Porn Is Bad

Pornography is inherently and irrevocably harmful to human sexuality, and you all are a part of it. I say you all, because the supermajority of college men and about 18 percent of college women watch porn regularly. Those who watch porn multiple times a week, or even a day, see themselves as one of millions of consumers, detached from the fact that they are contributing to the demand for one of the great ills of society.

To be honest, this argument generally doesn’t land well on young men, and most people who are anti-porn are accused of being prudes, or out of touch with their own sexuality. Being opposed to porn, however, isn’t the same as being against sex, or being against sex workers. Being against porn means that you stand against an industry that actively exploits women, and destroys the development of healthy sexuality in young people.

We all intuitively know that pornography is not great for young minds and the young women who become involved in it. We know it isn’t realistic, we know it is exploitative. However, that doesn’t stop us from watching it. Thirty percent of all data transferred across the World Wide Web is pornographic content. To put this into context, more people visit porn sites each year than Netflix, Twitter, and Amazon combined. Videos populate these sites by the thousands. And each one causes immeasurable harm to women and men across the world.

There are many people, both inside and outside the industry, who believe porn can be done humanely—in a way that realistically depicts sexual interaction. The trend of “sex positivity” has attempted to reclaim porn as a beautiful art of women expressing their sexuality. However, for each enlightened, sex positive woman involved in porn, there are thousands of young girls with no other options who are pulled into the industry. Of the thousands who enter the industry each year, a few get active Twitter followings, book deals, and public appearances. The rest end up working in physically and mentally taxing conditions, partaking in scenes and acts that they never expected to be involved in.

We have convinced ourselves that porn is harmless and victimless. This is simply not the case.

According to the 2015 documentary Hot Girls Wanted, “Major amateur porn companies typically book a new girl 2 or 3 times…Unless she is a breakout success, she will have to accept more niche-oriented jobs in order to keep working.” These niche-oriented jobs refer to the most degrading and violent acts. Even when you watch so called “vanilla” porn, where there is no clear exploitation, you are helping create demand for sadism such as facial abuse pornography, where scenes depict women forced to give oral sex until they vomit, and are often forced to eat that vomit. I cannot stress enough that these are not small percentages of the content available. The 2010 Violence Against Women study found that 88.2 percent of pornography shows verbal or physical violence towards women. For those women who entered the porn industry because they had few options and couldn’t turn down the idea of easy money, it is a rude wakeup call to realize that their career must become one filled with these painful and degrading acts desired by these so called “niche groups.” Nobody would engage in these types of videos if they had other options.

If the fact that porn as an industry is violent and harmful to women isn’t enough, the widespread access to pornography is harmful to the developing sexuality of adolescents. Porn is centered on the sexual act itself, which is nowhere near sufficient in capturing the nuances of true human sexuality. Consider the fact that the majority of young people’s first exposure to sex is through pornography, and they see women brutalized again and again onscreen before they even have their first kiss. How can these young people, primarily boys, understand how to be a caring, respectful partner when their teacher is pornography? How can girls be safe around boys who learn how to behave during sexual encounters from porn? Violence, coercion, and unhealthy power dynamics are present in porn more often than they are not. New societal issues such as young men becoming addicted to porn, no longer able to function normally sexually or form relationships, are becoming commonplace, and we are all to blame—hundreds of thousands of acts, hundreds of thousands of women in millions of combinations are at adolescent’s fingertips. With our lack of coherent sex education in most parts of the U.S., most young people’s sex ed comes from porn, and anyone who has ever watched porn can tell you that this is a major problem.

When it comes to porn, we choose not to think about the humanity of the people in the videos. Deep down, I think we all know that what happens to women in these few minute clips is creating unhealthy behaviors in our youngest generations and altering our views of what sexuality is supposed to look like. Porn will never go away. But we can at least be aware of how our consumption is affecting our own sexual psyche, and recognize the unhealthiness of the videos we watch.