sites like OnlyFans have brought prostitution/sexwork into the household, supercharged by socialmedia algorithms promoting teaser videos, which reinforce this as normal and “hey, a great side hustle”.
kids (both viewers and producers) are exposed to this so young because it’s not classic pornography.
Edit: I originally wrote “Still though, sirens on the rocks”. Some, understandably, saw the sirens as the OF women—a poor metaphor choice on my part. I meant really the algorithmic engagement bait as the siren. Debatably, one could say the OF women are also sirens in this metaphor. Debatably.
What’s actually worse is the moral panic dressed up as analysis. You’re not diagnosing anything. You’re just uncomfortable that sex work is now visible and women aren’t hiding.
OnlyFans didn’t “bring it into the household.” It made public what was always there. Sex work existed long before the internet. What changed is who gets to control the narrative. Visibility is not the threat. Your loss of monopoly is.
If kids are being exposed early, that’s a failure of parenting, algorithmic design, and media silence. Not of the workers. Not of the platforms. Blaming women for being seen is not critique. It’s just updated puritanism with better lighting.
Sirens weren’t the problem. The men who refused to take responsibility for their own steering were.
Straw man argument. This isn't moral panic. It's thoughtful analysis. You may disagree with it; fine. But trying to diminish it by erecting a straw man argument isn't a credible response.
Lisa, calling it “thoughtful analysis” doesn’t magic away the hand-wringing. Every generation thinks they invented collapse. You can call it a straw man, but you’re not actually engaging with my point—you’re just allergic to your own nostalgia. If the argument is “sex work’s visibility and ease is uniquely damaging,” then prove it with something besides anxiety and Oscar rage.
You're right that every generation thinks they invented collapse. That's been true since the dawn of time.
That's not what I see being argued in this post. But perhaps I'm misreading it. I see her saying that the nature of porn has changed.
I don't think it's deniable that depictions of porn on, say, Ancient Greek amphorae, is fundamentally different from the porn being promulgated online today. I think it constitutes more than difference of form or degree.
Sasha, I can't tell to whom you're responding. Are you saying that I'm an AI-generated chatbot or somebody else in this thread is? I'm real. I write under my real name. I live in Maryland. You can easily Google me, not to mention my profile is easily available here on Substack.
(Apologies if you were replying to somebody else, but I find these threaded responses on Substack sometimes hard to decipher.)
This Jasmine person is AI. All their comments are written the same way. It’s not blank, it’s blank”
Repeatedly using the name of the person they’re responding to, using a bunch of words strangely and in a way no one would really use, always arguing every little thing not matter what anyone says.
Sorry but the Sirens and the men that fall for them are the problem. You both are. Stop trying to wrestle accountability away from people that chose to be Sirens.
Literally said both siren women and the men that solicit them are the problem yet you took that as me solely blaming the women.
What a bad faith interpretation.
This is just you showing your bias towards women and how they can do no wrong. It's just projection. "it's just decisions they choose to make there is no morality to decisions, unless those decisions come from men "
Spare me
It's both that are a fault. The seller of sex and their client. It's the same as the drug dealer and a junkie. Both are complicit.
this may be the worst argument ever constructed: sex work is positive and liberating for women, but men should resist it. dont blame women for producing and selling a product (im referencing o. f.), blame men for consuming it. are you retarded?
You’re not referencing me. You’re projecting. I never said men should “resist” sex work, and I didn’t blame them for consuming it. You built a fake argument and then got mad at it. That isn’t critique. It’s intellectual cosplay.
What I actually said is this: stop blaming women for being visible online and pretending that visibility is new corruption. If you want to talk about harm, bring evidence. Bring structure. Don’t bring your feelings and expect applause.
Sex work is not inherently liberating or inherently oppressive. It is labour. It exists within systems. Sometimes exploitative, sometimes empowering, always complex. Like most industries. If you can’t tolerate that level of nuance, this isn’t the conversation for you.
Also, if you’re going to throw slurs around, at least read the post first. Or don’t. I’m not writing for you.
"Sirens weren’t the problem. The men who refused to take responsibility for their own steering were." those were YOUR words. not me "projecting". to recapitulate "the girls selling their bodies to young men arent the problem, the men "refusing to take responsibility" (ie consuming the product) are the problem." no, im pretty sure the girls selling the poison are a big part of the problem.
but whats even worse are you, the enablers. because its not just young men who are the victims. the girls are also victims. being sold the lie, "selling your sexuality, your dignity, is not only emotionally and psychologically risk free, its positive! its empowering!" that is an abusive lie. there are thousands, probably millions, of girls who DEEPLY regret doing porn. and its taken from them something they can never fully recover. the zero cost, all reward message is a disgusting lie. and a casual "well it may not be for everyone" isnt exculpatory. people like you have destroyed countless lives with your lies.
? I'm not blaming women. Maybe you took my, admittedly not entirely perfect, metaphor in the wrong direction (namely, who the sirens are). I suppose I'm primarily blaming..the intangible spectre of society and technology?...it was more of a lamentation.
That being said, I _would_ like to blame:
- Algorithmic design, as you point out.
- The companies and platforms. Strangely you let them off the hook even though they designed the algorithms and have responsibility for safeguarding the platform and users.
- (With a smaller share of the blame) The creators. Gasp. I know, a treacherous turn. But, they definitely have agency in this. As you suggest, they are "controlling the narrative" more, and that narrative often targets very young adolescents who are already dopamine-hooked to their devices.
Though you say OnlyFans didn't bring sex work into the household..I think it very much did both conceptually and literally. Once again, for both producers and consumers. Models can broadcast themselves from their bedrooms to those across the world, letting horny teenagers swipe their credit cards all night.
Ultimately, if you don't agree there's an issue with the availability of OF/porn for teenagers and algorithmic gaming luring them in, and rather you see this new phenomenon as merely sex worker empowerment, then I'm not sure there's much of a discussion we can sort out. imo, it's both.
If you think that being a pawn of a giant industry profiting off of addiction is freedom, please reconsider that premise. Let's not apply old arguments used in the 70s to contemporary life. Different times. This is about business, not freedom. And business is winning.
Encouraging 18 year old girls to prostitute themselves online when they were far removed from that culture and concept is not good. It is harming our society and the sooner it is removed the better. If parents did what you said you would call them abusive for preventing their child interacting with online strangers trying to feed them porn.
No soul was harmed in the making of this reply, but thanks for the projection. You assume profit = pain because you’ve only ever traded labour for shame. I didn’t degrade myself. You just can’t fathom a woman choosing visibility on her own terms. If an AI did write it, you just got intellectually outboxed by a robot. Either way, you lost. Now decide: do you want it to be fake, or do you want it to stop hurting your feelings?
You write with Ai. That is obvious. Your entire persona is possibly Ai. “Jasmine Belmont” may not exist at all. I’m about 90% sure she doesn’t except as an Ai creation.
“Sirens weren’t the problem,” I don’t know sounds like something a siren would say. I think we can both recognize that prostitutes making content they know children are going to be able to have access to, share just as much responsibility for this as do the parents. Sirens actually were the problem for singing their song to lure men in, the men did have a responsibility to avoid their call. To ignore the “sex workers” (a euphemism I find distasteful) responsibility in perpetuating sex abuse and involving themselves in an industry that profits from human trafficking and sex slavery, is literally victim blaming. You right now are basically saying “well if kids didn’t want to see their genitals, they shouldn’t have clicked on the video.” I understand you think this is all hand wringing or some attack against sex workers or something. It’s not, that’s not something you get to just put on people who disagree with you.
Im a Merchant Mariner, I have been all over this world, mostly a lot of poor third world places. Sex work is so prevalent out in the open in every single third world country I’ve been to. Most of the time they are being held in the position as their passport is “held”for them. Some i talked to said they were happy doing it, whether it was true or not I don’t know. In those instances im not so sure it was a failure of parenting as much as it was a necessity, usually they sent their money back home to their families. As a parent to a girl, it’s a dread i fear that I have to navigate this, but the deeper question I have, is do young kids believe that this is love? Is it affection? And if thats so are they the only displays they have of those things?
My youngest is 19 and I was shocked to realize how nonchalant sexting is with adolescents now, too. It's become no big deal, almost like asking for a phone number 30 years ago. The amount of d*ck pics girls receive before age 18 is staggering.
Ahhh I don’t know I can’t imagine porn to be a bigger trauma than just getting beaten up by your parents as children used to got beaten up. Like it’s just stupid to look at porn and assume you know everything about males sexuality it’s as stupid to assume knowing about female sexuality from watching porn
Thank you for this, Freya. I'm one of the many people reading this who have had their lives damaged by pornography. I appreciate your honesty and bravery, and for insisting that it isn't okay.
I discovered my first porn tape at the age of 11, and it impacted the rest of my teen years and early adultlife, by sparking the addiction. Only once I began living for myself, and in service to my partner, was I able to then set better habits that removed this crap from my life. Seeing the sunrise and no screens for 30 days was a powerful first step.
"Boys who realized this was harming them got gaslit and ridiculed; girls were made to feel insecure and broken."
I have anecdotally heard that many young people who develop gender dysphoria did so in reaction to porn, the girls fleeing womanhood "like a house on fire" and the boys thinking that if porn describes manhood, then testosterone is "toxic" and that it and all maleness must be eliminated from their body. There are also men/boys who describe porn making them want medical gender transitions for sexual reasons. Unfortunately, MD's are ready to "help," once they hit 18, in any state, no mental health evaluation needed ("informed consent"), just go to Planned Parenthood. In blue states, even earlier.
Some really destructive stuff is making its way to young impressionable people right under their parents' and other caregiver's noses.
I’m sorry but this is absurd. Being trans isn’t a trauma response, it is simply a possible relationship to a person’s gender identity. It is terribly dangerous as we have done so much to de-pathologize homosexual and trans people and this kind of rhetoric takes us back to decades ago.
