Today’s twentysomethings were the first people to grow up in a world where porn was free, easily accessible — and often extreme. Gabriel Pogrund, 23, describes how it shapes young people
When one popular website reached its 10th birthday earlier this year, thousands upon thousands of people took to Twitter to say what the site had taught them over the past decade. The responses were tinged with creepy nostalgia.
One user joked: “To always lock the doors.” “How to shut down the PC very fast,” said another. One, a little more candidly, confessed, “It’s OK to be different,” while another said the site had taught them “every little thing I know about sex”.
The site in question was Pornhub: a company that sits at the heart of the $100bn global porn industry and has more visitors than the websites of the BBC, CNN and Amazon.co.uk combined. Its birthday felt like a timely moment to reflect on the wave of smut that has swept over my generation.
When I was born in 1994, a handful of production studios in LA made most of the world’s pornographic films. A mostly male clientele bought them on VHS tapes from seedy sex shops, rented them from independent video stores or watched them on pay-per-view channels at home or in hotel rooms. Then the internet happened — and porn became pervasive, then portable.
Today, according to Pornhub, it is young adults who account for the majority of porn consumers. Millennials — people aged 18 to 34 — make up 60% of the website’s users. That’s approximately 45m people — of whom 23% are women — accounting for an estimated 55bn videos viewed last year.
I first came to understand the ubiquity of Pornhub — and in turn, porn’s impact on my generation — in a mock pub quiz at my friend’s house, aged 16. One of the more risqué rounds was to name every category on the website. When the quizmaster announced the round, we exploded in embarrassed laughter. Yet, slowly but surely, each team proceeded to name about 30 categories. “Teen”, “lesbian”, “ebony”, “interracial”, “gay”, “vintage”, “European”, “amateur”, and so on.
The more I’ve thought about it since, the more I’ve considered what a remarkable reflection on my age group it was. Here were 20 or more pimply teenagers — all of them virgins — reciting with devastating accuracy a cornucopia of sexual fantasies, preferences and perversions.
It’s not just the site’s nomenclature that was seared into our souls. A friend who was there on the day affirms: “We recognised the names of the porn stars, too. Different sexual positions. We knew the adverts that popped up on the side. We’d all been guzzling down porn for years.”
If it exists, there’s porn of it. ‘Fidget spinners’ and ’Boris Johnson’ have ranked among top porn searches recently
The quiz testified to the fact that, unlike our parents, my generation had grown up in a porn-saturated, porn-literate, porn instantly and infinitely and freely available world. Being teenagers in the early Noughties (or should that be Naughties?), we had grown up in a culture that spawned “Rule 34” — one of the so-called rules of the internet — which states: “If it exists, there’s porn of it.” That is to say, any conceivable thing you can dream up has already been depicted in pornographic form somewhere online. The rule still applies — “fidget spinners”, “killer clowns” and “Boris Johnson” all ranked among the top searches globally on Pornhub over the past two years.
As curious teenagers with Google at our fingertips, we could search for anything we could think of. And not much — not even the most obscene content — shocked us.
Most memorably, aged 14, word of a grotesque porn film called 2 Girls 1 Cup spread among my schoolmates, which featured two Brazilian porn actresses and a cup of human excrement. For weeks we huddled around PCs at school watching it, retching and sniggering with schoolboy glee. I will spare you the details, but the film became such a phenomenon that it featured — without the need for context or introduction — in a 2009 episode of the hit Channel 4 comedy series The Inbetweeners. The character Jay plays the video on his new laptop and his friend Will comments: “That can’t be real, that’s gotta be chocolate!”
A trend simultaneously emerged in which thousands of people filmed themselves retching hysterically in response to the clip. George Clooney sportingly agreed to watch it during an interview with Esquire (he reportedly fled the room, gagging). An unofficial video of Kermit the Frog’s reaction garnered millions of views.
