What’s Porn Got To Do With Sexual Violence?

“Violence against women is a human rights violation, yet the industry that fuels the production and distribution of pornography continues unabated in the denigration of women and the indirect facilitation of the most heinous of crimes.”¹

Sexual violence remains a huge problem in our society – and one that still disproportionately affects women and girls.² According to the latest figures, one in five women in England and Wales has experienced some type of sexual assault since the age of 16 – although we know that the real proportion is likely to be much higher, as most victims don’t report it.³

How can we possibly tackle such an epidemic? With more campaigns? Better policies and reporting procedures? Or perhaps with better sex education and clearer messaging about consent?

All these things are important. But when it comes to the link between sex and violence, few people consider one of the most significant influences on our cultural sexual landscape: online pornography.

Porn is full of sexual violence

In 2010, a team of researchers looked at 50 of the most popular porn films.⁴ Of the 304 scenes featured in the films, they found that:

88% contained physical violence (shoving, biting, pinching, hair pulling, open-hand slapping or spanking, gagging, choking, whipping, threatening with a weapon, kicking, closed-fist punching, bondage / confining, using weapons, torturing, mutilating and attempting murder)
49% contained verbal aggression (name calling / insults, threatening physical harm and / or using coercive language.
The typical scene averaged 12 physical or verbal attacks.

The online porn giant Pornhub recieves 150 million views per day by consumers who are bombarded by wall-to-wall images of sexualised violence and sex acts that eroticise the power imbalance between men and women.

As Dr Jessica Taylor, founder of Victim Focus, points out: “Violent materials depicting the rape and abuse of women and teenage girls are becoming the norm. Actually not the norm, the goal.”⁵The harming of women is becoming not just normalised, but positively glorified. Porn sexualises “strangling women, beating women up, raping women on camera and hurting them so badly during sex acts that they cry out for help, pass out or scream in pain.’⁶

So why don’t we make the association between violence in real life and sexual violence in pornography?

Perhaps it’s because we imagine that porn is fantasy, merely a form of escapism that has nothing to do with real life. Perhaps it’s because we imagine the men who watch violent porn aren’t any more likely to act out what they’ve seen than boys who play violent video games. Or maybe we have such faith in our own autonomy that we instinctively resent the idea that our thoughts, attitudes and behaviours are influenced in ways we can’t control, or even recognise.

Yet the truth is that pornography is created and manufactured n the real world. And there’s a vast body of empirical evidence pointing to the fact that porn influences both our attitudes and behaviours, and the wider culture around sexuality.

1. Porn is no fantasy: it is the real record of sexual exploitation and abuse

As soon as violence is sexualised, it becomes invisible. We would be extremely concerned by the argument that some women enjoy getting beaten up and abused but that, somehow, when it comes to sex, we’re suddenly OK with it. The fact is that porn is set up in such a way that, while we assume the women have consented to what they’re going through, we can ultimately never know for sure. We believe what we want to believe, and what conveniently removes the friction of our conscientious objections.

The truth is that most porn actors enter the industry from a place of naivety, vulnerability and / or limited life options, and although many are to some extent inured to the trauma inherent in porn’s productoin through previous experiences of sexual abuse, some degree of real physical and psychological harm is inevitable.

Pornhub is also full of user-uploaded content featuring ‘real’ women and girls, including:

Content made through sex trafficking: In October 2019, Pornhub hosted content from Girls Do Porn, an affiliate porn company that was charged with sex trafficking for lying to and coercing women into shooting content for them.⁷

Child sexual abuse material: In 2019, the Internet Watch Foundation stated that it had confirmed 118 cases of child rape and sexual abuse on Pornhub, half of which featured Category A level abuse (including penetration and sadism).⁸

Fimed rape and sexual assault: 14-year-old Rose Kalemba from Ohio was taken at knifepoint and raped for 12 hours, and the crime scene videos of her abuse were uploaded to Pornhub.

‘Revenge’ porn: In 2020, ‘Sophie’ was mortified that a film of her having oral sex with her ex-partner had been uploaded onto Pornhub and watched around 600,000 times.⁹

Non-consensual recordings: In October 2019, Pornhub took down hidden camera footage shot inside a women’s locker room at a South Carolina college, amid a police investigation.¹⁰

These examples represent a vast, unquantified number of similar cases, since online porn platforms tend to make it easy for users to upload any content with zero friction and zero checks. This, combined with the growing demand for more novel and extreme material, means that all kinds of illegal, abusive and non-consensual content is being consumed as pornographic entertainment.

