Pornography

It's a well understood trope that we are what we eat, which is to say our bodily health is regulated by the food we eat. Correspondingly, we are what we see and hear. More generally, we are what we experience. Experience of course impacts mental health and creates personalities, and this begs the question: what personality traits does the porn experience create, and what is the impact of porn on mental well-being?

Supporters of porn suggest pornography can't possibly be harmful, because it's only fantasy. Being that we live in the real world instead of a fantasy world, let's take reality as our source and look at some scientific research, which reveals:

• Individuals who viewed pornography were more likely to experience loneliness ¹

• Pornography addiction was linked to depression and anxiety ²

• Pornography consumption had a negative effect on sexual satisfaction ³

• Individuals with hypersexual behavior had reductions in gray matter ⁴

• Porn use leads to poorer executive functioning and greater impulsivity ⁵

• Consumption of pornography was associated with greater rape myth acceptance ⁶

• Pornography use uniquely predicted making unwanted sexual advances toward women ⁷

• Pornography users routinely self-describe an escalation in the kinds of materials required to achieve arousal, culminating in child sexual abuse images and escalating violence ⁸

So the personality that porn viewing generates is lonely, depressed, anxious, has reduced gray matter and increased impulsivity, makes unwanted sexual advances, and is driven to engage with the sexual abuse of children. Is that the kind of person anyone wants to be? It's not the kind of personality anyone I know aspires to — though many (perhaps most) men I know are uncritical porn enthusiasts, and exhibit a number of these traits in varying degrees. Undeniably then, porn hurts the real viewer in the real world, and is not harmless fantasy. ⁹

Seeing the detrimental impact of porn on the individual viewer, we must now ask if things are better for those involved in porn. I should highlight that ideally this would be the starting point for our conversation, but after innumerable conversations I've learned that porn culture discourages asking questions about the well-being of those involved in porn. Most commonly, it's only after helping porn viewers come to understand that porn is not harmless to them, the lonely and depressed individual viewer, that consumers of porn begin to see porn as problematic. So, what about the people involved in porn?

We find a brutally honest answer to this question from the porn industry itself:

I'd like to really show what I believe the men want to see: violence against women ¹⁰

my true responsibility as director was to make sure the girls got punished ¹¹

These quotes are from pornographers. If your response to this is disbelief or dismissal, and you're thinking "the women made a choice" or "the women consented", it's important to understand those responses aren't grounded in reality, because:

When you identify what is the most popular or highest consumed categories, they are Teen and Barely legal. They are revenge porn and they are incest. So essentially the most popular pornography is the one without consent. ¹²

Looking beyond such clear violations of consent, and setting aside those in the porn industry whose instinct for psychological self-preservation dictates they interpret their life choices as empowering, ¹³ when we listen to women who have exited the porn industry we find they echo the radfem conclusion, that in porn:

the man makes hate to the woman ¹⁴

When listening to women who have experienced this hate, instead of listening to porn defenders, we quickly uncover the despotism of porn-related exploitation:

He told me I’d have the opportunity to be featured in mainstream publications

His posing orders quickly scaled from provocative to salacious, but ... I was too afraid to say anything. “What if it IS for Vogue? What if he gets mad? What if he pushes you off the roof?” Was the chorus in my head. I didn’t know this man, and I was scared to my core.

He told me to take ... my underwear off and to pose against a wall

you need to understand the level of fear a woman has when she feels powerless

I dissociated. Instantly. I was fucking terrified. I felt cheap and used, powerless and demeaned.

I was a pawn to them, they never saw me as a human being with a soul and a future. They trafficked me ... I had no control. ¹⁵

Again:

at 16, my boyfriend (23 yrs old) and his father were grooming me to be trafficked into strip clubs and eventually porn ¹⁶

I was told by my handlers to hide in my locker if the authorities came looking for me. This all became so normal to me that I didn’t realize how very wrong it was. After being raped violently over my childhood, it seemed easy. ¹⁷

And again:

I lay there covered in liquids, saliva and sweat from twenty five different men. Disgusted, sore, defiled and void of all emotions, a part of me died that day; my soul was shredded and separated among the twenty five men who I just sold my body for ... They knew I was a single Mom and needed the money so they took advantage of me ... The abuse and pain were so bad that I ended up in the emergency room from a nervous breakdown. ¹⁸

And yet again:

Pornhub has the audacity to monetize & place ads inside a video titled “paralyzed teen” featuring an actual paralyzed “teen” with bed sores on her body and Pornhub DOES NOT VERIFY CONSENT. Did she consent? ¹⁹

Indeed:

Porn sites in America and elsewhere compete in routinely depicting acts of sexualised violence, humiliation and degradation against women without arousing the same level of horror and outrage that is rightly directed at the CIA and government agents in many other countries around the world ... Men aroused by the fear on the faces of women during sex mistake relief at escaping from the Russian roulette of strangulation, suffocation, severe beatings and internal injuries, for female arousal ²⁰

Should any doubt remain that porn is exploitation, consider this horrific merchandising of murder:

In 2019, Dr. Priyanka Reddy was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and set on fire by a gang of men who filmed every moment of her agonizing death.

The video of her rape and murder was uploaded to XVideos were it was monetized and trended at #1 for DAYS with over 8 million searches. ²¹

Clearly, porn is not harmless fantasy.

So when I ask questions about pornography and porn supporters reply "Why do you think you can tell other people what to do?", I respond that I don't think I can tell others what to do, but I will ask them to think, and I will show them the real harm that porn does to real people, and I will point out they are supporting, promoting, and masturbating to male violence against women. ²²

To be fully clear:

A fantasy is something that happens in your head. It doesn't go past your head. Once you have somebody acting out whatever that scenario might be in your head, it is an act in the world. It is real. It is real behavior with real consequences to real people. ²³

Being anti-porn then, is about withdrawing support for a sociopathic socioeconomic system that misleads, betrays, demeans, abuses, strangulates, rapes, and murders real women. ²⁴ Being anti-porn is not seen this way by the population at large however, because these realities about porn are rarely confronted (let alone conceded) in mainstream culture and politics. This is unsurprising because the victims who have been exploited into porn, like all victims, have little or no voice and little or no power. But unlike mainstream ideologies that suppress these women's voices, radical feminism amplifies their words, and you'll find these women's words in short order if you look for them instead of looking for porn. But please don't take my word for it. Instead, try reading news from radical women for a few weeks and see what the real world of women tells you.

The key element here is grit, because when you take a moment to enter the real world of women what you'll find is a never-ending torrent of uncomfortable truths, including the fact that pornography is prostitution. ²⁵ In fact, the word "pornography" is derived from the Greek words porni ("prostitute") and graphein ("to write"). Despite this, porn and prostitution are often treated as separate subjects in public conversation, and for this reason I discuss prostitution on its own.

→ Next blog in this series: Prostitution