Multiple media outlets have reported that Tyler Robinson, the alleged murderer of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, was an avid consumer of pornography. The Daily Mail relays that Robinson was embedded in dark corners of the internet, featuring sexually explicit content starring humanoid animals. This is a common interest of a group called “furries,” people who prefer to identify as non-human creatures and adopt an animal alter-ego, or “fursona.”
The depth of Robinson’s involvement in this highly sexualized subculture is not clear, but two things appear to be true. First, Robinson watched porn, and if he was accessing “furry” content, likely a lot of it. Second, Robinson, who was raised in a conservative home, was in a relationship with a transgendered man, and his murder of Kirk was partially motivated by the latter’s advocacy against trans ideology.
Some might see two unconnected things: a pornography habit, and a violent commitment to gender fluidity. But there is compelling evidence that the second is downstream of the first.
Many people still have trouble conceptualizing the unique pathologies of modern digital pornography. For those who grew up with Playboy magazine, the word “porn” may still connote hard-to-get photographs of beautiful women, cheerfully showing off their bodies alongside banal content like political columns or movie reviews. The porn user of yesteryear could give himself to lust, but only after age and money enabled it, and even then, most were obliged to keep one foot in reality given the trappings of physical media.
Internet pornography is to Playboy magazine what fentanyl is to whiskey. The world of online porn, the world that Robinson and hundreds of millions of his peers have inherited, is a world bereft of the limitations and tethers of the last century. Children routinely access it. Smartphones keep it near users at all times. Curated genres and “communities” guarantee that no fantasy is too brutal or degrading that it can’t be found.
Digital pornography has been a key feature of internet culture for decades, in ways that are more relevant to social and political life than many appreciate. Through the early 2010s, the microblogging platform Tumblr was a massively popular place for two particular things: fan fiction and pornography. Tumblr users could use pornographic content as a prop in their own digital fantasies, fantasies often expressed in forums dedicated to anonymous role-playing (much like the “furry” content that Robinson consumed).
This powerful blend of the pornographic and the fantastical made Tumblr one of the earliest hubs of transgender narratives. This wasn’t an accident. Both Tumblr’s form (an open-ended forum for personal, anonymous narrative) and content (pornography and fantasy) made it a plausibility structure for gender ideology. As one piece published in the journal Feminist Media Studies puts it:
Tumblr supported trans experiences by enabling users to change over time within a network of similar others, separate from their network of existing connections, and to embody (in a digital space) identities that would eventually become material. Further, before 2018 policy changes banning “adult” content, Tumblr upheld policies and an economic model that allowed erotic content needed for intersectional trans community building.
Pornography is a hallucinogen. It reframes human sexuality in utterly unreal ways. Characters in pornographic content portray sex the way Harry Potter portrays magic: as something that can happen for anyone, at any time, to any degree imaginable. For young men in particular, this narrative of sex cultivates a deeply dissonant conception of personhood and intimacy, one that is constantly confused and frustrated by real life. Pornography and sex are not the same thing; in fact, they are very nearly the opposite. As the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han observed in The Agony of Eros, “What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all.”
All of this makes pornography one of the chief ingredients for various self-destructive ideologies, including transgenderism and political violence. As the pornography user surrenders to the world of unmoored fantasy more and more, other aspects of life follow. While much pornographic content is violent, the fact remains that even nonviolent smut deadens the conscience and makes aggression more plausible. According to one study, porn addiction is more closely associated with intimate partner violence than even alcoholism or drug addiction.
The details of Robinson’s life are still sparse, and we should be very cautious about parading the biography of a political assassin, lest such fame prove inspirational to others. Yet this is another jarring reminder that pornography is one of the worst and least-addressed cultural crises of the last fifty years. It almost certainly played a crucial role in giving Robinson both the motivation and willingness to murder Charlie Kirk. And it continues trapping millions of people into patterns of dark delusion. Our society’s lament of violence and alienation rings hollow as long as we continue to wink at one of their chief exporters.
Image by Mario Yaír TS, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped,