You're naive if you think that part of the massive spike in girls calling themselves "nonbinary" or "trans" in the last decade is not due to witnessing the oppression and degradation of women in porn. If that represents womanhood, who would want to sign up for that? Girls traditionally never had issues with their natal sex, it was very young (and future gay) males who historically expressed the wish to be the opposite sex. Part of the new phenomenon of girls identifying out of femaleness is due to the wish not to be treated as sex objects. A trans identity is a way to escape society's treatment of women and girls, whether it is objectification (always having to look and act like a bimbo, a la some reality shows) or sexual abuse.
I’m not naive. I am informed. I have been studying this for many years. The amount of oppression that LGBTQ people have dealt with created a ton of repression. The advancement of our rights has made more people feel safe enough to explore their identities outside of the paradigm of gender binarism. I speak from my lived experience, and from the lived experience of so many other people like me, not just from opinions based on research. It is incredibly naive and disturbing that you think people can be pushed into embracing a gender identity different from their own. Women have historically always been vilified. Actually they have never ever been respected as much as they are respected now. Your argument simply does not stand and it is filled with transphobia, ignorance and arrogance. And this kind of disinformation is harmful.
I’m a GenX parent, and I’m a transphobe. Meaning: I have witnessed the carnage of state-sponsored permanent, debilitating, loss-of-function elective cosmetic chemical and surgical sex trait modifications performed on teenage girls and boys, and it is indeed terrifying. The worst part of it is the way these ghastly and ghoulish “remedies” for emotional distress are promoted as “lifesaving.” In my jurisdiction, we are living in an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” scenario, wherein anyone even raising tentative doubts about whether amputation of healthy flesh and organs is an effective suicide prevention for young people gets shrieked at, bullied, and excommunicated from polite society by aggressive “trans allies.”
So yes, I’ve been effectively conditioned to be “phobic” about all things “trans.” I see the rainbow as a terrorist symbol now. And I was once someone who proudly marched in rallies for gay marriage. Call me a hateful bigot, I am full of care and concern about best outcomes for all kids, gay and straight. But I do not believe there is such a thing as a “gender identity” separate from biological sex, and it is horrifying to see kids and families being destroyed by that erroneous concept.
Why do you lump LGB together with QT? Many would argue they don't belong together. LGB are sexual orientations, they are about who someone is attracted to. What is QT?
Have you researched how homophobic Evangelical Christian parents are transing their kids rather than accepting an effeminate son or tomboy daughter? At the Tavistock GIDS in England, the joke was that there would be "no gay kids left."
A lot of the "research output" there is to study is itself ideology in the form of "science". Especially since it's all soft science, and can easily bend whetever way the wind blows. And even more so when speaking against that wind in the past decades got one out of research grants, book deals, journals, or even totally exciled from academy.
Correlation is one of the basic mechanisms by which we detect causation.
Lacking an evident hard causal mechanism (e.g. genetics, physics, etc), observance of correlation and applying rational thinking to exclude independent variables that just happen to match trendlines is the very basis of common sense deductions.
MANY female detransitioners, young women who for a while wanted to be seen as men, mention how viewing the degradation of women in pornography made them want to not be women.
MANY male detransitioners, young men who for a while wanted to not be seen as men, mention how viewing on males abused women in pornography made them not want to be men because they did not want to be seen by others as abusers.
And many of these young people also realized that they are homosexual and had internalized homophobia, so they thought their same-sex attraction meant that their same-sex attraction meant that they were "really" of the opposite sex and so heterosexual.
MANY young people who are "identifying" as "transgender" have been sexually abused and want to dissociate from their sexed bodies in the magical belief that they would not have been sexually abused if they did not have the sexed bodies that they in fact have.
I understand that you’re raising concerns that come from listening to people who have had painful or complicated experiences with gender identity, and it’s important to take those stories seriously. But it’s equally important not to generalize them or turn them into an argument against the legitimacy of trans identities as a whole.
Some detransitioners have described trauma, internalized homophobia, or discomfort with their bodies. These are valid experiences. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of transgender people who access gender-affirming care report lasting benefits, improved mental health, and no regret. This is supported by decades of research and by major medical associations worldwide, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the World Health Organization.
Being trans is not a pathology. It is not caused by exposure to pornography, nor is it a symptom of abuse. Many cisgender people are also deeply harmed by those same things, but we do not conclude that their identities are invalid. What’s often missing in these discussions is nuance. People are complex. Their paths to self-understanding are rarely linear. Some change how they describe themselves over time. That’s part of being human, not proof that trans identity is a mistake or a trend.
If we are truly concerned about sexual violence, misogyny, and homophobia, we should confront those forces directly. Blaming trans identity for the harms caused by a deeply unequal society only adds to the suffering of people who are already marginalized.
Having gender dysphoria isn't a trauma response, no, yet there is mounting evidence that part (NOT all) of the spike in LGBTQ+ self-identification in GenZ and Gen Alpha is because of mimetic social dynamics as opposed to truly indwelling, experienced (edited for clarity) conditions. If that fact isn't addressed, then our society will not progress in healthily raising children in a digital age.
Being transgender is not a ‘psychiatric condition’ in the way that phrase implies. It’s not a pathology or a mental illness - it’s a deeply felt aspect of someone’s identity and experience of gender. Leading medical and psychological organizations, like the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association, have moved away from defining trans identities as mental disorders. Instead, the focus is on affirming care, recognizing the distress that can come from living in a society that doesn’t always accept or understand trans people - not from being trans itself.
Describing transness as a ‘truly indwelling psychiatric condition’ risks reinforcing stigma and misunderstanding. It’s more respectful - and more accurate - to speak of it as a legitimate and human variation in gender experience. If we truly care about raising healthy kids, we should make sure they feel safe and are not demanded by society to ignore huge portions of their identity. We have been there, and it’s not pretty.
No one is "born in the wrong body." It is damaging to people to alienate them from their natal sex when what they really need is therapy to accept the bodies that they live in, not health altering and sterilizing chemicals and mutilating surgeries to try to look like something they can never truly be. 100% a mental illness. And the organizations that you quote as supporting this farce have been captured and bullied by ideological activists pushing their own agenda. Complications from pharmaceuticals and surgeries, a documented increase risk of suicide 10 years into transition, why would you wish that on anyone?
Yes it is. Self harm (via GAC) and deciding to pretend to be something you're not for the rest of your life are prima facie evidence of poor ill mental health.
Fair enough on my terminology. However, with a word swap, I hold to my point. Gender dysphoria is a legitimate lived experience for some, and for others it is a frame that is claimed for reasons that are different from those for whom it is their only experience. To ignore that categorical distinction among people (especially adolescents) who are trans and people who are not in the same way, is to ignore something that is true in society. And if we ignore what is true, then we cannot truly seek healing.
Pretty sure trans activists had it removed from the "mental health" classification to enable tax-payer funded "gender affirming care" because if its a mental affliction (hint, it is), then surgery isn't a solution... so,
Hey, that's cool how you know what "being trans" is and isn't. "it is simply a possible relationship to a person's gender identity" and stuff. Dead simple. Thanks for clearing that up.
You are mislead. There are many trans people who have made that connection, one famously stated that "sissy porn made me trans". Girls see how they are portrayed in porn and want nothing to do with it. Particularly those who have already suffered sexual abuse. Better to be unattractive to men than become their piece of meat. And nothing is more unattractive to a heterosexual man that another man, or a female who looks like one.
For many years thought I might be trans because I didn't want to be a man anymore, because I felt being a man was "bad." (In other words, I was traumatized out of believing in the dignity of my gender.) In your words, it's indeed a possible relationship to one's gender identity—and relationships are affected by our life experiences and viewpoints. Once I healed my relationship with my gender, boom, turns out I was happy being a man. This is not to say it's a common story at all, but it's my story.
Exactly what makes you an expert on this topic? Why are you so sure that gay or trans isn’t a trauma response? Maybe not for all, but definitely for some.
I’m a transgender man who happily and thankfully transitioned as a minor. 11 years later I’m happily married, in a masters program, and raising my step daughter. I was shocked to scroll down to read the comments and see the unnecessary vitriol towards trans people. Thank you for taking the time to provide substantive rebuttals to the anecdotal evidence provided, I appreciate it.
+1 Francesca. (also, not that you need it, but sorry for the vitriol out here.)
Saying porn induces gender dysphoria is a bold claim to make without any evidence (yes, talking to you @forthekids). Even evidence aside, I think the proposed mechanisms/reasons suggested here are...strange and unintuitive (in the case of boys) or absent (for girls).
To suggest that _porn_ is the only--or even the main--source where boys might be exposed to the issues with masculinity is..invalid. Society and history are smothered in examples. And then to suggest that this leads to GD is also a big leap.
No reason is given for girls wanting to transition, although, one could imagine some negative response. But again, it's a steep claim to propose GD.
And finally, why isn't the response the uniform? Boys want to reject toxic masculinity..yet girls are attracted towards it?
The boys don't want to reject toxic masculinity, they want to participate in it from the female side. It is called autogynophilia. And, as for girls, they are very susceptible to social contagion, social pressures and groupthink (see: anorexia, cutting, tics). Perfect example of falling prey to groupthink is our friend Francesca here, whose postmodern brain has lost all critical thinking skills, like most of the "Be Kind' generation. It starts out by trying to be tolerant and accepting, and before you know it, you are cheerleading for the most horrific, destructive, ghastly medical scandal in history and smiling while your sex class loses all rights to single sex anything.
I am not your friend. You are free to base your point of view on fantasy-based theories, and handpicked anecdotal data that has no scientific backing whatsoever. But you are not free to call me your friend. I don’t know you, and I’m happy to keep things that way.
I have long suspected that the rise of trans interest on the heels of the porn explosion was no coincidence. Trans can be seen as a flight from sexuality rather than the embrace of something different. (Others will disagree and that is their right.)
