the impact of pornography on women

cw: in-depth discussions of sexual assault, rape and other violence against women

Pornography in its modern form is harmful, there are no two ways about it. It significantly distorts attitudes and perceptions about the nature of sex, as well as perpetuates misogynistic, racist, ableist, homophobic, and islamophobic narratives, it is very addictive, and it’s been proven that prolonged use of pornography produces habituation, boredom, and sexual dissatisfaction. So why is the consumption of it considered normal in our society now?

Forms of pornography have been around for centuries, in recent times before the internet, pornographic content was available in the form of magazines and videotapes. You would have to go out and buy or rent the explicit content or sift through your dad’s secret collection and see what you could find. Overconsumption of different types of pornographic material was not as big of an issue as it is today when porn is just a few clicks away.

The average age people are first exposed to pornography today is 11 years old. Many people are exposed to it much younger than this, even before they have been taught basic reproductive sex education at primary school. Some disturbing statistics from Bitdefender, a security technology company, report that the under 10 category account for 22% of online porn consumption under the age of 18. The most frequented site by children under 10 is Pornhub, the current biggest porn site. NSPCC ChildLine released a report in 2015 that stated porn addiction was a major concern for a tenth of children aged between 12 to 13-year-olds.

From when I was a pre-teen to a teenager, a lot of people I knew had access to phones and computers with internet from a very young age and whether it was accidentally or deliberately, pretty much everyone I knew had seen porn in some form, some of us consistently watching it by the time we had all started secondary school, aged 11, including myself. Another NSPCC study from 2016 found that 56% of boys think online pornography is realistic as well as 39% of girls. It’s a harrowing study, one of the girls in the 11 to 12-year-old age category is quoted saying ‘I didn’t like it because it came on by accident and I don’t want my parents to find out and the man looked like he was hurting her, he was holding her down and she was screaming and swearing. I know about sex but it didn’t look nice. It makes me feel sick if I think about my parents doing it like that.’

This gives a slight insight into just how detrimental the effects on girls and women are and will continue to be moving forward. Boys, in particular, wanted to copy the behaviour they had seen performed. 39% (more than a third) of 13 to 14-year-olds and 21% of 11 to 12-year-olds. Over three-quarters of respondents agreed that pornography did not help them understand consent (87% of boys and 77% of girls).

When you have over half of teenage boys and a good chunk of teenage girls believing the way sex is portrayed in pornography is realistic, you start to have real issues. Sex education must be reformed to counter these problems, and the way society treats sex and self-pleasure, in general, must also change. We can’t hide children from sex, we can’t hide them from pornography, we must give them the best education that we can and answer their questions, give them alternatives, we can be sex-positive whilst anti-porn.

Now, why is it an issue that children are actively consuming pornography? Boys will be boys, right? I feel like it’s generally well known now that porn has a way of rewiring your brain. If you happen to be unaware, here’s a somewhat short explanation: When repeatedly viewing pornography, it causes your brain to get less pleasure while wanting more, causing desensitisation to the content you are consuming the more you watch it. One source from a neuroscientific study states ‘Over time, the brain builds up a tolerance to the excess dopamine and requires either more access or more extreme content (or sometimes both) to achieve that same level of perceived pleasure.’ meaning that when you start watching porn regularly and your brain begins to associate it with self-pleasure, you’ll usually start at more ‘normal’ porn and then eventually gravitate towards more and more extreme content to get the same pleasure you originally gained from porn, and it seems to me that with a never-ending plethora of violent content such as throat-fucking, gang bang, gang rape ‘role-play’ other rape ‘role-play’ etc the cycle doesn’t end.

In relation to young girls and pornography, I’ve been watching the uprise - both online and in real life - in discussions of kink. It’s especially prevalent on TikTok, (a short-form video social networking app, but I’m sure you know that) where hashtags such as #kinktok have a total of 11 billion views at the time of writing this. A scroll through this tag will show you videos of most commonly, young women talking about different forms of kink, common kinks include bondage, degradation, objectification, sadism and masochism and the more you scroll you’ll come across videos about consensual-non-consent/somnophillia. I’m not going to get into kink discourse, however, I think it’s relatively clear why young people being introduced to violent and degrading kinks - especially without the knowledge of how to perform them safely and consensually - is dangerous. On TikTok, I’ve seen a few questionable trends, one in recent time, was the 365 challenge based on the film 365 Days (about a girl being abducted and given 365 days to fall in love with her captor) and the challenge was based on romanticising excessive bruises on women after intercourse. I’ve seen numerous viral videos of young girls being slapped across the face and then kissed by their boyfriends while a romantic song plays in the background, all while the comments are other people encouraging it, saying they wish it would happen to them. It is particularly alarming to see the romanticism of hitting your partner when a recent BBC study of women in the UK between the ages of 18 and 39 revealed that 38% had experienced unwanted choking, slapping, or spitting during consensual sex. This is over a third of women in that age bracket.

