When I was ten years old, I was playing soccer with friends after school. We’d message each other on Facebook and meet in a park alongside the river that connected our housing estates together. One of the boys got a Nokia Lumia for Christmas and was, as children do, showing it off with a series of now-anachronistic remarks such as “it can do way more than a Blackberry” and “it’s basically an iPod touch but you can call and text on it as well.”
“Most of us had been exposed to porn long before adolescence, and prior to when we began to explore our own sexualities”
After playing around with a few of the base apps, he opened a video he had downloaded featuring two women and a man having intense and aggressive penetrative sex. He saved it to his library from RedTube, a pornography site. Showing this was, at least in the case of my friend, a typical pre-adolescent boy’s attempt at accruing laughter via shock value. Gathering from the eruptions it ensued, it worked. But I also remember my stomach curdling, going “what the hell is this?” I had never seen sex before aside from movies which are scant on details due to motion picture guidelines. But porn was unfamiliar territory. It wasn’t until the age of twelve that I had even had my first romantic interaction. But still, two years prior, thanks to friends and technology, porn had found me. I soon came to realise this was a common case for most of my peers; most of us had been exposed to porn long before adolescence, and prior to when we began to explore our own sexualities. I now wonder as an adult if this is symptomatic of a larger problem.
The research is out, although it was already intuitive to many. Porn, and the tech we use to watch it, is harmful. By unnaturally hijacking the reward centre in our brains, it makes fostering real intimacy seem less interesting in comparison. This problem escalates with increased consumption. As overexposure to intense stimuli shows diminished returns over time, the neuroplastic brain adjusts to a new baseline of wants and pleasures that were not there prior. It is the same feedback loop that explains why movies, or art of the past, are slow-moving and boring to us now. Our baseline has adjusted for more intense and instant gratification, and now our expectations need to be surpassed. In the case of porn, this bleeds into other areas of life. The National Institute of Health has associated porn with an increase in compulsive behaviours such as gambling and substance use.
It has always been the case that young boys will seek out sex, but unfettered access to pornography has changed the course of this. Before the age of fetish content at the click of the button, there were dial ups on adult television, or playboy magazines. Porn was alive and well for decades, except viewing it necessitated a valid ID at a sex shop and showing your face at the counter. Access was physically and imaginatively limited. If tweens or teens wanted to peer into the explicitly unknown, it meant they had to be cunning enough to catch a glimpse of it– maybe knowing a friend who owned a magazine, or changing the channel on the remote when parents were coming down the stairs.
These obstacles are an example of what would be considered by the current self-help zeitgeist as ‘delayed gratification,’ and it likely has something to do with the fact that boomers and Gen X were having more sex in their heyday than the young men of today. They were also having less performance issues in bed, as opposed to nearly half of thirty-something year old men today in some Western regions, according to a 2018 study of 2000 British men. If restricted access to sexual media in the past meant that young men had little options but to connect romantically with others in the real world, could it be argued that the convenience of porn inhibits this, and is therefore partially responsible for mens ‘failure to launch’ today?
”The pornification of our culture is engineered to satisfy men’s desires for profit”
Porn is a gendered problem, with consequences on both ends. A study published by the Economic and Social Research institute showed that almost two thirds of twenty-year-old men in Ireland regularly view it as opposed to 13% of women. As much as 91.5% of men in some studies have consumed some form of porn in the previous month. This disparity not only proves that consumption is particularly a male epidemic, but it also proves that the pornification of our culture is engineered to satisfy men’s desires for profit. Take the depiction of women; swollen breasts and a lack of pubic hair is the norm in the world of porn. For female adult actresses, not only is there pressure to remain as aesthetically desirable as possible, it also means performing the kind of sex that satisfies the fantasies of those audiences.
“How are young women expected to co-exist interpersonally with a male population who are regularly interacting with this content?”
And what are the outcomes of this? An analysis published on fightthenewdrug.org, a non-profit organisation founded to raise awareness on porn’s pervasive impact on society, found that 88.2% of among the highest viewed porn videos featured physical violence and aggression, and 48.7% contained verbal aggression. How are young women expected to co-exist interpersonally with a male population who are regularly interacting with this content?
The ethical question regarding porn does not just concern the effect it has on its (primarily male) consumers, it concerns its performers too. Mia Khalifa was twenty-one when she starred in a string of adult film videos over the course of three months after being ‘scouted’ by an alleged ‘modelling’ agency. She was compensated twelve thousand dollars for content that went on to generate millions. Although her career was a three month stint, she subsequently became the subject of online abuse from ISIS sympathisers and online trolls for years and now regrets her decision to enter the industry. Adult film actress Riley Reid shared that her career made her a recluse and ruined her relationship with friends and family, who cut her off after the revelation of her line of work. She would also no longer consider having children for fear of the harassment her children would receive.
The supply chain of porn will always leave a destructive trail behind itself. But who is to blame for this? Is it big tech, careless parents, or is it both? We know that tech companies extract data from the attention consumers give to their products – this data is collected to make these products more efficient, easier to use, and more addictive. If Silicon Valley has catalysed an addiction-prone generation in general, are these companies also responsible for the porn epidemic? In the case of parents, many find convenience in the endless stream of occupancy tech offers their children. Is it easier to ‘keep an eye’ on a child when they’re in the physical safety of their bedroom as opposed to wandering in the outdoors, even if that means the illicit viewing of porn? If most parents would not allow their children to walk alone in an adult shop, why are children granted access to devices that permits them to virtually do the same, but essentially worse thing? Is it even possible to regulate a problem that has tacitly entrenched itself so deep within our social ecosystem?
I believe on some level we have a societal obligation to confront pornography when its unrestricted freedom has, in this case, with empirical evidence, caused a great deal of damage. On a grassroots and legislative level, we owe it to ourselves.
