China's War on Porn & Its Unexpected Consequences

Porn consumption is one of the most popular use cases for the internet. Some estimate as much as 30% of internet activities consist of it.

It’s in this way that gooners around the world, divided by culture, are united in their common project.

There is however one group of gooners, who seem unable to be a part of this great experience

They are the gooners in China.

Porn is banned in China. Both its production and distribution

China is not the only country that does this by law, but it is one of the few that takes it this seriously in practice, and perhaps the only one who has managed to implement it with such technological effectiveness

As a result, it seems virtually impossible to find any porn on the internet in China today.

That fact raises an intriguing question:

How do Chinese gooners goon

I mean, do Chinese gooners even exist? Because if they do, how do they engage in their practice when there is no porn

That question seems trivial on the surface, but it’s rather profound indeed

To give a sense of scale, there are more than a billion internet users in China, that’s about one fifth of all internet users on the planet.

The fact is that by thoroughly banning porn, China has inadvertently performed one of the largest anthropological experiments in the world.

It’s created a condition in which one fifth of the internet users in the world cannot do the one thing which the rest of us seem to primarily use the internet for.

What can possibly go wrong?

In today’s video, I’m going to examine the unexpected results of this fascinating experiment. I’ll talk about China’s ban on porn, people’s attempt at circumvention, and the lesson it contains about human nature.

Before we move forward I should define a few terms for those in my audience who are less chronically online.

I’ll use the word “gooning” a lot in this video to humorously refer to the practice of watching porn while masturbating.

I’ll also use the word “gooners”, which refers to those who engage in that practice.

Anyway let’s get started first with how China managed to eradicate porn.

The story starts with an technological infrastructure called “the Great Firewall”. The Great Firewall is China’s state-run internet control system that filters the content coming into and leaving the country.

It’s quite impressive really, as it allows the government to control their domestic online landscape with profound scale, filtering and shaping its content as they see fit.

And one category of content the Great Firewall targets is porn. As a result, no foreign porn sites are accessible within China.

Now theoretically it’s possible to host a porn site from within the Great Firewall directly to bypass its filter. However doing so puts the operation squarely within the jurisdiction of Chinese law enforcement. As a result such effort will likely be shut down quickly, with its operators landing in jail. So don’t do that at home.

Now before the early 2010s, it was possible to find some porn sites in China. It was not a straightforward process however. These sites were typically hiding on the last few pages of the search results, and were riddled with pop-up ads and viruses.

Around 2013 to 2014, an official task force was created called 净网 or the ‘clean internet’ campaign. This was a nationwide systematic effort to remove pornographic content from the internet. And it’s been an ongoing project since then.

The reports of their work come out on an annual basis where you can see a paper trail of their impressive accomplishments, like how many 10s of thousands of adult websites they shut down that year and how many offenders they arrested.

They have done and are still doing a great job cleaning up the internet such that at present, there is pretty much no porn online in China anymore. I certainly couldn’t find any when I tried earlier and I don’t know anyone personally who still possesses a link to a functional adult site accessible in China.

Despite this impressive porn ban however, Chinese gooners do exist. The stats on this is pretty clear.

One survey done on Chinese university students found that about 75% of men and 47% of women have used porn at least once in the last 12 months.

With Another survey showing about 45% of men use porn regularly

To compare, a similar study done on American college students found the numbers to be around 86% for men and 31% for women. With about 48% of the men and about 3% of the women as regular users.

So despite China’s porn ban, their porn use pattern looks somewhat comparable to that of the US from these data.

Especially when you consider that porn is viewed as taboo and illegal in China, which can lead to under-reporting during data collection.

Now a caveat: This data was collected from university students. This is a cohort of people who tend to be younger, more tech-savvy, more educated and usually wealthier.

So they are not representative of the entire country’s population, meaning these stats can’t be generalized to represent the porn use pattern of China as a whole.

But they do prove that gooners exist in China. And despite the porn ban, these gooners do manage to watch porn, and in some population, as frequently as those in Western countries. Some of them might be doing it right now as we speak, which is a scary thought indeed.

The question is how are they doing it? There’s supposed to be no porn on the Chinese internet right?

To answer that question, we need to distinguish between the two types of gooners in China: they are the amateur gooners and the professional gooners.

Let’s start with the amateur gooners, because this is where most gooning careers begin.

If there is no porn on the Chinese internet, the first workaround is quite simple.

You look for substitutes.

I want to call these substitutes softcore porn but that’s not quite accurate.

This is because all porn is banned in China in theory, even the softcore variety.

Therefore to distribute softcore porn, their producers employ a content strategy called 擦边.

擦边 is a Chinese internet slang that literally translates to “rubbing the edge.” Or ‘edge touching’.

