How Does Pornography Affects Women?

Pornography is a multimillion-dollar industry. That tells us how much of it is consumed by people. Most people have watched porn or are regular consumers of porn. For many young people, pornography has become the default sex educator. But pornography is mostly created by men for the pleasure and consumption of men. Research shows porn has harmful impacts on young people and adults alike. Some impacts are deeply disturbing, particularly pornography’s contribution to sexual violence.

Firstly, since the 80s and 90s, porn movies have become a lot more aggressive, violent and offensive. Mostly women in porn movies are subjected to these violent acts which include gagging, spanking and even choking. Offensive words like bi**h and sl*t are often used in porn to describe women. Unfortunately, even women call themselves these derogatory terms to increase the intensity of the situation.

Male aggression is ever-present in porn movies, and this results in dangerous consequences. Research shows that these aggressive and violent acts in porn are often just generating positive or neutral responses from the viewers. They never generate a negative response, and this is a big indicator of the change in the attitude of the viewer towards their sexual relationships. The idea of sexual pleasure is now associated with aggression and violence. And this is not just the case of the male viewers. 

Men who watch pornography more often are more likely to desire or practise aggressive and degrading practices, such as gagging and choking. And women who watch pornography are more likely to desire or practise submissive practices. Even women have started to associate sexual pleasure with more aggressive and violent sex.

Watching pornography can lower men’s sexual satisfaction. They start to seek out the same responses from their partner as they see in porn movies and when they do not get these reactions, they start wondering what is wrong. They may even try to go for a more aggressive form of sex to explore if that generates a better response from their partner. They could also resort to more violent acts for their own sexual satisfaction since their brain has already associated violence with sexual pleasure.

For women, male partners’ pornography use can feed self-objectification and body shame, reduce intimacy, or involve coercion into sexual acts. A woman who is a regular consumer of aggressive porn is more likely to get involved in violent sexual acts in real life as well.

In porn, the women are dehumanised. And the regular consumer can become insensitive to women and dehumanise them. It is likely to cause many instances of sexual violence including rape. In a US study, people who watched violent pornography were more than six times as likely to engage in sexually aggressive behaviour.

Then how would we escape from this situation which is getting worse each day? Though that would be the ideal situation, banning porn worldwide is not a practically feasible option. But we can establish better sexual education in schools and talk to our children about porn and the aftereffects of porn. As adults, we can ourselves opt to stop watching porn and stop contributing to this offensive and problematic industry. We can make a change only by changing ourselves.

-Staff Reporter