What Porn Did to American Culture?
98 comments
·April 27, 2025whatnow37373
Not buying it. She just states “porn shaped society” without anything to prove it.
Seems absurd to me on the face of it.
Are men objectifying women? Yes. Have they done this since the dawn of mankind? Yes.
I could easily claim the reverse. Society shapes porn. It’s a reflection, not the other way around.
cryptonector
Not sure the following is caused by or correlated with porn use, but it might be: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43813335 ? My guess is "correlated with", not "caused by". Or perhaps even "that causes porn of that"?
loeg
Presumably to be explored further in her unreleased book. But yeah, certainly this interview is not interesting on its own.
-__---____-ZXyw
I think "society shapes porn" was totally true up until the point where it no longer was.
Porn shapes society the exact moment when the majority of young people get the majority of their beliefs and views on sexuality, romance, relationships, gender roles, sensuality, etc, from porn. This isn't true of all groups of humans everywhere, but it's definitely true of many societies right now already, and I would say obviously so.
None of this is meant as a "moral panic" type point. I'm just saying, there's no point hiding from the reality that young people get their views on sex from online porn, and that has major effects on them and the whole of society.
Jensson
There is so much porn that people watch what they want to watch rather than what they are fed, whatever you want to find you can find. So the only way it shapes society is that now people are aware of everything you can do in sex and what their preferences are, it doesn't create those preferences it just makes them known.
-__---____-ZXyw
Just like they listen to the music they want, watch the movies they want, buy the products they want, and go to the websites they want..?
I don't think it's true for porn or for any of the above things that people "do what they want" in any serious sense of the term.
It might be true in some sort of world without advertising, where media is presented neutrally, and barriers to creating and sharing (porn, music, plays, books, etc) are low, and we all explore and pick what we liked from these media sources in a deliberate, thoughtful way.
But that is so very, very far from the world we're in, surely?
Or a different way to make the point, just compare a pre-internet and post-internet kid. What did pre-internet kids know of sex when they were 14 or 15? And post-internet? This is a quick and easy example, but surely it's a major shift?
standardUser
This reads like a discussion form the 90's when the porn industry, and most media, were tightly controlled by small number of dominant players that set the norms (whether we liked it or not). I know a lot of people who have created porn in the 2010's and onward and none of them have any connection whatsoever to that porn industry of yesteryear. This feels like a strained attempt to stain the independent porn of today with the worst aspects of studio porn.
loeg
Not advocating for the article/interview in any way, but: if anything, I think the porn industry is more consolidated today than it was in the 90s? MindGeek owns all of the brands.
standardUser
I don't see how it matters what one company owns or doesn't. When dozens of studios ran everything, it didn't matter than there were dozens of them or just one since they all set similarly stifling requirements. What matters is autonomy and creative freedom, of which there is now dramatically more than ever before both in porn and across all media.
pseudalopex
MindGeek are Aylo now. They own a large share of studio porn. But OnlyFans increased independent production.
hdjjhhvvhga
That was my first thought: any woman can easily get into any level of "production" now and get direct profit from it, and also leave it without much stigma, sharing the same platform with non-nude celebrities. She can also control the amount of experience that is delivered to the "fans". It's incomparable with the situation from the 80s/90s.
mystraline
The article claims porn, and sure, that's a part.
The bigger issue here is outmoded predominant protestant christian views of 'morality'. And that percolates all through the rest of USA culture, including into advertisements and commercialism. Their view of sex is as a sin, so its shamed, hidden, and secretly desired. All these things have popped up with all these pretty terrible results.
Sexuality is 'tittalting' so it helps sell. Those interactions aren't genuine, but transactional. Transactions themselves aren't the problem, but when people crave genuine sexuality and get faced with '$5 for next hour of OF', yeah. Takes advantage of people.
Advertisements also been going on for a while, always pushing harder to see what sells but still legal and norm enough. Like the hot rod magazines - does anybody really think if they buy a red mustang, they'll also get the 44dd blone bimbo?