Yet it is my sense that what is marketed currently is devoid of merit, celebrating violence and the debasement of both sexes. No one is wrong to run away and, to that extent, compassion for those who experience gender dysphoria is in order.
"Gender dysphoria" is not what heterosexual adult males are experiencing when they announce that they are really women and lesbians. They are exhibiting the sexual fetish of autogynephilia, which is characterized by males being sexually aroused at the thought that they have female bodies, most notably female breasts.
Not a fetish, a paraphilia. A paraphilia involves inflicting it on others without their consent. Violating boundaries and norms are part of the arousal.
True, but do you really think AGP drives young adolescent boys? Why the huge spike in young girls who declare themselves non binary on their way to trans man? I’m genuinely curious. There has to be a common instigating factor. Statistics don’t lie. The incidence of homosexuality in both males and females has remained stable for years. There has been a literal trans explosion.
No, AGP does not cause adolescent boys to imagine that they are girls. Nor are young women motivated to call themselves as "nonbinary" or then move on to seeing themselves as "trans men".
*Young people are being force-fed transgender ideology by "progressive" teachers and other school staff, including school counselors.
*Social media and the isolation of children and adolescents due to school closures because of Covid has greatly increased social anxiety and other anxiety among younger people.
*Social media also boosts social contagions, particularly among young females (Young females are always more prone to social contagions.)
*Kids are being told that normal adolescent insecurities and confusions about sexual orientation, the changes in their bodies during puberty, and the overall adolescent search for "who am I" actually means they "might be transgender".
Autogynephiles have gender dysphoria, often worse than HSTS's. This is well documented throughout Blanchard, Lawrence, etc. I also observed it first hand.
For those who do not know, HSTS refers to males who want to be seen as women who are attracted to men or females who want to be seen as men who are attracted to women. This means they are homosexual. Autogynephiles are males who are attracted to females, I.e., heterosexual.
You're not citing data. You're importing panic. Linking gender dysphoria to porn consumption is not just reductionist. It’s dangerous. It's the same logic that once claimed comic books cause violence or that gay teachers "turn kids gay."
Dysphoria is not porn-induced. It’s not a response to male failure. It’s not trauma cosplay. It’s a real and complex experience that cannot be collapsed into your cherry-picked anecdotes and secondhand Reddit spirals.
The only thing being proven here is how quickly adults will demonise media, disown youth autonomy, and erase queer existence if it makes them uncomfortable. Trans people don’t “flee womanhood like a house on fire.” They were never at home there.
If you're concerned about youth vulnerability, start with media literacy, consent frameworks, and healthcare access. Not censorship and trans panic dressed as parental grief.
You’re so desensitized you can’t understand why people are disturbed by preteens watching hardcore porn by the millions and you are defensive over an “experience” that was easily admitted to be a “disorder” by the trans crowd a few years ago.
You will be hated for saying pornography and transgenderism is related but watching 4chan and Discord culture over the years they are clearly linked. This doesn't mean every trans person is a porn addict but there are porn addicts that try to live out their fantasies by transitioning.
Recently on r/MtF, they stickied a post at the top of the subreddit telling all the degenerate males to stop “horny posting” because it gives transwomen “bad optics.” 🙄
I cannot even begin to quantify the amount of times I have seen online conversations or had in-person conversations where something along these lines are uttered in response to a woman who is distraught about her partner’s use of porn, typically from another woman: “porn use is natural, what do you expect from men?!”
To which my response, whether I state it or just choose to keep it in my own head, is “no it isn’t”.
We seem to have confused the natural attraction to attractive people and sexually suggestive behaviors with 24/7 instant access to literally every possible variety of person doing literally every single possible variation of sex act—with no effort or investment required on the part of the viewer.
This isn’t normal, look into history—this is unprecedented. And please, do not be one of those people who compares erotic artwork from the 1700s or whatever to hardcore porn of today, it isn’t the same, everyone knows that, please save it.
Not only is it not normal to access such experiences without having to put some sort of effort into the matter, it isn’t normal to be stimulated in such a manner. This should be obvious, but somehow apparently isn’t to many. It’s the old “common doesn’t mean normal” thing.
When we add in the fact that this isn’t just an adult problem but is now a problem of childhood, the premise should be all the more obvious. The willful ignorance and purposeful disregard of this problem by adults who defend the industry because of their own attachment to it speaks to both the worst parts of human nature and the power of the product. The industry is to blame, but so are individual adults who defend it.
Take two seconds to think critically about history, human nature and the world we live in and realize that just because we grew up with it doesn’t mean this is healthy and fine.
A medium is “the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses”. In being critical of the substance the system produces and sells in order to convey a twisted, artificial, industrialized version of human sexuality to the senses of the people, is one not also being critical of the system itself?
Personal discomfort is the result of accessing the truth about the substance.
The scale is not the only thing that has changed, the medium itself has changed. An erotic Venus figure has morphed into videos of barely legal (or hell, not legal at all) teenagers getting deep throated by strangers until they vomit, and the form and structure of the continued subjugation of human sexuality continues to morph via technology—into such atrocities like deepfakes and AI child sex abuse materials.
Human desire actually is changing as a result of pornography. It encourages objectification and as such, sexual violence, particularly against women and children. Consider the fact that we have record numbers of children offending against other children. Problematic sexual behavior amongst the pediatric population is highly associated with exposure to both non-violent and violent porn. Pornography is a very active participant in the evolution of the human brain and considering the massive scale you speak of here (apparently as a positive thing), the damage is being done on the same massive scale and it starts in childhood.
The fact that women produce and profit from their own exploitation and the inevitable harm of the children exposed to their “work” isn’t the boon to feminism you clearly think it is. Through legitimizing the commodification of both one’s body and sexuality, those who consciously and actively participate in various forms of prostitution and call it empowerment are in fact glorifying the abuse and harm of both the women and children who engage in the system not as a matter of choice but of force or desperation. The “happy hooker” is the more tasteful, easily digestible facade of an industry that is based in exploitation. Exploitation is inherent in the premise of the work and the individual is an agent of the system that work exists within.
I am angry about algorithmic targeting, lack of age gates and exploitative platforms. I also am angry that the people who produce and profit off of all of these things, including women, choose to continue to do so despite knowing of the existence of all of these things—things their work is tied to, whether they like it or not. Again, willfull ignorance and purposeful disregard—except this time with a fat paycheck attached to it. Pornography isn’t formed by human desire, it is forming human desire and is itself formed by human greed. That’s analysis, not stigma.
Workers, survivors, humans, yes. Products, no. People are not products. Stating this isn’t erasing you, it truthfully perceiving you as a person with a natural born right to human dignity, not a product.
Emily, you have built a cathedral out of anxiety and called it analysis. Let’s cut through the sermon:
* Blaming the medium: You frame porn as an alien substance injected into society, warping minds and rewiring desire. If the medium is so powerful, where is the actual evidence? Child-on-child offending and sexual violence rates have not exploded in the age of mass porn. You want data to match your panic, but you keep serving vibes and headlines.
* Historical amnesia: You say this era is unprecedented. Sex work and explicit content are older than every modern institution. The only real shift is who gets paid and who gets seen. Now that women, queer people, and minorities are no longer invisible, it suddenly becomes a threat. If your outrage is about deepfakes and child abuse, fight for regulation and prosecution. Do not camouflage tech panic as a crusade against all sex work.
* Human desire is not that fragile: Every new media gets blamed for social collapse - novels, TV, games. If you want to debate what shapes desire, look at capitalism, tech, and social isolation, not the existence of porn or the fact that people masturbate.
* Workers as products: No one using “product” denies their humanity. It is a comment on commodification, and that includes every wage worker alive. Sex just makes you nervous, so you turn it into a moral outlier.
* The myth of the fat paycheck: If porn is so lucrative, why are most sex workers barely scraping by? The ones cashing in are platforms. You keep mixing up billion-dollar companies with individual women just trying to pay rent.
* Selective outrage: If you cared about exploitation and greed, your outrage would include TikTok addiction, influencer child-labour, Amazon’s warehouses, and YouTube radicalisation. All those industries chew up humanity on a bigger scale. Sex is just your easy villain.
You are not seeing products, you are seeing your own fears reflected back. You want someone to blame for a world you cannot control. The truth is that porn and sex work are not the source of your discomfort. Panic and the urge to police desire are. If you wanted dignity for workers, you would stop using women as metaphors for decline every time you feel anxious about what is popular.
You are not defending childhood. You are writing eulogies for a fantasy of control that never existed.
Just curious but what do you think to the concept of ethical porn and that as the solution to sites like PornHub? Just it is refreshing to read an in-depth comment but using only extremes to argue against something always makes me a little weary...be interested in your perspective
I appreciate this question! I do not know much about how it is made but I would first want to ask what it is about it exactly that makes it ethical, and how the makers and participants would define “ethical”.
I think it is tricky because as the viewer, it is essentially impossible to truly know if consent and self determination is present. We also have to consider coercion and desperation. I have 14 years of sobriety after being a heroin addict but I likely could have been coerced into some form of sex work when I was actively addicted and would have done it solely out of desperation—and being told that it was the “ethical” version of porn would have made it all the more easier for me to talk myself into it.
If the themes are milder and less violent/degrading, that is obviously a positive, but generally I am pretty staunchly against the sale of the body as a product due to the precedent it sets. This is why I am also against things like surrogacy and egg donation.
Wow. This is powerful. I am a female ER doctor who treats girls and women in the aftermath of sexual trauma and mental health crises. I just want to applaud you for taking a stance and sharing your voice.
Reading this brings tears to my eyes. I am well aware of the shame and destruction that porn can bring, particularly when viewed at a young age (mine was 7). Despite my efforts, I am still battling this constant addiction. Thank you for taking the time to write this.
One could share anything publicly or with strangers; more easily offline.
When you feel like continuing this conversation, we can agree on what software we're going to use. You can add e.g. here messages about anything you're going to publish. The more privately one wants to share some things, the more carefully we prepare.
