Rougher, harder, violent: how porn is warping the male mind

Escalating aggression towards women in mainstream porn makes it a violence issue that can’t be ignored.

Rougher, harder, more violent: even those who fancy porn as legitimate entertainment are being urged to understand rapidly escalating aggression towards women in mainstream porn makes it a violence issue that can’t be ignored.

Statistics around how violence towards women has become the most commonly viewed porn are alarming: according to Australian adolescent sexuality expert and researcher Maree Crabbe, recent analysis of the “most popular” porn found 88 per cent of scenes included physical aggression such as gagging, choking and slapping.

In 94 per cent of those scenes the aggression was directed towards women. Women were slapped in 75 per cent of those scenes. There was verbal aggression in 48 per cent of scenes.

For a glimpse of how much popular porn has changed in the last decade, try this quote from LA-based porn actor Anthony Hardwood (interviewed for Crabbe’s recent Australian documentary Love and Sex in the Age of Porn).

Hardwood told the film-makers he had seen porn change dramatically since his beginnings in 1997 when it simply involved “making love on a bed”, and confirmed what Crabbe had discovered elsewhere — that rougher “Gonzo” porn had left the fringe and replaced old-school stylised porn sex.

“You know when I started it was like very lovey dovey sex, not tough like Gonzo,” says Hardwood.

“After three years they wanted to get more energy, more rough, they do like one girl with you know like four guys and they just take over and destroy her.”

Little by little, slapping women around and “destroying” them sexually has come to be normalised in sex entertainment. Ironically, Relationships Australia warned this week that intimacy in one in five Australian relationships is being impacted by internet porn consumption.

The national counselling service found readily accessible online porn is leading to a breakdown of trust and an erosion of intimacy in about 21 per cent of all relationships and pornography consumption is also increasingly being cited as a reason for marriage breakdowns.

Crabbe’s warning about the extreme nature of and normalised violence in most mainstream porn also coincides with the speaking tour of Australia by Cindy Gallop, former advertising guru and now self-described “porn disruptor” and founder of a movement to try to promote healthy porn, the #realworldsex website MakeLoveNotPorn.

Her startup, MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, prides itself on being “of the people, by the people, and for the people who believe that the sex we have in our everyday life is the hottest sex there is”.

Users submit their “real world sex” videos, and also rent other people’s in what is hoped to be a satisfying transaction for all involved.

Gallop’s world of more democratic porn intersected with Maree Crabbe’s research-based warnings about the content of industrial porn when Crabbe phoned ABC radio recently during a long interview given by Gallop.

Unfortunately Gallop did not have time to address the serious issues raised by Crabbe’s statistics around the promotion of violence against women in mainstream porn — the porn whose standards Gallop is attempting to disrupt.

However she had earlier described the rise of Gonzo porn as “driven by a bunch of guys seriously scared they’re not making money, doing what the other guys are doing who are making money”, thinking “that’s what’s making money that’s what we will do”.

Crabbe’s concern that extreme (now normalised) porn is where the money is should worry all who hope to reduce violence against women in and outside the home: not only has porn become the main sex educator of adolescents according to many health experts, degradation of women is stock in trade of the stuff that sells.

As Crabbe told VicHealth’s audience of anti-violence policy influencers: “For all its professed diversity, mainstream porn tends to communicate messages of male aggression and female sexual subservience.

“Oftentimes it eroticises the degradation of women and male brutality.”

She said the influence of pornography means girls are increasingly being asked — or expected — to follow that script in real life, even if it’s not what they want or is painful or degrading.

Denying the prevalence of porn (whose use accounts for 30 per cent of internet traffic and a global industry making $25 billion a year) is useless. It’s here to stay and for many it’s a completely routine part of life.

But if he’s getting off on slapping and abusing her, and she thinks she must act like it’s OK, then people we have issues.

Originally published as Rougher, harder, violent: how porn is warping the male mind