How porn became so extreme – and how it’s shaping the sex lives of young people
A few years ago, the singer Billie Eilish opened up on the Howard Stern Show about how she began watching porn around age 11.
“I’m so angry that porn is so loved, and I’m so angry at myself for thinking that it was ok,” she said.
Eilish became addicted to porn, and it led to problems. “The first few times I had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good,” she said. She had nightmares because the content she was watching was so violent and abusive.
Online porn is a multi-million dollar business, driven by algorithms designed to keep people clicking for more. These algorithms push more and more extreme content, often for free, to people who didn’t go searching for it. This can include strangulation, exploitation or incest porn, that’s often misogynistic and racist too.
“If you take incest and strangulation, we can look at content studies from the 1980s, for example, when there was hardly any of that material,” Clare McGlynn, professor of law at Durham........
