Last week, I posed a question in this space: “Is Violent Porn Making Girls Identify as Transgender?” Quoting parents, experts, and my own research, I observed one of the reasons that many girls are rejecting femininity is because of the rape culture created by predominantly violent digital pornography. If our culture is answering the question “What is a woman?” with the front page of Pornhub, it is not surprising that some girls will want no part of it. Porn culture teaches girls that to be a woman is to be a target. The essay struck a chord, and many people responded with harrowing anecdotes that support its contention. One mother wrote:
I believe this contributed to my child’s trans identity. She had been exposed to online porn that included violence, rape, pedophilia, and bestiality. She was groomed by adults and would ask them questions about her confusion. I had no idea. We monitored her phone every day, we pored over every text/email/post. It was turned off every night. She had an app where she could share stories she had written. We thought it was innocent enough, but she created an additional username that we were not aware of.
It was there she found the pornographic content and was groomed. When we found out, I think she felt a lot of shame. So we took her to a therapist, who eventually ended up affirming her behind our backs, against our explicit request. She was 12. We wanted to pull her out of school but were told that she would kill herself if we did so, because she needed her friend group and the stability of band and school. We were terrified, so we kept her in school but never affirmed. That was a line we were not willing to cross.
From another parent:
Thank you for writing about this. It’s a big deal. I believe it contributed to my own daughter’s ID. The subject matter I found when monitoring her texts at age 13 were beyond comprehension in their inappropriateness. My stomach still turns thinking about them.
Yet another wrote:
Our daughter was exposed to violent porn at age 11 by an older teen at her dance school. I can’t even begin to explain how terribly this affected her. She identified as trans from about age 15-18 and currently identifies as nonbinary (age 19 now).
Perhaps the most heartbreaking comment emphasized the extent to which digital pornography has contributed to shaping the identities and consciousnesses of many young girls:
Whenever my step-daughter was asked why she felt she was a boy, she’d say, ‘I don’t want to be female because girls get raped.’ It was clear to us what was going on, but the gender clinic barely raised an eyelid and tried to get her on PBs [puberty blockers]. Who is listening to our girls?
Many other commenters offered their own observations about the poisonous world that pervasive pornography has created. One woman agreed with Mary Harrington—who told me in an interview that if she were growing up in this digitally deformed landscape, she would be identifying as “non-binary”—noting: “I’ve been saying this to my family for years! If someone had told me at 16 that sex as a woman meant being physically abused, I would have totally opted out.” Her description, unfortunately, is no exaggeration, as one need only listen to young women navigating today’s dating scene to know.
One woman wrote: “I have a beautiful teenage daughter. She says all the guys that are her friends watch porn and a lot of it. They talk about expecting degrading sex acts from their girlfriends. THIS IS CHANGING this generation. We are all just standing by and letting it happen. Misogyny.” She is right. We have decided, both actively and passively, to allow a metastasizing rape culture to permeate adolescence in the name of freedom of speech, or sexual liberation, or both, while libertarians make idiotic comparisons between the internet and the advent of radio to insist that things Are Just Fine, Actually.
One reader noted that, despite the evidence I had included in my essay on how porn spurs sexual violence, I hadn’t “even included the rise in anal tears in young women due to the increase in anal sex within heterosexual couplings as a result of pornography.” It was not possible to cover all the impacts of pornography, but I have written about this previously. Doctors have reported a spike in such injuries, with one noting that the slight bodies of young teen girls simply cannot sustain this sort of abuse. Teen girls are suffering sexual injuries so horrific that one 16-year-old will be wearing a colostomy bag for life.
Again, girls as young as 13 have asked me, at Christian schools, why their boyfriends are requesting these acts. The answer is pornography. It is so essential for adults to understand what it is like growing up as a teen in porn world. One commenter posted a thread detailing the sort of things she hears from high school girls. “Please tell the boys to stop threatening to rape us if we don’t send nudes … Please ask the boys to stop telling us they are going to take us to their sex dungeon.” Last October, best-selling British novelist Holly Bourne described what porn culture is like for girls in a column for the Daily Mail:
Gripping my office desk, I read the messages landing in my inbox. “I’m 14, and my boyfriend wants anal in a car park while people watch.”
“I’m scared to get strangled but everyone else is doing it.”
“Sex always hurts and my boyfriend doesn’t care.”
During almost every shift as an online sex and relationships adviser for young people, a teenage girl would write in, confused and upset after she’d been pressured, coerced or forced into having sex. In particular, to have rougher and more violent sex – like the sex they said the boys were watching in online porn. I had known from my training that sexual violence would come up, but I never expected the onslaught. On a bad shift, at least half the messages would involve sexual violence. What was especially upsetting was these girls rarely realised they had just described a rape to me – they just saw non-consensual, degrading and painful sex as a ‘normal’ part of their lives.
