Articles Of Loathing

There are few issues in the modern world as confusingly divisive as pornography. Back in 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” Today, we are arguably further than ever from a shared definition of pornography — especially one that captures the scope and scale of what now falls under that umbrella.

Porn has long been considered a private matter, but the nature of that privacy has radically shifted with the rise of high-speed internet. Where once a group of boys might sneak a magazine from a bush or an older brother’s drawer, explicit videos of hardcore sex are now just a few taps away for anyone with a smartphone. This ease of access has slowly normalised pornography — though in a strangely taboo way. Almost everyone will admit to watching porn or masturbating to it at some point, yet talking openly about porn use remains awkward, even shameful. It’s the elephant in the room in many relationships, friendships, and families — an elephant caked in heavy makeup and sporting surgically enhanced features.

Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the advent of the Pill, Western society has largely become more sexually permissive. Where once cohabiting couples and sexually active women were scandalous, these are now commonplace and accepted. Pornography has piggybacked on this shift, positioning itself as part of that broader sexual liberation. It sells itself as empowering, progressive, and inclusive.

Advocates argue that “sex work is real work” and that women monetising explicit content are reclaiming agency and autonomy. But this argument often ignores the dark realities of the industry: countless women are coerced, trafficked, or abused, and the infrastructure supporting cam sites and porn studios is often exploitative. Revenge porn, hidden cameras, leaked videos — these are not fringe phenomena. They are part of the mainstream consumption pipeline. For the viewer, it may be just another click; for the subject, it can be a life-destroying violation. As legal scholar and feminist Catherine MacKinnon put it: “Pornography is not about free speech; it’s about paid silence — of women who are abused and objectified and can’t speak against it.”

Some counter that “ethical porn” or “feminist porn” offer better alternatives. While well-intentioned, these niches are a microscopic fraction of the online porn landscape, and their impact is dwarfed by the industry’s ever-growing shift toward violence, degradation, and novelty for novelty’s sake. If porn were truly moving toward progressiveness, we would not see such a sharp rise in content featuring abuse, coercion, and humiliation. The worrying trend of step-sister or step-father content becoming popular, or simulated rape and the utterly deplorable “barely legal” pornographic videos, symbolise the further escalation of extreme content becoming normalised and widely accessible to anyone.

Others defend porn as a harmless private indulgence — a sexual outlet that hurts no one and should remain beyond moral policing. But even if we set aside issues of exploitation, trafficking, and non-consensual uploads, the effects on users themselves are deeply troubling. In “Neuroscience of Internet Pornography Addiction” (Love et al., 2015), researchers found that excessive porn consumption alters brain function in ways comparable to drug addiction. In another study, “Pornography Use and Relationship Satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis” (Wright et al., 2017), higher porn use correlated with reduced relationship satisfaction and commitment.

Porn doesn’t just change what people look at; it changes what they want. The sexual script it promotes reduces intimacy to performance and people to body parts. As Gail Dines puts it: “The problem is not that porn shows too much, but that it shows too little. It reduces the human person to body parts and the sexual act to performance.”

When sexual gratification is defined purely as the pursuit of orgasm without mutual connection, how can real intimacy compete with the endless novelty of online porn? Many partners find themselves pressured to perform acts popularised by porn — acts that can be degrading, painful, or emotionally alienating. This rewiring of expectations bleeds into the bedroom, often creating dissatisfaction and confusion. The phrase “masturbating with your body” is often used to describe the experience of those who cannot reach orgasm without imagining pornographic content even during real sex — and the implications for relationship satisfaction know no limit.

Worse still is the effect on children and adolescents. In the absence of comprehensive sexual education, porn becomes the teacher. It instructs young people on what sex is supposed to look like, how they should behave, and what their bodies should do or endure. Without context or care, porn becomes the default blueprint for sexual development. This does not only distort boys’ expectations; many girls and young women also internalise these scripts, measuring their worth against pornographic standards.

It is difficult to view the scale of today’s pornography industry without seeing the commodification of women at its core. For young men especially, it risks distorting how they view women, sex, and relationships. When sex becomes mere stimulus-response, input-output, we lose something sacred. We lose the possibility of real intimacy, real connection, and a sexual ethic grounded in mutual respect. The rise of OnlyFans and other sites where women can sell explicit material through memberships is only feeding this commodification, while paradoxically parading itself as women’s liberation.

To bring it together, sexual freedom is a vital human right. The fight for bodily autonomy and equality is not one to be dismissed lightly. But if our vision of freedom leads to exploitation, desensitisation, and emotional detachment, we must ask ourselves whether we’ve mistaken erosion for progress. The question is not whether we are free to consume porn. The question is: what is that freedom costing us?