Porn: Erotic, “exotic,” sincerely very toxic

Well this is something I never thought I would say — deep breath — but the Republicans have a point. Or at least they have one point regarding one issue: We need to start worrying about porn. As a millennial who sits comfortably on the left, condemning online erotica is not exactly fashionable or analogous to my generation, but I wholeheartedly believe it is necessary.

In July, the G.O.P. unanimously pledged to fight widespread usage of online pornography. When I read that the party deemed porn a “public health crisis” and was particularly concerned with the “harmful effects” it had on children, I was relieved someone had finally said it. Contrastingly, liberals in the U.S. are unconcerned, even dismissive, of the impact of browsing online erotica: Democrats remain for the large part silent on the issue; The New York Times referred to the G.O.P. platform as “far to the right” and “a strict, traditionalist view of the family;” The Washington Post called it “weird” and “odd,” and The Huffington Post contended that porn “hasn’t really been the most pressing concern for most Americans recently.”

But the more that liberals refrain from engaging in critical discourse on this issue, the more the religious right are able to control the narrative.

There have been approximately 12,000 clicks on Pornhub — the single largest porn website — since you started reading this article. There will have been around another 380,000 by the time you finish it. In an hour, another 2.4 million. That is 21.2 billion clicks per year on Pornhub alone — with the U.S. causing more traffic on the site than any country in the world. Globally, it is estimated that one in four computer searches and one in five mobile phone or tablet searches are for erotic content. The internet is for porn. We know this. So let’s start talking about the obviously gigantic sociological, anthropological and psychological implications of this relatively novel phenomenon.

The limited information available online indicates that the pivotal moment for accessible and free online video voyeurism was 2007. This was the year online porn blew up and sites such as Pornhub were created. According to Covenant Eyes, the average age that boys first watch porn in the U.S. is 12 years old. Girls, on the other hand, according to Sex, Likes and Social Media: Talking to Our Teens in the Digital Age by Allison Havey and Deana Puccio who founded the Raising Awareness and Prevention Project, are far less likely to be interested in pornography until later stages in life.

I was born in 1995, meaning that my male peers were the first ever to be exposed to mass online porn as preteens. This draws a line between my contemporaries and every generation before us. Of course, the emergence of online erotica targeted people of every age: As Paul Fishbein, founder of Adult View News, writes, “Porn doesn’t have a demographic — it goes across all demographics.” But the boys I grew up with and have always been surrounded by were at a precise pre-pubescent state of sexual cluelessness when they first watched pornography, their sexuality a blank slate on which to be written, an empty vessel to be filled. And as sociologist Jill Manning writes, “Even more disturbing is the fact that the first Internet generations have not reached full maturity, so the upper limits of this impact are yet to be realized.”

Porn lesson 101: All sex is rough sex and rough sex itself is exceedingly violent — 88 percent of erotic online content involves acts of physical aggression. The notion of sex as an inherently violent act is reinforced by the titling — the phrasing of which is too offensive to print in full — that refers to sexual acts as “drilling,” “ramming” and “pummeling,” and deems girls for the most part “sluts” and “whores.” Moreover, all girls love “deep throating” a man’s genitals and apparently have no gag reflex. In fact, in between choking, they often exclaim animatedly that this is their favorite part. Anal goes without saying. All girls love guys ejaculating on their faces (evidently conjunctivitis is worth his being able to physically mark his territory), or, as a runner up, their boobs. Girls partaking in a sexual act should be a lot younger than the guy involved and far, far better looking.

More depressingly, as with any sexist experience, women of color are dealt the worst hand. Non-white women in porn are dramatically fetishized. Titles too demeaning and dehumanizing to explicitly reference draw attention to crude physical racial stereotypes. This is a particular type of sexual othering: Black, Latino and Asian women are presented as simply a kink, an exotic and exciting alternative to the status quo of the white girl. This too disturbingly mirrors sociopolitical realities for women of color: doubly oppressed and thus subject to maximum abuse.

But what unites the narrative of all porn, regardless of the level of skin pigmentation of the woman involved, is that sex is almost entirely about male gratification. That the women — whether they are being dominated or doing the dominating, whether they are shackled and whipped or treated like a sacred jewel, whether there is one female being passed around or many arousing one male — are simply there to please the man. Even in the absence of a man in the scene, the action is still wholly exhibited for the male gaze. Close ups of women experiencing multiple orgasms courtesy of sex toys are depicted for the man’s pleasure of watching her eye-roll and moan. “Girl on girl” is not a presentation of lesbianism but instead a pander to the popular male fetish. Porn is informing generations of male preteens and early teens, in these most formative years of sexual socialization, that sex is all about them. Porn is the pillar of the new age patriarchy: It reinforces backwards ideas about gender in a dystopian setting.

Now, I want to be clear: I am not anti-porn and have no problem with it in theory. There are many potential benefits. Porn can improve sex lives by providing people with a platform to pinpoint exactly what turns them on; porn can help people satisfy their fantasies in a contained, virtual setting, and perhaps porn could even lessen sexual violence by quelling sexual frustration. It is not porn itself but the nature of the overwhelming majority of it to which I object: that of misogyny, violence, dehumanization and racism.

So how is this affecting millennials’ perception of all things sexual? Is a boy of 12 able to understand that the wildly violent and eccentric acts they watch on their iPhone late at night are not an accurate representation of the duller, more tender, more vanilla realities of teenage sex? If a girl of 14 is being force fed a diet of Ryan-Gosling-kisses-in-the-rain romantic comedies and a boy of the same age “XXL Anal Violation,” what happens when they come together romantically and sexually?

I call on all sociologists, psychologists, neuroscientists and anyone else in any other field with the funding, time, manpower and expertise to please put everything else aside and start conducting research on the long term effects of online porn on preteens and teenagers. While I’m not an expert, I would bet the entirety of my student loan that the findings will be fascinating, frightening and integral to understanding my generation and all the ones after. The U.S. is gradually beginning to talk about sexual violence and we need to make porn an essential part of that dialogue.

Leah Gavron is an English Literature major, on exchange from the University of Sussex. She can be reached at lgavron@oxy.edu.