That’s what broke me in the end – the girls not realising. That they were feeling ashamed, confused and upset not due to a muddled sexual encounter, but because a horrific crime had been committed against them. It was worryingly evident what early exposure to hardcore porn was doing to this generation.
There is no reason that we need to tolerate an industry pumping poison into our cultural groundwater. Despite the protestations of libertarians who believe that it is “freedom of speech” when real women are subjected to real sexual torture for the arousal and entertainment of the masses, and despite the sexual revolutionaries who think it’s fine to hit a woman as long as it arouses the viewer, policymakers have a moral responsibility to address this crisis. My own view is that we should ban hardcore pornography and I would be happy with any steps in that direction. The porn industry is destroying children; so, we must destroy it. A healthy youth culture and the porn industry cannot coexist. At this point, I’m ready to end every column on this subject by paraphrasing Cato: “and furthermore, Pornhub must be destroyed.”
‘Intersectionality’ has been a popular concept in recent years. Perhaps we should begin applying it to the webs in which we have allowed our young people to become trapped—webs in which sex roles are defined by porn and trans activists offer them a dangerous and delusional way out.
Readers Respond: Rape Culture, Transgenderism, and Growing Up in Porn World
Last week, I posed a question in this space: “Is Violent Porn Making Girls Identify as Transgender?” Quoting parents, experts, and my own research, I observed one of the reasons that many girls are rejecting femininity is because of the rape culture created by predominantly violent digital pornography. If our culture is answering the question “What is a woman?” with the front page of Pornhub, it is not surprising that some girls will want no part of it. Porn culture teaches girls that to be a woman is to be a target. The essay struck a chord, and many people responded with harrowing anecdotes that support its contention. One mother wrote:
From another parent:
Yet another wrote:
Perhaps the most heartbreaking comment emphasized the extent to which digital pornography has contributed to shaping the identities and consciousnesses of many young girls:
Many other commenters offered their own observations about the poisonous world that pervasive pornography has created. One woman agreed with Mary Harrington—who told me in an interview that if she were growing up in this digitally deformed landscape, she would be identifying as “non-binary”—noting: “I’ve been saying this to my family for years! If someone had told me at 16 that sex as a woman meant being physically abused, I would have totally opted out.” Her description, unfortunately, is no exaggeration, as one need only listen to young women navigating today’s dating scene to know.
One woman wrote: “I have a beautiful teenage daughter. She says all the guys that are her friends watch porn and a lot of it. They talk about expecting degrading sex acts from their girlfriends. THIS IS CHANGING this generation. We are all just standing by and letting it happen. Misogyny.” She is right. We have decided, both actively and passively, to allow a metastasizing rape culture to permeate adolescence in the name of freedom of speech, or sexual liberation, or both, while libertarians make idiotic comparisons between the internet and the advent of radio to insist that things Are Just Fine, Actually.
One reader noted that, despite the evidence I had included in my essay on how porn spurs sexual violence, I hadn’t “even included the rise in anal tears in young women due to the increase in anal sex within heterosexual couplings as a result of pornography.” It was not possible to cover all the impacts of pornography, but I have written about this previously. Doctors have reported a spike in such injuries, with one noting that the slight bodies of young teen girls simply cannot sustain this sort of abuse. Teen girls are suffering sexual injuries so horrific that one 16-year-old will be wearing a colostomy bag for life.
Again, girls as young as 13 have asked me, at Christian schools, why their boyfriends are requesting these acts. The answer is pornography. It is so essential for adults to understand what it is like growing up as a teen in porn world. One commenter posted a thread detailing the sort of things she hears from high school girls. “Please tell the boys to stop threatening to rape us if we don’t send nudes … Please ask the boys to stop telling us they are going to take us to their sex dungeon.” Last October, best-selling British novelist Holly Bourne described what porn culture is like for girls in a column for the Daily Mail:
There is no reason that we need to tolerate an industry pumping poison into our cultural groundwater. Despite the protestations of libertarians who believe that it is “freedom of speech” when real women are subjected to real sexual torture for the arousal and entertainment of the masses, and despite the sexual revolutionaries who think it’s fine to hit a woman as long as it arouses the viewer, policymakers have a moral responsibility to address this crisis. My own view is that we should ban hardcore pornography and I would be happy with any steps in that direction. The porn industry is destroying children; so, we must destroy it. A healthy youth culture and the porn industry cannot coexist. At this point, I’m ready to end every column on this subject by paraphrasing Cato: “and furthermore, Pornhub must be destroyed.”
‘Intersectionality’ has been a popular concept in recent years. Perhaps we should begin applying it to the webs in which we have allowed our young people to become trapped—webs in which sex roles are defined by porn and trans activists offer them a dangerous and delusional way out.
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