How porn became so extreme – and how it’s shaping the sex lives of young people

A few years ago, the singer Billie Eilish opened up on the Howard Stern Show about how she began watching porn around age 11. “I’m so angry that porn is so loved, and I’m so angry at myself for thinking that it was ok,” she said. Eilish became addicted to porn, and it led to problems. “The first few times I had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good,” she said. She had nightmares because the content she was watching was so violent and abusive. Online porn is a multi-million dollar business, driven by algorithms designed to keep people clicking for more. These algorithms push more and more extreme content, often for free, to people who didn’t go searching for it. This can include strangulation, exploitation or incest porn, that’s often misogynistic and racist too. “If you take incest and strangulation, we can look at content studies from the 1980s, for example, when there was hardly any of that material,” Clare McGlynn, professor of law at Durham University in the UK, tells The Conversation Weekly podcast. “Today both incest and strangulation becomes mainstream.” In the UK, the government will ban the possession and publication of incest and strangulation porn from early November. McGlynn, who worked with civil society groups to push the regulation of extreme content, says it’s a “huge step” that sends a message about the harms of “normalising sexual violence”. McGlynn, who has written a recent book about the rise of extreme porn, says large online porn platforms are pushing people towards more and more extreme content. Their business model is to keep you engaged. They want us on the platform for as long as possible, and the way to do that is to feed you more content, not necessarily what you were looking for, but also, the more extreme, the more polarising, the more shocking content … unfortunately, that seems to be what our kind of base instincts go for and what does actually engage us to keep us searching. McGlynn says an abundance of extreme and violent porn is shaping the sex lives of young people, and it can lead to an increased risk of problematic behaviour. There’s a study that followed 16,000 young people, showing that high porn use, particularly at a young age, is a big risk factor in problematic sexual behaviour of young teenage boys. And there’s studies in Australia and the US … showing that the more porn they watch, the more strangulation they see, and then the more they identify that they act out the strangulation. Disclosure statement Clare McGlynn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Credits This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware with help from Isabella Podwinski and Ashlynne McGhee. Mixing by Daniel Semo and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Newsclips in this episode from 9News Sydney, ITV News, and The Howard Stern Show. Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.