What Is Pornography Doing to Us?

Pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry that plagues the world and more specifically our society. According to this article, it is approximately a $12 billion industry in the US alone.

Women are commonly portrayed as subservient, the target of abuse,and humiliated. A very large portion of the industry is geared towards mens' fantasies and only mens' fantasies; there is only a small amount of pornography intended for women. Because of this fact, that most porn is for men, it does not help at all towards women's issues and the fight for equality.

In today's world, pornography is all too readily available, even for children. All one has to do is go online and search something crude in Google and they are presented with a plethora of websites. The requirement to get inside? To hit the "Yes I'm 18 button" which one can easily lie about. Once inside, one is presented with an endless amount of images that sexualize and objectify women. The way woman are often portrayed, the over time have become the objects of man's pleasure.

Kerby Anderson's article, "Pornography Plague", notes that exposure to violent pornography can lead to anti-social attitudes and behavior.

Most people who view pornography tend to be more aggressive towards women and be less responsive to the pain of rape victims.

The article above cites resources that has shown that:

• Pornography negatively influences a person's understanding of normal sexual practices

• Pornography causes people to become jaded towards sex.

With constant exposure to pornography, the viewers are being more and more stimulated to sexual practices and in turn when they have sexual experiences of their own, it is unexciting. The experience becomes boring and less satisfying.

Even in pornography, the demographics only portray the ~2% of body types in the U.S.: young, white, and skinny. When a viewer is consistently exposed to this kind of "beauty", that is all they can look for. Their partners will not be attractive enough for them and sexual performance for both individuals will be lower.

Over time we start to become desensitized to pornography. The porn industry has to constantly find ways to stimulate us and starts to become more sexualized, more violent, more erotic, and more dangerous. This is an ongoing issue that we will have to keep our eyes on and hope it changes for the better in the coming years.