The Delicious Poison

The term ‘pussy’ has come to acquire many meanings over the years. Initially being used as a word for cats, developing into a term for weakness, and most disturbingly, used a term for vaginas. It is extremely common for the porn industry to use this phrase as a means to objectify and degrade women, by referring to us solely by our body parts. In particular, there is a fixation on our vaginas. Here is a title I found on over 50 porn sites which perfectly demonstrates this; man finds some fresh teen pussies. This is undeniably sickening, but a highly accurate representation of how twisted our society has become.

Now before I begin on the depravity of the porn industry, it is important to highlight the facts on how truly prevalent the issue of pornography is. One-quarter of the total daily search engine requests are for pornographic material, and one in five mobile searches are for pornography. In 2019, Pornhub alone received 42 billion visits, the equivalent of over five times the world’s population. That’s 115 million visits per day, which is the equivalent of the populations of Canada, Australia, Poland, and the Netherlands combined. Let me reiterate, that is in one day, on just one porn website among millions. Not only this, but the attitudes towards pornography are important as it demonstrates the lack of knowledge on the dark reality of the porn industry. Research from Covenant Eyes showed 96% of young adults are either encouraging, accepting, or neutral when they talk about porn with their friends. This same study found that teens and young adults believe failing to recycle is worse than viewing pornography – so it is very clear that porn is heavily normalised in our society.

What should be our biggest concern about the porn industry is that it reduces humans, especially women, to products whose value lies in sexual objectification. If you spent even a mere ten seconds on any porn site, you would see a collection of degrading thumbnails and titles centred around women’s body parts, all of which are too gruesome to refer to in this article. Many studies have proven that most children turn to pornography to learn about sex, so what are they learning? Girls will learn that their value lies in being a sex object. They will likely become desensitised to the degradation of their own sex. Similarly, boys will grow up believing that this is the role of females in society and will be driven to degrade and abuse us. A woman told Collective Shout, a woman’s rights organisation, about her own personal experience with this. She recalls when her 11year-old daughter told her about viewing a male classmate’s snapchat story of a video of him and a few other boys from her class laughing as they watched rape porn. She said the woman was bound up, saying “no” as a masked man approached her. In porn, ‘no’ just means ‘be more aggressive’, so what is this teaching young children that turn to porn to learn about sex? Tons of young boys are constantly accessing videos exactly like the one listed above and are rewiring their young brains, before they have even been fully developed, to be aroused or amused by male violence against women.

A 2010 study discovered that, on average, nine out of ten porn scenes contain physical aggression and the typical scene contains over eleven attacks. Some common hashtags from the popular porn site, XVideos, include ‘‘chloroform” “sleep assault” “strangled” “drugged” “abuse” “assault” and “rape”. Whereas Pornhub decided to take the more ‘careful’ route of re-wording their rape videos to “coerced” and their chloroform videos to “chloro”. And if this isn’t enough evidence, we can listen to the real victims of this abuse. This takes me onto my next point: porn ignores consent. According to a study by National Youth Council of Ireland, most young people do not know what consent means. This is likely due to most young people turning to pornography to learn about sex. Consent should be informed, enthusiastic and reversible, all of which porn is not. Porn actors have little to no idea what they are in for when they sign up for porn, and most of them start off as children, meaning it was impossible for them to give consent. Of the trafficking victims that are forced into porn production, the average age they began being filmed was 12.8 years old - this says plenty about the extent of consent that goes into porn videos. Even if the porn actors were to initially agree to doing porn, in a consensual situation, this should be reversible, meaning that they can refuse to have sex or a refuse a sex act at any point, and the sex should be on their terms. But the reality is that when porn actors try to refuse, the risks are typically as severe as being raped, beaten, or even killed. Linda Lovelace, a famous porn survivor, has reported being held at gun point and forced to perform oral sex in the filming of the popular porn film Deep Throat. Mia Khalifa, another porn survivor, recently took to social media to speak about being forced to wear a hijab in a pornography shoot, facing years of online abuse for this, even though she had no other choice. She exposed this on her twitter recently; ‘‘They never saw me as a human being with a soul and a future. They trafficked me into the hands of this man with no supervision or regards for my safety. I was not paid for that shoot. I was not informed what it would be used for. I had no control.’’ Regan Starr, a porn survivor, also recalls her time during the filming of porn; ‘‘I got the shit kicked out of me...Most of the girls started crying because they’re hurting so bad. I couldn’t breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset, and they didn’t stop. I [asked them to turn the camera off] and they kept going.’’ The common misconception is that porn is just filmed sex, but when you go onto a porn site, you are not looking at a mutually enthusiastic, consensual act of love between two adults, you are likely looking at females being raped and sexually assaulted. There is little to no methods of finding out if this is not the case, so do you really want to take that risk for a few minutes of ‘pleasure’?

Gail Dines, an anti-porn activist, took to her Facebook to share the details of her meeting a survivor who was drugged to make fetish porn. She states that a common drug used in the porn industry is called ‘Triple H’ , a mixture of Ritalin, Ambient and Ecstasy. The drug works in a way that the victim looks awake and willing, even though she is fully drugged and in a blackout. Some eye-opening follow up questions from Dines include: ‘‘Do you think this is an isolated incident? If it is, how would you know for sure? If it’s not, what is the acceptable number of drugged women you would accept in your porn?’’

