Is Sexual Violence Porn-Driven?

Warning: This column includes some descriptions of a mature and disturbing nature. Reader discretion is advised.

Recently, a woman by the name of Kitty published a book about a year during which she decided to experiment with casual sex. Her self-stated purpose was to shake off a deep aversion she had felt towards sex ever since she had been assaulted by a boy when she was just ten years old.

“No more guilt. No more self-loathing. No more self-limitation. I was liberated and fearless.” Those were her thoughts as she embarked on a year in which she would have casual physical relationships with ten different men.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go the way she expected. What began as a symbolic gesture to express her freedom from the trauma of that early encounter, quickly became a nightmare—one that left her even more deeply wounded than before.

Like so many young people, Kitty had bought into the lie that sex is, or can be, a purely harmless “pastime,” that can be indulged in freely, with no serious consequences. Instead, however, she quickly discovered what so many naïve young women discover when they put the lies of the sexual revolution into practice: to pursue casual sex is to open yourself up to being emotionally wounded and physically abused by unscrupulous men.

By the end of the year, Kitty had been raped multiple times. She also had been repeatedly subjected to sexual violence, of a sort that has become shockingly common. On one occasion, as Kitty was saying goodbye to a man whom she had found likeable, she suddenly found his hands around her throat, choking her. Another one of her casual partners also choked her during one of their encounters, also without warning or permission.

Related: Husband Addicted to Porn? How to Rebuild Your Marriage

Porn and the Normalization of Violence

Ultimately, Kitty blamed her disturbing sexual encounters on the easy accessibility of online pornography, in which men “can scroll through an endless stream of videos in which women are hurt and humiliated, in which men are aggressive and entitled and physically abusive. The existence of these videos on porn sites suggests that these things are sexy.”

“Has violent porn convinced [men] that rough choking is what women want?” she muses in her book. “Is it a matter of cruelty or a matter of ignorance, or both?”

For those of us who did not grow up as part of a generation hooked on high-definition, streaming, instantly accessible, and extraordinarily violent pornography, questions like these can seem as if they come straight from another planet. What on earth does choking have to do with dating and sex?

But even a glance into recent research reveals that, according to men and women in their teens and early 20s, such bizarre and violent practices are not only not fringe, but they are also positively ubiquitous. So ubiquitous, in fact, that even the New York Times has raised the alarm about how quickly sexual choking has been mainstreamed, and how little is being said about its many harms.

As the author of the Times article, Peggy Orenstein, writes, a recent anonymized poll of 5000 college-age girls found that a full two-thirds of them reported that a sexual partner had choked them. Forty percent of girls reported that the first time they were choked during sex was when they were between 12 and 17 years old.

Debby Herbenick, the director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, is someone who prides herself on her progressive attitudes towards sex. And yet, she told Orenstein that she is deeply disturbed by the rapidity with which this once extremely fringe sexual practice has become mainstreamed. “Why do girls all want to be choked?” she recalls one 15-year-old boy asking her during a Q&A session after a talk at a school. “How come boys all want to choke you?” asked a 16-year-old girl.

Dr. Keisuke Kawata, a neuroscientist at Indiana University’s School of Public Health, has been studying the brains of college-age women who have been repeatedly choked (that such a field even exists is a tragedy in itself). Kawata is one of the scientists who first raised the alarm about how the frequent hits suffered by football players were triggering degenerative brain disease and compares the consequences of choking to what such players suffered.

Women who have been choked, Orenstein summarizes, “show a reduction in cortical folding in the brain compared with a never-choked control group. They also showed widespread cortical thickening, an inflammation response that is associated with elevated risk of later-onset mental illness.”

And that’s just the start. Such women also showed a markedly higher likelihood of suffering from severe anxiety, sadness, loneliness, and depression. The paradox, notes the Times, is that at a time “when #MeToo has made progress against harassment and assault, there has been the popularization of a sex act that can damage our brains, impair intellectual functioning, undermine mental health, even kill us.”

Porn Shapes Desire

The question, of course, is how is it possible that so many young people have come to think that such bizarre, dangerous, violent, and demeaning practices are not only normal, but preferable? We have already seen the answer, of course, identified by Kitty above.

As Orenstein notes, “Sexual strangulation, nearly always of women in heterosexual pornography, has long been a staple on free sites, those default sources of sex ed for teens. As with anything else, repeat exposure can render the once appalling appealing. It’s not uncommon for behaviors to be normalized in porn, move within a few years to mainstream media, then, in what may become a feedback loop, be adopted in the bedroom or the dorm room.”