Why would one share more?
1. Once one starts sharing, it's useful to share a lot on that topic.
I see it happening to me and others: we want to discuss a topic comprehensively. Anybody may have seen person 1 displeased with the fact that person 2 has just interrupted their speech. That energy wants to flow, so it hurts when it's dammed; one is going to look for opportunities for that energy to continue flowing.
One can choose e.g. a friend or a psychotherapist as a listener or even as a reader.
2. I think that it's worth my while to address some words to someone when it is probable that they would care, that they would understand, or that they would take effective actions together with me.
My best childhood friend was shown hardcore porn by her stepfather. It twisted her into a double-life of being a "normal" girl and one who was sex-obsessed. She entered prostitution as a young woman and ended up running a brothel. She eventually got out of it, got married, had two children, but her understanding of "love" was permanently damaged.
As parents it is urgent that we speak with our children about porn (in age-appropriate ways) and why it damages our hearts and minds. If children know that they can talk about what they accidentally, or purposely, encountered online it can help keep them from spiralling into porn addiction. Having devices only in common areas of the home, not bedrooms, can help avoid temptation and development of secrets.
Smartphones are "pocket porn". One of the most helpful ways to support children in avoiding porn exposure is delaying phones, and opting for simple flip phones.
Thank you Freya for this crucial wake up call to parents!
This is why I wrote a piece last week calling on parents to stop giving smartphones & tablets to minors. Otherwise, internet porn is impossible to protect our kids from. Moms, we must protect our girls (and boys). And I believe we have a moral, and Biblical, obligation to do so.
"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?"
This. Someone finally seeing this and saying it literally made me tear up. YES. I see it constantly. If a woman has an issue with her partner watching porn than she is "the problem". The manipulation is just disgusting.
This is absolutely appalling. I would bet my life savings that this "doctor" has a porn habit himself that he doesn't want to face and offers this kind of treatment to patients to justify his own behavior.
"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."
We have universalized child sexual abuse. Boys especially are the target and cannot possibly consent to their reaction to discovering our culture’s foul open secret.
The appalling influence on the english language of this putrid product is one of the worst aspects of this horror show.
For me, the gaslighting was the worst part. For a decade when I mustered the courage to admit and talk about my daily "porn" use, every counsellor or therapist (usually a woman) looked at me strangely and said some version of "but that's ok, everyone watches porn” - like that was supposed to be comforting, instead of brutally demoralizing and trust-destroying. The media actively promote it. Academics justify it with their ridiculous “studies” as harmless. I felt like I was trapped in the invasion of the body snatchers. We need a “me too” for boys, and a call for accountability from academics, educators and media who whitewashed this for decades.
I’m over 5 years off of it now but my self-respect is still decimated. I wanted to be a teacher but couldn’t bring myself to look students in the eye, how could I since once a day I was visiting Pornhub to look at women masturbate. IT IS A DRUG STRONGER THEN CRACK. It destroyed my integrity and there was zero understanding, only insistence that the shame I felt was the problem, not the fact that I was traumatized by it, and angry at the gaslighting about something so obviously terrible. The consequences Freya describes hit me like a truck 15 years ago as I knew this was happening, and no one seemed to believe me or care. Everyone laughing and ignoring it was worse than the actual act. The inability to articulate this or get anyone to listen drove me to resent society. I am dumbfounded at our unwillingness to look at its connection to incels, school shooters, p diddy, Gisele picot, human trafficking, male loneliness, female depression, sextortion, virulent online misogyny, lack of trust in each other etc.
Read this article to the end for a perfect example of media, political and academic collusion on this issue.
Pictures/film/litterature that is highly sexually explicit, showing individuals having sex or in sexual situations. Legally, individuals watching porn, and individuals in the porn material, must be over 18 years of age. The purpose of porn is to sexually arouse.
Example: “My friend really enjoys watching porn.”
What is furry porn?
This is a type of pornography containing images, videos or animations of animals having sex. Reach out to us if you have questions about your situation and want more information.
I think that the gaslighting around how harmless “porn” is for a generation has made it impossible for men to grieve being so brutally disabused of their boyhood chivalry by that foul new product. It comes out sideways as rage and shame. We have sexually abused a generation of boys and told them they liked it. How can a 14 year old consent to what happens when he googles “sex”? We weaponized puberty against them. And then gaslit them into oblivion.
Your pain is real. But pain alone is not proof that porn is universally harmful. It is proof that you had no tools, no literacy, and no guidance. That is a systemic failure. Not a reason to collapse the entire industry.
What you describe is not a global moral truth. It is a personal reckoning. Porn did not destroy your integrity. Shame did. Silence did. Cultural repression did. Those are not the fault of performers or platforms. They are the fault of the world that made you believe desire is inherently corrupt.
Some people consume adult content ethically and live grounded lives. Some are the people you watched. They are not mindless objects. They are workers. They are autonomous. They exist whether you approve of their role or not.
You want a reckoning. Fine. But do not erase others to have it. Your experience does not justify criminalising choice, silencing performers, or blaming an entire industry for what you were never taught to handle.
If society failed you, fight the silence. Not the visibility.
They’ve terrorized people for their convenience. The trade off is unconscionable. You ignore the many mass side effects, on purpose. What a silly comment. It’s fuelling trafficking, sextortion, it killed flirting, it polluted the language, it’s so divide. There is no ethical way to distribute it every minor in the world. You are insane.
While I agree that kids viewing porn is a huge issue and hence a good reason to keep phones away from them. I fear that it's growing into a hysteria. It's not like porn is the only issue young people are facing. They are also facing big problems like the cost of living crisis, the increasing chasm between the rich and the poor, political polarization, and climate change. Then there's the youth mental health crisis, and yes I know that porn is contributing to the latter, but it's absolutely not the only reason.
Another thing is sexual abuse, and other forms of abuse done for real to kids and teens by by people they know like their parents, their parents partners, their parents friends, etc. Are these other things also not important? Is a kid with a stable home life who accidently viewed hardcore porn, worse off then the next kid who doesn't have a stable home life and been abused by people he or she knows?
I see the side effects. I just reject your framing. You’re treating adult content as a biological weapon when the real crisis is literacy, repression, and the cult of shame that made you feel broken for wanting anything at all.
You’re not describing harm. You’re describing untreated guilt.
And no, that doesn’t justify burning the whole industry down to soothe your conscience. You weren’t terrorised. You were unprepared. And now you want a world without mirrors.
I’ll be running for school board in Victoria, BC in 2026. Voices like yours could help me be more effective in my effort to highlight the issue and encourage conversations about the destabilizing and dangerous aspects of kids’ access to and adults’ encouraging the use of porn as part of Canadian sex ed school curriculum. I need people who are willing to speak on the record and be quoted by name, so as not to have this waved away and dismissed as heresay.
it’s worse than that.
sites like OnlyFans have brought prostitution/sexwork into the household, supercharged by socialmedia algorithms promoting teaser videos, which reinforce this as normal and “hey, a great side hustle”.
kids (both viewers and producers) are exposed to this so young because it’s not classic pornography.
Edit: I originally wrote “Still though, sirens on the rocks”. Some, understandably, saw the sirens as the OF women—a poor metaphor choice on my part. I meant really the algorithmic engagement bait as the siren. Debatably, one could say the OF women are also sirens in this metaphor. Debatably.
What’s actually worse is the moral panic dressed up as analysis. You’re not diagnosing anything. You’re just uncomfortable that sex work is now visible and women aren’t hiding.
OnlyFans didn’t “bring it into the household.” It made public what was always there. Sex work existed long before the internet. What changed is who gets to control the narrative. Visibility is not the threat. Your loss of monopoly is.
If kids are being exposed early, that’s a failure of parenting, algorithmic design, and media silence. Not of the workers. Not of the platforms. Blaming women for being seen is not critique. It’s just updated puritanism with better lighting.
Sirens weren’t the problem. The men who refused to take responsibility for their own steering were.
Straw man argument. This isn't moral panic. It's thoughtful analysis. You may disagree with it; fine. But trying to diminish it by erecting a straw man argument isn't a credible response.
Lisa, calling it “thoughtful analysis” doesn’t magic away the hand-wringing. Every generation thinks they invented collapse. You can call it a straw man, but you’re not actually engaging with my point—you’re just allergic to your own nostalgia. If the argument is “sex work’s visibility and ease is uniquely damaging,” then prove it with something besides anxiety and Oscar rage.
You're right that every generation thinks they invented collapse. That's been true since the dawn of time.
That's not what I see being argued in this post. But perhaps I'm misreading it. I see her saying that the nature of porn has changed.
I don't think it's deniable that depictions of porn on, say, Ancient Greek amphorae, is fundamentally different from the porn being promulgated online today. I think it constitutes more than difference of form or degree.
You may call it "hand-wringing." We differ.
You are not arguing with a real person. Please check the profile/site. It's all AI generated images.
The definition of clickbate material behind a mask of a real advocate. Makes you wonder who's actually hiding behind that digital fake mask...
Sasha, I can't tell to whom you're responding. Are you saying that I'm an AI-generated chatbot or somebody else in this thread is? I'm real. I write under my real name. I live in Maryland. You can easily Google me, not to mention my profile is easily available here on Substack.
(Apologies if you were replying to somebody else, but I find these threaded responses on Substack sometimes hard to decipher.)
You nailed it.
This Jasmine person is AI. All their comments are written the same way. It’s not blank, it’s blank”
Repeatedly using the name of the person they’re responding to, using a bunch of words strangely and in a way no one would really use, always arguing every little thing not matter what anyone says.
Girl how is Jasmine’s a straw man?? lol
Sorry but the Sirens and the men that fall for them are the problem. You both are. Stop trying to wrestle accountability away from people that chose to be Sirens.
Imagine blaming women for male decisions and thinking that’s ‘accountability’.
Literally said both siren women and the men that solicit them are the problem yet you took that as me solely blaming the women.