And really, everybody should at least try a sex party (Bacchanal) once. Have to do some std checks ahead of time, but its just so liberating and freeing for everyone. It gets money, possessiveness, prudishness, and all those distorting things out of the way. And puts sex into perspective. And well, its fun.
SequoiaHope
Sex parties are fun!
I’m in the “embrace sex, skip the shame” boat. In the Bay Area there’s a really solid polyamory community. I’ve been reading the books and working on my own communication issues and anxieties for a good 15 years now and at this point things flow so smoothly. I have so many people in my life I’m on a kissing basis with. It’s so lovely! I’m surrounded by genuine connection and affection. Me and my community have good communication. No one ever gets jealous as we’re all consensually dating a bunch of people. (I’m mostly “solo poly” these days.) I have some regular partners I share more structured, intentional loving and intimate connection with. I have cute friends I go on bike rides with and then kiss and cuddle while taking a break at the waterfront. I get invited to all kinds of functions. Sex is a source of genuine joy for me. I get tested once every two or three months and I have a clear communication protocol and safer sex practice I use with new people.
Amongst all this, porn is just a way to get my motor running. An arousing way to engage in self play and to build energy for what weekend adventures await. Or, if I’m so inclined, a way to ease my own stress and experience some physical release of energy and ease stress.
I’ve heard this notion before - that people who suffer from “porn addiction” often have an unhealthy relationship with sex, often coming from Christian puritanical views and shame of the self and the body. Drop the shame! Learn to love yourself. Learn to communicate your needs and desires. Be with your community. Have fun! I am. :)
mystraline
Ah, so true.
I'm sure you're reading some of the other comments to me.
For example, I am married. And my partner has similar views as me. And there's nothing at all like looking at a man or woman, looking at my partner and a sly grin and nod, and we both go ask together!
But the most bile and hatred I see come from the puritanical groups of Christianity. They cannot only fail to understand, but I get moralized the whole time as well. Like, try it before you knock it?
And I'm even getting flack for recommending STD testing. Some diseases can hide, like herpes and HIV. I'd rather know for me and my lovers, rather than hurt them. And, its not much different than a covid test - keep the people around you safe.
thraway79879s8d
You're right, but I don't think "just go to a sex party" scales up. There is simply way more male interest in such things. (Though yes, a lot of men would chicken-out last minute too.)
A gestalt of 3rd wave feminisism is "maybe if women are liberated, they will be hornier like men", and there was a huge amount of cultural messaging in this direction. It does not work, and as the interview entails, there is a lot of resentment from the women feeling like they were being propagandized to enjoy a hookup culture that didn't not fulfill their needs.
Either
1. men need to get less sociosexual 2. women need to get more sociosexual 3. wayyy more men need to come out as bi 4. or money needs to change hands.
We've already more or less tried and failed at 2 per the above, no one has a clear proposal for 1, 3 would be great but unclear how high the ceiling is, and then there's 4.
I would love to avoid 4 if anyone could actually come up with a serious proposal on how to massively increase sex party attendance / polyamory / etc. without money changing hands, but I am not seeing it.
cryptonector
If women are not happy with the hookup culture, then maybe you need to add one more option to your "either" list: marriage. I know that sounds quaint, but look around this thread and see that marriage need not mean monogamy, for a lot of people anyways, but stability (emotional, financial, familial, sexual).
Besides, your list comes across as very male-centered[0]: how do we provide men with all the sex they neeEeEeddd?? And oddly enough one answer to _that_ question is also marriage.
Now, there are unhappy sex-less married couples, so of course one question is how to address that. But at least in my and -as far as I can tell- my friends' experience marriage does provide men and women with the level of sexual activity that they need/want.
BTW, your (1) is probably happening as testosterone levels go down. Or at least one would expect that to be the case. If it is then you're getting your wish.
None of this is judging anyone.
