If we were asked which virtual platform has the most visits, perhaps we would think of Netflix first. However, there is a platform that competes with it, because it has millions more content than Netflix and is probably visited by many more teenagers. This platform is Pornhub, one of the largest pornographic sites in the world, receiving 130 million daily visits. Pornhub presented its annual statistics these days and it deserves to put on the table some silenced debates.
In recent years we have raised the volume of debates on women, violence and sexuality. At the rate of almost one femicide per day, we have organized marches, claims, complaints and proposals. In this context, a current of feminism has focused on the relationship between violence and pornography. A pornography that represents violence and sells it as pleasure and even love. The industry has gone from the 1980s and 1990s Playboy Mansion-style “woman-sexy object” to the pornography of Fifty Shades of Greyfull of whips, gags and representations of power, combining the concepts “desire” and “violence” in the same act.
Desire can enter blind alleys and the manipulation of impulses and dollars. Pornhub had to remove millions and millions of videos from its platform that represented sexual exploitation, violence against women and children. Pornography tends to derail into the “hentai” of perversion.
Results from a review by Klaassen & Peter, which included the first scene of 100 of the most popular videos from each of the four most popular websites (Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn and xHamster), finding that 40% of the scenes contain acts of physical violence, and 93% of those that do contain violence against women. Porn violence includes behaviors such as choking, gagging, slapping, biting, pinching, binding, and spanking. One exerts violence, the other seems to enjoy. In the public debate there is a growing awareness. A few months ago, Billie Eilish declared that she was addicted to porn at the age of 11, that she had nightmares because the content was very violent and abusive: “it destroyed my brain.” His case is not isolated: according to our research and international studies, the start of consumption occurs at the age of 11 on average. Available on any phone, tablet or computer, one click away, at any time, and dressed in the glamor of series like Elite, Sex Education or Bonding, porn is saying that enjoyment justifies violence and offers the perfect context for violence –the violent– disguise themselves as enjoyment and pleasure.
Thus, pornography, the most consumed content on the Internet, the most available, involves the educational experience of children and adolescents, modeling the sexual sensitivity of half the planet in the logic of pleasurable violence. Meanwhile, we discuss ESI programs in schools, still poorly applied, with enormous training challenges for all of us who must work to empower and accompany children and adolescents.
Research psychologist and academic director of sexual education studies at the Universidad Austral
