Pornography
USA – Porn sites crumble
Since MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub and XTube, faces increasing scrutiny over apparent sex trafficking and rapes streaming on its platforms, the sister site XTube has announced they will disable video and photo uploads, and by Sept. 5, the site will close down. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) told The Daily Wire via email that the XTube closure is evidence that the “pornography industry is collapsing.” We look forward to the day we can announce that Pornhub and additional MindGeek-owned pornography sites are ending,” the CEO added. This means justice for the victims of trafficking and abuse who re-live these experiences while their videos remain on the platform. More
England – Popular Porn Sites Feature Sexual Violence, Study Finds
The largest study of online pornography to date was recently published in The British Journal of Criminology. It raises urgent questions about the extent of sexually violent, non-consensual, and even criminal material easily and freely available on mainstream porn websites. Fiona Vera-Gray, a legal research fellow and co-author of the study, told the BBC that sexually violent material “eroticized non-consent” and distorted “the boundary between sexual pleasure and sexual violence.” The implications of these findings on both an individual and societal level are significant. Over a six-month period, researchers analyzed the homepages of the three most popular porn websites—Pornhub, XVideos, and XHamster. The study concluded that 1 in 8 video titles alone shown to first-time users on the homepages are labelled with text describing sexually violent acts.
The descriptions and titles of the videos, match what the World Health Organization defines as sexual violence. The most frequent form of sexual violence in the sample—8,421 titles—was related to sexual activity between family members. “Teen” was the most frequently occurring word in both the entire data sample and in the sexual assault category.
The word “black” occurred in the top twenty most frequent words for the physical aggression and sexual assault category, but not for others—suggesting a connection between scripts of sexual violence and racialized descriptions of black performers. Terms that implied an inability to consent like “very young,” “schoolgirl,” “drugged,” and “unconscious” dominated the sample—with 2,698 titles coded as coercive and exploitative. More.
US – iPhones to be monitored for Evidence of Child Porn
Smartphones already act like tracking devices broadcasting the whereabouts of their owners, but Apple is about to open the door to far more advanced forms of smartphone-based voluntary surveillance by launching a new program designed to detect and report iPhone users who are found to have child pornography – known by the academic-speak acronym CSAM – which stands for Child Sexual Abuse Materials. There are concerns that the tool being used to unearth child pornography could one day be abused by authoritarian governments and once Apple has committed to using this type of surveillance, governments will demand it from everyone. More
Czech Republic – Youth activist on pornography
Jeronym Kristof, a Czech republic 19-year-old wrote his final school thesis on the negative effects of pornography. He conducted a survey with 437 adolescents in his region and the results were: Pornography viewing is widespread among adolescents, they have little knowledge about the risks and social problems associated with pornography viewing, pornography viewing affects the sexual expectations of the respondents, teens often come into contact with porn without searching for it, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is even worse. The 19-year-old initiated a petition against porn in which he summarised the facts, and demands the content on the porn websites of WGCZ Holding be checked for illegal porn activity, and withdrawn. Based on Jeronym’s petition the investigative research of the Denik N began. His decision to do all this stemmed from the multiple cases of sexual exploitation against Pornhub. This investigation that started due to his petition have caused more than 10 articles to be published to this day and have attracted interest from the Police of the Czech Republic. This report was from NCOSE’s 2021 Virtual Summit / More details of Jeronym’s research is attached below.
US – Does Porn Fuel Rape Culture and Sexual Assault On College Campuses?
What does sexual assault have to do with pornography? Well, turns out they are more closely linked than people think. In September of 2015, The New York Times reported that a survey commissioned by the Association of American Universities (AAU) showed more than about 23% of female college undergrads at leading universities reported being sexually assaulted by force or when they were incapacitated. This included everything from unwanted touching to rape. If you didn’t know before, college students watch a lot of porn. One survey polled about 2,500 university students from across the UK, half of whom were between the ages of 16 and 19, and found that 80% of men and 45% of women admitted to regularly watching porn.
One 2020 study entailed a large-scale content analysis and coding of a sample of 7,430 pornographic videos taken from the two most popular free porn sites, Pornhub and Xvideos. The study found physical aggression against women present in 44.3% of Pornhub and 33.9% of Xvideos scenes. In fact, the study found that physical aggression was substantially more common in online pornographic videos than verbal aggression.
Specifically, women were the target of nearly 97% of all physically aggressive acts in the samples from both sites. Violence in porn isn’t an exception, it embodies entire genres on porn sites. Of course, not all porn material features physical violence, but even non-violent porn has been shown to have effects on consumers.
The vast majority of porn—violent or not—portrays men as powerful and in charge; while women are submissive and obedient. Watching scene after scene of dehumanizing submission makes it start to seem normal. Study after study has shown that consumers of violent and nonviolent porn are more likely to use verbal coercion, drugs, and alcohol to coerce individuals into sex.
Multiple studies have found that exposure to both violent and nonviolent porn increases aggressive behaviour, including both having violent fantasies and actually committing violent assaults. If we’re really going to tackle the issue of sexual abuse as a society, we need to be aware of all the places where this harmful behaviour is normalized, and even promoted. The same kind of behaviour that many college sexual assault and rape survivors endured is easily accessible for anyone with internet to watch. This is precisely why many are beginning to speak out and shining a light on the connection between porn and making fantasy out of abusive situations. More