Since the birth of Pornhub in 2007, the website, along with similar pages, has seen a huge increase in the number of people using them. This increased usage comes with increased danger, especially for male attitudes toward women. With the website’s most popular categories including ‘violence’ and ‘barely legal’, I am terrified of the consequences this content can create for women. The progress that women have made over the century is at risk of taking a U-turn as men are increasingly viewing women as sexual objects.
The frequent use of websites like Pornhub can create unrealistic expectations of what sex can look like. Men frequently consume content, which is staged, and the female actors appear in what society considers ‘perfect’, which can be extremely harmful to their view of women. It creates an idea of women being thin, cleanly shaved, and often submissive.
This idea of all women being submissive is also harmful as it can encourage violence towards women in the bedroom, including things such as hair pulling and choking. It makes men believe that this behaviour is normal and enjoyed by all women, as explored by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in her Guardian Article (When it comes to porn’s damaging effects, millennials and Gen Z feminists are united | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | The Guardian). Rhiannon explores herself and her friend’s experiences during sex and relates them to how they have been influenced by porn, “It’s as though he was trying to do what he has seen in porn”. This is incredibly harmful and puts women at risk, especially for one-night stands.
Not only is the representation of women in porn harmful, but so is the representation of men. The men seen in ‘mainstream’ porn are also displaying the ‘ideal’ body, creating an unrealistic standard for men to live up to. Thanks to patriarchal systems like toxic masculinity, and the expectations put upon men to confine to traditional ideas of masculinity, men can become disheartened when their bodies aren’t represented in porn, putting them at risk of performance anxiety during sex, body dysmorphia and some cases, eating disorders.
I also think that having porn available at the click of a button is dangerous for addictions. When it is so easy to access millions of videos, it is also so easy for an addiction to start, especially for young teenage boys, when their developing brains are so susceptible to falling into habits such as porn addiction.
Personally, I am the most scared about the young generations of men gaining access to these platforms. I am scared that young teenage boys viewing violent porn believe that this is how sex should be, and I am scared that when they grow up, they will use this violence learnt through porn against women. I am also scared of the attitudes that porn may ignite in young boys. Coupled with influencers like Andrew Tate, there is a high possibility that they become exploited and brainwashed into believing that women are invaluable and that they are simply just sexual objects.
Platforms like Pornhub shouldn’t be accessible to anyone, yet this is understandably a risk associated with the internet. Young children can find anything by accident, and the risk of them finding porn is one of the scariest things for me. With a new generation of teenagers raised with the internet, I think it is incredibly important that even more restrictions are placed upon pornographic websites so that the content doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.