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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Marie Le Conte

France is reckoning with the harms of online porn. But will anything change?

person looking at pornography website on laptop
‘In the report, producers admitted that they must keep making increasingly extreme content in order to get more clicks.’ Photograph: Artur Marciniec/Alamy

Online pornography has become inescapable. Hundreds of millions of people watch it every month. The global industry makes vast amounts of money every year. Countries and governments constantly debate its practices, excesses and dangers, yet nothing meaningful ever happens. Can it be stopped or curtailed? Should it?

It is France’s turn to agonise over adult content, how it’s produced, what it leads to and whether it should be banned. The catalyst was a report launched by the High Council for Equality Between Women and Men (HCE), a government-nominated watchdog on gender equality.

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