It’s free, it’s everywhere, and it’s more addictive than ever. According to Forbes, the pornography industry generates about $97 billion to $100 billion in revenue each year. That’s more than Netflix, Hulu, the NFL, NBA, MLB, and even the gambling industry. But the real cost of pornography goes beyond its financial footprint. After speaking with St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes counselors, teachers, and students, the data is crystal clear – pornography has the ability to create distress in relationships, disrupt expectations of intimacy, and oversexualize our society.
While pornography is undeniably present in society, the issue is so complex and uncomfortable that many people would rather ignore it than confront their reality. In 2024 New York Times article, Dr. Bryan Willoughby, a social scientist at Brigham Young University, said, “You can stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist, and say this is bad and pray harder, or use addiction language, but you have to have a realistic understanding of what’s happening.”
According to Common Sense Media (CCM), on average, Americans first come across online pornography at the age of 12. By the age of 13, over 65% of boys have seen pornographic material, whereas for girls that number is 40%. Peoples’ exposure to this kind of content does not have to be explicitly through pornographic sites, but can also be through social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X (formerly known as Twitter).
From a Google Form The Voice sent out, out of 54 students, 87.8% said they’ve seen pornography on social media, whether intentionally or by accident. The statistics indicate that through social media, different kinds of pornography are highly easy to access.
Mike Domitrz, the author of Can I Kiss You? states this access could “potentially alter primarily teens’, and adults’, mental health and overall perception of what a healthy relationship should look like.”
“Even if people [depicted in pornography] seem to like what they do, they might not really enjoy it, or it might be painful,” said Dr. Beata Bothe, a psychologist at the University of Montreal. “It might be obvious to some older adolescents, but not to the younger consumers of pornography, who have no real-life sexual experience.”
An anonymous female SSSAS senior responded to The Voice’s survey saying that porn “desensitizes teens to sex and the human body/sexual content” and it “destroys how men view women as objects instead of people.”
According to a recent statistic from 2023 by Ballard Brief, the general revenue of pornography companies has increased by 12.3% in the last year, and that does not even account for sites and apps where pornography is openly accessible to viewers. With pornography being one of the primary forms of sex education for young teens, it often provides a false portrayal of how sex and relationships should be. Ultimately pornography is just another form of fiction, just like your favorite movie or book but is more harmful due to its explicit visual content.
We interviewed SSSAS Health and Human Sexuality teacher Ms. Mazur. She compared porn to a type of performance. “It’s a show, it’s highly edited, it’s unrealistic. And the danger of young adults watching pornography is they might think that’s real.”
Ms. Mazur also explained how this can cause anxiety in relationships, and the unrealistic view of how relationships and sex should look. If teens compare themselves to what they see on their computer screen, teens’ self-esteem will lower drastically, and they are going to be dissatisfied with their own bodies. Ms. Mazur also highlighted the dark side of pornography, noting that consent is not always given in these videos. “As you can imagine, that would be incredibly traumatizing for someone to have a video of themselves leaked on these sites that is impossible to get down.”
Pornography can be especially dangerous when it contains actions that are overly aggressive toward the participants, who are primarily women. In a report from 2023, by Common Sense Media, over 75% of teens ages 17 and under have reported seeing porn where violence is induced upon one or more individuals. From an anonymous form The Voice sent out, 22% of student respondents chose “yes,” when prompted if they had ever seen any form of violence in pornographic videos.
Similarly in an anonymous interview with an upperclassman, they stated that porn “cause[s] you to lose some values because I feel like [people our age] watching it don’t respect whatever gender they’re watching in the video as much.”
Mike Domitrz also added that viewers of violent pornographic content believe that what they are watching is normal and okay, and will even think that treating their partners in such a manner is acceptable or even desirable because it is depicted so much in modern content.
