The Shifting Narrative Around Pornography
There has been a fundamental shift in the public debate on pornography over the past decade. In 2017, I took the affirmative side in a radio debate with a queer studies professor on the question “Is pornography inherently harmful to society?” Much of what I highlighted then—the normalization and mainstreaming of sexual violence, pervasive porn addiction beginning in preadolescence, the consequent inability to engage in or even understand healthy intimacy—is now the position of panicky government officials from the U.K. to France.
Hardly a week goes by without some news story highlighting the devastating effects of ubiquitous porn use across the West and beyond. Two reports from May alone highlight this fact with chilling clarity.
The first is a disturbing report in the Guardian by Harriet Grant on the growing phenomenon of men who do not have the profile of a typical pedophile—a sexual interest in children—nonetheless being arrested for viewing and possessing child abuse material. These men ended up viewing child pornography when their addictions escalated and spiraled out of control. As one told her: “I didn’t start out wanting to see kids. I was addicted to porn and I went down a road of being totally desensitised as I got further and further from what was normal.”
In England and Wales, 850 men are being arrested monthly for “online child abuse offences.” Similar trends are emerging elsewhere. Grant notes that we face “a spiralling global crisis” with law enforcement and child protection experts consistently pinpointing one culprit: “the explosion over the past 10 to 20 years of free-to-view and easily accessible online pornography. . . . A growing body of research is beginning to warn of how problematic porn habits can be a pathway into viewing images of children being abused.”
Grant observes that the explosion of extreme content, including child abuse imagery, is not merely feeding a demand but fueling one. Users crave porn for the dopamine; to achieve consistent arousal, they must escalate their usage; algorithms deliver a constant digital diet of depravity. Viewers have been pushed to edgy material for a long time (as evidenced by the “Barely Legal” phenomenon). As one man related: “You know it’s wrong, but the dopamine hit from what you are doing overrides everything else. I think the pathways in my brain had been changed by all the porn I had watched. . . . You feel sick and horrible.”
Significantly, most of the men who eventually encountered child pornography did not actually search for it. The Finnish group Protect Children profiled 4,549 anonymous child sexual abuse offenders and found that not only was pornography a key “facilitating factor,” but over 50 percent first saw child abuse material when they were not seeking it. Michael Sheath, who has worked with child abusers for more than thirty years, told Grant: “I see men who have gone down what I call an ‘escalating pathway.’ The link is unambiguous. . . . The threshold for abusive behaviour is through the floor. It used to be that child abuse material was hard to find and looking at it was extremely risky.” Not anymore.
“We are seeing people who are turning 18 and have had 10 years’ exposure to hardcore porn,” said Detective Chief Inspector Tony Garner, who heads a team of online child abuse officers in the U.K. “My officers are finding young people watching the most abhorrent material, including child abuse. . . . As a country, as a society, it feels completely out of control.” Meanwhile, Pornhub insists that it is not pushing viewers to increasingly extreme content, but that users merely “discover” new sexual themes.
A report in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof tells a different story. Kristof reviewed internal documents from Pornhub accidentally released by a federal district court in Alabama, exposing many internal discussions. One exchange between staffers read: “There is a LOT of very, very obvious and disturbing CSAM [child sexual abuse material] here.” Another document stated that as of May 2020, Pornhub “had 706,000 videos available on the site that had been flagged by users for depicting rape or assaults on children or for other problems.”
Despite that, many videos remained available; Pornhub “did not necessarily review a video for possible removal until it had been flagged at least 16 times.” Another private memo “acknowledged that videos with apparent child sexual abuse had been viewed 684 million times before being removed”; another featured managers recommending that words such as “brutal,” “childhood,” “minor,” and “unwilling” be permitted in video descriptions; a third note “says that a person who posted a sexual video of a child shouldn’t be banned from the site because ‘the user made money.’”
Many of the phrases Pornhub debated internally are too vile to print. Kristof reports that in 2020, “underage” turned up 183,301 videos on the site; 155,447 videos had the keyword “12yo.” Kristof concludes by stating that something clearly must be done about this crisis; he suggests that perhaps “we can use civil and criminal penalties to incentivize the pornography industry to show only videos for which the website has verified age and consent.” This proposal, while a step in the right direction, avoids the fact that porn use almost always escalates.
A raft of recent age-verification legislation in the United States indicates that lawmakers are beginning to grapple with the social costs of pornography. Sen. Mike Lee went further, introducing the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act” in May, which would include pornography under the category of “obscenity” and essentially render much of this material illegal. Lee’s proposal has been widely mocked, but those insisting on the necessity of protecting pornography in the name of free speech must be forced to answer key questions.
Do we want to live in a society where it is normative for children to be exposed to extreme porn before puberty, and their libidos wired to respond to sexual violence? Where almost a quarter of adult American women reportedly “felt scared during sex” due to porn-inspired violence like choking? Where underage porn users are increasingly abusing other children? Where men are being transformed into sex offenders by pornography that is increasingly difficult to avoid? Where innocence is increasingly impossible?
These reports reveal the society we have chosen to create by prioritizing so-called “sexual liberty” over the safety and innocence of women and children. We now know where this social experiment has taken us, and what it has cost us. It is a growing consensus not just among conservatives, but across all fields, that pornography has been a tremendously destructive force. It is time to reverse our priorities, and to recognize that digital pornography is lethal poison in our cultural groundwater and should be treated as such.
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