Attn: Dear Reader. This is hot. Meaning, it could be triggering. Read when you have bandwidth, and plan to go for a walk in nature or have a cuddle afterwards.
I have been spending the last few months doing a deep dive into the past, present and future ramification of the porn industry on women. I have been studying in my Women’s Work course alongside a cohort of brave women, learning from feminist authors and activists, and gathering voices past and present. What I have been learning has deeply disturbed me, and I have done my best to synthesize and alchemize so that you, dear reader, can glean the important points without being forced to digests the terrible ones. In this essay I’ll share some of my discoveries and I’ll tell you why I care, because I think it’s important for women to know how this shapes our world… especially mothers of daughters and sons who are growing up with an ever increasing access to porn.
In October 1979 Andrea Dworkin made a speech to a rally of over 5,000 women who marched on Times Square, organized by Women Against Pornography. For the first time, Times Square didn’t belong to the pimps, it belonged to women - not women hurt and exploited for profit but women proud and triumphant.
In her speech The Lie (which is in Letters from a War Zone), which I highly encourage you to read, she called out the one LIE that is implied in all pornography, all the time:
she wants it.
“There is one message basic to all kinds of pornography from the sludge that we see all around us, to the artsy-fartsy pornography that the intellectuals call erotica, to the under-the-counter kiddie porn, to the slick, glossy men’s ‘entertainment’ magazines. The one message that is carried in all pornography all the time is this: she wants it; she wants to be beaten, she wants to be forced, she wants to be raped, she wants to be brutalized, she wants to be hurt. This is the premise, the first principle, of all pornography. She wants these despicable things done to her. She likes it. She likes to be hit and she likes to be hurt and she likes to be forced.
Meanwhile, all across this country, women and young girls are being raped and beaten and forced and brutalized and hurt.
Excerpt from:
Dworkin , Andrea. “The Lie.” Letters from a War Zone, Lawrence Hill Books, Brooklyn, NY, 1993.
When I was a little girl in the 80s, I was first introduced to porn by my father, via the semi-nude bikini calendar on the wall of his garage. I think I was 6 or 7 years old when I first noticed it. In a sense, this scenario speaks to the lack of awareness of an entire generation. I can’t really blame him, the impacts of pornography on children were largely unexamined back then, people just weren’t thinking about this.
I feel strongly that today, however uncomfortable it makes us, we must think about it. From what I’ve learned and seen, it’s clear to me that we can no longer remain in willful ignorance.
Looking back, I can now see what pornography was teaching me about the world. I would say it taught me that if I wanted the attention of my father (and other men), that my body should look a certain way, specifically half clothed and big breasted. That I should smile at men with a wink, that I should move my body into provocative postures, and perhaps most influentially, that I should want to have this attention.
Not much later I found some of his porn magazines. I remember the feeling of discomfort in my body, immediately my body knew this was wrong, but I was so curious about how sex worked. Appendages go into holes! WTF! I shoved them away and never returned, the fear of being caught was too great. But the damage was done, I had my first indoctrination into a culture that views women as sexual objects, as orifices for penises, and I learned something foundational about my place in it.
This is probably why I wasn’t more vocal about my trespass experiences later, at age 10-11, or why I didn’t come forward about what happened when I was 5 either. In my mind, seeing porn early reinforced that this was just how it was. Men used women, women accepted it. The bikini calendars told me by her smiling face, she wants it.
When my breast buds began to form in puberty, male teachers and boys at school began to treat me differently. Suddenly, there was attention I had never known before, flirting attention. I recognized the looks of those women in the calendars on my own face, and on the other girls faces too. I learned that this was the face that they preferred, and so in order to stay connected, I gave it to them. In order not to be isolated, ostracized, cut out socially, I conformed and became appeasing, likable, easy going, smily, and not argumentative. I said yes to sexual encounters with boys too soon and too often, and had no idea how to say “No.” or “That hurts.” or “I don’t want to.”
When I started my healing journey around my trespass experiences, age 25 or so, I became ANGRY about the male gaze. I started to notice it everywhere. I began to resent it, and what it had made me into. Literally everywhere I went in Seattle, where I was living, I was being looked at. You know what I mean? That greasy look that has flashes of domination and conqueror energy behind the eyes? That send me raging. I was learning about boundaries and anger was my weapon against those gazes.