Porn, it was clear, was now interwoven with contemporary youth culture. Extreme or otherwise, we watched it alone, with our friends, in our bedrooms, at school. We watched it for sexual pleasure, we watched it for laughs. And as we marinated in this material, a discussion raged in the distant adult world over whether porn was bad for us. Was it taking away our innocence? Was it ruining romance and sex for a whole generation?
explicit statistics
- 23%
of Millennials who visit Pornhub are female - 60%
of visitors to Pornhub.com are Millennials — people aged 18 to 34 - 53%
of British 11- to 16-year-olds say they have seen explicit material online - 53%
of boys think porn is a realistic depiction of sex, compared with 39% of girls (Source for all stats NSPCC/Middlesex University 2016)
Those discussions felt irrelevant to us. They definitely couldn’t disrupt the overall trend: as we got older, porn — the good, the bad and the ugly — became faster, freer and much more accessible. Porn migrated: from the desktop to the laptop and, finally, to the smartphone, so that unlike the old porn industry of video cassettes and magazines, we could access it wherever we wanted, without a trace. As one person joked on Twitter on Pornhub’s recent anniversary, “It’s taught me how important Incognito mode is”, referring to the option to temporarily disable your browsing history. “It taught me how important deleting my internet history was,” posted another.
“I think the first time I watched porn was aged 12,” recalls Jamie, now 22. “I remember people would come in [to school] with hard drives full of it. We’d download it onto our iPods and then share it around. It was so easy — complete impunity. No one was going to get caught.”
Jamie remains grateful for the role played by porn in his younger life. He is bisexual and grew up in an area with no openly gay peers or family friends. “Porn meant that I could log on and in seconds see that the stuff I liked was also being viewed by hundreds of people,” he says. “It was an incredible relief.”
He says it also meant being exposed to “shocking” stuff, though. “I’m grateful for discovering that not everyone was straight, but the content was often grim. So much porn depicts scenes of men subjecting women — and indeed other men — to aggressive domination. We weren’t equipped to critique it, and at that age we didn’t care to.”
Jamie was still a virgin when he went on to study English at Oxford University. “When I arrived, it took a while with girls and guys to learn what was and wasn’t acceptable,” he says. “I don’t mean that I arrived on campus a sexual predator, or did anything terrible. I mean that, although porn showed homosexuality was OK, it didn’t show me how to express that in a particularly healthy or generous way. It was a blessing and a curse.”
As our generation came of age online, mainstream porn simultaneously seemed to become more graphic and obsessed with power. For a study in The Journal of Sex Research in 2014, researchers examined hundreds of the most popular videos online and found that in 40% of films, women endured “physically violent acts” — including slapping, spanking and choking — while “coercive sex” occurred in one-tenth of scenes.
The authors found an industry in which men were dehumanised as angry sex machines, while women were portrayed as “instruments for men’s pleasure” who “did not respond negatively to violence”. The domination wasn’t purely physical, it was also psychological. “Schoolgirl is taught a lesson.” “Babysitter is blackmailed into sex.” “Daddy teaches daughter’s friend how to have sex.” Professional, financial and generational imbalances were encoded into the DNA of the industry.
I have met 18-year-old boys whose first sexual experience involves asking girls to tie them up and whip them
Martin Daubney, who edited the lads’ magazine Loaded before becoming a sexual-health activist in schools, has encountered teenagers who are shockingly ill-equipped to separate fantasy from reality. “I have met 18-year-old boys whose first sexual experience involves asking girls to tie them to chairs and whip them,” he tells me. He has heard girls say their boyfriends emulate the performances of porn stars, and engage in acts the girls find invasive, unpleasant or traumatising. “I’ve spoken to boys who say they’ve never kissed anyone, but definitely want to try anal sex.”
“Before the internet,” Daubney, 47, recalls, “it took a lifetime to work out what you were into… now the process of sexual exploration has been condensed into the prepubescent years.”
The result is that, for many young people, real sex — when it eventually arrives — is far less exciting than it should be. This is borne out by statistics on the incidence of conditions such as erectile dysfunction — once considered an old man’s disease. In Europe, the rate of the dysfunction among men aged 18 to 40 has surpassed the rate it was among those aged 40 to 80 a decade ago, up to as much as 28%.