The edge here is not the edge that you might be thinking of.

It refers to the edge of rules, or boundary of rules.

To touch the edge of rules is to behave in ways that almost break the rules without actually breaking them. You are right at the boundary of what’s allowed such that you are touching the boundary, but you are arguably not crossing it.

As a content strategy it means making the content as sexual as possible without it being so sexual that it gets taken down. It also means basing the content on a pretense that is non sexual in nature, so that the creators can pretend at least on paper that they are not creating sexual content.

For example this is an ASMR video meant to help people sleep. It has nothing to do with sex obviously.

And this is a fitness tutorial on an ab workout. It’s not meant for sexual gratification, I promise.

Here’s a list of content type that edge touching content creators often use as pretense:

“fitness”
“dance”
“cosplay”
“swimsuit try-on”
“ASMR”
“aesthetic”
“modeling” / “photoshoot”
“daily life”

I think you get the idea.

Now although pornography is absent from the Chinese internet, this edge touching content is rather abundant.

For some gooners, this is enough. But others might find themselves wanting more.

To ascend to the next level of amateur gooning, a gooner begins to cultivate a private supply of real porn, usually acquired through people networks.

In practice this often looks like friends sharing their private porn stash with each other, or inviting each other to group chats in which porn is shared at some small scale.

Once in a while someone might even get their hands on a link to a functioning porn site, and share that too. Although as mentioned earlier, these sites are increasingly rare, and are often quickly shut down, since the clean internet campaign of the 2010s.

Now when you share porn in this way, you are technically disseminating pornographic materials which is illegal. However enforcement don’t usually target sharing among friends, although sharing in group chats are sometimes targeted, especially for larger groups.

In this way, the private supply of pornography in China is not dissimilar to the distribution of marijuana in US states in which weed is illegal, or in Canada before 2018 which was the year weed became legal.

Weed was illegal on paper in Canada but it seemed like everyone and their mother had done it.

Cops didn’t usually care about private consumption unless you were doing it right in front of them. They mainly targeted sales and distributions.

Most people would have acquired weed through their network. You would know a friend who knew a friend who hopefully knew a dealer. And if you go to the right parties, it was not difficult to get your hands on some weed.

The private supply of pornography in China functions similarly. The analogy isn’t perfect since one deals with digital products while the other deals with physical ones, but the dynamics are pretty close.

Now one problem with relying on private supply for gooning is the lack of variety.

Gooners outside of China probably take variety for granted. Frankly the sheer variety of porn online is a little overwhelming.

But for the amateur gooners in China, their variety can be limiting.

Their porn stash mostly consists of whatever they can get from their network, which may or may not fit their preferences.

Therefore, some amateur gooners who are itching for more variety, might decide to shed their amateur identity, and ascend to become a professional.

Before we move on I want to stress that turning pro in the realm of gooning is no trivial matter. It’s a decision as profound as the journey is difficult. And it culminates in a process known as 翻墙, which literally translates to ‘climbing over the wall’.

What wall? You might ask.

Well the Great Firewall of China.

Climbing over the wall refers to a process of employing technological tools to circumvent the Great Firewall’s censorship.

When a gooner successfully climbs over the wall, he gains access to all the porn that exists on the open internet, thereby transcending his identity from an amateur to a pro.

The most straightforward way to climb the wall is through a VPN.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a software that routes your internet traffic through a server elsewhere. It can make it look like you’re browsing the internet from another country, which effectively circumvents the Great Firewall.

You might be familiar with VPN since many Chinese travel guides explicitly instruct tourists to download it before they go to China, so that they can still post their latte photos on Instagram, watch videos on YouTube, and access many other Western sites banned by the Great Firewall.

To get a VPN outside China and bring it inside is easy enough. One simply goes to the app store and clicks download.

To get a VPN inside China however is a different matter entirely, because you run into a rather annoying chicken-and-egg problem.

VPN websites are blocked by the Great Firewall. To download a VPN you need to go to their websites. But you need a VPN to get to those websites in the first place.

So how does one resolve this circular nightmare?

Well if it were easy everyone would do it. But it isn’t impossible.

To begin with the most straightforward method is to simply leave the country, download a VPN, then come back.

If you live close to the border this actually isn’t unrealistic. Like if you live in Shenzhen, you just need to remember to download a VPN next time you go shopping with your friends in Hong Kong.

But for most Chinese people, leaving the country to climb over the wall is indeed too logistically complicated.

But there are other ways.

For example people network can still work here. If you know someone who has a working VPN, you can borrow their VPN enabled device to download a copy of the software for yourself.

