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

The invocation of young people in political discourse often serves reactionary ends. Calls to protect their innocence are based on a fantasy of childhood that does not and never did exist—a childhood untouched by the world of adults and adult desires. The appeal to childhood innocence also tends to draw an implausibly sharp distinction between the way things were and the way things are now, skating over the continuities: between the Rolling Stones and Miley Cyrus, between top-shelf magazines and PornHub, between making out in the back row and the dick pic. What’s more, it is arguably the rest of us, and not today’s teenagers and young adults, who are under-equipped to deal with the technological renovation of our social world. By this I don’t just mean that kids are the ones who most easily grasp the semiotic possibilities of TikTok and Instagram. I also mean that they have a sensitivity to the workings of gendered and racialized power that outstrips anything seen before in the political mainstream. It would be a mistake to assume that they are unable to cope with the pornworld just because we believe that we, as children, couldn’t have coped. Like the anti-porn feminists of the second wave, perhaps my students attribute too much power to porn, and have too little faith in their ability to resist it.

It is easy to see why many women—and not just the ones dealing with a history of sexual trauma—might find something salutary in a phantasmic role reversal.