The Mass Trauma of Porn

What have we done?

Imagine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her childhood, when she mentions, somewhat casually, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He introduced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had gotten her first period, without her parents knowing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time something more extreme. By ten it seemed normal. By eleven, she was watching regularly on her own. She is calm about this, reassuring you that this has happened to most of her friends.

Would anyone think this was normal? Part of coming-of-age, her healthy development? Exploring her sexuality? Or would we call this abuse?

This is exactly what is happening to children today when we hand them a smartphone. But instead of one stranger introducing them to porn, it is a billion-dollar industry, profiting from their trauma.

These days we talk a lot about trauma. We worry about the impact of words, we agonize about our parenting, we inspect every inch of our childhoods. But one trauma being tragically ignored, potentially lasting trauma, changing the minds and souls of children, is porn.

By porn I mean what Common Sense Media calls any content showing “nudity and sexual acts,” like videos of people having sex. Today, in the U.S., the average age of first exposure is twelve. And this does not just happen on dedicated porn sites. Parents can block those all they want, or trust their children would never go there, but many access this content on Instagram, X, Snapchat, Discord, Twitch, and TikTok. Many stumble across it accidentally.

Modern porn is unlike anything else in history. Children are learning about sex for the first time from social media algorithms designed to drag them toward ever-more degrading content. They are also learning from sites like Pornhub, which use addictive tactics like infinite scrolling, variable rewards, autoplay features and subscription services to unlock more. This is the gamification of graphic porn. These platforms also use data mining to track people and provide endless, personalized videos. Users are categorized by their fantasies and fetishes; “See more like this” suggestions can escalate from incest to violence to “barely legal” content; viewing habits get leaked to third parties for targeted ads; rape and assault videos can be "Recommended For You." And what we would immediately see as abuse for an individual child, we choose to ignore en masse. We pretend it has always been this way, because it is too painful to accept that it hasn’t.

This type of porn can traumatize children. Several studies have found that the earlier they are exposed to online porn, the more likely they are to view violent content, and have lower self-esteem. Later in life, porn use has also been linked to lower relationship satisfaction, and a higher likelihood of infidelity.

The impact is not only on individual children; this is doing something to our societies. What does growing up with limitless online porn do to our ability to love, to form lasting relationships? To our desire to start families? To our capacity to see people as people, instead of objects? My generation was taught to see each other not only as content to consume, and products to shop through, but as categories, sex objects, things to get pleasure from. We grew up watching what were often sex trafficking victims, likely seeing rape and abuse — and are somehow expected to file that away, to fall in love in the real world, to have romantic experiences just the same as previous generations did, to be tender and gentle and loyal, to know how.

We learned the wrong things about love. We girls learned that sex is brutal, that men are predatory and insatiable, that the only way to be loved is to become a better object. That intimacy isn’t something to be clumsily stumbled through together, but a performance to be delivered, “content” to be copied. Of course we did. If a girl grew up being shown hard core porn by a stranger, we wouldn’t be surprised if she couldn’t accept love as an adult, didn’t know how to function in relationships, couldn’t see her own worth, feared abandonment, and couldn’t fully trust. We worry that young women have learned to accept violence and being hurt. We don't worry enough that they never learned how to accept being loved.

So this is not only about violent porn, or illegal porn. Nor is it about addiction, or “problematic use.” I’m talking about the entire online porn industry. The whole thing: seeing people as sex categories, getting bored and swiping onto something more depraved, betraying partners behind backs. All of it, dehumanizing. Gazing into screens instead of eyes; preferring pixels over people; this whole numb retreat from one another. People laugh at AI girlfriends and how dystopian that seems but online porn, oh that’s natural, normal, healthy. We forget that dystopia has already arrived. Yes, AI girlfriends and sexbots are terrifying but my generation is already primed for those. We are already addicted to simulations, the nightmare has already begun, this is just what they sell after they have successfully numbed a generation and drained their drive to connect with other human beings. This is liberation, though. This is what we call progress, having everything except our humanity. Having intimate access to anything we want, except each other.