Along with this, vanilla-shaming (meaning being shamed for enjoying plain sex with an absence of kink) has seen an increase. When I was still in secondary school, I witnessed many conversations taking place where girls would be actively shamed and called ‘boring’ for not being interested in rough sex and kink or on the opposite side, praised for how ‘freaky’ they were. I have been called boring by several different men for things such as not wanting a loaded gun held to my head or a blade to my throat during intercourse (wow Hope! Can you even get anymore boring?), I’ve been told I look like I’d be into violent sex and rape play. I had a boyfriend tell me he wanted to ‘defile me’ because it was his fantasy when I was 15 and he was 16 (glad to say that relationship didn’t last long). Internalised misogyny also factors into this with so many girls bragging that they aren’t boring and are into kinky, rough sex while simultaneously putting down other girls for not wanting it. What I am trying to understand is, why violent sex is becoming the standard for so many young people.

I link it all back to pornography and the glorification of sexual violence in this content. A study done in 2010 analyzed popular pornographic videos and found that over 88 per cent of the scenes contained physical aggression by men against women, who were depicted as enjoying treatment such as slapping, gagging, and choking. When you haven’t had sex and you also haven’t had extensive sex education and are then watching porn where the majority of content available shows violence in sex as normal and shows the women in the videos enjoying the abuse with little-to-no emphasis on female pleasure, consent etc and this is where young people are getting the majority of their education from, this will indefinitely cause major issues for women and society in general.

There need to be legal barriers put up between minors being able to view pornographic content such as ID checks, obviously, it won't stop all minors from being able to access such content, however, it will certainly make a difference. I desperately wish I hadn’t started watching porn so young, I’m still trying to undo the effects it’s had on my perception of sex, what I find appealing, how I should be treated etc, and this is with me being aware that the sex portrayed in porn is fake. So much of it could’ve been avoided with proper sex education at the right age and/or actual barriers to content.

Expanding on the effects it has had and is continuing to have on women, I wanted to share another personal experience of mine. While I was with them, two of my male friends were watching ‘wrong-hole’ compilations (also known as painal… bleh) on a popular pornsite and were laughing at them. These wrong-hole videos consist of heterosexual pairings having PIV sex and the man will ‘accidentally’ slip into the anus causing extreme sudden pain and shock to the other participant, them screaming, thrashing around in pain in response, often calling out, begging them to stop. If this isn’t accidental - and in a lot of these videos it’s pretty clear it’s not, as well as many pornstar testimonies speaking out about it - this is anal rape, however, these compilations rack up millions of views and plenty of comments encouraging, laughing at and/or getting off on the distress of the woman. For a lot of viewers, this form of abuse is just comedic, or possibly worse, arousing as they watch the victim in agony and distress.

This does, in fact, carry on into real-life situations, I’ve always wondered what the straight boys’ obsession with anal sex is, I asked a few of the men I know around my age and the general response was that it was to do with power. There was a time I was talking to a guy, and as I got to know his likes and dislikes, I found that he favoured anal over most sex, I wasn’t sure why, until a few days later, it came back up in conversation again, and he said that he loved seeing the pain on a girls face as the man entered anally. This was obviously… highly concerning, this was coming from a teenage boy who was in other words admitting he got off on the suffering of women for men’s pleasure.

