I haven’t moved in particularly sheltered circles and, my goodness, I’ve been exposed to enough colourful first-hand stories about sex (the Bare Reality series taught me a lot), but even I am slack-jawed at what people are getting up to in the privacy of their bedrooms.
Well, I say ‘privacy’, but are bedrooms private anymore?
The horrifying case of a female lawyer raped on a livestream while over 1,000 people watched raises this question in a way that feels both grimly modern and sickeningly disturbing. A married father of four met the victim on a dating app, committed this crime and then, rather than flee in disgust, strangers stayed to watch.
Let’s recap those details and reveal a few more. He was married. They met on an app. He filmed their sexual encounter. She agreed to that, but with a pillow over her face. Then it stopped being consensual and became rape. 100 people watched this live. An estimated 1000 people have watched it now.
If this isn’t evidence of a cultural sickness, I don’t know what is.
Marital infidelity aside, this weird show wouldn’t even have been possible just a couple of decades ago.
You see, we need to talk about internet porn. Its rise has not only changed fantasies but fundamentally altered sex itself and, in cases like these, blurred the lines between personal gratification and criminal behaviour. What role does pornography play in an incident like this?
This isn’t just about technology enabling new kinds of crime — it’s about how porn has warped what people consider sexually thrilling or even acceptable.
In Free Your Mind, Patrick Fagan and I wrote about sex’s power to disintegrate psychological defences and condition behaviour. Sexual arousal floods the brain with dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, creating a state of heightened imprintability. What we pair with that pleasure — whether images on a screen, a specific scenario, or even a harmful behaviour — can shape our tastes and desires.
You might even call sex a potent brainwashing tool.
Psychologists have known since at least the 1960s that paraphilias can be conditioned. One study hooked men’s penises up to a device to measure engorgement. When the men viewed pornographic pictures of women, they became sexually aroused. Shown erotic pictures of women in boots, the men became aroused as expected due to the naked women. After a certain number of exposures to the women in boots, however, the men became conditioned to associate the boots alone with arousal. Eventually, just an image of boots was enough to turn them on. They had become conditioned to find boots sexy. This seems innocuous — kinky boots, who cares! — but what associations with sex are current in pornography these days?
At the time I was researching Free Your Mind, the world’s most popular porn website, Pornhub, had 2.6 billion visits in October 2022, each visit averaging eight pages on the website. By comparison, the BBC had under a quarter that number of visits, which is both a little bit amusing and very worrying. When I conducted my unpalatable research, on the homepage of Pornhub homepage was a cornucopia of thumbnails inviting clicks. There was ‘something’ for everyone. On a single selected day, among the expected interests on the home page, were bondage, sex with a machine, and an extremely niche video combining a part of the body painted to resemble a seasonal vegetable – the pumpkin – with a sex act. On top of that were videos featuring step-sisters, step-daughters and step-mums which conveyed (and encouraged) incestuous desires while circumventing illegality. Lots of ‘barely legal’ content, with teens, babysitters and schoolgirls (all assuredly 18+ but not necessarily looking like it) reflecting a taste (and again encouraging a desire) for girls. Gang sex scenarios are a significant category on porn websites and often feature prominently in various forms. And there’s no need to explain how the nature of porn feeds into a voyeurism fetish.
Studies have shown that people can be conditioned to respond sexually to previously neutral stimuli. Now apply this principle to the content freely available on mainstream pornography platforms. Extreme acts, group sex, incest scenarios, and violent depictions are some of the most popular categories! Over time, these shape what people find arousing, often encouraging fantasies that would have seemed taboo or even repulsive just a few decades ago. In other words, popular pornography websites are rearranging our psychological boundaries.
The implications are staggering. Porn is not just a private indulgence — it’s a new cultural force. When you consider how many people watch porn regularly, it’s clear we’re dealing with a mass reshaping of human desire, boundaries, and behaviour. And when you consider how many people are ‘enjoying’ this, you can see why it’s a difficult conversation to have publicly.
But we do need to talk about it, because isn’t it obvious that porn isn’t just reshaping fantasies, it is reshaping our lives and society?
In another terrible case, a husband was caught viewing child abuse images, and according to his wife she believes that ‘this behaviour didn’t necessarily come from a primary sexual interest in children, but could reflect a porn addiction’. Online pornography already normalises extreme, degrading content — some of which is non-consensual — and so it isn’t hard to see how someone could slip from mainstream porn into illegal and abusive material.
It is difficult to imagine that the vile orchestrated rapes of Gisele Pelicot could happen without the influence of porn, not to mention that her husband advertised on the internet to find men with ‘shared interests’.
Bonnie Blue and Lily Philips’ disturbing challenges to have sex with armies of men would not have happened without the OnlyFans platform and the influence of pornography.
The question of what to do about porn is urgent. It seems incredible that TikTok — a platform full of dance trends and memes — could be banned in certain countries while porn sites, which are breeding grounds for paraphilias and often host non-consensual content, remain freely accessible.
The solutions are not simple though. What people do in the privacy of their homes and on their own time is up to them. But avid porn users should be aware that their sexual tastes could change, just like the men who came to prefer boots, or the couple who met for live-streamed sex rather than your old-fashioned first dinner date.
The challenge we face is twofold: first, to acknowledge the role pornography plays in shaping these behaviours; second, to decide as a society how to respond. Whether it’s through regulation, education, or cultural change, we need to act. Because if we don’t, these stories will only become more common, and our collective humanity will continue to erode under the weight of unchecked desires.
One solution might involve stricter regulation, but history tells us that prohibition often drives a problem underground rather than eradicating it. Education is essential, both in schools and in homes, but perhaps the focus should be on the unsavoury and illegal aspects of the online porn business along with honest eduction to understand the effects of pornography on developing brains and sexual tastes. Age verification should protect minors somewhat hopefully. And, of course, adults need to reckon with the impact of their consumption habits.
Cultural shifts are also necessary. Movements like NoFap, which encourage abstaining from porn as a form of self-discipline and recovery, are gaining traction, especially among young men who feel porn has damaged their relationships and sexual health. While these movements may seem niche, they hint at a growing awareness of porn’s dangers.
We also need to ask a hard question about consent, not just between individuals but within society — have we collectively consented to the ubiquity of porn and its effects on our culture, or have we simply let it happen?
The stories above aren’t isolated, they are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Porn has changed the way we think about sex, not just in fantasy but in real life, and the consequences are spilling out in crimes that are as shocking as they are heart-breaking.
I am so glad and grateful you are talking about this. Yes it is a sickness. Yes it does immense harm. Yes we must return to our essentially Judeo-Christian moral balance (without the masochism!). Thank you.
It’s just too sad that we have sunk so far. Shame and regret are powerful sins that can lead to suicide. When we fail to remember that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and gave the image of God stamped on us and eternity input hearts then sin and debauchery reign.