In much of regular day-to-day media, outside of porn, there is a desensitization towards the violence or degradation of women. Jack Harlow, a highly successful rapper, raps about certain, potentially dangerous acts in one of his most popular songs: “Lovin On Me.” He sings, “I’m vanilla/ baby/I’ll choke you/but I ain’t no killer, baby.” While this might seem fairly innocuous to most listeners, it actually is a telltale indication that this behaviour is deeply rooted in our modern day society and causes a disillusioned perception of what sex and relationships should be.
In that same interview with the anonymous upperclassman student, they continued to discuss how porn affects one of their fellow peers, saying “It’s not really natural. I don’t know if it’s an addiction, but like, if you told them to stop, it wouldn’t really happen. So there’s gotta be something wrong there.”
While it might seem surprising, porn addictions are common and do affect those in the Saints community, as seen above. In the form we released, 32.7% of the 54 respondents said they watched porn, and 57.7% of respondents said they know someone who watches porn.
Porn addictions can even “contribute to isolation and loneliness quite a bit,” noted Ms. Harrison, the Upper School counselor. When asked on a scale from 1-10, how harmful porn’s effect is on teens, an anonymous male junior rated it an 8/10, saying “[I] Used to [watch porn], but happier now that I don’t.”
According to the National Library of Medicine (NLM), 56% of men use porn as a way to relax and destress. While people might think this is harmless, it is important to note that pornography has negative effects on the brain. The effects of porn on the brain are similar to those of drug addictions. The NLM states that porn, like an addictive substance, is a hyper stimulating trigger that leads to high levels of dopamine at an unnatural level. This damages the body’s dopamine reward system, leaving it unresponsive to natural pleasure. This is why those who watch porn experience less satisfaction with a physical partner.
An anonymous female sophomore, expressed how porn is like a “dopamine hit” to some of her peers. “I feel like it just creates a new level of expectations and pressure that teens and young adults don’t need … I have known people who were extremely affected by it and it definitely didn’t help with their depression. I just don’t think the content should exist.”
Another anonymous female senior said, “It takes all of the emotions out of sex and treats it as a casual thing, which leads to hookup culture, and that leads you down a dirty path of destruction of your self-esteem and mental health.”
Daniel Cecere, a sophomore at SSSAS, was open for an interview about porn and its effect on teenage relationships. He said he knows a person who watches porn daily, but thinks their habit is excessive. “They [his peer] oversexualize everything,” he told The Voice.
Although oversexualization has negative consequences, Daniel does think that pornography is a natural curiosity every teenager shouldn’t be ashamed to have. Overconsumption, however, “puts a false thought of what sexual intercourse is.”
He also expressed how porn is hurtful and demeaning to teenage women and how it puts them down in both the bedroom and society.
An anonymous senior at SSSAS also agrees that pornography sets up damaging presumptions about women in the media; “A lot of porn that gets produced is violent towards women, so men think of women in that way and think of sex as a violent thing, and try to replicate that in real life.”
Ms. Mazur explained that despite some of porn’s controversies, it is brushed upon in class, but not as a stand alone topic because the SSSAS Health class curriculum puts more focus on mental health, pregnancy and STD prevention, healthy relationships, consent, and drug usage. Ms. Mazur notes that it has never come up as a topic to discuss in Senior year.
“While pornography is not a standalone topic in our curriculum, seniors have the opportunity to explore this subject through our current research assignment, where they can choose topics of interest,” she explained. Past students have researched areas regarding how social media affects mental health, and this year some students chose to examine gambling addictions.
The topic of pornography often comes off as an uncomfortable subject to discuss because of its taboo nature; however, addictions to it are real and the overconsumption of pornography on a large scale can cause repercussions for everyone. It is important to talk about pornography to provide a safe space for those who reach out while also educating others about porn’s effects.
As an anonymous male senior from our survey responded, “Porn is a crazy topic to tackle for an article. I wish you luck. And make sure to tackle the harder topics within it because it is necessary.”