2. Porn inspires sex crimes

Aside from the fact that watching violent porn drives the demand for the production or upload of more illegal or violent content, we can’t discount pornography’s profound influence on consumers themselves. Sexual fantasies are an important component of sexual crimes. As one study observes, “[a] sense of sexual entitlement paired with use of pornography may lead to coercive and forced sexual contact.’¹¹

“You keep craving something which is harder, something which gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where pornography only goes so far… I’ve lived in prison for a long time now. And I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence just like me. And without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography – without question, without exception – deeply influenced and consumed by an addiction to pornography…”
Ted Bundy, Serial Killer¹²

Another example of this is the fact that porn consumption significantly increases the odds of a man sexually abusing a woman in the context of domestic violence.13

“In the past few years, we have had a huge increase in intimate-partner rape of women from 14 to 80+. The biggest common denominator is consumption of porn by the offender… We have seen a huge increase in deprivation of liberty, physical injuries, torture, drugging, filming and sharing footage without consent. I founded the centre 25 years ago and what is now considered to be the norm in 2015 is frightening.”
Di Macleod, Director of the Gold Coast Centre Against Sexual Violence 14

3. Porn influences consumer attitudes and behaviour

The influence of pornography on consumers is not limited to men who are predisposed to violence and abuse. It’s true that every individual responds to porn differently, and there are a plethora of different factors at play when determining porn’s particular impact.¹⁵ However, no human mind can simply ‘lock up’ the extreme, violent sexual images it sees in pornography so that they don’t ‘leak out’ into other parts of the mind and imagination.

The more we porn we watch, particularly in the context of masturbation, the more we unconsciously imbibe its messaging. The imagery in porn builds a remarkably consistent picture of what women and men are ‘like’, and what sex ‘should be’. Men’s aggressive and coercive sexual domination over women is consistently reinforced in pornography, with violence being equated to mutual pleasure and satisfaction. The women in porn rarely object to the abuse they receive; on the contrary, they tend to respond positively to whatever new act of violence or humiliation men inflict.¹⁶ Watching porn scene after scene, hour after hour, consumers become acclimatised to the verbal and physical aggression directed against women.¹⁷

Repeated exposure to pornography has been found to help shape an individual’s fantasies, perceptions, rationalisations, and deeper core beliefs. Research has consistently shown that the degradation encouraged by pornography breeds negative attitudes and dominant behaviours towards women, including the heightened proclivity towards coercive sex.

Clinical psychologist Dr Robi Sonderegger summarises the findings of “an overwhelming number of empirical studies” regarding the relationship between watching porn and sexual delinquency:

“Irrespective of additional mediating / moderating variables, pornography contributes directly to pro-sexual-offending attitudes, intimate relationship difficulties, sexual callousness, disinterest in the suffering of others and desensitisation to violence against women, acceptance of male dominance and female servitude, leniency toward rapists in legal proceedings, accepting various rape myths (that rape can be justified), self-assessed proclivity to force sex on women, and the direct instigation of sexual assault.”¹⁸

4. Porn shapes our sexual scripts

We like to believe that pornography will lead to sexual liberation and creativity in the bedroom, particularly – but nothing could be further from the truth. For many, porn sex – the coreographed performance, with its various trends, tropes and almost ritualised sexual violence – has become the only point of reference, with our pornified culture squeezing out the version of sex that has to do with intimacy, empathy and human connection.

Many men enact what they have seen in porn – particularly if they start watching it from a young age. Repeated exposure to porn means they can become conditioned into believing they should behave towards their real-life partner just like the men in porn, where physical and verbal coercion and abuse is normal and the women seem to respond positively.

Porn also indocrinates women about male dominance and female subordination in the bedroom, and conditions them into liking – or at very least into accepting – sex acts that are risky, painful or degrading.

“…[F]eeling pressured into doing a load of freaky-deeky shit with a guy the first time you shag him just so you don’t “disappoint” is not natural. Tell you what’s disappointing: Not enjoying sex with someone because you feel so much pressure to act a certain role that you can’t even be present in your own body.”
Maddy Musen, Student¹⁹

Women’s magazines, Fifty Shades of Grey and even pop music videos have romanticised sadism and masochism (S&M) culture. As Dines points out: “It seems many of today’s young women are caught in a perfect storm: sex with men reared on violent porn; a crisis of self-confidence that they can never do enough sexually; and a hook-up culture which means if they don’t agree to a certain sexual practice, the next date will.”²⁰

“In a crowded market, porn sites are showing ever more extreme practices to get clicks. And, terrifyingly, this multi-billion-pound business is often the most powerful form of sex education for today’s youth… The younger they are when they see it, the more it’s going to get seared into their sexual template. So now, a lot of young men are playing out porn sex. Women are the collateral damage of the porn industry.”²¹