Russia's War on Western Decadence
At the heart of that question is a civilizational conflict that Russia likes to imagine is fought along moral lines. One of the ironies of the proposal, of course, is how closely it mirrors modern Russian propaganda about Ukraine: in the Kremlin’s telling, Kyiv is a den of depravity and moral corruption, influenced by the decadent West and fighting a war against the sort of traditional values espoused by President Putin and the Orthodox Church.
In the eyes of the wilder-eyed Russian propagandists, Ukraine is already – notwithstanding Russia’s own long history of producing pornography to cater to all tastes – a country controlled by borderline satanic and carnal forces, against which the humble Russian serf must stand with all his might.
Outside Russia, that view is pushed relentlessly, with the Ukraine war presented to an audience of Western conservatives upset about social changes in their own societies as, in essence, the culture wars in military form: support Russia for traditional values, or support Ukraine to stand with Brussels’ liberal imperialism, or with the values of the porn dens and abortion clinics of California.
That this is nonsense – Russia itself has a long history of extraordinarily high abortion rates – matters little to the Westerner upset about social changes in his own country. Identifying and exploiting that discontent has been one of the key strategies of Russia's information war in the West.
There is something blackly comic, then, about the prospect of a Russian conscript on the front lines hearing the buzzing noise of an approaching Ukrainian death drone, and understanding that it may have been financed by middle-aged gentlemen in Wolverhampton or Walsall with deeply specialized tastes.
A Propaganda Risk for Ukraine
Indeed, this is the danger for Ukraine, and one of which it must be deeply cognizant: to legalize pornography would be to conform to the stereotype of the country already being propagated by its enemies.
Go online, and one will find the Russian sympathizers – alongside the inevitable Russian-operated accounts and bots – already engaged in a deep-rooted propaganda war against Ukrainian women. Chat forums populated by young men are full of memes and posts mocking Ukrainian soldiers for fighting and dying on the front line while young Ukrainian women who have fled the country as refugees supposedly cavort with and prostitute themselves for wealthy Western men.
The image, therefore, of the Ukrainian woman selling herself online to fund the war is something that the Kremlin propagandists will make good use of, notwithstanding the fact that Ukraine remains one of the relatively few European countries to retain such a broad criminal prohibition.
West or East? A Question Porn Can Answer?
In most Western countries, the decision to legalize pornography had both practical and ideological roots.
First, as Ukraine is discovering, modern technology makes banning pornography a fool’s errand: trying to restrict the production or consumption of it would, in effect, mean cutting a country off from most of the global internet. Indeed, it might well be argued that pornography and the ability to access it illicitly have been at the forefront of many online developments, not least those concerning privacy and the ability to make anonymous payments.
Second, demand for pornography is, to use an economic term, inelastic: consumers are willing to go to great lengths to obtain it, meaning that the production of material has always been lucrative for those willing to bear the social stigma of making it.
And third, a ban has always been incongruous with basic notions of liberalism: banning pornography puts sex in the unique category of something that is entirely legal to engage in oneself, but entirely illegal to watch anybody else do.
For Ukraine’s liberals, a measure such as this has an attraction therefore that goes deeply beyond the economic. For many in that country, the conflict is indeed entirely as the Russians imagine it to be: Ukraine wishes to be Western and liberal, even if the Russians call that decadence. To be Western and liberal means being Western and liberal about sex, just like everything else.
And so, if Ukrainian weapons are in fact to be funded by the recorded work of Ukrainian adult performers, then for the country itself that may actually be a source of ironic pride. Many such performers might now have reason to recall the line in the cult movie Starship Troopers: “I’m doing my part.”
