Porn use soars in pandemic, prompting fears for young viewers
Lockdowns and restrictions that have characterised the past two years have led to a dramatic rise in the consumption of online pornography, increasing the risk of abuse to women and warping healthy male sexuality, according to leading experts.
In 2020 Pornhub, one of the world’s biggest adult websites, reported increases of online traffic to its site of up to 61% — well above the 2019 average of 115 million unique visits per day (42 billion annually).
Porn as a coping mechanism
With dating and casual sex opportunities largely not possible during the lockdowns and restrictions enacted by world governments across 2020-21, the huge increases in online traffic to porn sites such as Pornhub suggest many people turned to pornography as a coping mechanism.
The study ‘Internet and Pornography Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Presumed Impact and What Can Be Done’ found that searches using the words ‘corona’ (18 million) or ‘quarantine’ (11 million) were notable on Pornhub, leading to the label the “eroticization of fear” and the view that viewing aggressive pornographic content could potentially fuel an individual's abusive sexual tendencies.
Yahoo News Australia spoke to Dr Meagan Tyler, Senior Lecturer at the Centre for People, Organisation and Work at RMIT, and Collective Shout movement director Melinda Tankard Reist on how online porn use has increased and what harm it has caused.
Women most at risk of abuse
Both Tyler and Tankard Reist agree that more women are on the receiving end of abuse inspired by habitual porn consuming men since a pandemic was declared in early 2020.
“We know there has been increased use of pornography (in the past two years), but in Australia the use of pornography in men, particularly young men, was already extremely high,” Dr Tyler said
“One of the Australian studies from only a couple of years back study suggests 99 percent of men under 30 had watched pornography and about 85 percent of that cohort were watching it daily or weekly.
“We know a lot of this content is not pleasant content and we know increasingly that it involves a lot of aggression and violence against women.
“With people working from home and potentially spending hours a day watching pornography that is eroticising violence, what does that actually mean in creating a safe workspace by being forced to work or live in the same space as someone doing that?
“I think it raises a lot of questions that we don’t have a lot of answers for yet.”
Consent an issue for socially isolated
Ms Tankard Reist said that the porn industry had capitalised on social isolation, with a recent study suggesting it led to 32 percent of respondents saying a partner tried to force them to watch pornography when they did not want to.
“What we have seen is an intensification of a pre-existing issue,” she said.
“Pornhub was offering free premium subscriptions almost as if they were offering a free community service and while there was clearly an increase in usage, it’s the flow on effect that concerns me the most.
“What we’re seeing with covid-related lockdowns and restrictions is that women who had pre-existing vulnerabilities to being abused, those vulnerabilities have increased and men who are habitually consuming porn are acting out on their partners and wanting them to do things that they don’t want to do.”
Extreme sexual acts now 'normalised' through porn
Both Ms Tankard-Reist and Dr Tyler pointed to the rise in the “normalisation” of once extreme sexual practices like choking and slapping as being directly inspired by the saturation of freely available online pornography.
Both also agreed that while the harmful effects on women is clear, the availability of porn and normalisation of porn-inspired practices has destroyed the development of healthy sexuality and attitudes towards women for an entire generation of young men and boys.
“Women bear the brunt of that because they’re the ones that often get choked or slapped or abused in various ways but also what are we doing grooming young men and boys into believing that’s what it is to be a man?” Dr Tyler said.
“What we’re seeing now is the normalcy of consumption but also how young that happens and it is a very formative process, as in it is normal to have consumed so many hours of pornography when you’re very young and long before you’ve had any sexual contact with another person.
“That’s obviously going to have a significant impact on you.”
Porn 'destroys healthy male sexual development'
Ms Tankard Reist said the work she did with Collective Shout in schools revealed that young boys are being exposed to porn from an early age, which was causing some alarming behaviours towards young girls.
“Boys are being targeted, preyed upon and groomed to have a sense of entitlement to the bodies of women and girls,” she said
“What they’ve learned from watching porn is that they think that violence is sexy... I have more girls saying to me that boys want to choke them, strangle them and think that girls will like that.
“Boys aren’t born that way, they’ve learned this through the biggest sex educator in the world – the porn industry.
“It’s really a crime against those young boys in the way that they then go on to behave and not know what healthy respectful and healthy intimate relationships look like.
“We’ve really destroyed the healthy sexual development of a generation in my view.”
Experts call for government intervention over porn access
Ms Tankard Reist has long been a critic of successive Australian governments for not doing enough to protect children from viewing pornography online.
She said urgent measures are required now to stop young boys from developing into sexual deviants and young girls believing it is ok to be treated like pornstars.
“Collective Shout were speaking in schools before lockdown in Queensland last year and we went to a regional part of Queensland where girls were telling us that the boys were making sexual moaning noises in class everyday, it was so common.
“I said how many of you had experienced this and 300 girls put their hand up.
“Girls expect that they won’t enjoy sex, that it will hurt…girls tell me that boys are demanding sex acts even at school.
“That’s why at Collective Shout we’ve been supporting moves for a proof of age protection, a system to at least put one obstacle in the way of young boys at one click seeing rape porn, torture porn, sadism porn and incest.”
Reversing the damage
Dr Tyler believes the way forward to reversing the damage already caused to men and women by porn was “to open up a space to have discussions with men who have now chosen to no longer watch porn after realising the damage it has caused to them and the women they have interacted with.”
A spokesman from the office of the e-Safety Commissioner told Yahoo News Australia it was developing “an implementation roadmap for a mandatory age verification (AV) regime relating to online pornography.”
“This roadmap forms part of the government’s response to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs report, ‘Protecting the age of innocence’,” the spokesman said.
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