28
Why is pornography illegal in China?
(lemmy.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
28 points (88.9% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
1373 readers
115 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
The ban was put into place for primarily moral reasons alongside combating Triad sex trafficking operations, and no one particularly cares to challenge the law because porn is one of those ‘open secret’ activities that everyone consumes via VPNs.
Yep, no one in China cares if you consume (foreign/Taiwan-made) porn. The Chinese government just doesn't want tens of thousands of people on the mainland spending their lives on a rather unproductive and exploitative pornography industry.
Honestly, I've never really gotten the train of thought that if a piece of media is sexual in nature it automatically becomes socially unnecessary. In my opinion, this whole narrative that something must be SFW to be socially necessary is... kinda arbitrary?
Porn is less exploitave than the actual model/photography industry which pimps men and woman out, alan ritchson talked about his experience on dax shepard's podcast and how normalized it is.
Media being sexual in nature doesn't automatically make it pornography. Media that's specifically designed for sexual gratification is. Movies like Her, American Beauty, The Graduate are all not porn even though sexuality is heavily involved.
From my perspective, I don't view the sexual as "antisocial until it is adorned with "higher" aspects of humanity". I think the sexual can be pro-social in and of itself.
No one said the non-sexual aspects of media are "higher aspects of humanity". Yes the sexual can be pro-social, you'll see plenty of that in China, but media designed specifically as wanking material is not considered healthy by China.
But then how would you differ creative expression of one's own sexuality from wanking material?