The narratives on porn provoke fear and shame, but porn does not meet the criteria for a public health crisis.

The narratives on porn confuse causation and correlation. The body of research finds weak causal evidence.

Porn does not cause sexual dysfunction, addiction, or aggression.

The real public health crisis may be the lack of comprehensive sex education and porn literacy.

Since Utah (a state with high religiosity) declared pornography a "public health crisis" in 2016, more than a dozen US states have passed similar resolutions, and the phrase now surfaces in UK debates. The language provokes much fear, and combined with poor sex education, the narrative becomes powerful because when people are afraid, they can become vulnerable to believing misinformation. The language borrows the authority of epidemiology and implies a measurable, population-wide harm on the scale of tobacco, opioids, or obesity. However, the claim does not stand up to the actual standards held by public health itself.

What makes something a public health crisis

Public health crises are defined by evidence: rising mortality or morbidity, plausible causation, and a burden of harm that can be counted across a population. Opioid deaths, the HIV epidemic, and smoking-related cancers meet that bar.

The state resolutions on pornography were not built on new epidemiological data. They were symbolic and non-binding, and largely drafted with advocacy groups (many of which had religious moral imperatives). Nelson and Rothman (2020) argue that porn does not meet the criteria for a public health crisis. Other reports on this topic came to the same conclusion. Pointing the finger at porn risks diverting attention from the real issue: improving comprehensive sex education, including porn literacy.

Indeed, it could be argued that a major lack of sex education is the actual ongoing public health crisis that governments seem to be reluctant to address properly. But it is also documented that some anti-porn campaigns can cause real harm too, making men feel shame for their viewing of pornography, and it is shame, not porn, that can deteriorate people’s mental health to the point of suicidality. While the narrative of “porn is a public health crisis” sound like a virtuous endeavor on the surface, it might actually do more harm than good, and it is not evidence-based.

The causal evidence is weak

Much of the research cited for the public health crisis confuses causation and correlation. There........

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