If you’ve been alive since the conception of a recorded video, you’ve seen porn. In our postmodern world, almost everyone has access to the internet, therefore, access to pornography. Porn is unavoidable in this day and age, whether one is looking for it or not. 

Origins to Today

To be able to talk about this, there are several things we need to understand first. Porn first became an industry in the 1980s when the use of the internet was becoming more and more popular. 

Studios started showing up everywhere with different varieties of sex/sexual videos. 

From the beginning of this industry, these videos portrayed sexual aggression towards women which they seem to enjoy. 

These types of videos create unattainable standards for the average person to be able to or want to do with their partner. This does affect both sexes but in different ways. 

Women are expected to have “perfect” bodies and be able to move and stay in crazy positions. They are also expected to put the man’s pleasure first and not communicate their needs and to just take whatever is given to them. 

As time went on, porn became more violent with specific sites spawning online dedicated to torture porn.

It’s Everywhere

Now it’s impossible to be online and not run into some form of pornography. Even just scrolling through the Instagram explore page, there are posts with graphic sexual content and several ads for porn games. Speaking of games, most mobile games also have ads with pornographic material. 

What’s really terrifying is the target audience for these types of ads is young people, mostly children. Youth First states the average age of someone when they first see pornography is only 11 years old.

The ads most times portray a cartoon woman with captions claiming “Do whatever you want to her” and other statements of sexual nature. 

These ads force children them to see things they cannot understand. This damages kids’ and adolescents’ perceptions of sex and expectations of women.

Its Impact

The Behavioral Architects state that pornography desensitizes men to see women as sex objects, normalizes sexual aggression and violence against women and creates impossible standards for what sex should be. 

The National Library of Medicine has linked violent pornography exposure to teen violence in relationships. 

This doesn’t only affect young couples; pornography is also an issue for adults. The Webroot states that 56% of divorces involve one party being addicted to porn. 

The Prestige Men’s Medical Center states that frequent porn consumption leads to negative physical, psychological and social consequences. Porn skews one’s perception of reality, changing what they believe to be normal and acceptable. 

Studies by PMMC suggest that men who watch porn often experience difficulty performing in the bedroom. 

Is It All Bad?

With this array of negative effects and impacts, you might be thinking that all porn is evil and unethical; however, there are ethical sources for this kind of content. 

Ethical porn is only possible when the creators completely control the work they do and publish.

Porn as an industry is responsible for damaging the perception of women and what their role is in society as well as creating lasting ailments for frequent consumers. This does not mean we should villainize sex workers.

We should work to take down these industries that have no regard for their employees or the impact their content has on the world.