Last week, I posed a question in this space: “Is Violent Porn Making Girls Identify as Transgender?” Quoting parents, experts, and my own research, I observed one of the reasons that many girls are rejecting femininity is because of the rape culture created by predominantly violent digital pornography. If our culture is answering the question “What is a woman?” with the front page of Pornhub, it is not surprising that some girls will want no part of it. Porn culture teaches girls that to be a woman is to be a target. The essay struck a chord, and many people responded with harrowing anecdotes that support its contention. One mother wrote:
I believe this contributed to my child’s trans identity. She had been exposed to online porn that included violence, rape, pedophilia, and bestiality. She was groomed by adults and would ask them questions about her confusion. I had no idea. We monitored her phone every day, we pored over every text/email/post. It was turned off every night. She had an app where she could share stories she had written. We thought it was innocent enough, but she created an additional username that we were not aware of.
It was there she found the pornographic content and was groomed. When we found out, I think she felt a lot of shame. So we took her to a therapist, who eventually ended up affirming her behind our backs, against our explicit request. She was 12. We wanted to pull her out of school but were told that she would kill herself if we did so, because she needed her friend group and the stability of band and school. We were terrified, so we kept her in school but never affirmed. That was a line we were not willing to cross.
From another parent:
Thank you for writing about this. It’s a big deal. I believe it contributed to my own daughter’s ID. The subject matter I found when monitoring her texts at age 13 were beyond comprehension in their inappropriateness. My stomach still turns thinking about them.
Yet another wrote:
Our daughter was exposed to violent porn at age 11 by an older teen at her dance school. I can’t even begin to explain how terribly this affected her. She identified as trans from about age 15-18 and currently identifies as nonbinary (age 19 now).
Perhaps the most heartbreaking comment emphasized the extent to which digital pornography has contributed to shaping the identities and consciousnesses of many young girls:
Whenever my step-daughter was asked why she felt she was a boy, she’d say, ‘I don’t want to be female because girls get raped.’ It was clear to us what was going on, but the gender clinic barely raised an eyelid and tried to get her on PBs [puberty blockers]. Who is listening to our girls?
Many other commenters offered their own observations about the poisonous world that pervasive pornography has created. One woman agreed with Mary Harrington—who told me in an interview that if she were growing up in this digitally deformed landscape, she would be identifying as “non-binary”—noting: “I’ve been saying this to my family for years! If someone had told me at 16 that sex as a woman meant being physically abused, I would have totally opted out.” Her description, unfortunately, is no exaggeration, as one need only listen to young women navigating today’s dating scene to know.
One woman wrote: “I have a beautiful teenage daughter. She says all the guys that are her friends watch porn and a lot of it. They talk about expecting degrading sex acts from their girlfriends. THIS IS CHANGING this generation. We are all just standing by and letting it happen. Misogyny.” She is right. We have decided, both actively and passively, to allow a metastasizing rape culture to permeate adolescence in the name of freedom of speech, or sexual liberation, or both, while libertarians make idiotic comparisons between the internet and the advent of radio to insist that things Are Just Fine, Actually.
One reader noted that, despite the evidence I had included in my essay on how porn spurs sexual violence, I hadn’t “even included the rise in anal tears in young women due to the increase in anal sex within heterosexual couplings as a result of pornography.” It was not possible to cover all the impacts of pornography, but I have written about this previously. Doctors have reported a spike in such injuries, with one noting that the slight bodies of young teen girls simply cannot sustain this sort of abuse. Teen girls are suffering sexual injuries so horrific that one 16-year-old will be wearing a colostomy bag for life.
