Pornography floods the internet. A 2023 report from Brigham Young University estimated that pornography could be found on 12% of websites. Porn bots regularly surface on X, on Instagram, in comment sections and in unsolicited direct messages. Defenders of pornography tend to cite the existence of ethical porn, but that isn’t what a majority of users are watching. “The porn children view today makes Playboy look like an American Girl doll catalog,” one teenager wrote in 2023 in The Free Press, and it often has a focus on violence and dehumanisation of women. And the sites that supply it aren’t concerned with ethics, either. In a column last week, Nick Kristof exposed how Pornhub and its related sites profit off videos of child rape.
There are consequences for members of Gen Z, in particular, the first to grow up alongside unlimited and always accessible porn and have their first experiences of sex shaped and mediated by it. It’s hard not to see a connection between porn-trained behaviours – the choking, slapping and spitting that have become the norm even in early sexual encounters — and young women’s distrust in young men. And in the future, porn will become only more addictive and effective as a teacher, as virtual reality makes it more immersive and artificial intelligence allows it to be customisable. (For a foretaste of where this might end up, you can read a recent essay by Aella, a researcher and sex worker, on Substack defending AI child porn.)
In her new book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, Sophie Gilbert critiques the mass culture of the 1990s and 2000s, noting how it was built on female objectification and hyperexposure. A generation of women, she explains, were persuaded by the ideas that bodies were commodities to be molded, surveilled, fetishised or made the butt of the joke, that sexual power, which might give some fleeting leverage, was the only power worth having. This lie curdled the emerging promise of 20th-century feminism, and as our ambitions shrank, the potential for exploitation grew.
Gilbert has a talent for pinpointing moments that, in hindsight, signal a change: when the “ferocious activist energy” of the Riot Grrrl movement was supplanted by the Spice Girls’ sexy, consumerist pop; when grown-up, self-assured supermodels are pushed off magazine covers in favour of easily manipulated waifs; when reality television and paparazzi hounds made self-exposure (willing or unwilling) the norm.
And she’s clear about the thread that runs through it all: the rise of easy-to-access hardcore pornography, which “trained a good amount of our popular culture,” she writes, “to see women as objects – as things to silence, restrain, fetishise or brutalise. And it’s helped train women, too.”
But while Gilbert is unsparing in her descriptions of pornography’s warping effect on culture and its consumers, she’s curiously reluctant to acknowledge what seems obvious: porn hasn’t been good for us. While her descriptions of the cultural landscape imply that the mainstreaming of hardcore porn has been a bad thing, she pulls her punches.
“I’m not interested in kink-shaming,” she writes, “and I’m not remotely opposed to porn” – immediately after describing a 2019 study that found that 38% of British women under 40 reported having experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during sex. That data point comes at the tail end of a chapter that draws a disturbing and convincing line from the emergence and popularisation of violent, extreme pornography in the late 1990s to the photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib in 2004 of prisoners being sexually humiliated.
But in its reluctance to acknowledge what the evidence suggests, Girl on Girl is not unusual. Despite significant evidence that a deluge of pornography has had a negative impact on modern society, there is a curious refusal, especially in progressive circles, to publicly admit disapproval of porn.
Criticising porn goes against the norm of nonjudgmentalism for people who like to consider themselves forward-thinking, thoughtful and open-minded. There’s a dread of seeming prudish, boring, uncool – perhaps a hangover from the cultural takeover that Gilbert so thoroughly details. More generously, there’s a desire not to indict the choices of individuals (women or men) who create sexual content out of need or personal desire or allow legislation to harm those who depend on it to survive.
But a lack of judgment sometimes comes at the expense of discernment. As a society, we are allowing our desires to continue to be moulded in experimental ways, for profit, by an industry that does not have our best interests at heart. We want to prove that we’re chill and modern, skip the inevitable haggling over boundaries and regulation and avoid potentially placing limits on our behaviour. But we aren’t paying attention to how we’re making things worse for ourselves. Phillips’s case is one example of how normalisation of pornographic extremes has made even lurid acts de rigueur; it’s not hard to imagine a future that asks (and offers) more than we can imagine today.
Most recently, the only people who seem willing to openly criticise the widespread availability of pornography tend to be right-leaning or religious and so are instantly discounted – often by being disparaged as such. But cracks are beginning to appear in the wall, as shown by sources as varied as the recent, if quiet, revival of the anti-porn feminist Andrea Dworkin (Picador books rereleased a trio of her most famous works this winter) and the heartfelt podcasts of Theo Von, who frequently discusses his decision to stop watching porn.
And members of Gen Z seem more willing to openly criticise it than their careful elders. The Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan, whom Gilbert quotes in the introduction to Girl on Girl, notes this in her 2021 essay “Talking to My Students About Porn”: “Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalisation of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.” In my own experience speaking to college students and young adults, they’re dismayed and discouraged by the role pornography has played in their sexual formation. In their eyes, it colours everything.
“I wanted to understand how a generation of young women came to believe that sex was our currency, our objectification was empowering,” Gilbert writes. “Why were we so easily persuaded of our own inadequacy? Who was setting the agenda?”
The thing is, we all know. Perhaps we should be so gauche – or brave – as to simply admit it.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Christine Emba
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