[0] If your list is not male-centered, then it is still centered on this idea that sex parties are the bomb, but that's almost certainly not what most people think. I've a ton of close friends from all walks, many of them coupled, many not, and not one has ever even hinted that sex parties are a thing they care about, let alone come right out and said so.
nerdjon
I think it is really important to take societal pressure on woman into account here. Which you kinda touch on, but not fully.
If a woman is a slut, they are shamed. If a man is a slut, they are cheered on.
Or put another way, a woman has to play "hard to get" and can't be "easy". When was the last time you heard a man called "easy"?
There is a lot more shame put on woman for having a healthy sexuality that often leads to not exploring their desires.
thraway79879s8d
Absolutely that exists, and I used to be more optimistic that with enough cultural shift that would go away and the problem would be solved, but now I am skeptical.
There's just tons of writing on women against frustration with changing cultural norms around casual sex that doesn't mention stigma at all, and I just can't hand-wave all that away as "subliminated stigma", as convenient as that would be!
davidmurdoch
> Their view of sex is as a sin
Interesting perspective. But this is actually what Protestant Christians believe: https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/columns/ad-fontes/5-surpri...
swat535
Right, there's a popular idea that Christianity is somehow anti-sex, but that's not really accurate if you look closely at the tradition itself. The Bible doesn't condemn sex, in fact, books like Song of Songs celebrate it in pretty vivid terms (just to name an example though one could dig up much more..).
What Christianity actually critiques is sex outside of marriage. The reasoning is that sex is viewed as the most complete form of love between two people, and so it belongs within the lifelong commitment of marriage. Even then, it's worth noting that sex isn't at the center of Christian moral teaching. "Sins of the flesh" are taken seriously, but they're considered less grave than sins like pride or cruelty, something C. S. Lewis explains very clearly.
It's less about being "anti-sex" and more about believing that something so powerful deserves a proper framework.
We can argue about the moral framework of Christian values, of course and many have, thoughtfully, but it's important to at least critique what Christianity actually teaches, rather than a caricature of it.
davidmurdoch
Yes, this.
Bizarre that I was downvoted for simply providing evidence. HN readers sure can be a strange bunch!
davidmurdoch
Even more interesting is that when shown irrefutable evidence of what Protestant Christians believe I am downvoted multiple times for showing it.
pseudalopex
> And really, everybody should at least try a sex party (Bacchanal) once. Have to do some std checks ahead of time, but its just so liberating and freeing for everyone. It gets money, possessiveness, prudishness, and all those distorting things out of the way. And puts sex into perspective. And well, its fun.
Sex parties are liberating for some people. Not for others. People who go to sex parties are not healthier or unhealthier in my experience.
giardini
pseudalopes says>" People who go to sex parties are not healthier or unhealthier in my experience."<
There is no doubt whatsoever that people who go to sex parties or who have more sex partners are more likely to be diseased. It's just germ theory and simple numbers: the more sexual contacts you have the more diseases you will carry.
Anyone desirous of having children someday would probably want their offspring to be free of disease. Ergo, steer clear of disease and seek a partner who has done the same.
null
smitty1e
> The bigger issue here is outmoded predominant protestant christian views of 'morality'. And that percolates all through the rest of USA culture, including into advertisements and commercialism. Their view of sex is as a sin, so its shamed, hidden, and secretly desired.
Total strawman argument.
However, the bigger issue here is the demographic bomb detonating in slow motion. Demoting sexuality to a video game at your Bacchanal appears to be slow-motion suicide.
Possibly you could explain how your approach perpetuates the society, please?
Yutrentu
[flagged]
blueprint
yeah "possessiveness" has absolutely no basis in anything reasonable, let's villainize it too while we're pretending not to alienate anything about ourselves lol
mystraline
I should have expected that my general attack on protestant Christianity's views on sex would get a sarcastic response.