A lot of universities and companies also provide state-approved VPN software that students and staff can use to access blocked websites for study or work purposes. If you are associated with an organization like that, you can use their VPN to get started with your own.

However if you don’t know anyone or any organization with a working circumvention tool, then you are on your own and the process becomes a bit harder.

To be clear the process itself is not that complicated. You can google how to do this right now. I even saw some step by step tutorials on YouTube. All you need to get it done is some capacity for effort, patience to follow instructions, and maybe some spare change for a subscription if you decide to use a paid product.

The problem though is that these how-to guides exist on platforms that are typically banned in China.

The platforms that are not banned in China are often scanned and filtered on a regular basis, where information about how to climb over the walls are promptly removed.

So we get chicken-and-egg 2.0 here. You need information about how to climb over the wall to climb over the wall. But you need to climb over the wall first in order to access that information.

In other words, not only is the contraband contraband, the information about the contraband is also contraband.

That being the case, an aspiring wall climber typically needs to brute-force their way out of the wall somehow, even with slow, unstable or unsecure connection, for just long enough to access a platform where they can find the instructions about how to do it properly.

It’s not impossible but it’s not a walk in the park either. And the project typically requires some degree of technical skills or digital savviness.

Now that being the case, it’s clear that wall climbing is not for everyone. Instead it’s a process that selects for people with particular sets of characteristics.

Research shows that wall-climbers tend to be younger, more urban, more educated, and of a higher socioeconomic class.

This makes sense, given what we know about the wall-climbing process.

The higher you are on the socioeconomic ladder, the more likely you are to be associated with the right people-network or organizations with access to working VPNs that can get you started on acquiring your own.

And the more educated you are, the more likely you are to have the technical skills to pull it off.

But this presents us with a strange inequality that is morally bizarre, because it turns pornography into almost a luxury good of sort whose access is divided by socioeconomic status.

If you are rich, you get to be a pro gooner and enjoy all the porn the internet has to offer. If you are broke, then you are stuck being an amateur with whatever scraps you can get from your friend’s porn stash.

Now I call this inequality morally bizarre because I don’t know how to feel about it. In fact it kind of just sounds funny. It generates a different feeling state from the conventional inequalities that we often hear.

For example, I can tell you that the richer you are, the longer you live; which is a correlation that happens to be true in the US. Now regardless of causation, when we hear that stat, most of us get a gag reflex that’s relatively straightforward.

We know how to feel about this kind of inequality. It feels unfair, because health feels like the kind of thing that should be closer to a human right, not something you get more of simply because you have more money.

Now what about the inequality of porn access. If you tell me that the richer you are in China, the more likely you are to get better quality porn and a larger variety of porn. Ok am I supposed to be mad about that?

On the one hand, this is still an inequality where higher socioeconomic status gives you better access.

But on the other hand, is porn supposed to be some kind of human right where every human should have equal opportunity to experience?

Isn’t porn bad for you? So the rich have more opportunity to increase their risk of porn addiction while the poor are ironically protected from that risk?

Anyway, I don’t know how to feel about this.

I’ll move on for now, because this strange inequality is not the only unexpected consequences of China’s porn ban. That’s just an appetizer. There are two more I want to share with you, and each is weirder than the next.

You see once you create a world where porn is hard to get, you don’t just reduce supply. You also change what porn is.

In most internet-enabled modern societies, porn is as accessible as tap water. Its abundance makes it boring.

But in China, porn isn’t tap water. It’s contraband. It’s a thing you’re not supposed to have.

It’s forbidden, and taboo. And when you make a boring sex act taboo, you make it more enticing.

So by banning porn, China did not reduce desires for porn. Instead it turned porn into a forbidden fruit, which paradoxically makes it more appealing.

This applies to both amateur gooners when they slowly expand their porn stash through people-network. It applies to professional gooners as well, when they finally succeed in climbing over the wall after endless trial and error.

Crossing the wall = bypassing control

Now one thing that’s interesting about the professional gooners is that, once you climb over the wall, what you find on the other side is not merely an open porn stash. What you find is the open internet itself.

You don’t just unlock porn. You unlock everything: Instagram and its infinite brain rot. X and its political rage bait. YouTube and its stupid videos like this one, along with everything else. You unlock the entire global conversation, the good, bad, and everything in between.

In other words, you didn’t just bypass a porn filter. You bypassed censorship entirely.

And you should know that the Chinese government don’t want you to do this, because the whole point of having the Great Firewall is control—to shape the informational landscape inside the country and decide what can be produced, distributed, and consumed.

If everyone climbs over the wall, there’d be no point in having that wall.

Fortunately not everyone climbs over the wall. In fact most people don’t, not because they can’t make the climb, but because on some level they don’t care to climb.

