Our morals are Motherless

By now, most of the English-speaking world is aware of the CNN investigation into the porn website Motherless and the global rape academy. If not, here’s a brief recap.

Motherless is an adult website positioned as “morality-free.” It consists of user-generated material and explicitly refuses accountability via the tagline:

“If you want to blame someone for the content on this site, blame the freaks of the world — not us.”

A months-long investigation by CNN exposed that there were 62 million visits to the Motherless website in one month. It hosts over 20,000 videos in this specific category, with tags such as #sleep, #passedout, or #eye-check. Linked to the website was a Telegram chat of over 1,000 men who shared tips on how to drug and rape their wives, girlfriends, sisters, or mothers — sometimes live-streaming the horrifying abuse for $20 a viewer.

After the exposé, which included widespread discussion of the article on social media, men took to the comments in droves to “correct” those who had misreported a detail of the story.

“Actually, it was 62 million visits to the website, not 62 million men.”

“Actually, there were only 1,000 men in the group chat.”

In chorus they shrieked: stop misreporting; stop overreacting.

It’s not that bad.

The “morality-free” positioning is core to the architecture of the Motherless site; the tagline displacing all responsibility onto “the freaks of the world.”

Now we get a lesson in what psychologists call moral disengagement. We see this psychological mechanism not only in perpetrators of sexual and other crimes, but in bystanders and witnesses. It is structurally produced, culturally normalised, and has measurable human costs.

Everything contained in the CNN Rape Academy exposé, and what followed on social media, are classic examples of moral disengagement.

Moral disengagement is a well-established socio-cognitive theory put forward by the psychologist Albert Bandura. The theory proposes that aggressive and violent behaviour occurs due to altered moral standards, which allow individuals to commit harm without negative self-sanctions (Bandura, 1990, 1999, 2001), thus maintaining psychological equilibrium.

It allows individuals and institutions to neutralise their own moral standards to permit harmful behaviour.

There are eight different mechanisms that typically follow a four-step, escalating process:

A. Reconstruct the behaviour to appear more morally acceptable

1. Moral justification — behaviour is justified if it serves a moral or worthy cause

2. Euphemistic labelling — behaviour is described in socially acceptable terms

3. Advantageous comparison — behaviour is viewed as less harmful when compared to more extreme acts

“It’s only porn. It’s just fantasy.” “I was only watching — I didn’t drug my girlfriend.” “Yeah, but a lot of women use the site and have those fantasies.”