Tangle - How dangerous is porn, really?

Warning: Today's edition of Tangle has explicit description of sex, sexual acts, abusive behavior, and explicit language.

The average age at which an American boy views pornography for the first time is now 11 years old.

For researchers looking into the harmful impacts of porn, the ease of accessibility among adolescents is one of the most concerning developments for healthy sexual development. It's worrisome in part because the average age teenagers start engaging in sex hasn't changed much since the 1980s from around 16 or 17 years old. That means before many boys have had any real sexual intimacy themselves, their understanding of sex and intimacy has been shaped by pornography for five or six years.

"The whole of the industry has shifted," Dr. Gail Dines, a sociologist at Wheelock College in Boston who has been researching pornography for 40 years, told me. "You used to have soft core, medium, hardcore. Now these free tube sites are virtually only carrying hardcore. So this 11 year old boy, his first sexual experience is cruel, body-punishing, violent, misogynistic imagery. That's how he's developing his sexual template."

A few months ago, I read a piece about pornography in The Free Press from a 16-year-old named Isabel Hogben. Hogben shared an intimate and frightening tale about finding pornography as a 10-year-old. "I saw simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism, and unthinkable physical violence," Hogben wrote. "The porn children view today makes Playboy look like an American Girl doll catalog."

And then Hogben realized something startling: Many of her teenaged friends seemed addicted to this content.

The piece went viral, and generated a lot of conversations about the risks porn poses to American teens. When I first started reading about what some activists have called "the new drug," I was skeptical. Not only has porn been around forever, but our country has a track record of working itself into a moral panic over everything from marijuana to TikTok. Hogben's highschool experience is, by definition, anecdotal. It can easily be true while also being unique, not indicative of some larger trend. 

Instead, I found evidence to suggest the opposite: Hogben's story is indicative of a larger trend. The scale of the industry is beyond what I had believed, the content has gotten more dangerous, the volume of porn available has fundamentally changed the problem, and the research we have about its impact on kids is pretty compelling.

The impact porn has on adults is a bit of a different story (which I’ll get into briefly), but there’s plenty of reason for even the most permissive skeptic to believe that our current situation is harmful for kids.

This is not a position staked out by prudes and scolds, nor is it one born out of religious conservatism. Dines told me she regularly has to remind people she approaches her studies from an evidentiary perspective, and is not trying to convince people porn is bad out of a religious or moral belief.

"That's one of the first questions they'll say to me: 'So Gail, you are a right-wing Evangelical?' And I say, 'actually, I'm a left-wing progressive feminist Jew.'"

Before talking about the research, it's worth getting an understanding of the scale and nature of the problem.