Nobody’s paying attention to the fact that we’re bringing up a generation of boys on hardcore pornography.  This is a major cultural shift. We’ve never had this before. So what does it mean? Here you are, eleven, eleven and a half, you’ve got no experience with sex, and your first experience with sex is hard core pornography. How does that shape your sexuality? How does it impact you in the way you think about yourself as a male, about relationships, about intimacy, all of these things that are so central to a culture?

Right.  Remember they are dating these guys.  These guys want them to perform what they see in pornography. So the girls are being pressured into doing stuff they don’t want to do.

They say, “Porn gives me agency.” They say, “This is what I want to do.” [But in reality] they are being pressured into sex.  They see themselves as sexual beings and only sexual beings. What is being said to young girls is, “Your entire worth is based on how sexual you are.” Girls take this on.  They believe it because they’ve got no other images on how to be female.  If you look around today at pop culture, they have no alternative images on how to be female. 

There’s a new study out that says “all young men use pornography.” One-third of all websites have porn in them. Porn websites have increased 17% over last year.  It’s an industry now.  It wasn’t an industry before.  It was a collection of images.  It was sold under the counter.  What it is today is part and parcel of mainstream pop culture.  This is new.  And because it’s an industry, it has political clout.  It has lobbyists, it has influence on the kind of laws that are passed.  It has impact on media in general. 

Pornographers have sold the image of pornography as fun, as fantasy.  And what my book tries to do is give the real story of what goes on in pornography.  And it isn’t fun, it’s not fantasy. This is brutality, cruelty, and dehumanization.  And men are debased too, because of the images of men in pornography. In pornography, a man has no morality, no dignity, no integrity, no sexual boundaries, nothing.
There is a visceral response to it.  I’m not saying that boys read or see pornography and then go out and rape.  But I am saying that the effects are nuanced.  In my interviews with men, they compare their girlfriends to porn stars and the girls come out unfavorably. The men get bored with regular sex.  My interest is in the vast majority of men who will in some way be affected by these images. So if we’re going to do anything, it has to be based on public outrage, especially the attitudes of parents.

The first thing is, we need to treat it as a public health issue, which means you come at this from multiple angles:  education, health, public awareness.  We have to have raised consciousness as to the harm of pornography. We have to let boys know that if they use this, it’s going to impact their sexuality.

There’s a group of us called Stop Porn Culture.  And we can’t do it alone.  It has to be a mass movement.  Otherwise I think the culture is going to belong to the pornographers. It’s going to get much worse.

I don’t think they know what they’re defending.  What I believe is that porn denies us our right to full citizenship.  It tells men that we’re not equal to them, that we like to be treated in these cruel and brutal ways, and that we’re not worth more.  Porn is a world that distorts completely who women are—and, importantly, who men are.  Because I don’t believe that men are what the pornographers say they are.  I believe that men have more humanity than what the pornographers give them.

When I lecture, you would think the men would be against me.  “What can she possibly tell me about pornography?” And as I’m speaking, their body language changes.  They start to move forward.  They know I’m speaking to their lives, in a way that nobody has ever spoken to their lives before.  Nobody has ever said to them, “Look, when you use pornography, this is what happens to you.  This is why it’s not good for you.”

The universities are overflowing with porn.  But the colleges won’t take this up. I think the university should be a porn-free zone, because it should be seen as a form of sexual harassment.  It creates an unsafe place for females.

We say that if anything goes wrong with the child, it’s the parents’ fault.  It’s the parents’ job to socialize the child into the culture.  But the culture is toxic.  So what do you do?  It’s counterintuitive to keep the culture away from your children.  So I see all this as an attack on parents, but especially on mothers.  It makes our job impossible.  You can’t be breathing down your child’s neck all the time. You can’t put your child in a bubble, outside the culture.  It’s like saying, we live in polluted air, and it’s your job as a parent to stop your child from breathing that air.  Ludicrous.

That’s just a way to try to diminish us, to avoid having a serious conversation.  We’re “prudes,” they say, we hate sex.  All these are just cheap shots, ways to try to close us down.  If you want to debate us, then let’s have a proper conversation.