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Biography

Gail Dines, Ph.D., is a Professor Emerita of sociology and women’s studies. She has researched and written about the porn industry for over thirty years. She is a recipient of the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America and the author of numerous books and articles. Her latest book, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, has been translated into five languages. She is the Founder and President of Culture Reframed, a non-profit organization working to stop the emotional, behavioral, and sexual harms of pornography on children and youth. She has consulted for a number of governments around the world on developing programs and legislation to address the harms of pornography.

Mandy Sanchez, Ph.D., specializes in domestic and sexual violence; the intersectionality of gender, sexualities, place, and trauma; the harms of pornography to young people and women; and justice-involved women and children. She co-founded and remains on the Research Center on Violence at West Virginia University board. She is a trained facilitator for the International Inside Out Prison Exchange Program, developing and coordinating programs on trauma/victimization in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. She is Culture Reframed’s Director of Programming.

Abstract

The average age of first viewing mainstream pornography for boys is around ten to twelve years old. The pornography they encounter is largely from “tube sites,” named after YouTube, which are popular because they require no registration, no payment, and no subscription. For the most part, an adolescent only needs access to a digital device to view hundreds of thousands of free videos. As we discuss in this article, the weight of the scientific evidence shows that viewing pornography is associated with multiple social, emotional, sexual, and cognitive harms. However, none of these studies provide a detailed analysis of the content, and we have learned from numerous presentations and workshops that much of the public is unaware of the cruelty and violence in pornography that are perpetrated against women by men. By focusing both on the content and effects, our goal is to expand and deepen the contemporary understanding of pornography as a cultural text and narrative that has normalized, glamorized, and cemented the ideological and material reality of women and girls as a debased sex-class.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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