I started to dress in frumpy weird clothes, to distract the male gaze. It didn’t really work, maybe a little, but I still got cat-called. One time I chased down a group of boys on the street who shouted at me, “You want me to come fuck you?” I challenged them on their abhorrent behavior, reminded them that I could be their sister or mother or daughter. I was seething. I don’t think they apologized. They had already been conditioned by porn culture that this was acceptable behavior. Secretly, they believed, I wanted it.
In my Women’s Work cohort, a group of us women are unpacking our stories about our first exposure to porn, and how it has affected our lives. Most of them, like me, were exposed early. Many of us were exposed by our fathers, a story I didn’t realize was so common until we all started talking about it together. Today, most kids are exposed to porn by age 13, with 84.4% of males and 57% of females ages 14-18 having viewed porn (1).
One of the women in our group told a story about how she first saw it on her dad’s computer, and it included a chat with someone online. She became immediately alarmed that her father was going to leave their family for this other woman, so she began to secretly monitor her father’s porn and chat use. She read his dirty messages and was determined to find proof of his plans to leave, in order to warn her mother. This went on, and eventually she became interested in what she was seeing, and that paved the way to her own experience of porn addiction later on.
This story is heartbreaking to me because it truly highlights how the industry of porn uses tricks to make the brain addicted. From what I’ve now read, perhaps especially curious young brains.
I’ve come across an incredible documentary series called Brain, Heart, World which was produced as a three-part series intended to be an educational resource for those in middle school and older. It highlights the ‘new drug’ of pornography and how it affects the brain, the heart, and the world. If you have kids, I highly recommend watching it with them, for your education as well as theirs.
One of the most shocking and interesting brain concepts I learned from my explorations is that of mirror neurons. “Mirror neurons convince us that when we see something, we are actually experiencing it. These special neurons are located throughout the brain and help children learn from adults and from each other. Unfortunately, when they see pornography, these mirror neurons lead children’s brains to become prematurely sexualized, and they can cause children to act out or want to imitate what they see.” (9)
I can see how my own abusers were likely victims of early exposure to porn. This is what motivates me to study and speak on this, because if I can help prevent one girl or boy from being exposed, perhaps some piece of my story (which is OUR story) can heal.
I think for many young adults, porn became a place where we could get sex education, because no one around us was shooting it to us straight. When I was in middle school and most curious, no one in my entire life was telling me the truth about sexuality, pregnancy, reproduction, or my body. I was told blatant lies about pregnancy and fertility to scare me into abstinence. We were shown horrific birth videos to scare us too. I went on not knowing what was true well into my mid-twenties, when I began walking my own path towards healing. Despite how unrealistic and toxic porn can be, 1 in 4 young adults (4) list pornography as the most helpful source to learn how to have sex, and 53% of boys and 39% of girls believe (5) that pornography is a realistic depiction of sex.
While I have never been addicted to porn, or had any habits of watching it myself, I’ve learned to how absolutely life-altering porn addiction is from porn-sick men and women first hand. And I’ve also listened to the stories of some women in porn themselves: the women who are perceived as “porn stars”.
First, let’s be honest, porn is not liberating for women, full stop.
Like I wrote about in my recent essay, My Case Against Vibrators, there’s a phenomenon of privileged women believing false stories about female sexual liberation. Namely, that porn is a liberating chosen career for some women. That’s why they’re called Porn Stars, right?
Well...no. I’ve learned a lot from two women I deeply respect, Isabela Maudlin and Serendipity Day speaking candidly about the real experiences of women in porn in this podcast: Whose Body Is It: ‘What Has Porn Done to Us?’
Consider this stat I recently heard, 90% of women in porn are there unwillingly. Research involving current and former porn performers suggests that exploitation and trafficking are common experiences in the porn industry (6) , with pornography ranking as the third-most common form of trafficking reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline (7).
In addition, 1 out of every 8 porn titles shown (2) to first-time users on porn site home pages describe acts of sexual violence, and at least 1 in 3 porn videos show sexual violence or aggression (3). If this is true, women are being raped, beaten, and harmed unwillingly on camera. This is not liberating for women.
Do you need take a breath and digest these stats for a moment? I did while writing this. That’s why it’s taken me three weeks.