Without the sex industry, sex trafficking would not exist, so it pretty much goes without saying that porn fuels sex trafficking. A story which initially shed light on the sex trafficking behind porn videos involved a 15-year-old rape victim whose name became a suggested search term on Pornhub, along with the 58 videos of her abuse which were uploaded and made the ‘Top 5’. Unsurprisingly, there are tons of stories just like this one, with some victims being as young as three year’s old. Despite the majority of victims begging for their videos to be taken down, they faced years of neglect from Pornhub’s moderators. Due to this, Pornhub faced many legal suits as well as Visa withdrawing their partnership with them. This led to Pornhub deleting millions of videos, only allowing ones from so-called ‘verified users’. Although this clearly was not due to the

kindness of the Pornhub executives, I suppose it is a step in the right direction. Despite this, there is still an extremely long way to go before we can abolish the sexual exploitation of women and girls. XVideos, the second most popular porn site, is also known for its abundance of abuse videos. An example of this is in December 2019, when only a few hours after a young Indian woman was gangraped and burnt alive, her name made the “trending” list on this site. Not only are these videos uploaded and masturbated to by millions, most of them also get monetised with ads, showing that the more women and children get raped and abused, the more money the porn industry makes. The largest study ever done on prostitution from the London School of Economics proves that legalising prostitution directly fuels sex trafficking. This contradicts the common lie spewed by the ‘Sex Work Is Work’ crowd that ‘‘legalisation makes prostitution safer’’. Now although porn is not listed as prostitution by law, anyone with half a brain can see that these are indistinguishable.

It is undeniable that porn is not a ‘choice’ for most women in the videos. However, let's entertain the delusion that women in pornography are supposedly mentally healthy and consenting women with plenty of other options available to them, yet they still choose to do porn. Even in this case, porn is still wrong. This is because every human being has intrinsic value by virtue of their humanity. This value that we all possess mandates that we should all be treated with dignity. For a government to legislate that some human beings, particularly women, can be legally sold and traded in a marketplace is the absolute antithesis of treating a human being with dignity. In the eyes of a pornified society, women's lives are no more valuable than an object. It is a never-ending cycle of women being disposable slaves existing only for the use and sick sexual gratification of men. When else in history have we seen the government legislate that some human beings are commodities to be sold and traded? I can certainly think of a few prominent examples. Not only this, but how far have we perverted the notion of bodily autonomy, that we are fighting for women’s’ so called right to give away that bodily autonomy away to men?

Now although I have already given the pro-porn crowd’s delusions far more consideration than they deserve, I will address another justification they use to defend this corruption. In the same way the pro-prostitution lobby make false claims about legalisation reducing the crime rate, many people will claim that porn does this also. They will claim that men having access to porn in all its deviant glory, will actually benefit society, as they will no longer feel urges to sexually assault women or act upon any severely messed up ‘fantasies’ they may have. In fact, the direct opposite is true, and what better way to illustrate this than from the mouth of the prolific serial killer and rapist himself, Ted Bundy. Just days before his execution, Bundy stated that he does not doubt that porn fuelled his crimes. He said ‘‘I've lived in prison for a long time now and I've met a lot of men who were motived to commit violence just like me. And without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography. Without question, without exception.’’ Porn has been proven to be extremely addictive, and like any drug addiction, the more you consume the drug, the more your body adapts to it, and so you need to consume a higher dosage, or more intense drug in order to achieve the same ‘high’. The same happens with a porn addiction. Consumers progressively watch more ‘extreme’ content in order to reach orgasm. We of course know that this more ‘extreme’ content is synonymic to more violence against women, leading most consumers to BDSM and rape porn, and some consumers to snuff (homicide) porn, and child porn. And eventually, the porn will not be enough, turning consumers into perpetrators. Ted Bundy states: ‘‘You keep craving something harder, which gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach a point where the pornography only goes so far.’’ Not only this, but even if in some fantasy land men watching porn did reduce their urges to sexually assault women, the victims in the porn industry are not sacrificial lambs that exist to save other women from rapists and sexual deviants. The people who make this argument are essentially saying that some women are less valuable than others. The only justification that porn users can ever truly resonate with is that they simply do not care about women or children. Many men are perfectly content in knowing that a woman or child’s entire life will be ruined, just so that they can stroke their penis for a couple of minutes. These men are too far gone to convince, but hopefully most consumers still have at least an ounce of empathy left.

Finally, it would not be an accurate representation of pornography if I did not highlight that the industry’s aim is to exploit all marginalised and vulnerable people in our society. And so, I will bring to your attention some of the other minorities that are being abused by the porn industry. The infantilisation of women is an extremely common theme in porn, ranging from schoolgirl outfits, to diapers and pigtails. The most searched term in porn is “teen”, and an analysis of 400 million web searches over the span of a year showed the most popular category of sexual searches was “youth”. Pornhub has also been caught with videos of actual toddlers in diapers being sexually abused. Porn puts teenagers and children at real risk, as its sexual fixation around them is conditioning people to be aroused by them. Plan International UK, a charity, reported that 1 in 3 girls are sexually assaulted when wearing school uniform. Seeing as most grown men are watching porn, and “schoolgirl” is one of the most searched terms on porn sites, any reasonable person can make the link here. Further, in light of recent stand against police brutality of black people, we must recognise other prevalent forms of racism in our society. Pornhub has an abundance of videos with titles similar to black nigger slave girl brutalised and raped, a real title, as well as their category section which literally puts women into categories based on their race. This is systematic and institutional racism, widely overlooked by our society. Why does our culture speak out against injustices, yet openly consume porn which glorifies it? It's about time we abolish this disgusting industry.