Along the lines of men finding women’s suffering to be entertaining and even funny, I’ve witnessed plenty of heartless ‘jokes’ at the expense of women's rape and abuse in similar situations. In 2009, Rose Kalemba, aged 14, was abducted at knifepoint and raped over a 12-hour period while her assault had been filmed by another man, she had been stabbed and beaten. She recalls one of the men bringing out a laptop at some point and showing her footage of attacks that had been performed on other women, Kalemba said ‘The attackers were white and the power structure was clear. Some of the victims were white but many were women of colour.’ After surviving an attempt of taking her life due to the situation, she assumed the worst was over, however, a few months passed and she was scrolling through MySpace when she saw people from her school sharing a link that she had been tagged in, through the link, she was lead to Pornhub where she found several videos of her attack uploaded. ‘The titles of the videos were 'teen crying and getting slapped around', 'teen getting destroyed', 'passed out teen'. One had over 400,000 views,’ Rose said. She also said the worst videos were the ones where she was unconscious. She was bullied at school as a result of it, peers saying she deserved it for leading them on and calling her a slut. She emailed Pornhub numerous times in six months, begging them to remove the videos. ‘I sent Pornhub begging emails. I pleaded with them. I wrote, 'Please, I'm a minor, this was assault, please take it down.'’ However, she got no response and the videos remained up. Eventually, she had the idea to set up an email address posing as a lawyer and sent Pornhub an email threatening legal action. Within 48 hours all the videos disappeared. When her case went viral in 2019, I watched as thousands of comments from men on different sites such as Instagram, TikTok and Twitter started pouring in, ‘jokingly’ or not, asking for a link to the videos, blaming her, sharing memes and making other jokes at her expense.

This is not an isolated case for Pornhub especially. A 15-year-old girl went missing in late 2018 for a year before she was found through 58 videos of her being sexually abused uploaded on Pornhub and other porn sites. Serena Fleites is another girl who had a nude video of herself aged 13 that she had been pressured into recording uploaded to the site and Pornhub took weeks to remove it after the requests were sent out, only for it to be re-uploaded and the cycle continue. Pornhub has also given a platform to Michael Pratt, owner of GirlsDoPorn, who coerced and manipulated dozens of women into sending him sexually explicit content. A man who fled the United States after being charged with producing child pornography and trafficking minors. Up until 2020, the website had no age or ID verification requirement to upload a pornographic video. And these restrictions only came into place because of all the criticism it was receiving for more and more cases similar to this one.

But the assault of women and girls uploaded to pornsites, unfortunately, doesn’t stop there, rape and other forms of assault aren’t uncommon within porn, and many popular and unpopular pornstars have come out with testimonies against actors and other people in the field. There are countless accounts you can read online about the exploitation and mistreatment of sex workers, however, the lack of empathy surrounding them is shocking, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising at this point, but I still seem to have endless hope for these people. I’ve brought this up in conversation before and responses I’ve had from men who watch porn were usually ‘well they signed up for the job, they’re choosing to do it, they knew what they were getting themselves into.’ refusing to consider why a lot of people get into sex work in the first place. There is a lot more you can read up on about Linda Lovelace, as well as a film about her life, however a summary, she was one of the first major pornstars and starred in the first major hardcore porn movie, Deep Throat, which Lovelace later wrote that she was coerced and sexually assaulted in the production and that it is a real rape pornography film. Chuck Traynor (husband, producer, manager) was responsible for manipulating her into the industry against her will through relentless abuse. He threatened to shoot her if she didn’t star in the film, she says she only engaged in pornography to avoid her and her family being killed.

Another actress, Jessi Summers said, ‘I also did a scene where I was put with male talent that was on my no-list. I wanted to please them so I did it. He put his foot on my head and stepped on it while he was doing me from behind. I freaked out and started balling; they stopped filming and sent me home with reduced pay since they got some shot but not the whole scene.’ A quote from Corina Taylor follows, ‘When I arrived to the set I expected to do a vaginal girl-boy scene, but during the scene with a male pornstar, he forced himself anally into me and would not stop. I yelled at him to stop and screamed ‘no’ over and over but he would not stop. The pain became too much, I was in shock and my body went limp.’ The assault testimonies from pornstars are never-ending, I could fill several pages with them. There are plenty of cases of stars with multiple cases of alleged rape and assault against them, Ron Jeremy and James Deen are two famous examples of this with their own long lists of accusations you can research, some proven, some not.

Women don’t just become sex workers for the sake of it. I say this because I see people (widely men) saying they do often. A lot of them need quick money to support their family or to survive, many women are coerced into it or trafficked. And even so, if women do get into it because that’s what they want to do, they don’t deserve any less respect or bodily autonomy just because they’re using their bodies for work, yet as I said, so many people have this belief that they do. This is for many reasons, a major one being that sex is assigned to women as deviance. She must be a pure virgin, otherwise, she is dirty and she is not deserving of our respect. She must be a Madonna, or else... She is a whore.

