Yes, you read that right. We’re going to talk about porn. We have to talk about porn! So let’s dive in…
Let’s start with some statistics:
- 30% of the internet industry is pornography;
- The average age an American first comes into contact with porn is 11 years old;
- The online porn industry makes $3,000 per second;
- A recent content analysis of the 50 best-selling adult videos revealed that across all scenes:
- 3,376 verbal and/or physically aggressive acts were observed;
- On average, scenes had 11.52 acts of either verbal of physical aggression, ranging from none to 128;
- 48% of the 304 scenes analyzed contained verbal aggression, while more than 88% showed physical aggression;
- 72% of aggressive acts were perpetrated by men;
- 88.2% of top-rated porn scenes contain physical aggression; 48.7% contain verbal aggression. Perpetrators were usually male;
- 94% of aggressive acts were committed against women.[1]
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-porn (in terms of effectiveness that would be like being anti-cellphone). But if you look over these statistics, it’s pretty obvious that we have a problem. So, what can we do?
Here’s where we look to people like Erika Lust. Born in Sweden and living in Spain, she is the director, writer and the founder of the Barcelona based Lust Film. She creates adult films and books aimed towards women.
In the TV series, Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, Erika tells us that, “We can’t ignore that porn today is sex education. Especially for people who never had sexual experiences in their own life. How are they going to know how sex actually works?” Her statement, coupled with the fact that about 40% of sexually active 14 to 18-year-olds say they learned more about sex from porn than from school, reminds us that children are consuming this violent, mainstream porn. We need to do something about this, we need to recreate what porn looks like and we need to educate our youth on realistic, mutually-respectful sex.
Erika continues, “I have two daughters and porn is one click away. Many parents have absolutely no clue. If their kid has access to an iPad, that kid also has access to all the porn-tubes online. And the ones who are teaching our children are the porn stars. I mean, imagine if I would leave my kids to learn about drugs from drug dealers.”
This “sex-ed” is tangible in the changing sex statistics of the 21st century. In this century, the biggest change in American sexual behavior is an increase in anal sex. In 1992, 16% of women aged 18 to 24 said they had tried anal sex. Today, 20% of women 18 to 19 have, and by ages 20 to 24, a whopping 40%. It doesn’t stop there, unfortunately. In a 2014 study of 16 to 18-year-olds (I mean, these are really young people if you think about it) published in the British medical journal found that it was mainly boys who pushed for anal sex and that they approached it not as an act of intimacy with their partner (who they assumed would have to be convinced to go through with the act) but as a competition with other boys. Horrifically, they expected girls to endure the act, which young women in the study consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed the girls for the discomfort.[2]
There is so much more that is wrong with the porn industry of today. It’s an industry that promotes violence against women and conditions our youth to see that as acceptable. It dehumanizes sex and takes away the beauty with which it can and should actually be perceived. But there is hope, as Erika so gracefully stated:
“As women we need to use our voice. We need to tell the world how we would like it to be. The gender roles that most porn shows, it’s not a modern vision at all. It’s not a feminist vision. But we’re going to change it.”