And no, possessiveness in regards to other humans is honestly really bad. It may every so often feel good for a moment, in a 'they want me' sort of feel. But that has a really bad tendency to go off the rails and turn violent quickly.
There's ways to do sexuality and relationships healthy. Possessiveness, jealousy, shame, and other similar emotions aren't healthy for anyone involved.
blueprint
Who cares about my tone, how about actually understanding the argument itself, which is based on science instead of your attempt to externalize your own religiosity?
I suppose you think you know better than thousands of psychologists who have explained the difference between adaptive and maladaptive. or perhaps you know better than billions of years of evolution. just because you don't understand how to bond with someone adaptively doesn't mean that there is no way to bond with someone adaptively. There's a reason why we want to make sure that our partners are actually bonded with us and trustworthy. It doesn't have anything to do with oppression. But your externalization and automatic presumption of pathology tells me a lot about what you must have experienced and what you never got to experience.
Noumenon72
> One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people... And my theory for why it’s happening is that certain kinds of porn have inured so many people to cruelty.
Besides being a complete stretch, has anyone even showed that men generally watch porn with cruelty? It's never on the front page, and it's kind of aberrant when hyper-enthusiastic "partners" are on offer.
hdjjhhvvhga
I believe it's the core of the argument of the author: she wants to link porn to cruelty at several places without offering any argument in favor of it.
Paradoxically, I could offer a starkly different argument - it is women who prefer BSDM if you look at the sales numbers of certain books.
ta12653421
no link/source here, but IIRC the most selected content by female users of PornHub is "FemDom", if i remember this correctly
does this somehow relate to your idea?
pseudalopex
Lesbian was the Pornhub category most viewed by women in 2024. Female domination was none of the top 15.[1]
[1] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review#gender-...
mvdtnz
I'm not sure I trust this analysis, at least the gender breakdown. They don't say how they determine if a viewer is male or female, but they make the claim that 38% of viewers are female, and well over half in some markets - this just doesn't seem credible to me.
loeg
Right out of the gate the interview has a pretty extreme claim -- that porn is somehow responsible for societal cruelty, not just towards women, but towards a rainbow coalition of progressive causes. No explanation or justification is given; it's just a sound bite. Is the rest of this worth reading?
Edit: I ended up reading the rest of it, and... there's just nothing there? If you're interested in a short interview with Sophie Gilbert, maybe this is appealing, but if you've never heard of her, I don't see the draw.
alganet
How many incidents involving sex affected the american perception on its institutions?
Of course, declaring that in an interview would be impossible. However, it is obvious. Anyone should be able to make that connection.
Is porn to blame? If it is, then any other kind of sexualization platform also is (you can think of it, I don't need to name it). It's hard to trace a line that doesn't leave you in a place of hypocrisy.
American culture adopted porn as a word, outside its original realm. The expression "action porn", for example, puts the practice into a everyday word, normalizing it. This kind of expression has gone through many entertainment industries and iterations.
The combination of sexual repression and porn is dangerous, the dangerous part being the sexual repression. That repression has also became part of the american culture, and in much higher doses than porn.
nerdjon
I should be very clear here that I am a gay man, so I don't really have exposure to much of what is talked about here even if I have heard about it.
What I find interesting is that it seems to equate critiquing porn with critiquing the treatment of the people in porn. Those are 2 very distinct things, you can have issues with treatment within the industry without going down a prudish anti-porn route.
Personally I feel like much of the issues with Porn, particularly in the US, stem from being uncomfortable talking about sex. Instead of feeling like we need to hide and be ashamed that we watch porn, it should be talked about so from a younger age we know its fantasy. We know that these positions, angles, noises, the perfection, isn't normal.
Sex is messy.
This shame about sex, our bodies, leads to many of these problems with how we view porn.
I strongly believe that there is nothing wrong with consuming porn, casually, with your partner(s), regularly, whatever. It is just another way to explore your sexuality and we should not demonize that. We should however address the problems with the industry, but without demonizing its existence.