Barbara Alper/Getty Images

As well as porn, films like Fifty Shades of Grey have opened the world of BDSM and kink to a very large audience of inexperienced people who don’t know how to perform acts such as choking, bondage, impact-play etc safely and it’s clearly having negative effects. Even more concerning, these things are now becoming considered the new vanilla to many people because porn has desensitised so many people. A quote from the book Rough by Rachel Thompson states: ‘Erika Lust, a female porn director, says ‘face slapping, choking, gagging and spitting has become the alpha and omega of any porn scene and not within a BDSM context. These are presented as standard ways to have sex when, in fact, they are niches.’ Breath play, or erotic asphyxiation - a niche BDSM act - has been co-opted by mainstream pornography, crucially without showing the consent protocols that are central to the BDSM community.’ More often than not, people aren’t asking for consent to certain acts such as choking, spitting, slapping, spanking etc, they are just doing it, this is likely because they believe it’s just a part of sex now, and this is often a genuinely traumatic incident for a lot of people but it is quickly brushed off and dismissed more often than not even though it is a topic in dire need of discussion. A university graduate told the BBC she was shocked when a man tried to grab her neck during sex. She said ‘I felt extremely uncomfortable and intimidated. If someone slapped or choked you on the street, it would be assault.’

The Guardian reports that the use of “rough sex defence” in murder cases has risen by 90% in the last decade. A girl aged 21, died on a Tinder date in 2018 when she was strangled during sex. The killer claimed he'd killed her accidentally during consensual rough sex. Campaigners are warning us that men are being given a ‘free pass’ to kill their partners thanks to the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ defence, which allows them to claim their victims wanted to be strangled and beaten.

Porn also is notorious for showing a lack of consent. Fight The New Drug (a non-religious and non-legislative organization that exists to provide individuals with the opportunity to make an informed decision regarding pornography by raising awareness of its harmful effects using only science, facts, and personal accounts.) states in an article: ‘Not only does porn teach that you don’t need a willing partner to have sex, it sells the idea that a lack of consent can be considered “sexy.” ... A common situation depicted in porn is a teen girl getting taken advantage of against her will. And a few years ago, researchers did a study of the most popular porn videos at the time. Of the 304 porn scenes examined, 88% contained physical violence and 49% contained verbal aggression. And the most disturbing part? At least 95% of the victims responded neutrally or with pleasure In the scenes.’ (Once again quoting a study I cited earlier).

When anyone, but especially young people and children are consuming this content consistently without proper education on what is or what isn’t consent, this causes a very large issue. Rainn's statistics state that ‘Every 68 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. And every 9 minutes, that victim is a child. Meanwhile, only 25 out of every 1,000 perpetrators will end up in prison.’ 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed, 2.8% attempted) and about 3% of American men—or 1 in 33—have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. Offenders are overwhelmingly men and sexual assault/rape is a gendered crime, so then when you have young men actively consuming pornography with violent, degrading sexual acts that show no communication between partners, no asking if it’s okay to change positions or start doing a different sexual act, this can easily translate into real-life sex.

Countless studies prove excessive pornography consumption desensitises you to violence and can even cause sexual aggression. Another quote from Rough by Rachel Thompson says: ‘Chyng-Feng Sun - a clinical professor of Media Studies at NYU … - interviewed over fifty heterosexual men and women both in individual interviews and in focus group discussions. She found that men who have watched facial ejaculation in pornography found it desirable; and while some found it strange or repulsive at first, after repeated viewing they came to expect such scenes. ‘Most who liked watching it also wanted to do it to a real person,’ she says. ‘Some did it to their girlfriends with or without their consent; some would not want to do it to their girlfriends because they “respect them”, but had no problem doing it to hook-ups or “scumbags”; and some had to strategically “season” their sexual partners for such an act by ejaculating on other body parts and moving on to the ultimate goal.’’ There are obviously many disturbing parts to this, I don't even particularly want to think about the fact these men knowingly associate facial ejaculation with being disrespectful and can only do to certain women (?!!!), but moving on… I’m honing in on the link between them doing this non-consensually and pornography, some would argue there’s no link, akin to the ‘video games cause violence’ argument, however, I would argue the difference is that we are taught from a very very young age that hurting people is wrong, as well as usually being punished for it if we do hurt others, however, we aren’t often taught about sexual consent until much later in our development, and if you pair this with young children - boys in particular - watching pornography where consent isn’t a focus or mentioned at all in the video, it’s going to be confusing/misleading to them. In the US, only 24 states and the District of Columbia mandate sex education in public schools and only 8 of these require these classes to mention consent, yet you have such a large amount of children (and adults who seem to lack a proper understanding of consent) watching pornography.