What a bad faith interpretation.
This is just you showing your bias towards women and how they can do no wrong. It's just projection. "it's just decisions they choose to make there is no morality to decisions, unless those decisions come from men "
Spare me
It's both that are a fault. The seller of sex and their client. It's the same as the drug dealer and a junkie. Both are complicit.
You are a deeply unserious person
this may be the worst argument ever constructed: sex work is positive and liberating for women, but men should resist it. dont blame women for producing and selling a product (im referencing o. f.), blame men for consuming it. are you retarded?
You’re not referencing me. You’re projecting. I never said men should “resist” sex work, and I didn’t blame them for consuming it. You built a fake argument and then got mad at it. That isn’t critique. It’s intellectual cosplay.
What I actually said is this: stop blaming women for being visible online and pretending that visibility is new corruption. If you want to talk about harm, bring evidence. Bring structure. Don’t bring your feelings and expect applause.
Sex work is not inherently liberating or inherently oppressive. It is labour. It exists within systems. Sometimes exploitative, sometimes empowering, always complex. Like most industries. If you can’t tolerate that level of nuance, this isn’t the conversation for you.
Also, if you’re going to throw slurs around, at least read the post first. Or don’t. I’m not writing for you.
"Sirens weren’t the problem. The men who refused to take responsibility for their own steering were." those were YOUR words. not me "projecting". to recapitulate "the girls selling their bodies to young men arent the problem, the men "refusing to take responsibility" (ie consuming the product) are the problem." no, im pretty sure the girls selling the poison are a big part of the problem.
but whats even worse are you, the enablers. because its not just young men who are the victims. the girls are also victims. being sold the lie, "selling your sexuality, your dignity, is not only emotionally and psychologically risk free, its positive! its empowering!" that is an abusive lie. there are thousands, probably millions, of girls who DEEPLY regret doing porn. and its taken from them something they can never fully recover. the zero cost, all reward message is a disgusting lie. and a casual "well it may not be for everyone" isnt exculpatory. people like you have destroyed countless lives with your lies.
? I'm not blaming women. Maybe you took my, admittedly not entirely perfect, metaphor in the wrong direction (namely, who the sirens are). I suppose I'm primarily blaming..the intangible spectre of society and technology?...it was more of a lamentation.
That being said, I _would_ like to blame:
- Algorithmic design, as you point out.
- The companies and platforms. Strangely you let them off the hook even though they designed the algorithms and have responsibility for safeguarding the platform and users.
- (With a smaller share of the blame) The creators. Gasp. I know, a treacherous turn. But, they definitely have agency in this. As you suggest, they are "controlling the narrative" more, and that narrative often targets very young adolescents who are already dopamine-hooked to their devices.
Though you say OnlyFans didn't bring sex work into the household..I think it very much did both conceptually and literally. Once again, for both producers and consumers. Models can broadcast themselves from their bedrooms to those across the world, letting horny teenagers swipe their credit cards all night.
Ultimately, if you don't agree there's an issue with the availability of OF/porn for teenagers and algorithmic gaming luring them in, and rather you see this new phenomenon as merely sex worker empowerment, then I'm not sure there's much of a discussion we can sort out. imo, it's both.
AI-generated nonsense.
lol how ya doin over there
AI wrote this post. Try again.
If you think that being a pawn of a giant industry profiting off of addiction is freedom, please reconsider that premise. Let's not apply old arguments used in the 70s to contemporary life. Different times. This is about business, not freedom. And business is winning.
Encouraging 18 year old girls to prostitute themselves online when they were far removed from that culture and concept is not good. It is harming our society and the sooner it is removed the better. If parents did what you said you would call them abusive for preventing their child interacting with online strangers trying to feed them porn.
Says the woman profiting from her own soul-destroying self-degradation.
Cope better.
No soul was harmed in the making of this reply, but thanks for the projection. You assume profit = pain because you’ve only ever traded labour for shame. I didn’t degrade myself. You just can’t fathom a woman choosing visibility on her own terms. If an AI did write it, you just got intellectually outboxed by a robot. Either way, you lost. Now decide: do you want it to be fake, or do you want it to stop hurting your feelings?
You write with Ai. That is obvious. Your entire persona is possibly Ai. “Jasmine Belmont” may not exist at all. I’m about 90% sure she doesn’t except as an Ai creation.
“Sirens weren’t the problem,” I don’t know sounds like something a siren would say. I think we can both recognize that prostitutes making content they know children are going to be able to have access to, share just as much responsibility for this as do the parents. Sirens actually were the problem for singing their song to lure men in, the men did have a responsibility to avoid their call. To ignore the “sex workers” (a euphemism I find distasteful) responsibility in perpetuating sex abuse and involving themselves in an industry that profits from human trafficking and sex slavery, is literally victim blaming. You right now are basically saying “well if kids didn’t want to see their genitals, they shouldn’t have clicked on the video.” I understand you think this is all hand wringing or some attack against sex workers or something. It’s not, that’s not something you get to just put on people who disagree with you.
Im a Merchant Mariner, I have been all over this world, mostly a lot of poor third world places. Sex work is so prevalent out in the open in every single third world country I’ve been to. Most of the time they are being held in the position as their passport is “held”for them. Some i talked to said they were happy doing it, whether it was true or not I don’t know. In those instances im not so sure it was a failure of parenting as much as it was a necessity, usually they sent their money back home to their families. As a parent to a girl, it’s a dread i fear that I have to navigate this, but the deeper question I have, is do young kids believe that this is love? Is it affection? And if thats so are they the only displays they have of those things?
This Jasmine person is AI. All their comments are written the same way. It’s not blank, it’s blank”
Using the name of the person they’re responding to, using a bunch of words strangely and that no one would really use.
My youngest is 19 and I was shocked to realize how nonchalant sexting is with adolescents now, too. It's become no big deal, almost like asking for a phone number 30 years ago. The amount of d*ck pics girls receive before age 18 is staggering.
And it's not helped by movies such as "Anora" and the glorification thereof.
Everyone was telling us how great this movie was, how "charming," how "profound." I thought was profoundly disturbing.
And then it went on to win Best Director, Best Picture. Best Actress at the Academy Awards. Unbelievable!
Ahhh I don’t know I can’t imagine porn to be a bigger trauma than just getting beaten up by your parents as children used to got beaten up. Like it’s just stupid to look at porn and assume you know everything about males sexuality it’s as stupid to assume knowing about female sexuality from watching porn
Thank you for this, Freya. I'm one of the many people reading this who have had their lives damaged by pornography. I appreciate your honesty and bravery, and for insisting that it isn't okay.
I discovered my first porn tape at the age of 11, and it impacted the rest of my teen years and early adultlife, by sparking the addiction. Only once I began living for myself, and in service to my partner, was I able to then set better habits that removed this crap from my life. Seeing the sunrise and no screens for 30 days was a powerful first step.
Was it as addictive when you needed to buy a tape? I think now the addiction is sparked by the ease of access.
It's useful to share the Web address of the dataset to which one refers.
Before you do, I've tried this: https://substack.com/search/from:davidmaren%20porn None of those messages of yours seem to include this story.
"Boys who realized this was harming them got gaslit and ridiculed; girls were made to feel insecure and broken."
I have anecdotally heard that many young people who develop gender dysphoria did so in reaction to porn, the girls fleeing womanhood "like a house on fire" and the boys thinking that if porn describes manhood, then testosterone is "toxic" and that it and all maleness must be eliminated from their body. There are also men/boys who describe porn making them want medical gender transitions for sexual reasons. Unfortunately, MD's are ready to "help," once they hit 18, in any state, no mental health evaluation needed ("informed consent"), just go to Planned Parenthood. In blue states, even earlier.
Some really destructive stuff is making its way to young impressionable people right under their parents' and other caregiver's noses.
Here's one parent's description (yes, an anecdote, sorry), this is a site which publishes a diverse range of parent experiences: https://www.pittparents.com/p/transgenders-connection-with-pornography
I’m sorry but this is absurd. Being trans isn’t a trauma response, it is simply a possible relationship to a person’s gender identity. It is terribly dangerous as we have done so much to de-pathologize homosexual and trans people and this kind of rhetoric takes us back to decades ago.
You're naive if you think that part of the massive spike in girls calling themselves "nonbinary" or "trans" in the last decade is not due to witnessing the oppression and degradation of women in porn. If that represents womanhood, who would want to sign up for that? Girls traditionally never had issues with their natal sex, it was very young (and future gay) males who historically expressed the wish to be the opposite sex. Part of the new phenomenon of girls identifying out of femaleness is due to the wish not to be treated as sex objects. A trans identity is a way to escape society's treatment of women and girls, whether it is objectification (always having to look and act like a bimbo, a la some reality shows) or sexual abuse.
I’m not naive. I am informed. I have been studying this for many years. The amount of oppression that LGBTQ people have dealt with created a ton of repression. The advancement of our rights has made more people feel safe enough to explore their identities outside of the paradigm of gender binarism. I speak from my lived experience, and from the lived experience of so many other people like me, not just from opinions based on research. It is incredibly naive and disturbing that you think people can be pushed into embracing a gender identity different from their own. Women have historically always been vilified. Actually they have never ever been respected as much as they are respected now. Your argument simply does not stand and it is filled with transphobia, ignorance and arrogance. And this kind of disinformation is harmful.
I’m a GenX parent, and I’m a transphobe. Meaning: I have witnessed the carnage of state-sponsored permanent, debilitating, loss-of-function elective cosmetic chemical and surgical sex trait modifications performed on teenage girls and boys, and it is indeed terrifying. The worst part of it is the way these ghastly and ghoulish “remedies” for emotional distress are promoted as “lifesaving.” In my jurisdiction, we are living in an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” scenario, wherein anyone even raising tentative doubts about whether amputation of healthy flesh and organs is an effective suicide prevention for young people gets shrieked at, bullied, and excommunicated from polite society by aggressive “trans allies.”
