to the commercial production of pornography.”
The content and phrasing of the group’s findings is identical to the talking points of religiously inspired anti-porn lobbies and crusading groups such as NCOSE and Exodus Cry in the U.S. Like the religious anti-porn groups, Dame Johnson and her group reduce all adult content to a heterosexual, cisgender dynamic between coerced women as objects exploited by pornography, and men as its “users.”
The group has made an impassioned call for state censorship of adult content, quoting religiously motivated anti-porn crusader Laila Mickelwait, though failing to disclose Mickelwait’s links with controversial anti-porn ministry Exodus Cry.
A Full SWERF Attack on All Forms of Sex Work
In addition to her attack on porn, Antoniazzi also issued a standard SWERF (sex worker-exclusionary radical feminist) call for enhancing the criminalization of all sex work.
“In England and Wales, there is a loose patchwork of laws relating to prostitution, with no consistent objective underpinning them,” she told the House of Commons. “Third-party facilitation of prostitution is illegal in some circumstances yet permitted in others. Victims of sexual exploitation face criminal sanction for soliciting in a public place, while individuals who pay for sex only face criminal sanctions if they ‘kerb crawl’ or pay for sex with an individual subjected to force, even then, the law is very rarely enforced.
“Pimping websites are commercial online platforms dedicated solely or partly to advertising women for prostitution,” Antoniazzi continued. “They function like mass online brothels, making it as easy to order women to exploit as it is to order a takeaway. Despite it being illegal to place a prostitution advert in a phone box, the same advert can be legally published for-profit on a website. Our laws have not kept pace with technological change and pimps have got rich as a result.”
SWERFs have stated that adult cisgendered women do not have the ability to consent to sex work, among which they include all porn performances involving females, and have theorized that it is not actually even a possible choice.