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| All so accessible, porn is messing up minds and lives. Photo: Julia M Cameron |
Billie Eilish is the latest to highlight the intense disturbance pornography can cause in young people's minds, in fact, in their life. She said on a radio show she had been addicted to watching porn from the age of 11. It gave her nightmares and spoiled her first dating adventures.
“I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” [the] singer said, saying it helped her feel as if she were cool and “one of the guys”.
“I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she added, saying she suffered nightmares because some of the content she watched was so violent and abusive.
The Guardian's report continues:
Eilish, who was homeschooled in Los Angeles and has seven Grammy awards, is known for her often dark lyrics. In the ballad Male Fantasy on her second album Happier Than Ever, she sings about being home alone and distracting herself with pornography as she recalls a broken relationship.
She is now angry at herself for thinking it was OK to watch so much porn.
“The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to,” she said.
An online conference on pornography that we will garner more information from in a moment heard that "women do use porn, but often to explore what might be expected of them sexually". In other words, like Eilish, women try to learn how they can comply with the wishes of their male partner.
Eilish started out in her career preferring baggy clothes, but has since done photo shoots for fashion magazines drawing attention to her body, which shows how messed up young people's thinking can be about how to express one's identity.
Age ratings and regulated viewing exist in most Western countries up to the present time. This form of censorship and regulation of what individuals can and cannot do is accepted as necessary for the mental well-being of young people especially. Similarly, we have viewer advisories for TV shows to protect viewers from scenes of death or suffering and a lot more.
It's time that pornography be brought fully under control as evidence mounts as to its links to violence against women and to how it perpetuates the West's "hypersexualised culture [that] victimises girls".
Britannica.com states:
The word pornography, derived from the Greek porni (“prostitute”) and graphein (“to write”), was originally defined as any work of art or literature depicting the life of prostitutes.
It goes on:
Pornography [is] representation of sexual behaviour in books, pictures, statues, films, and other media that is intended to cause sexual excitement. The distinction between pornography (illicit and condemned material) and erotica (which is broadly tolerated) is largely subjective and reflects changing community standards.
The argument that the participants in the acting part of making pornographic material consent to treatment that is inhumane and unbalanced is deeply flawed. The weakness is that any reasonable person would recognise that what is done in hardcore porn is degrading, violent and abusive. Human dignity demands that no person should endure such treatment. Period.
British anti-porn campaigner Julie Bindel wrote in the Observer in October:
Tackling porn culture is clearly a key part of tackling sexual violence towards women. I have campaigned to end the sex trade for decades, and am well aware of its role in the sexual exploitation of women.
Bindel reported on an international conference that had just been held online:
Taking On Porn: Developing Resilience and Resistance through Sex Education was organised by Culture Reframed, a US-based NGO founded by the academic and anti-porn activist Gail Dines. Part of it focused on how to help parents to have conversations with their children about what Dines calls the “public health crisis of the digital age”.
Inspired partly by demand from the UK educational world, the conference is responding to concerns from many parents about “pro-porn” programmes running in some schools since relationship and sex education became mandatory in September 2020.
Dines points to one teacher guide that puts forward the argument, “Porn is entertainment, like a film, not a ‘how to’ guide. However, that doesn’t mean people can’t learn things from porn they might not learn in other places. Just as movies can sometimes contain valuable insights, so can porn.”
But, as Dines points out, today’s online content is nothing like the now defunct Playboy magazine. In short, it has become more sadistic and extreme. One influential study found that about 90% of the most commonly viewed heterosexual porn scenes contained aggression and violence towards women and girls.
Online pornography has become the primary form of sex education for young people, and the average age for kids to start accessing it is 11. Porn sites get more visits each month than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined.
“Many sex ed teachers feel ill equipped to tackle the issue of porn use among their students,” says Dines, the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. For Dines, [...] porn has become the leading form of sex education globally [...]. She believes that pornography acts as a kind of cultural script, which exploits women and at the same time limits their free sexual expression and pleasure.
Parents have been telling [the NGO] Culture Reframed about how concerned they feel about their children’s viewing of porn, with one saying: “My daughter was bullied into sending a sext by her boyfriend, who then sent it to his friends. Culture Reframed’s online resources not only gave us the ability to help her, but also gave us insights into the ways our hypersexualised culture victimises girls.”
Another expert who took part in the conference was Tom Farr, a UK-based campaigner against male violence. Bindel reports his contribution in this way:
“Porn has become the de facto form of sex education for many young men and boys,” says Farr. “They have unfettered access to the most degrading, violent and abusive content imaginable at the click of a button. What are the individual and societal implications of a generation of young people groomed by exposure to hardcore porn?”
The exploitation of women using money as the means of entrapment has the same characteristics as the exploitation of farm workers in many parts of the world; many vulnerable people taken advantage of for the generation of wealth for the few.
Bindel concludes:
Like other feminist campaigners against the sex trade, Dines has been accused of being an anti-sex moralist who wishes to censor sexual expression, but, she says, nothing could be further from the truth. “Any progressive, humanitarian approach should focus on dismantling the porn industry,” says Dines, “and not the continuation of its insidious commercialisation of abuse and misery.”
Create the culture before the crisis
The statistics about the age at which children first see pornography online, and the speed at which watching porn becomes normalised, particularly for teenage boys, make for grim reading. In 2019, the British Board of Film Classification commissioned a survey that suggested 51% of 11 to 13-year-olds had seen pornography online. In the majority of cases, this was accidental, and for younger children, in particular, it was traumatic. The study also revealed a disparity between what parents and children understood about the culture of sexual content: only 25% of the parents surveyed thought their child had seen pornography online, while 63% of those parents’ children said that they had seen it.
The facts are plain, whether they are palatable or not: pornography is easy to access, and is very likely to be seen by those far below any age restrictions, which are hard, if not impossible, to enforce. Also last week, the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, urged parents to “talk early, and talk often” to children about pornography and sexual harassment. She acknowledged that the conversation can be hard, but advised that parents and carers should “create the culture before the crisis. Children want to talk to their parents and carers about this. We know this because they’ve told us,” she said.
Immediately, therefore, parents should talk to their children about the dangers of watching pornography in order to preserve their balance, to answer questions on what might be the stuff of nightmares, and to prevent dysfunction as dating begins.
Parents must also limit use of smart devices in their household. In this, it is imperative that parents model their own ability to disengage from the internet and to engage with family members.
Arising from pushback by pro-porn advocates to what was in effect Eilish's plea for collective action on porn, Nicholson also points out that society does have a role. She writes:
There was a small ripple of backlash to what Eilish had to say, from pro-porn advocates who argued that she was treating all pornography as the same “bad” sort. I’m not sure that she should have had to assess the ethics of types of sexual content at that age, but what matters is that we listen to what she has to say, at 19, about her experiences of easily accessible and socially acceptable viewing of pornography.
How could a child of 11 or thereabouts make any kind of judgments when seeing shocking things done to women on porn sites? Nicholson appears to add her voice to the clamor for statutory action to limit accessibility online - in the absence of self-imposed checks on access - and to rein in the industry for the sake of the women being abused, even if those women have given consent to that abuse. The similarity of situations to that of violence in the home is compelling.
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