So yes, I’ve been effectively conditioned to be “phobic” about all things “trans.” I see the rainbow as a terrorist symbol now. And I was once someone who proudly marched in rallies for gay marriage. Call me a hateful bigot, I am full of care and concern about best outcomes for all kids, gay and straight. But I do not believe there is such a thing as a “gender identity” separate from biological sex, and it is horrifying to see kids and families being destroyed by that erroneous concept.
Why do you lump LGB together with QT? Many would argue they don't belong together. LGB are sexual orientations, they are about who someone is attracted to. What is QT?
Have you researched how homophobic Evangelical Christian parents are transing their kids rather than accepting an effeminate son or tomboy daughter? At the Tavistock GIDS in England, the joke was that there would be "no gay kids left."
> I have been studying this for many years.
A lot of the "research output" there is to study is itself ideology in the form of "science". Especially since it's all soft science, and can easily bend whetever way the wind blows. And even more so when speaking against that wind in the past decades got one out of research grants, book deals, journals, or even totally exciled from academy.
There is no such thing as a gender identity
Correlation, meet causation. Maybe the real cause of the spike in girls learning they are trans is the number of Adam Sandler films.
"Correlation is not causation" is a tired cliche.
Correlation is one of the basic mechanisms by which we detect causation.
Lacking an evident hard causal mechanism (e.g. genetics, physics, etc), observance of correlation and applying rational thinking to exclude independent variables that just happen to match trendlines is the very basis of common sense deductions.
So a woman transvests to live better when not at home?
When it comes to sexuality, I don't see that changing a female sex for a male sex (That's not what they're saying here: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Phalloplasty) solves such issues.
One can remove causes and help her rebalance.
How about actually reading this? https://www.pittparents.com/p/transgenders-connection-with-pornography
MANY female detransitioners, young women who for a while wanted to be seen as men, mention how viewing the degradation of women in pornography made them want to not be women.
MANY male detransitioners, young men who for a while wanted to not be seen as men, mention how viewing on males abused women in pornography made them not want to be men because they did not want to be seen by others as abusers.
And many of these young people also realized that they are homosexual and had internalized homophobia, so they thought their same-sex attraction meant that their same-sex attraction meant that they were "really" of the opposite sex and so heterosexual.
MANY young people who are "identifying" as "transgender" have been sexually abused and want to dissociate from their sexed bodies in the magical belief that they would not have been sexually abused if they did not have the sexed bodies that they in fact have.
I understand that you’re raising concerns that come from listening to people who have had painful or complicated experiences with gender identity, and it’s important to take those stories seriously. But it’s equally important not to generalize them or turn them into an argument against the legitimacy of trans identities as a whole.
Some detransitioners have described trauma, internalized homophobia, or discomfort with their bodies. These are valid experiences. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of transgender people who access gender-affirming care report lasting benefits, improved mental health, and no regret. This is supported by decades of research and by major medical associations worldwide, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the World Health Organization.
Being trans is not a pathology. It is not caused by exposure to pornography, nor is it a symptom of abuse. Many cisgender people are also deeply harmed by those same things, but we do not conclude that their identities are invalid. What’s often missing in these discussions is nuance. People are complex. Their paths to self-understanding are rarely linear. Some change how they describe themselves over time. That’s part of being human, not proof that trans identity is a mistake or a trend.
If we are truly concerned about sexual violence, misogyny, and homophobia, we should confront those forces directly. Blaming trans identity for the harms caused by a deeply unequal society only adds to the suffering of people who are already marginalized.
You sound so confident when you throw around terms like "decades of research" and "marginalized," Francesca.
2+2 ≠ 5
Trans-identity ≠ real
Appeal to Authority = cognitive fallacy. Gender identity - no such thing.
Having gender dysphoria isn't a trauma response, no, yet there is mounting evidence that part (NOT all) of the spike in LGBTQ+ self-identification in GenZ and Gen Alpha is because of mimetic social dynamics as opposed to truly indwelling, experienced (edited for clarity) conditions. If that fact isn't addressed, then our society will not progress in healthily raising children in a digital age.
My gender dysphoria was a trauma response to being sexually molested as a child. This is an absurd and untrue thing to say.
Sorry, are you agreeing with what I said or disagreeing with it? I can read both out of your comment but am uncertain.
Being transgender is not a ‘psychiatric condition’ in the way that phrase implies. It’s not a pathology or a mental illness - it’s a deeply felt aspect of someone’s identity and experience of gender. Leading medical and psychological organizations, like the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association, have moved away from defining trans identities as mental disorders. Instead, the focus is on affirming care, recognizing the distress that can come from living in a society that doesn’t always accept or understand trans people - not from being trans itself.
Describing transness as a ‘truly indwelling psychiatric condition’ risks reinforcing stigma and misunderstanding. It’s more respectful - and more accurate - to speak of it as a legitimate and human variation in gender experience. If we truly care about raising healthy kids, we should make sure they feel safe and are not demanded by society to ignore huge portions of their identity. We have been there, and it’s not pretty.
No one is "born in the wrong body." It is damaging to people to alienate them from their natal sex when what they really need is therapy to accept the bodies that they live in, not health altering and sterilizing chemicals and mutilating surgeries to try to look like something they can never truly be. 100% a mental illness. And the organizations that you quote as supporting this farce have been captured and bullied by ideological activists pushing their own agenda. Complications from pharmaceuticals and surgeries, a documented increase risk of suicide 10 years into transition, why would you wish that on anyone?
Yes it is. Self harm (via GAC) and deciding to pretend to be something you're not for the rest of your life are prima facie evidence of poor ill mental health.
Fair enough on my terminology. However, with a word swap, I hold to my point. Gender dysphoria is a legitimate lived experience for some, and for others it is a frame that is claimed for reasons that are different from those for whom it is their only experience. To ignore that categorical distinction among people (especially adolescents) who are trans and people who are not in the same way, is to ignore something that is true in society. And if we ignore what is true, then we cannot truly seek healing.
Pretty sure trans activists had it removed from the "mental health" classification to enable tax-payer funded "gender affirming care" because if its a mental affliction (hint, it is), then surgery isn't a solution... so,
Hey, that's cool how you know what "being trans" is and isn't. "it is simply a possible relationship to a person's gender identity" and stuff. Dead simple. Thanks for clearing that up.
Are you being sarcastic? It can be very difficult to discern when someone is being sarcastic.
I am, yes.
You recite the propaganda well, but you don't appear to understand the difference between reciting and reasoning.
Your performative indignation is the only card you have to play.
You are mislead. There are many trans people who have made that connection, one famously stated that "sissy porn made me trans". Girls see how they are portrayed in porn and want nothing to do with it. Particularly those who have already suffered sexual abuse. Better to be unattractive to men than become their piece of meat. And nothing is more unattractive to a heterosexual man that another man, or a female who looks like one.
There's no such thing as a "gender identity"
Porn is the market research and marketing campaign for the trans industry.
For many years thought I might be trans because I didn't want to be a man anymore, because I felt being a man was "bad." (In other words, I was traumatized out of believing in the dignity of my gender.) In your words, it's indeed a possible relationship to one's gender identity—and relationships are affected by our life experiences and viewpoints. Once I healed my relationship with my gender, boom, turns out I was happy being a man. This is not to say it's a common story at all, but it's my story.
Exactly what makes you an expert on this topic? Why are you so sure that gay or trans isn’t a trauma response? Maybe not for all, but definitely for some.
I’m a transgender man who happily and thankfully transitioned as a minor. 11 years later I’m happily married, in a masters program, and raising my step daughter. I was shocked to scroll down to read the comments and see the unnecessary vitriol towards trans people. Thank you for taking the time to provide substantive rebuttals to the anecdotal evidence provided, I appreciate it.
>Being trans isn’t a trauma response, it is simply a possible relationship to a person’s gender identity.
Some "possible relationships to a person’s gender identity" are trauma responses...
2+2 ≠ 5
Trans-identity ≠ real
+1 Francesca. (also, not that you need it, but sorry for the vitriol out here.)
Saying porn induces gender dysphoria is a bold claim to make without any evidence (yes, talking to you @forthekids). Even evidence aside, I think the proposed mechanisms/reasons suggested here are...strange and unintuitive (in the case of boys) or absent (for girls).
To suggest that _porn_ is the only--or even the main--source where boys might be exposed to the issues with masculinity is..invalid. Society and history are smothered in examples. And then to suggest that this leads to GD is also a big leap.
No reason is given for girls wanting to transition, although, one could imagine some negative response. But again, it's a steep claim to propose GD.
And finally, why isn't the response the uniform? Boys want to reject toxic masculinity..yet girls are attracted towards it?
The boys don't want to reject toxic masculinity, they want to participate in it from the female side. It is called autogynophilia. And, as for girls, they are very susceptible to social contagion, social pressures and groupthink (see: anorexia, cutting, tics). Perfect example of falling prey to groupthink is our friend Francesca here, whose postmodern brain has lost all critical thinking skills, like most of the "Be Kind' generation. It starts out by trying to be tolerant and accepting, and before you know it, you are cheerleading for the most horrific, destructive, ghastly medical scandal in history and smiling while your sex class loses all rights to single sex anything.
Let's remember that boys are just as susceptible to social contagion as girls. It's human quality.
I am not your friend. You are free to base your point of view on fantasy-based theories, and handpicked anecdotal data that has no scientific backing whatsoever. But you are not free to call me your friend. I don’t know you, and I’m happy to keep things that way.
Ah, I see, it was a strategic choice to not be tolerant or accepting.
There's no such thing as "gender identity." There's no such thing as "homosexuality." Even Foucault knew as much.
Do not attach trans to homosexuality, the LGB community appears to have had enough of said relationship.
I have long suspected that the rise of trans interest on the heels of the porn explosion was no coincidence. Trans can be seen as a flight from sexuality rather than the embrace of something different. (Others will disagree and that is their right.)
