Porn is brain-training a generation of boys
Modern pornography delivers warped perspective on women, relationships
The man who killed 10 people in Toronto’s van attack was part of an online community of “incels” — men who identify as involuntarily celibate and blame women for the lack of sex in their lives. The blame is vicious and misogynist, and has led to public debate about how to handle online hate communities. Do they incite violence? If we shut them down, are we galvanizing them? What about free speech?
This is a worthy debate. These are valid questions. But they alone won’t help us understand the self-proclaimed incel.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: the rootiest root cause is patriarchy, of course, which still underpins most of human production and interaction and gives people the overwhelming sense that men should be in charge. (It should be on a T-shirt, really: “It’s the patriarchy, stupid.”)
But patriarchy-since-time-immemorial has recently been given a giant reboot by online, high-speed porn. We need to talk about this because incels like Alek Minassian, accused van driver/murderer, have come of age at a time when porn has never been more available, more graphic and more stimulating.
As a home-schooler, I severely limit and monitor my kids’ screen time, and yet when my son was only 8, I walked into our study to find him peering at porn on our desktop monitor. How? It only took a couple of minutes chatting with a nine-yearold boy at the hockey rink and just like that, all my safeguarding and vigilance were rendered useless. I could not unring this bell. My assumption is that it’s even easier for school kids to find porn, given the omnipresence of older kids, phones, iPads, Wi-Fi and boredom. The reality is that the vast majority of kids (significantly more boys than girls) are getting access to graphic porn at ages far younger than they did a generation ago. It’s been a rapid, extreme social change that we’re barely acknowledging.
We need to talk about this because porn accounts for 30 per cent of all online traffic, and according to Psychology Today, attracts more site visits every month than Amazon, Netflix and Twitter combined. Yes, women look at porn too. But men are 543 per cent more likely to watch porn, and 88 per cent of online porn depicts violence against women. Even non-violent porn makes clear that sex is not about loving intimacy or a partnership: it’s about male penetration of the female body. It’s overwhelmingly about women submitting to male power.
Imagine, if you will, a boy who grows up watching this stuff. OK, maybe he spends more time playing video games, but what about those? Are they games in which women’s naked, bloody bodies are hung in the background like decoration, or in which a boy can play a character who has sex with a prostitute, shoots her dead, and then only spends a night in jail as punishment? Imagine a world where women who almost always look like porn stars are cheering on the exploits of the male drivers/martial artists/warriors/whatever. Imagine a decade of this. Imagine two decades of this. Imagine neural pathways being built in that boy’s brain based on this constant flow of experience in which women are always sexualized, sexually available, and subjugated to male power.
Now imagine that boy, eyes glued to his phone for several hours every day, getting less and less social interaction, and feeling increasingly awkward around people, especially girls.
Because these girls are nothing like the girls he’s grown up with online, who love to have sex with strangers and will even submit to sex when they don’t want it. But the girls he meets and sees in real life are nothing like this. They don’t even look at him or talk to him. Who do they think they are? This isn’t how girls are supposed to act! What makes them think they can say no to him?
These real girls — real women — are a betrayal of everything he’s grown up to believe, based on thousands of hours of brain-training. Will he rent a van and going on a killing rampage? Chances are slim. But will he go through his life lonely, and angry at women? That’s more likely. Maybe he’ll commit date rape. Maybe he’ll harass someone at work. Maybe he’ll join an online community and goad others into doing the same.
This is how dental students end up making rape jokes on Facebook about fellow female students. This is how male passersby think it’s OK to shout “F — her right in the pussy!” at female journalists working in the field. This is how the U.S.A. elects a president who brags about sexually assaulting women and who calls women dogs. We are brain-training boys by the millions to think of women this way.
Latham Hunter is a writer and professor of cultural studies and communications whose work has been published in journals, anthologies, print news and magazines for over twenty years. She blogs at The Kids’ Book Curator.