Related: To Women Addicted to Porn: An Open Letter

Indeed, if you were to compare public opinions about various deviant sexual practices, with the growth of the availability of hardcore pornography, there is little question that you would find a close correlation. In fact, studies have found that that people who consume more pornography are significantly more likely to support same-sex “marriage” or homosexual sexual practices.

This is the lie behind the idea that pornography is “merely” entertainment. Even movies made purely for entertainment are not “merely” entertainment. Everything we put into our minds shapes our minds. High-definition streaming porn, one of the most powerful forms of media ever devised, is clearly distorting an entire generation’s views of sexuality, from the earliest ages.

Protect Youth from Violent Content

Porn companies know this, of course. This is why their algorithms deliberately promote ever more extreme content to their users. They know that, with sufficient exposure, what people initially and intuitively find grotesque and off-putting, they will soon come to view as exciting.

This is the dirty little secret that was exposed by an undercover investigative video put out recently by a group called Sound Investigations. The videos show various employees at porn companies, explaining how they push deviant content to people, including children.

Employee Dillon Rice, a senior script writer at one porn company, argues in one video that porn can be beneficial for children. “Let’s say you’re 12 years old, you’re still figuring out your sexuality, maybe even your gender, wouldn’t it be helpful to see not a celebration but maybe just a … normalization of something that you think is what you want?” he says. Elsewhere he notes, “Let’s say I was 12 and I saw TransAngels [i.e. a porn site featuring transgender actors]… it would help me figure out what I do like and what I don’t like.”

Rice also adds that porn platforms that are primarily for straight men, might push non-heterosexual content to their users. “They need to try to push stuff that is … less accepted, like putting a trans male or trans female in a scene,” Rice said. “See if you can convert somebody.”

The same goes for the promotion of violent content, which now constitutes the overwhelming majority of content on many porn sites. Thus, porn users who begin their porn addiction by viewing non-violent heterosexual pornography—often as early teens who looked up pornography out of simple curiosity—can soon find themselves immersed a cesspool of violent, degrading, and otherwise deviant content.

Orenstein concludes her essay with an exhortation to require social media websites to ban content promoting the practice of choking, as they have done with content promoting suicide and self-harm. Meanwhile, she also urges TV and movie writers to “stop glamorizing strangulation, making light of it, spreading false information, using it to signal female characters’ complexity or sexual awakening. Young people’s sexual scripts are shaped by what they watch, scroll by and listen to — unprecedentedly so. They deserve, and desperately need, models of interactions that are respectful, communicative, mutual and, at the very least, safe.”

I have rarely found myself cheering more whole-heartedly for a paragraph published in the New York Times.

Parents, Take Charge!

Young people’s sexual scripts are indeed “shaped by what they watch, scroll by and listen to”. So are all their scripts: social, ethical, religious, etc.

This is why parents must pay such close attention to what their children are watching and listening to. Many parents hand their children a smartphone, tablet, and a TV, and never bother even to put in place basic filters, or to engage their children in conversation about the media they are consuming.

This is nothing short of a fundamental dereliction of duty. To hand your child a smartphone or any other, unfiltered internet-connected device, is to hand them a portal to a world in which vicious, unscrupulous figures are consciously exerting their intelligence to the maximum to find ever more clever ways to hook young minds on their addictive, degrading content.

Related: Teen Porn Addiction: Statistics and Advice for Parents

We know that up to 30% of Internet traffic is to porn websites. However, it’s not just the porn sites: Many social media sites, such as TikTok and Tumblr, are proactively pushing transgressive content to the youngest viewers. Such content normalizes and celebrates things like “identifying” by any of a myriad “alternative” sexualities. The worst of such videos are opening a pipeline towards confused adolescent children, steering them towards transgender “transitioning” including taking potent puberty blocking drugs, and undergoing mutilating surgery.

HLI’s leadership programs empower local leaders to protect kids. Thanks to our donors for giving people like Sister Adeline the skills to defend life and family!

It is hard to overstate the central importance of parents carefully controlling and monitoring their children’s media exposure in a world in which significant percentages of teens now think that violent choking is a “normal” expression of sexuality, and in which a staggeringly large number of teens no longer know whether they are a boy or a girl, and are convinced that they must spend a lifetime on powerful drugs, or with a mutilated body.

These are the bizarre and frightening times we live in. However, it is critical to remember that it is entirely possible for your children to have happy, healthy, normal childhoods. It’s just that it takes parents being proactive, informed, and prudent. Once you know the dangers, be proactive in implementing the solutions. This includes implementing strong Internet filtering on any internet-connected devices, frequent conversations with your teens, a strong policy against giving teens smartphones, and surrounding your teens with healthy alternatives to addiction to the Internet and social media.