Okay carrying on…
While a statistically small portion of women may be choosing to have onlyfans accounts, and some may consider themselves liberated ‘sex workers’, they are the vast VAST minority, and believing otherwise further harms the 90% who are there unwillingly. I wonder, if this form of ‘work’ is truly liberating for women - and not done out of an internalized patriarchal inequality - do they then happily tell their new partner’s family about their occupation at the dinner table? No probably not, so let’s stop calling it something it’s not. If I may, there’s no such thing as ‘sex work’ or feminist porn.
Furthermore, ‘Porn Stars’ are not Movie Stars. Women in porn are not stars, they do not get the red carpet treatment, they do not get the millions. Women in porn are being marginalized for a living, in fact most of the time it’s for no living at all. Most of the time they are unwilling and unpaid.
Globally, porn is a $97 billion industry, according to Kassia Wosick, assistant professor of sociology at New Mexico State University. At present, between $10 and $12 billion of that comes from the United States. Porn Stars are not the ones profiting.
‘Sex workers’ are not liberated, autonomous career women. They are using their sexuality as a tool to earn a living, in a patriarchal world where there is huge demand and, sure, when put up against a wall, they can supply. Some choose to do so, but again, the majority are not choosing.
But say they are choosing, to do so they must morph their sensuality and eros into a commodity, they must work with men they are not attracted to, they must turn themselves on in a way that bypasses their sacred body knowing. They must desensitize, desert, and divert their feminine essence in order to perform.
From where I am standing, it looks like it’s trespass, however you package it. I think it’s safe to say that a lifestyle of sex work or porn will cause trauma. Do you think there are health benefits packages for sex workers or porn stars? Retirement plans?
Ignorantly, I never used to have a problem with my partners watching porn. I believed the story that it’s mostly harmless to me, and that porn keeps the bad men off the streets and prevents rape. Actually this couldn’t be further from the truth. Porn stimulates reward centers in the brain that are constantly seeking novelty, more extreme scenarios, faster, harder, more violent…. it feeds these impulses rather than satiating them. Eventually porn-sick men often take this built up addiction out into the world, but now it’s been amplified. I now have a hard rule that my relationships are porn-free.
Studies suggest that porn is a form of augmented reality that flattens the experience of satisfaction with real human-to-human contact. People who participate in or consume porn have very high rates of dysfunction with Real People relationships, including diminished capacity for satisfaction, commitment to partnership, and acceptance of adultery. (8)
What’s it like to be in relationship with men who watch porn? Well, I was married to a porn-sick man. I didn’t know it was a sickness, an addiction at the time. I didn’t know about his history with porn, or the pick-up artist and new tantra sexual cults that porn led him into. This relationship was devastating for my self-worth. I was constantly feeling abandoned by his need for novelty and other women, it was traumatizing and eventually it’s what ended our marriage. I could only see in retrospect how his addiction had a hold of him, and there was no level of support I could offer him that could ever make him heal, god knows I tried. There was never anything wrong with me, it’s not that I wasn’t enough, it was that nothing was ever enough.
Porn makes it very difficult to appreciate the slow pace of an attuned intimate partner. To allow space for full ripening and engorgement, to unfurl petals of sensitivity and connection, to play without an agenda. The pace of nature, of breath linked between lovers, the parasympathetic unfurling that gives way to soul quenching pleasure… none of this is known or discoverable if porn is the only color palate.
I spoke in another recent essay about pleasure as a form of activism... I believe to heal we need to reconnect our bodies with nature, to remind us of our elemental humanity, to attune our sexual beingness to something our DNA can recognize. And I believe it’s because of porn that we are seeing the destruction of the feminine and the earth. Porn-sick men are enacting the violence they see in porn upon the planet in all manner of ways.
Questions I’m holding are, how do we model this and speak to this with our youth? How do we approach porn use in our homes, and with our partners? How do we make sure we don’t loose our root system in the place we live, quite literally on this planet?
There are tremendous forces in the world right now trying to digitize us, augment our realities, numb us and desensitize us, confuse us about what’s true, to make us comfortable and complacent to violence. Don’t acquiesce the elemental nature of your erotic being. This is how we know what’s REAL, by feeling with our bodies, the tuning forks that they are. I implore you to quit porn, quit mechanization, quit pharmaceuticals too while you’re at it, if you can. You’re not broken. You have a well of sensitivity and livingness to reclaim. You’re not beyond hope. You matter. You are magic.