It takes effort, network, patience and money to make the climb, and most people don’t want to go through all that trouble. After all if you can get everything you need inside the wall, why would you bother?

That is precisely the counter-intuitive feature that makes the Great Firewall so effective. It’s effective not because it’s a perfect wall that’s impossible to climb over. Rather it’s effective because it’s annoying to climb over.

The wall introduces friction, thereby creating a path of least resistance that points inward, and erodes people’s motivation to make the climb.

In that sense the wall is as much a technological infrastructure that reduces circumvention as it is a psychological infrastructure that reduces the motivation for circumvention.

This dual-pronged attack seems to work very well indeed.

Study shows that wall climbers are a minority of China’s internet users.

And of those who do climb over the wall, most do so out of necessity for work or study or social reasons.

Like if you need to connect to google drive for work, or need an article from google scholar to complete a reading assignment, or you got friends on facebook that you want to stay in touch with.

Outside of that, the motivation to climb the wall seems rare.

Once in a while you might get someone who is into the rare hobby of critical thinking and want to climb over the wall to experience arguments from different perspectives to formulate nuanced opinions about world but that is a rare breed of human indeed. Just look at Western social media. Many people seem perfectly comfortable inside their algorithmic echo chamber even when there is no wall preventing them from leaving their bubble.

So I wouldn’t expect intellectual curiosity to motivate that many people from climbing the wall.

So whoever built the wall should be pretty happy with themselves at this point right? They can declare their work finished and crack open the beer; go sit on top of some hill and watch the sun rise on a grateful universe, like a purple alien.

Well not so fast.

Let’s think about the motivation part a bit more.

I was saying that outside of cases of necessity, the motivation to climb the wall is low, but I wonder if that’s true.

I wonder if there is some other kind of motivation that can instigate human action on a larger scale. Something more primal perhaps. Something evolutionarily coded to motivate not just human action but animal actions in general.

Well you mean something like sex?

Indeed to survive and to reproduce are the central motivations of evolution.

As such sexual desire is not a rare intellectual hobby. It is a baseline human drive, especially in men. Basically any guy with a pulse and a functioning hormonal system wants it.

Therefore, I would expect there to be a lot more gooners who are capable of becoming quite motivated indeed.

Since there is no porn inside the wall, a larger population of people may suddenly find themselves willing to tolerate a bit more inconvenience: to learn the tools, follow the guides, ask friends, pay small fees, and do a little technical dance, because now there is something outside the wall that they really want, something they cannot get from inside the wall.

Indeed in a study on censorship circumvention found that,

“Regarding motivations for adopting Circumvention Tools, most participants identified practical and entertainment needs that are denied by censorship as primary drivers for seeking circumvention.”

The study provided a few examples:

Github for developers,
educational materials like Wikipedia and foreign college applications,
and entertainment like gaming or adult websites.

So by banning porn, China may have inadvertently motivated more people to climb the wall; people who otherwise would not have cared for such project.

It’s in this way that a policy meant for control ends up expanding the population that bypass control.

It’s kind of ironic. By suppressing desire they increased its motivation. And by tightening control, they begin to lose it; like a slippery piece of ice, the harder you try hold on, the more you seem to lose its grip.

So what can this story about Chinese gooning culture teach us about human nature?

What happens to desire when it’s banned?

Well first of all human desires can be very tenacious indeed. Brute-force suppression does not seem to work on them.

A ban doesn't erase desire but simply reorganizes its manifestation. Like water, desire changes its shape to fit whatever container that seeks to bind it.

In fact human desire is often antifragile towards top down suppression. Meaning that the more you suppress it, the stronger it becomes.

This is especially so when it comes to something as primal as sexual desire.

This pattern is true not only on a societal scale when countries attempt suppression through laws.

It’s also true on an individual level when we try to suppress our own desire.

Here I will borrow an idea from Carl Jung.

Carl Jung is a psychologist famous for many things including the concept of the Shadow.

The Shadow refers to the unconscious parts of our personality that we are not consciously aware of and often actively reject.

When we suppress our desires, the shadow is where they go. In other words, desires don’t disappear, we just cease to be aware of them.

And in the shadows, in the absence of our supervision, desires can fester, and turn into something much more sinister and dysfunctional.

That is unless we stop suppressing our desires, and start integrating them instead. This does not mean succumbing to our desire blindly and letting them run rampant. Instead you face your desire with eyes wide open, and integrate them into your life in a way that is productive and functional.

This is difficult to do but it’s much better than blind suppression.

So next time when you want to suppress your desire by force, be careful. As you press down with your iron fist, you might find it slipping through your fingers, and coming back at you in ways you do not expect.