Rapists often see women as sex objects who are there to fulfil men's sexual needs. They tend to feel they are owed sex from women for many reasons. They often hold false beliefs about women and rape. An example of this is, a rapist can believe that if a woman says no, she really means yes and that she is just playing a game. Antonia Abbey, a social psychologist, wrote that one repeat assaulter believed the woman ‘was just being hard to get.’ Another repeat offender she interviewed stated: ‘I felt as if I had gotten something that I was entitled to, and I felt I was repaying her for sexually arousing me.’ He described both of his rape experiences as ‘powerful,’ ‘titillating’ and ‘very exciting.’ Another believed that ‘most women say 'no' at first most times. A man has to persist to determine if she really means it.’ This is an example of sexual coercion which can be identified as a form of rape. And I believe this is way more common than people believe. I’m not trying to say that watching pornography makes you a rapist or that rapists are rapists because they watch porn, I’m just trying to highlight the fact that women are treated and portrayed as objects in porn, and that regularly watching pornography is proven to change the way you view sex and in turn, women.

Carrying on from Chyng-Feng Sun’s research I cited a moment ago, the book goes on to say ‘Sun asked the participants why they didn’t seek consent before ejaculating on their partners’ faces. ‘Some subjects felt that there was no need to ask for consent because they could tell that some women, who had a certain sexual energy, might be OK with whatever you are doing to them. Some felt that women wanted to be manhandled, overpowered or humiliated, but they did not yet know that themselves or they did not want to say so - so you should just do it and they will like it anyway.’ This here is exactly what I am talking about. There are men that really, truly believe that they can just do these things without a yes or without asking, a big reason (other than the way they are socialised in general) being, that women are portrayed as enjoying this degradation in pornography. Not all people are the same… at all. There is zero way to tell if someone wants something like that done to them without asking them first. That is assault.

So when you have pornographic content which is actively reducing women to subservient objects to be used and abused for the pleasure of men, and people are regularly consuming this material, like I stated earlier, their brain will begin to associate it with pleasure which results in people becoming desensitised to sexual violence and experiencing sexual dissatisfaction unless they can act on these violent desires during sex, often people may pressure or beg their sexual partners into letting them do these things, or they may not even ask at all as the 1/3 statistic proved. I’ve witnessed the desensitisation to violence against women first-hand in class discussions as well as online. When Pornhub removed over 10 million unverified videos due to an investigation that discovered Pornhub was hosting videos featuring children, rape, ‘revenge’ pornography and other unconsenting victims, the response online from boys and men, mainly around my age (16-21) was nothing short of extremely disappointing. There was an outcry of men complaining they had had their ‘favourite videos’ removed from the site and that removing all the unverified content was ‘unnecessary’. When people expressed disbelievingly that this was to at least try and combat the child porn, rape, and ‘revenge’ porn infestation of the site, there were endless responses making jokes at the expense of victims and asking for links to the illegal content. I heard some of these ‘jokes’ first-hand. It’s nothing short of unsettling, and it’s becoming apparently clear that a very large group of men feel no empathy towards these situations anymore.

I wanted this essay specifically, to focus on porn’s effects on the treatment of women in society, however, I am eager to expand on its effects on other marginalised groups such as trans people, lesbians and people of colour in another post at some point (since they deserve the same level of research and detail), because porn is setting mainstream narratives that are incredibly harmful not just for women.

I am in no way trying to say that porn is the only factor contributing to the current treatment of women and that it should all be banned, it would be impossible anyway, but that’s beside the point. The education system must be reformed and there must be extensive teaching on consent, what real sex is like, the reality of pornography and how it can normalise sexual violence. This isn’t important for just younger people, but people in general.

You can’t hide people from porn, you can only educate them and help them make better decisions.

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