Angela Gregory, a psychosexual therapist at Nottingham University Hospital, recently warned that the number of young male patients she has treated for erectile dysfunction over the past five years has soared. “These younger men do not have organic disease. They’ve already been tested by their GP and everything is fine,” she said.
Has porn become more extreme — more obsessed with power, more graphic — in order to appeal to a young generation desensitised to traditional pornography? Kat Banyard, a feminist and anti-porn campaigner, believes so. As she writes in her 2016 book, Pimp State: Sex, Money and the Future of Equality: “Porn profiteers have to find a way to elbow their porn to the front of the crowd… and are simultaneously waging a battle with boredom.”
To cut through the noise of a saturated market and appeal to desensitised users, Banyard argues, producers must create more and more extreme content.
When I put that to Corey Price, Pornhub’s vice-president, he argues that the industry is merely responding to the demands of the market: “It’s the same with any creative industry. If you want to stand out and really attract people’s attention, you have to create original and creative content that people want.”
I ask him if he thinks porn simply reflects the underlying sexual preferences of users, or whether exposure to porn desensitises them and creates an appetite for ever more extreme material. He says that’s for sex psychologists or philosophers to think about.
“This is what people are doing, we’ll leave others to speculate as to why. We’re just data and data science and algorithms. Our goal is to deliver the best video to the person. Our closest business model is YouTube,” Price says.
It should be said, his colleagues are well placed to adjudicate on what people want; over the past 10 years, Pornhub has recruited one of the most respected data-science teams in the world. “One was a nuclear scientist, one came from Microsoft, another was working in medical research,” Price says. “For you, it’s porn, but for them it’s just data.”
Their job is to analyse the biggest data set on human sexuality ever known. Two years ago, they produced a comprehensive report on their most lucrative demographic: Millennials. So, what distinguishes the first generation to have grown up with online porn?
The report begins by explaining that “open and rapid access to information afforded to this group by the web in their formative years” has set Millennials apart from previous generations in the way they consume porn online. They watch it more often than any other age group, use different devices (smartphones, rather than computers), access it at different hours (11pm to 12am is peak) and search for all sorts of different subjects.
The majority of Millennial voters may have preferred to remain in Europe, but UK twentysomethings look closer to home when it comes to porn: “British”is their most viewed video category. Scenarios concerning “teens”, “mums”,“threesomes” and “babysitters”, meanwhile, are among their foremost fantasies. Globally, health-obsessed Millennials — known for their clean-eating fads — are much more likely to watch “gym” and “yoga” porn than older generations, whose searches for “smoking” porn were 51% more common.
Price of Pornhub is non-judgmental about the transgressive or occasionally bizarre search terms that are used on his site. “People are looking for different scenarios and fantasies, they want to experience things that don’t exist in real life,” he says.
The porn industry has interesting ideological bedfellows on this front. Isabel, 25, a journalist and women’s activist, says: “I would never deny any fellow woman or man the right to watch what they want. That sounds like policing sexuality.”
She confides: “I’m in control of so many other areas of my life, I don’t mind being roughed up a bit, nor do I mind watching quite aggressive porn. As long as it’s consensual and above board, I don’t mind trying what my partner likes either.
“But it’s also very easy to tell when a guy has watched too much porn. Or, maybe, when a guy hasn’t learnt how to differentiate between real life and porn. The problem is when people bring that into the bedroom — and see porn as a template for what’s socially or sexually acceptable. As a feminist, that’s the conversation I’m interested in having — not ending porn itself.”
No one I spoke to for this article believed that the answer was to ban or censor porn. Pornhub’s data makes clear that Millennials aren’t going to log off in moral indignation anytime soon. Porn is a fundamental aspect of how they express and experience sexuality.
One internet entrepreneur and porn pragmatist thinks the answer is simply to provide better, more innovative content. Cindy Gallop started MakeLoveNotPorn, a website that features couples in real relationships having sex.
“Porn is as infinitely varied and rich as literature or anything else,” she tells me. “It’s fantasy, and people should remember that. If you’re a publisher and you don’t like books on offer, what do you do? Publish better books.”
Some of the names have been changed
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