Yet it is my sense that what is marketed currently is devoid of merit, celebrating violence and the debasement of both sexes. No one is wrong to run away and, to that extent, compassion for those who experience gender dysphoria is in order.
"Gender dysphoria" is not what heterosexual adult males are experiencing when they announce that they are really women and lesbians. They are exhibiting the sexual fetish of autogynephilia, which is characterized by males being sexually aroused at the thought that they have female bodies, most notably female breasts.
Not a fetish, a paraphilia. A paraphilia involves inflicting it on others without their consent. Violating boundaries and norms are part of the arousal.
Thanks for pointing out that there are differences in how expert use the terms fetish and paraphilia, even though lay people might use them interchangeably. Here is a good article for those interested in understanding more: https://psychcentral.com/blog/kinks-fetishes-paraphilias-treating-issues-with-non-traditional-sexuality#1
True, but do you really think AGP drives young adolescent boys? Why the huge spike in young girls who declare themselves non binary on their way to trans man? I’m genuinely curious. There has to be a common instigating factor. Statistics don’t lie. The incidence of homosexuality in both males and females has remained stable for years. There has been a literal trans explosion.
AGPs are getting younger and younger due to online porn. Blanchard studied them mostly prior to the internet porn era.
No, AGP does not cause adolescent boys to imagine that they are girls. Nor are young women motivated to call themselves as "nonbinary" or then move on to seeing themselves as "trans men".
This is an excellent book that explains some of the reasons there has been such a surge in adolescents becoming obsessed with their so-called "gender identity:": https://www.amazon.com/Irreversible-Damage-Transgender-Seducing-Daughters/dp/168451228X
There are actually several "instigating factors".
*Young people are being force-fed transgender ideology by "progressive" teachers and other school staff, including school counselors.
*Social media and the isolation of children and adolescents due to school closures because of Covid has greatly increased social anxiety and other anxiety among younger people.
*Social media also boosts social contagions, particularly among young females (Young females are always more prone to social contagions.)
*Kids are being told that normal adolescent insecurities and confusions about sexual orientation, the changes in their bodies during puberty, and the overall adolescent search for "who am I" actually means they "might be transgender".
Here's another excellent book about this:
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Trans-Nation-Psychiatrists-Madness/dp/1510777741
There are excellent interviews with both Abigail Shrier and Dr. Miriam Grossman on Youtube.
These are two websites with lots of excellent reference materials about why young people are being caught up in concerns about "gender identity":
https://segm.org/
https://genspect.org/
Autogynephiles have gender dysphoria, often worse than HSTS's. This is well documented throughout Blanchard, Lawrence, etc. I also observed it first hand.
For those who do not know, HSTS refers to males who want to be seen as women who are attracted to men or females who want to be seen as men who are attracted to women. This means they are homosexual. Autogynephiles are males who are attracted to females, I.e., heterosexual.
Compassion, yes. Debilitating loss-of-function elective cosmetic chemical and surgical sex trait modifications, no.
You're not citing data. You're importing panic. Linking gender dysphoria to porn consumption is not just reductionist. It’s dangerous. It's the same logic that once claimed comic books cause violence or that gay teachers "turn kids gay."
Dysphoria is not porn-induced. It’s not a response to male failure. It’s not trauma cosplay. It’s a real and complex experience that cannot be collapsed into your cherry-picked anecdotes and secondhand Reddit spirals.
The only thing being proven here is how quickly adults will demonise media, disown youth autonomy, and erase queer existence if it makes them uncomfortable. Trans people don’t “flee womanhood like a house on fire.” They were never at home there.
If you're concerned about youth vulnerability, start with media literacy, consent frameworks, and healthcare access. Not censorship and trans panic dressed as parental grief.
You’re so desensitized you can’t understand why people are disturbed by preteens watching hardcore porn by the millions and you are defensive over an “experience” that was easily admitted to be a “disorder” by the trans crowd a few years ago.
You will be hated for saying pornography and transgenderism is related but watching 4chan and Discord culture over the years they are clearly linked. This doesn't mean every trans person is a porn addict but there are porn addicts that try to live out their fantasies by transitioning.
Recently on r/MtF, they stickied a post at the top of the subreddit telling all the degenerate males to stop “horny posting” because it gives transwomen “bad optics.” 🙄
I cannot even begin to quantify the amount of times I have seen online conversations or had in-person conversations where something along these lines are uttered in response to a woman who is distraught about her partner’s use of porn, typically from another woman: “porn use is natural, what do you expect from men?!”
To which my response, whether I state it or just choose to keep it in my own head, is “no it isn’t”.
We seem to have confused the natural attraction to attractive people and sexually suggestive behaviors with 24/7 instant access to literally every possible variety of person doing literally every single possible variation of sex act—with no effort or investment required on the part of the viewer.
This isn’t normal, look into history—this is unprecedented. And please, do not be one of those people who compares erotic artwork from the 1700s or whatever to hardcore porn of today, it isn’t the same, everyone knows that, please save it.
Not only is it not normal to access such experiences without having to put some sort of effort into the matter, it isn’t normal to be stimulated in such a manner. This should be obvious, but somehow apparently isn’t to many. It’s the old “common doesn’t mean normal” thing.
When we add in the fact that this isn’t just an adult problem but is now a problem of childhood, the premise should be all the more obvious. The willful ignorance and purposeful disregard of this problem by adults who defend the industry because of their own attachment to it speaks to both the worst parts of human nature and the power of the product. The industry is to blame, but so are individual adults who defend it.
Take two seconds to think critically about history, human nature and the world we live in and realize that just because we grew up with it doesn’t mean this is healthy and fine.
perfectly stated thank you
Only addicts and the naive think the current state of pornography is natural.
A medium is “the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses”. In being critical of the substance the system produces and sells in order to convey a twisted, artificial, industrialized version of human sexuality to the senses of the people, is one not also being critical of the system itself?
Personal discomfort is the result of accessing the truth about the substance.
The scale is not the only thing that has changed, the medium itself has changed. An erotic Venus figure has morphed into videos of barely legal (or hell, not legal at all) teenagers getting deep throated by strangers until they vomit, and the form and structure of the continued subjugation of human sexuality continues to morph via technology—into such atrocities like deepfakes and AI child sex abuse materials.
Human desire actually is changing as a result of pornography. It encourages objectification and as such, sexual violence, particularly against women and children. Consider the fact that we have record numbers of children offending against other children. Problematic sexual behavior amongst the pediatric population is highly associated with exposure to both non-violent and violent porn. Pornography is a very active participant in the evolution of the human brain and considering the massive scale you speak of here (apparently as a positive thing), the damage is being done on the same massive scale and it starts in childhood.
The fact that women produce and profit from their own exploitation and the inevitable harm of the children exposed to their “work” isn’t the boon to feminism you clearly think it is. Through legitimizing the commodification of both one’s body and sexuality, those who consciously and actively participate in various forms of prostitution and call it empowerment are in fact glorifying the abuse and harm of both the women and children who engage in the system not as a matter of choice but of force or desperation. The “happy hooker” is the more tasteful, easily digestible facade of an industry that is based in exploitation. Exploitation is inherent in the premise of the work and the individual is an agent of the system that work exists within.
I am angry about algorithmic targeting, lack of age gates and exploitative platforms. I also am angry that the people who produce and profit off of all of these things, including women, choose to continue to do so despite knowing of the existence of all of these things—things their work is tied to, whether they like it or not. Again, willfull ignorance and purposeful disregard—except this time with a fat paycheck attached to it. Pornography isn’t formed by human desire, it is forming human desire and is itself formed by human greed. That’s analysis, not stigma.
Workers, survivors, humans, yes. Products, no. People are not products. Stating this isn’t erasing you, it truthfully perceiving you as a person with a natural born right to human dignity, not a product.
Emily, you have built a cathedral out of anxiety and called it analysis. Let’s cut through the sermon:
* Blaming the medium: You frame porn as an alien substance injected into society, warping minds and rewiring desire. If the medium is so powerful, where is the actual evidence? Child-on-child offending and sexual violence rates have not exploded in the age of mass porn. You want data to match your panic, but you keep serving vibes and headlines.
* Historical amnesia: You say this era is unprecedented. Sex work and explicit content are older than every modern institution. The only real shift is who gets paid and who gets seen. Now that women, queer people, and minorities are no longer invisible, it suddenly becomes a threat. If your outrage is about deepfakes and child abuse, fight for regulation and prosecution. Do not camouflage tech panic as a crusade against all sex work.
* Human desire is not that fragile: Every new media gets blamed for social collapse - novels, TV, games. If you want to debate what shapes desire, look at capitalism, tech, and social isolation, not the existence of porn or the fact that people masturbate.
* Workers as products: No one using “product” denies their humanity. It is a comment on commodification, and that includes every wage worker alive. Sex just makes you nervous, so you turn it into a moral outlier.
* The myth of the fat paycheck: If porn is so lucrative, why are most sex workers barely scraping by? The ones cashing in are platforms. You keep mixing up billion-dollar companies with individual women just trying to pay rent.
* Selective outrage: If you cared about exploitation and greed, your outrage would include TikTok addiction, influencer child-labour, Amazon’s warehouses, and YouTube radicalisation. All those industries chew up humanity on a bigger scale. Sex is just your easy villain.
You are not seeing products, you are seeing your own fears reflected back. You want someone to blame for a world you cannot control. The truth is that porn and sex work are not the source of your discomfort. Panic and the urge to police desire are. If you wanted dignity for workers, you would stop using women as metaphors for decline every time you feel anxious about what is popular.
You are not defending childhood. You are writing eulogies for a fantasy of control that never existed.
This reads like AI generated swill so thanks but no thanks on any further discourse.
Just curious but what do you think to the concept of ethical porn and that as the solution to sites like PornHub? Just it is refreshing to read an in-depth comment but using only extremes to argue against something always makes me a little weary...be interested in your perspective
I appreciate this question! I do not know much about how it is made but I would first want to ask what it is about it exactly that makes it ethical, and how the makers and participants would define “ethical”.