I believe unplugging our vibrators and our computers, desisting and going totally analog and earth-based, is the first step along the path to healing. This philosophy underpins my work to help women learn the physiological anatomy of arousal, menstruation, and birth. It informs my passion to spread literacy of the wisdom and magic of women’s bodies. It fuels my crusade to empower women to stand up as the matriarchs in their families, from a place of real power within.
It is at the heart of why I’m offering to hold space for young girls in Maidens + Menstruation Circles this summer and beyond (stay tuned for more on this!)
Our young people, their very impressionable bodies and minds are on the line.
You can stand up and say, ‘No, actually, I Do Not Want It.'
I’ll stand beside you.
love love,
WolfMother Sarah
References & Resources:
Fight the New Drug: https://fightthenewdrug.org/
Get the Facts: https://fightthenewdrug.org/get-the-facts/
Truth About Porn: https://truthaboutporn.org/
Women’s Liberation Front: https://womensliberationfront.org/
Brain, Heart, World Docuseries: https://brainheartworld.org/
Andrea Dworkin, The Lie (Exerpt from Letters from a War Zone):https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Letters-from-a-War-Zone-Writings-1988.pdf
Andrea Dworkin, Pornograpahy & Grief: http://feminist-reprise.org/docs/TBTN-DWORKIN-PORN-GRIEF.pdf
Whose Body Is It Podcast ‘What Has Porn Done To Us?’
Whose Body Is It Podcast: ‘Being and being Bought’
(1) Wright, P. J., Paul, B., & Herbenick, D. (2021). Preliminary insights from a U.S. probability sample on adolescents’ pornography exposure, media psychology, and sexual aggression. J.Health Commun., 26(1), 39-46. doi:10.1080/10810730.2021.1887980
(2) Vera-Gray, F., McGlynn, C., Kureshi, I., & Butterby, K. (2021). Sexual violence as a sexual script in mainstream online pornography. The British Journal of Criminology, doi:10.1093/bjc/azab035
(3) Fritz, N., Malic, V., Paul, B., & Zhou, Y. (2020). A descriptive analysis of the types, targets, and relative frequency of aggression in mainstream pornography. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 49(8), 3041-3053. doi:10.1007/s10508-020-01773-0
(4) Rothman, E. F., Beckmeyer, J. J., Herbenick, D., Fu, T. C., Dodge, B., & Fortenberry, J. D. (2021). The Prevalence of Using Pornography for Information About How to Have Sex: Findings from a Nationally Representative Survey of U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults. Archives of sexual behavior, 50(2), 629–646. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01877-7
(5) Martellozzo, E., Monaghan, A., Adler, J.R., Davidson, J., Leyva, R., & Horvath, M.A.H. (2016). 'I wasn’t sure it was normal to watch it'. A quantitative and qualitative examination of the impact of online pornography on the values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of children and young people. London: Middlesex University. NSPCC. Retrieved from https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/media/1187/mdx-nspcc-occ-pornography-report.pdf
(6) Donevan, M. (2021). “In this industry, you're no longer human”: An exploratory study of women’s experiences in pornography production in Sweden. Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence. 6(3) doi:10.23860/dignity.2021.06.03.01
(7) Polaris. (2020). 2019 data report: The U.S. national human trafficking hotline. Retrieved from https://polarisproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Polaris-2019-US-National-Human-Trafficking-Hotline-Data-Report.pdf
(8) Rasmussen, K. (2016). A historical and empirical review of pornography and romantic relationships: Implications for family researchers. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 8(2), 173-191. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12141
(9) Top Two Reasons Why Children's Brains are Vulnerable to Pornography: https://www.defendyoungminds.com/post/top-two-reasons-why-childrens-brains-are-vulnerable-to-pornography#:~:text=Unfortunately%2C%20when%20they%20see%20pornography,to%20imitate%20what%20they%20see.
Wow this is so good 💎 thank you for the bottom of my heart 💗 I needed to read this. Beautifully said 🙏💫🙌
Incredible , thank you so much for writing and sharing this.