Last October, poet Keira Van der Kolk went viral on TikTok for “Don’t Be Vanilla”, a spoken word piece about the ways men dehumanise women in sexual encounters. Lines from that poem — like “He conditioned me to believe that the time I looked most beautiful is with his hand wrapped around my neck” — resonated with countless women. When Keira re-uploaded an extended version of the poem this February, she found it resonated even deeper. “What it feels like dating a porn addict,” one commenter wrote, to which the poet replied “Yep!”
Once a hush-hush media consumed in secret, porn is now everywhere. You don’t even need to go on sites like Pornhub or its variants anymore. You can just as easily find clips of hardcore porn on Twitter or Reddit as on dedicated sites. Last month, Netflix released Money Shot, a documentary taking aim at Pornhub and the porn industry at large. A viral trend emerged on TikTok, where people played a sound bite mash-up of Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” and the Pornhub intro music to test whether the people around them recognised the jingle. Many of the test subjects were children, parents, and other people you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be on these sites. The ubiquity of porn — and the hyper-sexualisation of women that many argue is a result of that ubiquity — is hard to escape online, even if you’re not actually watching porn.
To deal with the omnipresence of pornography and to make sense of the hyper-sexualisation and violence they endure from young men they call “porn addicts,” young women have returned to the works of radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin. “The dehumanisation is a basic part of the content of all pornography without exception,” Dworkin declared in her seminal 1981 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women. “Pornography in this country in the last ten years has become increasingly violent by every measure … and every single orgasm is a reward for believing that material, absorbing that material, responding to that value system: having a sexual response to stuff that makes women inferior, subhuman.” At the time, she was dismissed as an ugly misandrist and sexless prude.
Though anti-porn movements emerged in the late 60s, they’re way more mainstream now (presumably as a result of the mainstreamification of porn itself). Exodus Cry, a Christian nonprofit abolition determined to shut down the sex industry, has planted firm roots on social media, posting podcast-style YouTube videos in which they discuss their anti-porn crusade. “Billie Eilish agrees with us,” they wrote in an email to supporters after the singer told Howard Stern how viewing porn at a young age wrecked her brain and self-image. But even when celebrities aren’t outright admonishing the porn industry, they are discussing it in their art. Indie-pop artist Samia sings “Screaming porn kills love/Outside your window with the Adventists” on her latest album.
In “How Porn Can Normalize Sexual Objectification,” Fight the New Drug —an organisation dedicated to educating people on the impacts of pornography — cite a plethora of studies that conclude that porn causes men to view women as sex objects. And a 2018 study in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality argued “exposure to degrading pornography (vs. erotica or control) generated the strongest hostile sexist beliefs and the greatest amount of objectification of the woman in the clip.” This in itself is not new. As far back as 2011, studies were revealing that men who watched porn were more likely to believe “rape myths,” less likely to intervene to stop a sexual assault, and apparently, also has “an increased behavioural intent to rape.” There are many studies that corroborate these claims and just as many debunking them, a seemingly endless stream of studies, as porn has become bigger and more present in our online and offline lives.
Curiously enough, though, the consensus amongst scientists remains there is no such thing as porn addiction. Nicole Prause, a neuroscientist and founder of Liberos (a research institute which studies the neurochemistry of sex and desire), explains that studies touted by anti-porn activists are often “written with causal language. Despite that, they’re just association studies.” The possibility of people who already have an inclination towards the actions performed in pornographic materials seeking out that type of content is very likely. She points out that if people believe that porn conditions people to behave in certain manners, then by that logic there should be increased rates of incest or child pornography, but there aren’t.
In the past, anti-porn feminists and religious folk united against pornographers and sex workers, but in the past decade a third group has emerged: profiteers. Many men have opened up about their porn addiction, urging others with similar compulsions to get help. Centres like Omega Recovery and Begin Again Institute use “health-focused language” as opposed to previous “morality-focused language” of “sin,” Dr. Prause notes. Pseudoscience is at the centre of these new age anti-porn groups she continues: “Often linking it with masturbation now, they say it will melt your brain or it’ll blow out your dopamine receptor — words that no actual scientists would use.”
Another theory challenged by researchers is the idea that porn causes many women and girls to develop body image issues. While this might be the case for some people, the argument that unrealistic body standards in porn are causing a rise in body modifications like labiaplasty is largely unfounded. While in the past porn studios upheld a certain standard of beauty, amateur porn has given many people relatable sexual models. “Now it’s like my ‘vulva is out there somewhere.’ If you like this kind of a partner or like that kind of sex, you don’t feel like a weirdo anymore because the thing that you like is represented somewhere” Dr. Prause says.
Dr. Prause’s latest study focuses on the harassment and violence committed by anti-porn groups, something she has been subject to for years. Targeted doxxing has been a norm on Reddit forums like r/NoFap (a so-called porn addiction and compulsive behaviour peer recovery space) and has increased since the creation of Exodus Cry. Sex workers are among their primary targets. Adult performer and writer Juicy Pomma has had their fair share of threatening messages from these collectives. “In 2017, a bunch of incels on Reddit started compiling information about sex workers who were supposedly not paying their taxes and were doxxing them,” they say.
Despite the fact a lot of anti-porn discourse focuses on the dimorphous term “industry”, it is in fact sex workers face the brunt of the backlash from the modern anti-porn panic. Like Juicy Pomma, many in the sex industry entered the trade for survival, especially amidst the pandemic and destabilising economic recession. “Honestly, how I feel is I would love to see no one have to turn to this line of work if they don’t want to,” they say. While they empathise with young women who have turned to radical feminism to interrogate the exploitation of sex workers, Juicy Pomma rejects talking points that compare sex workers to mindless sex dolls devoid of agency. Fear-mongering often puts sex workers in harm’s way. When Backpage (a classified advertising page and the largest online network for sex work) was shut down, they couldn’t properly vet their people and were forced to enter risky underground economies.
Porn, like all forms of media, should be interrogated, especially considering the rise of revenge videos and the proliferation of child pornography on various sites. Still, so many questions remain: What counts as pornography? Are sex scenes in movies porno? Do they also cause men to behave violently? Do BDSM films where women are doms cause them to behave violently? Will the pathologising of “porn addiction” leading to violence be used to excuse rapists in court? Is there such a thing as ethical porn? In a world dominated by patriarchal values, there is no question that misogynistic dynamics are reflected in pornography. It’s a “what came first the chicken or the egg?” situation. Regardless of the science and crude numbers, the personal accounts of women everywhere make it undeniable that an international reckoning is overdue. We just have to make sure we’re holding the right people accountable.