Written by Farida
The day Anisa first saw porn, she was the only one at home and power had just been restored. She put on the television then took a seat, waiting for a cartoon to come up, but it didn’t. What was playing on the screen was alien to her 9 year old mind and nothing could have prepared her for it.
“About four men surrounded one woman, one of whom was sitting on her, and they were doing all sorts of violent things to her. From slapping her, to touching her everywhere, then pushing against her body. She seemed to be pleased with their actions because she remained there and even asked them to continue. It was just unsettling and confusing. Why would people be torturing you and you’re not crying in pain?”
“I discovered later that it was my Aunty’s tape in the CD player. She was probably watching before the power went off, so she couldn’t eject it. And I was the one exposed to the trauma of watching it.”
The Problems with Porn
Pornography is a highly mechanical, sexist, and performative representation of sex. Simply put, it’s an awful portrayal of sex as well as a terrible sex education guide, from the way it places men’s sexual pleasure over women, to how it normalizes abuse.
Despite this, the industry is ever booming, which shows that porn is being consumed—by men and women alike—now more than ever. Every second, about 30,000 people watch pornography on the internet.
“I had an off and on addiction to porn, but in 2020 I was watching porn a lot, and I hate anything controlling me,” Jessica said.
Like Jessica, Chinelo had a similar story, “porn had me in a chokehold so bad that I needed to imagine my favorite porn scene in order to cum, sometimes with my boyfriend.”
In addition to sexual stimulation, people watch porn for sexual education, making the increasing number of porn consumers alarming. With the infusion of more violence and aggression into adult films, it is impossible for these dehumanizing acts to not seep into the psyche of viewers in how people perceive sex and women.
“I stopped watching porn when I realized that it was causing me, a woman, to objectify women,” Ife confessed.
Porn sets such weird expectations of sex, and it conditions the mind to approach sex in an abusive way. Women in porno videos usually express pleasure to all sexual acts, even the violent and painful ones, while the men maintain a stoic and robotic demeanor as they inflict harm. This solidifies the erroneous belief that women enjoy being violated.
Jessica explained that there are several components of rape culture attached to the manner in which porn is produced. “Even the so-called “ethical” porn is still a staged act that cannot in essence show how sex actually plays out when a camera isn’t there.”
It took her becoming a more critical feminist to quit porn completely. “I watched this TedTalk by a Russian feminist who broke down how porn affects the perception of young boys towards women. She also explained how engaging porn sites like PornHub and even random videos on Twitter could be engaging in the trauma of a porn performer who got into the industry purely as a result of trafficking.”
“There is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘ethical porn’. All porn diminishes human dignity,” Ife concluded.
Sexual standards are adopted from the kind of media we consume, whether from romantic novels, sex clips in movies or full-length porno videos. In a survey sampling 50 of the most common pornographic videos, it was revealed that 88% of scenes contained physical violence and 49% contained verbal aggression. Another study surrounding PornHub found that an alarming 15% of videos contained nonconsensual aggression.
Jessica confirms this. “There was this guy I was involved with who used to consume porn and his views on women were degrading. He was also quite misogynistic during sex and tended to be selfish.”
As with any form of exploitation, women are the ultimate victims.
If? observed, “anytime I see pornhub being sued, it’s always because they profited off someone’s rape being uploaded there and didn’t take it down even after being petitioned. Imagine being raped and then thousands of people consider it entertainment?”
“Some of them will even search for you on social media and start talking about how sweet you looked and how they would like to do the same,” she noted.
Now they have divested from pornography…
Chinelo feels nothing for pornography anymore. “I used to feel disgusted whenever I stumbled upon videos after I quit. But now, I can’t summon up anything to feel about porn.”
“Sometimes, I bump into it online and it’s easy for me to close the page. It doesn’t have power over me anymore and that happened because of feminism,” Jessica credits her freedom to feminism.
Anisa, now 24, believes her early exposure to porn may have turned her off for life. “I really can’t stand sex in any form. Even kissing is a chore. I think I’m asexual.”
