Is Pornography a Socially Disruptive Technology?

Emerging technologies have the potential to change social norms about what behaviour we consider ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. For instance, by reducing the likelihood of pregnancy after sex, the pill greatly contributed to the sexual revolution of the 60s in which sex before marriage became socially accepted. But before old norms are replaced by new ones in this revolutionary way, societies often go through a stage of cluelessness about how to regulate the behaviour enabled by an emerging technology. Scholars hence call these deregulating, but potentially revolutionary new technologies ‘socially disruptive’ (Anderson et al. 2026).

Pornography as technology

Pornography influences our sexual behaviour in a way that seems similar to the pill. Take the normalisation of ‘choking’ in young people’s sexual habits. While choking was virtually absent from pornography of the 2010s, today it appears in roughly 15% of it (Shor & Liu 2025). This helps explain why 43% of sexually active 16- and 17-year-olds report having choked or being choked by their bed partners (Vinter 2025). Yet since pornography has existed for centuries, and doesn’t really look like a ‘technology’ in the hammer-and-knife or chip-and-computer sense in which we usually conceive of it, it is easy to doubt that it truly qualifies – like the pill – as a socially disruptive technology.

Is this doubt justified? On its simplest definition, technologies are intentionally designed objects that are made to serve a purpose. While arguably serving the purpose of sexually arousing viewers through the features (such as nudity) its ‘designer’ includes in it, pornography is not a tangible object. But neither are, say, the AI’s that nevertheless go widely recognised as technologies. Those are more accurately captured by a definition of technologies as sociotechnical systems: systems that consist of many parts, including tangible technological objects, intangible ones (like software), and humans interconnecting those (Vermaas et al. 2011). Pornography – since it involves video cameras, laptop screens, website software and moderators keeping an eye on content, and undoubtedly much more – does check the boxes of a technology if understood in this more timely way; as a sociotechnical system.

This brings me to the question of whether pornography, as a technology, is socially disruptive. Pornography has certainly elicited conflict about whether its social impact is morally acceptable. Feminists of the 80s and 90s condemned it as a tool of subordination that incites and normalises treating women as sexual objects who can be humiliated, raped, or subjected to pain at will (MacKinnon 1987). They would see the rising popularity of choking – at once the method of killing in 27% of femicides (Smith et al. 2022) – as a validation of precisely this condemnation. But that a marginalised group experiences a new technology as oppressive doesn’t automatically make it socially disruptive. If pornography really subordinates women, it actually exacerbates rather than disrupts the patriarchal norms the pill subverted, and feminists sought to confront. Can a technology that upholds the status quo be socially disruptive?

Free speech disrupted

I would say it can. Pornography’s real disruptiveness came to the fore in the debate that ensued from this feminist condemnation. Politicians and liberal thinkers were swift to push back against feminist criticisms of pornography by arguing that even if pornography is misogynistic, its creators have a right to express their misogynist views due to their right to free speech. Feminists countered this by arguing that pornography, and especially the newly emerging filmed variant of it, did not just express an opinion about women’s subordination, but actively incited it. Porn movies – unlike images or books – require no work of our imagination, they argued, and hence formed an unprecedentedly strong tool to train men to link arousal and desire to the violent sexual scenes they were presented with (Dworkin 1987, cf. Srinivasan 2022).

By increasing the magnitude of the harms pornography could bring about, the rise of video-format pornography thus destabilised the very meaning of ‘free speech’. For feminists of the 80s and 90s affirmed, and a bunch of prominent male intellectuals (Dworkin 1981, Williams 1979) denied, that the rise of filmed pornography called for a revision of which speech should count as protected and ‘free’. And these questions resonate in new ways as technology reshapes pornography today. The rise of the internet has not only made pornography ever more accessible and ubiquitous, but the control of pornography platforms (and social media more generally) over what content to amplify or remove has also destabilised the conceptualisation of free speech as a regulation of the state-to-citizen relationship (Balkin 2018, Howard & Simpson 2026). Many now argue that it is not just the state, but also the tech companies behind these platforms, who carry a responsibility in realising a healthy public discourse.

Facing crises while maintaining cooperation

What do we learn from this? That socially disruptive technologies do not just create conflicts, but undermine the very mechanisms – like the right to free speech – on which we rely to regulate and resolve them. Their disruptiveness does not lie either in the social progress (like with the pill) or in the consolidation of oppression (like with pornography) they generate, but in the way they undermine our frameworks of social coordination. This is why socially disruptive technologies are worth paying attention to: not to celebrate or abhor the changes they bring about, but to understand how cooperation remains possible even though the rules that once structured that cooperation are destabilised. For while new technologies are essential to addressing contemporary crises, they should not undermine our equally vital capacity to coordinate. The debates over pornography’s potential harm and its relation to free speech in the 80s and 90s provides a compelling – and still underexplored – case by which philosophers can examine and address this challenge.

Bibliography

• Anderson, Joel, Jeroen Hopster & Björn Lundgren, “Defining socially disruptive technologies and reframing the ethical challenges they pose”, Technology in Society 86 (2026), pp. 1-11.
• Balkin, Jack, “Free speech is a triangle”, Columbia Law Review 118 (2018) 7, pp. 2011-2055.
• Catherine Mackinnon, Feminism Unmodified. Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge MA 1987).
• Dworkin, Andrea, Intercourse (New York 1987).
• Dworkin, Ronald, “Do We Have a Right to Pornography?”, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1981), pp. 177-212.
• Franssen, Maarten, Gert-Jan Lokhorst, & Ibo van de Poel, “Philosophy of Technology”, in: Edward N.
• Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.),The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition).
• Robin Vynter, “Nearly half of sexually active young people in UK have experienced strangulation, study shows”, The Guardian (18-10-2025).
• Howard, Jeffrey & Robert Mark Simpson, “Free Speech”, in: Robert Jubb and Patrick Tomlin (eds.), Issues in Political Theory, 5^th Edition (Oxford 2026), pp. 1-23.
• Shor, Eran, & Xuanchi Lui “The Rise of Spanking, Hitting, and Strangulation: A Longitudinal Evaluation of Aggression in Pornography”, The Journal of Sex Research (2025), pp. 1–13.
• Smith, Karen Ingala, Clarrie O’Callaghan, Katie Elliott, Rosie Allen, Veronica Jaso, Heather Harvey, 2000 Women. Every dead women is one too many, www.femicidecensus.org (2022).
• Williams, Bernard (ed.), Obscenity and Film Censorship (Cambridge 1979 [2015]).

Author Bio

Suzanne Kappé is a PhD candidate at the TU Delft. She has an interdisciplinary background in the humanities, with degrees in history, French literature and philosophy. Her doctoral research focuses on the intersection between philosophy of technology, conceptual ethics and pluralist political philosophy, and is funded through the research programme ESDiT.