Category: Pornography

Porn literacy curriculum may be well-intended, but it ultimately neglects decades of studies that have demonstrated porn’s real negative impacts

There are people out there in the commercial sex industry who say they love performing in porn and enthusiastically consent to it. But there are also many individuals who have been sex trafficked into the porn industry, as well as established consenting performers who have been abused on set. How can consumers tell the difference between consensually produced videos and videos involving exploitation? The tricky part is that there’s no reliable way to.

After examining 400 popular porn videos, U of Amsterdam researchers concluded that porn does, in fact, objectify men, just in a different way than women.

I struggle. I am not the only woman who does. Maybe you do. Maybe you know someone that does. I was convinced that I was the only one. I was so ashamed of myself, and I felt like I was hiding all of the time. The struggle is real. I get it.

We’ve all heard stories from smokers or former smokers that include something like, “It started with one cigarette, but eventually, I was smoking two packs a day. It’s one of the hallmarks of substance abuse: escalation. Users require more and more of their drug of choice to ‘get the same high,’ and their pattern of abuse is driven by their need for a greater quantity. This is especially true when the abuse is spiraling into addiction. But what about porn? Can porn consumption be an escalating behavior as well?

With huge numbers of users comes huge amounts of responsibility, and not a single site has developed a porn-proof filtering system or thorough enough moderation team.

Porn divides people in relationships, stunts sexual pleasure, and messes with consumers’ arousal and sexual function. Wouldn’t that make it sex-negative?

With the accessibility of porn and a sharp increase in popularity of the OnlyFans platform, a whole new demographic of (much younger) men are entering the commercial sex market.

Ohio could become the next state to protect children from obscene content online if legislation introduced last month becomes law. House Bill 84, or the Innocence Act, would compel platforms to verify users are age 18 or older before providing “material that is obscene or harmful to juveniles.” The law would also “prohibit a person from using another person’s likeness to create sexual images of the other person.”

Indeed, the deeper history of opposition to pornography in particular, and the sexual revolution more generally, suggests that one explanation for this lack of efficacy is a failure to emphasize a central truth: that the question concerning pornography is and always has been a ¬subcategory not of the question about sex but of the question about technology.

Many young girls grow up dreaming their first romantic relationship will be special—holding hands or sharing a kiss with a boy who respects and cares for her. But instead, the heartbreaking reality of most teenage girls’ sex lives features abuse, assault, and manipulation—sexual experiences altered by porn culture. One high school-aged girl said a boy recently told her, “If you give me [oral sex], I’ll give you a kiss.”