When I was a kid, I want to estimate 8 or 9 years old, my father left me alone with his laptop connected to a hard drive. He told me to pick out a film from the many he’d torrented, for us to watch together, with the agreement that anything besides an 18-rated film was fine because my mother wasn’t home. I scrolled through the films looking for the goriest horror I could find that was 15+, to make the most of it. During my search, I accidentally clicked the back button too many times because I’d gone through multiple folders. I ended up looking at the full contents of the hard drive. There was a singular uncategorized video with a tiny thumbnail and I clicked it. In it, there was a woman visibly in her 30s wearing her hair in pigtails and a modified school uniform that turned the blouse into a crop top. She was sitting on a desk in a classroom set.
I felt a pit in my stomach as it became very clear the video was pornographic. I clicked away in shock after a few seconds and I don’t remember what film I chose for that night. What I do remember is that I was extremely confused by why an obviously grown woman would be dressing up that way for a sexual video. The visual had an absurd quality to it.
At 14, my father was arrested for child grooming. It turned out he’d done worse than that, and to more than once girl, though that’s all he was convicted for. I thought back to that video soon after finding out. All of this is to say, I remember being a 14-year-old who was insistent that school uniforms in porn promoted pedophilia. That’s why I was immediately interested seeing so many articles about the efforts of Little Feminist Bookclub from the Cooper School to secure a ban on school uniforms in porn in the UK. They created a petition and used some of the same arguments I can remember furiously typing out on Tumblr and Twitter at the same age those bookclub members are now.
One quote used from Professor Clare McGlynn in their petition exemplifies the issue I have with this campaign. She says these clothing choices and scenarios in porn are, “ruining the lives of young teenage girls every day.” She adds, “They bear the consequences of being sexualised against their will.” This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of cause and effect in this case, and why school uniforms are popular in pornography. I give a lot of grace to teenagers who see things more simplistically, not least because their exposure to porn is small compared to adults who have been viewing it for years, but I can’t extend that to professors in their 50s.
Schoolgirls aren’t targeted in their uniforms because men are used to seeing these outfits on adults in porn and therefore think it’s okay to sexually harass them. They sexually harass teens in school uniform because it makes them feel powerful and they’re (whether aware of this or not) conditioning school-age girls to tolerate sexist behaviour. They think it’s fun to harass women and girls and they’re least concerned about facing consequences when she’s too young to defend herself. A school uniform is a quick guarantee of a girl’s age. It’s also a sign that she’s going to or from school and is unlikely to have an adult nearby to support her.
I was never catcalled more in my life than between ages 12 and 15 when I was walking home from school in my uniform. It happened every week. Construction workers would whistle at me and comment on my skirt length, drivers in cars would honk their horns and yell things out of the windows, other pedestrians would call out across the street that I should smile more. I heard so many comments on my legs that I never wore the version of the uniform with trousers (in spite of my preference for them) because I felt like that would be giving in to their objectification. At 16 I realized how much less I was being catcalled on the street since leaving school and wanted to vomit. I was furious at anyone who defended so much as wearing pigtails in porn, let alone fucking in a classroom set as student and teacher.
Those feelings and beliefs couldn’t be maintained once I became a sex worker and began viewing a large quantity of porn because of my work. The way I viewed it shifted from centring my own arousal to analysing other people’s. What I realized was that the cause of arousal over a school uniform from the typical porn viewer was almost the same as the cause of arousal over bondage or boss/employee relationships or daddy kind or doctors and patients; they like the power differential. School environments are extremely controlling of teenagers and most of us remember that sense of powerlessness well into adulthood. It seeps into porn the way shared experiences show up in all kinds of media.
None of this means that pornographic media involving these themes is above critique or that people who enjoy it shouldn’t introspect, but it does undermine the idea that the porn itself puts real teenagers in danger. The people who street harass teens in their school uniforms or try to groom them online are not doing so because of what they’ve seen in sexual videos. These predators do have an overlap with those who watch porn featuring school outfits, as you’d expect because as we’ve established the power differential is a common kink.
Laws around porn in the UK and limitations porn sites have placed for themselves to comply with them are becoming increasingly more restrictive. This may seem like a small and specific hill to die on regardless of whether you agree that dressing this way in a sexual context causes more harm to teens, however this proposed legal change exists in the context of a large scale push to suppress adult content. Restricting porn does not make it entirely disappear, it only pushes it underground and punishes sex workers the most out of everyone.
Not all creators stop making certain types of porn just because it’s been banned in one country. Videos get removed from mainstream sites, then pop up on those which do not comply with UK restrictions. Regular porn viewers may switch the sites they use to search for this kind of content, and as an unintended result are likely to watch more re-uploaded and uncredited content which does not materially benefit the sex workers who make it. The misogynistic attitudes don’t shift, the safety of the average girl attending school doesn’t improve, and sex workers earn less.
The grievances raised are real and blaming porn is not the answer. While I am impressed by any youth activism, particularly given how much more effort teenagers have to put in to educate themselves about topics that are kept hidden from them in the name of safeguarding, I think we should all be suspicious about the way adults are using the opinions of these young people to push their own agendas. It’s apparent in Professor Clare McGlynn posting about the issue to sell her book, in The Times post about it on Instagram full of comments arguing to ban porn altogether, and from a plethora of articles like The Metro choosing not to consult any sex workers who make this sort of content or have something to say about the legality of it.
I look at a lot of porn, on top of my personal watching habits, because I’m a sex worker with a lot of friends who are too. I see the content they make on social media, when researching, and sent to me by friends asking for my opinion. When I come across videos where someone’s in a school uniform, I click away and continue on with my day, because it is a fictional scenario involving consenting adults and my disgust is not an indicator of whether something is doing material harm.
If we had a fraction of the attention that this petition has gotten being funnelled towards actually dealing with sexual harassment and abuse of school-age girls at the source, we’d see a lot less of it. The only silver lining I see in this becoming a national news story is that perhaps it will make more people think about how school uniforms are a bad idea in the first place and we should put an end to them.