The most painful realization to me, as I get older, is the gaslighting. Girls like me grew up being told that this is completely normal; healthy, even. Pornhub is a right; it’s good for relationships. It’s not cheating; it stops men from cheating! It’s like food and water! Every guy watches it, you can’t expect him not to! You’re overthinking it; maybe you have anxiety?

And so we thought the problem was us. Boys who realized this was harming them got gaslit and ridiculed; girls were made to feel insecure and broken. And for those in Gen Z who didn’t grow up religious, who aren’t from more conservative families, we had no words to express how this made us feel. There was no language left. We couldn’t talk about morality, couldn’t talk about loyalty, couldn’t articulate any sort of spiritual degradation. That’s all reactionary and backward. We were convinced by a two decades-old billion-dollar online industry that their services are a natural need, and anyone who didn’t accept this was the problem. Until the only words we had left were their sales strategies.

Maybe that’s the best kind of marketing. Maybe the most powerful sales pitch is the one we can’t even see anymore, the one companies have convinced us is common sense, our own opinion. When something becomes this addictive and out of control, when we can’t conceive of life without it, we have to call it a good thing. It’s easier to reassure ourselves that this is ordinary and healthy, that anyone who opposes it is repressed, otherwise what the hell have we done? It’s the same with childhoods spent on screens. Something becomes so common we console ourselves that there is no other option; this is how life is now. And so there is little outrage. So few protests, campaigns, marches, or talk of trauma. Sometimes we even have the opposite. Political parties have promoted porn; celebrities have encouraged it; we celebrate the traumatizing of children for the freedom of adults.

But there is hope now; a backlash is beginning. There are brave young women admitting that being raised on porn destroyed their brains. There are brave young men deciding to give it up for good. There are confessions, everywhere: stories from children of porn addicts, from men in their twenties who wasted their potential, from girls who grew up watching simulated incest and gang-bangs since age ten. On one Reddit thread, hundreds of Gen Zers are finally opening up about when they first saw porn, with some as young as six. There are movements growing, wounded young men and women waking up to what has happened, and refusing to allow the same to happen to their children.

For most of us, the best way to start is with our words. To young women like me, who have always seen themselves as sensitive and insecure, I say your voice is more important now than ever. It’s time to use it. To young men who don’t want to degrade themselves anymore, who believe there has to be more to life and love and themselves than this, who want to be dignified and dependable, now is the time to be different. Because I’m beginning to see that all along, against all this cultural messaging — the marketing strategies, the trivialization, the gaslighting — the bravest among us were those “insecure” enough to insist that this is not okay. Those who had every reason to resign themselves, but refused.

Children are learning about sex for the first time from social media algorithms designed to drag them toward ever-more degrading content. They are learning from sites like Pornhub, which use addictive tactics like infinite scrolling, variable rewards, autoplay features and subscription services to unlock more. This is the gamification of graphic porn.

Because it’s far easier to pretend things are fine. To act as if this isn’t happening. But by doing that, we will leave another generation without the words for why this is wrong, and convinced the pain is all in their heads. We have to be brutally honest. I sat at a talk of Jon’s recently in London and he said something jarring, something we need more of. He said that boys feel that their lives are useless because they are. Well maybe the awful truth is that girls never feel enough because they aren’t anymore.

Just look at us now, the older end of Gen Z. Look at this liberated, lonely generation, trying to feel something, anything, from screens. A generation losing belief that love even exists, who increasingly expect infidelity and betrayal, who find it hard to look each other in the eye. I can’t help but think we are traumatized. And yes I know; that word is used too liberally. But maybe our actual trauma is the one we can’t bring ourselves to admit. The thing too unbearable to type out, too shameful to face. Perhaps the issue with the least outrage, the fewest protests, cuts deepest of all.

For the next generation, for their childhood, for their chances at love, we have to find our voice. We have to process the horror of pre-teens watching hardcore porn, acknowledge the scale of what is happening, confront what we have done and its consequences. Only by facing it will we find some words of our own. I hope we aren’t afraid to use them.