“If you want to destroy any nation without war, make adultery or nudity common in the young generation.” - Saladin
The internet gave us many things that changed the world forever but one of the negative aspects of it is the deluge of porn that hit humanity like a tidal wave. Porn is damn near everywhere you look nowadays and part of that reason was the internet made it so available that overt and hyper-sexualization became relatively normalized. While it's hardly the only reason, it's doubtlessly one of the big ones.
Instagram is now filled to overflowing with "influencers" wearing revealing clothing to mass attention. Streamers nearly have their entire bodies exposed during streams on websites frequented by children, and women are running OnlyFans accounts in increasing numbers.
And that's not even counting pornography websites of which there are a myriad with more being created all the time.
We are soaked in porn so much so that we have a Democrat candidate currently running in Virginia who, despite being a nurse practitioner and a mother of small children, ran a pornography stream with her lawyer husband quite recently.
(READ: America Has Come to a Moral Fork In the Road)
Many people consider this to be not that big of a deal. In fact, porn's defenders are many and they're voracious. Even merely highlighting porn's negative effects on society will cause them to come out of the woodwork to fight and argue. Type something about porn's effects on the brain into your Google search bar and you'll find more than a few sites (oftentimes the usual suspects) defending porn.
But despite any positive aspects they bring up about porn (you'd be surprised at how much porn drives technological innovation) the bottom line is that porn is a net negative on humanity. The effects it has on everything from our brain function to the commonality of some of the most heinous crimes are horrific. Yet, it's not often talked about, especially in mainstream circles, at least not negatively.
Let's start by taking a look at your brain on porn. According to Scientific American, regular porn consumption actually reduces your brain's thinking power in terrifying ways and even reduces gray matter, especially in men:
In May 2014, a study in the prestigious journal JAMA Psychiatry was all over the news. It found that the more porn men reported watching, the less volume and activity they had in the regions of the brain—specifically the striatum—linked to reward processing and motivation. They also found that connectivity between the striatum and the prefrontal cortex (which is the part of the brain used for decision making, planning, and behavior regulation) weakened the more porn the men reported watching.
The researchers hypothesized that these differences might reflect change resulting from intense stimulation of the reward system.
According to AlterNet, long-term pornography consumption also results in sexual dysfunctions, including erection disorders and difficulty achieving orgasm. This is because regular porn use teaches our brains to get our sex-induced dopamine hits from pornography and not real partners:
To try to explain these effects, some scientists have drawn parallels between porn consumption and substance abuse. Through evolutionary design, the brain is wired to respond to sexual stimulation with surges of dopamine. This neurotransmitter, most often associated with reward anticipation, also acts to program memories and information into the brain. This adaption means that when the body requires something, like food or sex, the brain remembers where to return to experience the same pleasure.
Instead of turning to a romantic partner for sexual gratification or fulfillment, habituated porn users instinctively reach for their phones and laptops when desire comes calling. Furthermore, unnaturally strong explosions of reward and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation in the brain.
The argument that porn is healthy and non-addictive is false. It's easy to fall into a porn habit and difficult to crawl out of it once you're in it.
But what about the people having sex on camera? They must be having a pretty good time, right?
No. Many are suffering greatly within the porn industry, oftentimes being wildly underpaid and undergoing mental and emotional hardships all the while. Moreover, there's a real sense of isolation for many porn stars whose relationships are oftentimes literally skin deep. Moreover, you're often pressured to go further down the path of depravity in order to be chosen for more and more roles. Since the pay is awful, you need more roles to stay afloat, and not everyone does. Probably unsurprisingly, suicide isn't uncommon in the porn industry.
One of the most eye-opening testimonies about the effects of the porn industry on porn stars comes from an interview Michael Knowles did with former porn star turned pastor Joshua Broome, who not only details his own tragic six-year path through the porn industry, but the sad ends to some of the people he knew in the industry came to at their own hands.
And then there's the criminality that pornography invites into our society.
In 2021, the website "XTube" was shut down permanently after accusations of sex trafficking. It wasn't just that site, however. The most popular porn site on the internet, "PornHub," also faced trouble after the New York Times published an article accusing it of monetizing child rape just for starters. As a result, it eliminated all non-verified users and content.
That was, for the most part, the end of it, at least for mainstream discussion. However, James O'Keefe recently went undercover in a sting operation targeting a manager at MindGeek, the parent company that owns a myriad of porn sites.
The person being stung was Mike Farley whose job title is "technical product manager" at MindGeek. What O'Keefe's team discovered was horrifying. There was an admission that PornHub is frequently utilized by rapists and child traffickers and that upper management knows about it and orders everyone else to shut up about it.
One of the first clips you see from the footage is Farley explaining how it's very easy to upload footage of underage girls on the site because even PornHub's verification process is easy to get around, and users aren't required to show their faces in the videos. When asked why PornHub doesn't get more serious about its verification process, Farley simply says it costs money.
BREAKING: Pornhub Exec Reveals Rapists & Traffickers Use Pornhub “Loophole” to “Make a Lot of Money”
— Arden Young (@arden_young_) September 13, 2023
C-Suite won’t fix “They would lose a lot of money”
Says government doesn’t “know sh*t… not qualified to identify the loophole”#PornhubTapes pic.twitter.com/2TaUBbkAgr
Needless to say, this loose of a verification system can result in atrocities being committed on minors, sex trafficking, and sexual abuses galore. Since PornHub is trafficked by billions and billions of people every year, the amount of potential sex crimes it could attract could be astronomical.
Porn is not a good thing. While I believe that consenting adult men and women should be free to take part in making or viewing pornography if they so choose, it's pretty clear that the industry has a lot of issues and our nation is wholly ignorant of the effects porn has on our society.
Young women, especially, are creating accounts on apps like OnlyFans in waves, opening the most intimate parts of themselves in the hopes of recognition and money, not considering the fact that once it's up on the internet, it never comes down. The mental effect it has on women's failure to garner any attention after exposing themselves is hardly ever discussed, but the issues are there and growing.
Our society is woefully ignorant about what porn is doing to us. It's time we start talking about it.
