To be sure, pornographers, unlike umpires, were never formally invested with the authority to tell the truth about sex. No one elected or appointed the pornographers. If porn is indeed the voice of the “ruling power,” it is not officially so. Whatever authority porn has is granted by those who watch it: by the boys and men who trust porn to tell them “what’s doing.” Some critics of anti-porn feminism say that this sort of de facto authority isn’t enough to hold porn responsible. Just because boys, and presumably some girls, take porn to be an authority on sex, doesn’t mean it really is. Whatever power it has was never sought or formally conferred. But this is to draw a sharp distinction between authority and power that belongs, perhaps, to an earlier time. The internet blurs the distinction between power and authority. Platforms for speech—previously allocated by radio stations, TV shows, newspapers, publishing houses—are now overabundant, infinitely available, and practically free. Without any formal grant of authority, individual speakers can amass great power—“influence,” as we have learned to call it. To what standard, if any, should we hold those who wield such power?

The porn star Stoya performs in what she describes as “gender-binary-heterosexual-oriented pornography for a production company that aims to have as much mass appeal as possible.”41 In a New York Times op-ed, she acknowledged an authority she did not seek out: “I didn’t want the responsibility of shaping young minds. And yet thanks to this country’s nonfunctional sex education system and the ubiquitous access to porn by anyone with an internet connection, I have that responsibility anyway.” “Sometimes,” she went on, “it keeps me awake at night.”42