Patrick Freyne’s article last weekend on porn education for teenagers was both fascinating and frightening. Thanks to teacher Eoghan Cleary, students in Temple Carrig school in Greystones are having essential, serious discussions about the impact of porn on their lives.
The effect on young women is obvious but young men are affected by porn as well. One student, Liam, described how “some of the content [I saw] made me question a lot of stuff about sex itself. How violent it seemed... It made me not like the idea at all and not want to be in a relationship.”
Funny how we all congratulate ourselves for having moved on from Ireland as a place of sexual repression, where people were terrified of sex. Now, young people are terrified both of sex and of not being sexual enough as a result of encountering online porn at scarily young ages.
Porn is only a click or a tap away for every child with a smart device. In 2021, online safety charity CyberSafekids found that 89 per cent of nine-year-olds owned one. Some 82 per cent of children aged eight to 12 have an online presence, including contact with people who are complete strangers.
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The trend towards children spending too much time online was exacerbated by the pandemic because they needed access to a device for online education. Parents also tolerated much more online activity when their children were unable to take part in real-world activities.
Aside from the “ethical porn” cohort who feel that certain types of porn are fine, there is virtual unanimity that young people are accessing pornography at an age when they are completely unequipped to deal with it.
A majority believe, and it is borne out by the young people interviewed by Patrick Freyne, that porn has an insidious effect both by normalising harmful gender stereotypes and by suggesting violence is a normal part of relationships.
So, what happens at the age of 18 that makes a person impervious to all of this? Are 25-year-olds or 45-year-olds impervious to the impact of pornography? Obviously, the young brain is more vulnerable but adult brains are far from immune.
Slapping and choking
The kind of consensus that exists around porn and young people evaporates whenever anyone suggests that adults should limit their access to porn. People who suggest that porn is inherently harmful, and that watching it fuels a misogynistic industry rife with trafficking and exploitation, will be accused of being prudish and out of date.
A 2019 article in the Guardian... profiled women who had died because of the pervasiveness of strangulation in sexual relationships. Men then employed the “rough sex” defence to try to avoid the consequences
But let’s look at the real-world impact. Eoghan Cleary says that in every single class, there are references to slapping and choking, something which did not happen even four years ago.
It should be called strangulation because that is what it is. A 2019 article in the Guardian, “The fatal, hateful rise of choking during sex”, profiled women who had died because of the pervasiveness of strangulation in sexual relationships. Men then employed the “rough sex” defence to try to avoid the consequences.
The normalisation of strangulation and other acts of violence has given rise to an organisation set up by Fiona Mackenzie, dedicated to highlighting the deaths of women during violent sexual encounters. Its aims are summed up in the name: We can’t consent to this.
The organisation describes at least 60 UK cases where men killed women but has not found a single case of a woman strangling a man and killing him during sex.
Apparently, in our hyper-individualised culture where porn is a highly profitable business, if someone is consenting, there is no harm. Even if it is a practice that has the potential to kill or cause brain damage, that is their concern if they are legally an adult.
Except, in a world where women and men are being conditioned by porn to see harmful practices as normal, how free is consent? Add in alcohol and the possibility of real consent becomes even more remote.
Monetising porn
In a somewhat sick twist to the Elon Musk Twitter saga, it emerged in August that since 13 per cent of Twitter’s profits came from porn, the company thought about monetising porn. Twitter is often used to direct traffic to OnlyFans, the subscription streaming service that thrives on young girls and women performing sex acts for men who are often decades older than them.
Discussing the impact of porn with adolescents is really worthwhile but is doomed to failure so long as it is accepted as just another hobby for adults
Twitter was only deterred from setting up in opposition to OnlyFans when it realised that it lacked the content moderation needed to prevent child porn from being uploaded.
Trying to change adult attitudes to porn runs directly into opposition from one of the most powerful human motivators, greed. In September, in stark contrast to the declining profits of other online media, OnlyFans reported paying out £433 million to its owner over two years.
Discussing the impact of porn with adolescents is really worthwhile but is doomed to failure so long as it is accepted as just another hobby for adults.
No matter what we would like to think, there is no clear line between adolescence and adulthood that miraculously removes the impact of pornography on human beings. To believe anything else is culpably delusional.