"We're watching it on the bus, the Tube, the plane. We're watching it in libraries. We're watching it during the day at work, or at home when we're supposed to be working."
From a young age, I was a very sexual person. I knew I wanted to have a lot of sex, and I also figured that to do that, I would need to meet women who felt the same. I never considered making sex my career. Or at least not until one day in Tokyo, when I was with a friend who got a call about a job.
I spent a large portion of my life as a young adult walking on the fence like this. On this right hand foot right here, oh, I believe I believe in Jesus, and I believe in God. On this left hand foot right here, I also like to party. I was like, tell dirty jokes. I just like to watch pornography.
Adult content has never been as accessible as it is now, thanks to the internet. Hell, online smut played a major role in the rise of the web itself in the 1990s. With that glut of porn, some have voiced concerns that some people are consuming too much of the stuff or even becoming addicted, which they claim could have consequences like regulating emotions or impaired sexual functioning.
In 2022, the world watched aghast as Russian troops invaded the European country of Ukraine. A group of psychologists viewed this as an opportunity to conduct a natural experiment to monitor how the stress and fears of being in a country under attack and at war would impact people's viewing of pornography. By this point, it was well-established that many people use pornography as a way to cope with loneliness, stress, and depression.
During the month of November for the past 20 years, the movement has invited men to grow a "mo," or mustache, to raise money for and awareness of illnesses that have long remained in the shadows. Each of these diagnoses directly impacts sexual functioning and relational health. Movember has added research showing that body image concerns, commonly associated with women's mental health challenges, can deeply impact men too.
U.K. law now requires pornography websites to verify their users' ages through means such as face scans and driver's licenses; it also requires that online platforms prevent children from being exposed to adult content (which is why sites like Bluesky and Reddit have begun checking some users' ages). To study the law's effect, the Post says it examined the top 90 porn sites based on U.K. visitor data from Similarweb, finding 14 sites that still don't perform an age check.