RHSeeger
Your thoughts along this topic run similar to mine. I would extend it a bit to say that a lot of the problems in the industry, and how it treats people, are a direct result of the fact that it's considered shameful by a lot of society.
nerdjon
Yes, 100%.
Made worse by maybe afraid to speak up because of how might be judged ("Oh this person was asking for it because they do porn").
Feeling like you have no power.
It is for sure a complicated issue and societal norms and expectations play into that.
thraway79879s8d
The issues at play are really fundamentally about heterosexuality.
The gay male money-free casual sex market "clears" --- grindr does in fact work. The (unpaid) heterosexual casual sex market will never clear regardless of app design, there are simply not even women interested in not enough casual sex for it to be any other way.
Whether its 2024 voters freaking about inflation (despite it being lower than in other countries), or the rise of the manosphere since hetero dating apps, Americans in particular are very consumer oriented society that freaks out when consumption desires get impeded. Somewhere, between many culture forces (porn, 1990s-2010s sex positivity, hookup culture discourse divorced from reality, hip hop lyrics (?!) the end of the Hayes code (?!), straight men's "needs rising in the hierarchy" rose to include much more casual sex than previous generations aspired to....and now the cat is out of the bag.
A lot of the discourse around this reminds me of say, gentrification discourse. There is a wish that the demand would just go away, that we could rewind the clock to when straight men were less horny, or fewer wealthy professionals wanted to live in the urban core. Neverminding that the former is a lot more sympathetic a goal than the latter, it feels like pipe dreaming divorced from actual tactical thinking about the size of the problem and therefore what remedies are actually sufficient. Actually rewinding the clock is, at least, really hard.
Capitalism has been invading the domestic sphere for decades. It's the same process as, say, less home-cooking and more takeout or restaurant trips too. (And in that case, freeing women from the kitchen is unambiguously good!)
In the housing case, the moral and correct answer is "just build more dense housing" --- allow supply to meet demand. In the straight casual sex case, the analogous answer is "just legalize prostitution", but the morality is admittedly less clear cut. Personally, I think we should try it, as all the other answers seem deeply seriousness given the scale of the problem. Better to do something that might actual work, then half-ass things that will certainly fail while the problem gets worse.
bradlys
[dead]
backtoyoujim
It seems to have made sex scenes in movies seem even dumber and for that i am grateful.
null
palata
I am not sure I get it. It starts with this:
> One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people.
So before porn in the 2000s, women, immigrants, gay and trans people were all respected in the human history? Is that the point the author is trying to make?
I mean, "black lives matter", "me too", and generally the wokisme came after that, right?
I am not defending porn, just trying to find where the causation is. What if I said "the world we live in has been molded by the violent video games from the 2000s ("obviously"), and probably that is the reason why we started having wars after 2000"? Wouldn't someone be quick to tell me that we had wars long before the 2000s?
Like this, I wouldn't immediately think that women's rights have become worse after the 2000s in general. I don't need to go back very far to find the time where women were not even allowed to vote.
vjulian
Yet another crappy article about sex from an otherwise respectable publication. Why does this keep happening? The article assumes a negative definition of “porn” without ever seriously examining it. As usual, sexual depiction is assumed as inherently harmful, isolating, or degrading without any good argument as to why. Then, it makes a leap implying that the rise of pornography explains social problems like loneliness or political alienation. Also, American discomfort with public sexual expression is not intrinsic or universal reality.
What distinguishes porn from other depictions of sex? Could it be that porn and social atomization are symptoms of deeper technological or cultural trends, rather than assuming one causes the other?
DangitBobby
> Why does this keep happening?
There is a Sophie Gilbert who writes for The Atlantic, so maybe that's how this article came to be. I haven't been able to determine if it's the same person or a coincidence.
pseudalopex
It's the same person. The writer called her my colleague and linked a recent article.
https://archive.ph/kmH5a