I think it is tricky because as the viewer, it is essentially impossible to truly know if consent and self determination is present. We also have to consider coercion and desperation. I have 14 years of sobriety after being a heroin addict but I likely could have been coerced into some form of sex work when I was actively addicted and would have done it solely out of desperation—and being told that it was the “ethical” version of porn would have made it all the more easier for me to talk myself into it.
If the themes are milder and less violent/degrading, that is obviously a positive, but generally I am pretty staunchly against the sale of the body as a product due to the precedent it sets. This is why I am also against things like surrogacy and egg donation.
Can you ethically distribute it to teen boys? Children?
Wow. This is powerful. I am a female ER doctor who treats girls and women in the aftermath of sexual trauma and mental health crises. I just want to applaud you for taking a stance and sharing your voice.
Reading this brings tears to my eyes. I am well aware of the shame and destruction that porn can bring, particularly when viewed at a young age (mine was 7). Despite my efforts, I am still battling this constant addiction. Thank you for taking the time to write this.
It is better to continue battling than it is to surrender. Thanks for sharing, and I said a prayer for you.
I agree. Thank you @Murray_HR 😊🙏
One could share anything publicly or with strangers; more easily offline.
When you feel like continuing this conversation, we can agree on what software we're going to use. You can add e.g. here messages about anything you're going to publish. The more privately one wants to share some things, the more carefully we prepare.
Why would one share more?
1. Once one starts sharing, it's useful to share a lot on that topic.
I see it happening to me and others: we want to discuss a topic comprehensively. Anybody may have seen person 1 displeased with the fact that person 2 has just interrupted their speech. That energy wants to flow, so it hurts when it's dammed; one is going to look for opportunities for that energy to continue flowing.
One can choose e.g. a friend or a psychotherapist as a listener or even as a reader.
2. I think that it's worth my while to address some words to someone when it is probable that they would care, that they would understand, or that they would take effective actions together with me.
How do you choose with whom you communicate?
My best childhood friend was shown hardcore porn by her stepfather. It twisted her into a double-life of being a "normal" girl and one who was sex-obsessed. She entered prostitution as a young woman and ended up running a brothel. She eventually got out of it, got married, had two children, but her understanding of "love" was permanently damaged.
As parents it is urgent that we speak with our children about porn (in age-appropriate ways) and why it damages our hearts and minds. If children know that they can talk about what they accidentally, or purposely, encountered online it can help keep them from spiralling into porn addiction. Having devices only in common areas of the home, not bedrooms, can help avoid temptation and development of secrets.
Smartphones are "pocket porn". One of the most helpful ways to support children in avoiding porn exposure is delaying phones, and opting for simple flip phones.
Thank you Freya for this crucial wake up call to parents!
Smartphones are pocketporn. That term needs to go viral and parents need help with protecting their children from the harmful effects of porn.
"Gazing into screens instead of eyes; preferring pixels over people; this whole numb retreat from one another."
Wow!!! That hit hard. So accurate and sad...
Excelllent article—thank you for writing this.
This is why I wrote a piece last week calling on parents to stop giving smartphones & tablets to minors. Otherwise, internet porn is impossible to protect our kids from. Moms, we must protect our girls (and boys). And I believe we have a moral, and Biblical, obligation to do so.
https://dearchristianparent.substack.com/p/dear-christian-mom-of-boys
I’m not religious but 100% agree. Parents giving young kids smartphones is irresponsible and wrong. Just because others do it doesn’t make it right.
thanks, Rosie!
"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?"
This. Someone finally seeing this and saying it literally made me tear up. YES. I see it constantly. If a woman has an issue with her partner watching porn than she is "the problem". The manipulation is just disgusting.
Professional gaslighting
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/sexual-intelligence/202402/porn-shouldnt-destroy-a-marriage-but-porn-phobia-could
This is absolutely appalling. I would bet my life savings that this "doctor" has a porn habit himself that he doesn't want to face and offers this kind of treatment to patients to justify his own behavior.
"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."
Heartbreaking and true. Thank you, Freya.
Please get this message out! This is root of so much that’s going wrong in our society. Thank you!
Such an important topic. Thank you for writing this.
Breaks my heart. This is the tip of the iceberg. Thank you for discussing it.
We have universalized child sexual abuse. Boys especially are the target and cannot possibly consent to their reaction to discovering our culture’s foul open secret.
The appalling influence on the english language of this putrid product is one of the worst aspects of this horror show.
For me, the gaslighting was the worst part. For a decade when I mustered the courage to admit and talk about my daily "porn" use, every counsellor or therapist (usually a woman) looked at me strangely and said some version of "but that's ok, everyone watches porn” - like that was supposed to be comforting, instead of brutally demoralizing and trust-destroying. The media actively promote it. Academics justify it with their ridiculous “studies” as harmless. I felt like I was trapped in the invasion of the body snatchers. We need a “me too” for boys, and a call for accountability from academics, educators and media who whitewashed this for decades.
I’m over 5 years off of it now but my self-respect is still decimated. I wanted to be a teacher but couldn’t bring myself to look students in the eye, how could I since once a day I was visiting Pornhub to look at women masturbate. IT IS A DRUG STRONGER THEN CRACK. It destroyed my integrity and there was zero understanding, only insistence that the shame I felt was the problem, not the fact that I was traumatized by it, and angry at the gaslighting about something so obviously terrible. The consequences Freya describes hit me like a truck 15 years ago as I knew this was happening, and no one seemed to believe me or care. Everyone laughing and ignoring it was worse than the actual act. The inability to articulate this or get anyone to listen drove me to resent society. I am dumbfounded at our unwillingness to look at its connection to incels, school shooters, p diddy, Gisele picot, human trafficking, male loneliness, female depression, sextortion, virulent online misogyny, lack of trust in each other etc.
Read this article to the end for a perfect example of media, political and academic collusion on this issue.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-poilievre-porn-age-verification-1.7122645
An example from current Canadian high-school sex ed:
https://thirstyforthetalk.org/learn-the-lingo/
https://thirstyforthetalk.org/no-filter-questions/
"Porn":
Pictures/film/litterature that is highly sexually explicit, showing individuals having sex or in sexual situations. Legally, individuals watching porn, and individuals in the porn material, must be over 18 years of age. The purpose of porn is to sexually arouse.
Example: “My friend really enjoys watching porn.”
What is furry porn?
This is a type of pornography containing images, videos or animations of animals having sex. Reach out to us if you have questions about your situation and want more information.
I think that the gaslighting around how harmless “porn” is for a generation has made it impossible for men to grieve being so brutally disabused of their boyhood chivalry by that foul new product. It comes out sideways as rage and shame. We have sexually abused a generation of boys and told them they liked it. How can a 14 year old consent to what happens when he googles “sex”? We weaponized puberty against them. And then gaslit them into oblivion.
Your pain is real. But pain alone is not proof that porn is universally harmful. It is proof that you had no tools, no literacy, and no guidance. That is a systemic failure. Not a reason to collapse the entire industry.
What you describe is not a global moral truth. It is a personal reckoning. Porn did not destroy your integrity. Shame did. Silence did. Cultural repression did. Those are not the fault of performers or platforms. They are the fault of the world that made you believe desire is inherently corrupt.
Some people consume adult content ethically and live grounded lives. Some are the people you watched. They are not mindless objects. They are workers. They are autonomous. They exist whether you approve of their role or not.
You want a reckoning. Fine. But do not erase others to have it. Your experience does not justify criminalising choice, silencing performers, or blaming an entire industry for what you were never taught to handle.
If society failed you, fight the silence. Not the visibility.
They’ve terrorized people for their convenience. The trade off is unconscionable. You ignore the many mass side effects, on purpose. What a silly comment. It’s fuelling trafficking, sextortion, it killed flirting, it polluted the language, it’s so divide. There is no ethical way to distribute it every minor in the world. You are insane.
While I agree that kids viewing porn is a huge issue and hence a good reason to keep phones away from them. I fear that it's growing into a hysteria. It's not like porn is the only issue young people are facing. They are also facing big problems like the cost of living crisis, the increasing chasm between the rich and the poor, political polarization, and climate change. Then there's the youth mental health crisis, and yes I know that porn is contributing to the latter, but it's absolutely not the only reason.
Another thing is sexual abuse, and other forms of abuse done for real to kids and teens by by people they know like their parents, their parents partners, their parents friends, etc. Are these other things also not important? Is a kid with a stable home life who accidently viewed hardcore porn, worse off then the next kid who doesn't have a stable home life and been abused by people he or she knows?
Getting ignored and gaslit for 20 years on such a no brainer would make anyone hysterical. We’re fed up.
You’re mistaking disagreement for ignorance.
I see the side effects. I just reject your framing. You’re treating adult content as a biological weapon when the real crisis is literacy, repression, and the cult of shame that made you feel broken for wanting anything at all.
You’re not describing harm. You’re describing untreated guilt.
And no, that doesn’t justify burning the whole industry down to soothe your conscience. You weren’t terrorised. You were unprepared. And now you want a world without mirrors.
Adult content is an Orwellian euphemism.
What are the side effects then?
It’s not a mirror it’s a pathway.
I’ll be running for school board in Victoria, BC in 2026. Voices like yours could help me be more effective in my effort to highlight the issue and encourage conversations about the destabilizing and dangerous aspects of kids’ access to and adults’ encouraging the use of porn as part of Canadian sex ed school curriculum. I need people who are willing to speak on the record and be quoted by name, so as not to have this waved away and dismissed as heresay.
Absolutely thank you for asking.
I’m in Victoria too. Would love to support you as you run for school board.
Fantastic. Thanks! DM me!
Powerfully written. My heart goes out to you 💛
Now the reckoning is here. And the boys are being thrown under the bus. Again.