Reports

Artificial Intelligence (AI) sexual programs, devices, and images have a growing role in the pornography industry, easily accessed on the surface web and purchasable with everyday credit cards and payment platforms. The porn industry now draws significant profits from peddling not only adult misogyny and violence, but also child sexual abuse, posing real and compelling dangers to the social, emotional, and physical development of young people.

Sexual strangulation is a growing phenomenon in sexual behavior gaining heightened popularity among adolescents and youths. Mainstreamed as the new sexual kink, this dangerous behavior continues to be trivialized and glamorized through every space and platform across our culture. Sexual strangulation is also a highly gendered practice; sexual strangulation is increasingly leading to the further killing of women. Academics, activists, and healthcare professionals have voiced growing concerns around the lack of awareness and inadequate education about the damaging consequences and physical and emotional harms of this sexual practice.

Today, digital screens and the internet are an inherent part of young children’s everyday lives. Around the world, preschoolers grow up with online devices: phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, gaming consoles, televisions, and more. This report specifically focuses on preschoolers (ages 4-6). Our ultimate aim is to provide data-driven guidelines on how parents can effectively respond if their young children encounter online pornography.

Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality are often hailed as the gateway to the future. In many respects, they are, and often in exciting ways. But these novel technologies are also new arenas for the perpetuation of the old, tiresome, and well-proven harms of pornography. This demonstrates the tenacity of myths asserting the harmlessness of pornography – myths that serve only to funnel more money into the pockets of a predatory industry that is entirely held in the hands of private owners who go to enormous lengths to escape notice.

Sexualization is not the same as sexual development or sexuality. The latter are healthy aspects of individual identity, expression, and experience. Sexualization, by contrast, refers to cultural norms that value persons on the basis of their physical attractiveness. While the variation and plasticity of human sexuality is expansive, moreover, sexualization imposes on people a narrow range of stereotypical and largely illusory ideas about visual appeal. In this way, sexualization opposes individual sexual freedom by seeking to control and monetize sexuality.

Though porn consumption is repeatedly framed in the scientific literature as a decidedly male enterprise, there is, as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (2022) points out, an unsettling truth about women that warrants equal attention: “[W]omen – and even young girls – now make up a sizeable block of pornography consumers,” and there has been a major increase in women’s use of porn over the past five decades (p. 1). What do we know and what don’t we know about women’s and girls’ porn consumption? The main objective of this white paper is to answer these two important questions.”

Some research suggests a strong association between violence against women, pornography, and incel misogyny. The main objective of this white paper is to review the extant social scientific literature on this connection. Prior to doing so, it is first necessary to supply a brief history of the incel movement, also known as the incelosphere (Center for Countering Digital Hate, 2022).

In the physical, face-to-face world, many commercial enterprises are required to verify the age of customers to protect children from certain products and activities. Globally, minors are widely barred from buying age-inappropriate items such as tobacco, alcohol, and certain pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and weapons. Most countries do not allow children to purchase property, sign legal contracts, vote, consent to medical treatment, file lawsuits, drive automobiles, or enter casinos and betting shops. These laws demonstrate a collective commitment to protecting the health and wellbeing of children.

Parents and other caregivers are in a key position to protect young people from hypersexualized media and pornographic images, and to ensure that their children are safe from online predators. Our research team has interviewed 50 front-line health care workers whose jobs bring them in contact with children suspected of being sexually abused. In our interviews, we learned of the many ways the internet in general, and social media and video games in particular, may be vehicles for exposing children to pornographic content and/or to potential child predators.

In the early days of the internet, it was often said that cyberspace would emancipate humanity from old stereotypes and prejudices. But the proliferation of online pornography proved this view naïve by solidifying the age-old sexist norm that a woman is worth her appeal to men. This is especially true for OnlyFans and webcamming.

Prepared for Culture Reframed
by
Walter S. DeKeseredy, PhD
Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of Sociology
West Virginia University walter.dekeseredy@mail.wvu.edu

Prepared for Culture Reframed
by
Walter S. DeKeseredy, PhD
Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of Sociology
West Virginia University

A Literature Review by Dr. Tamasine Preece

Primary author: Walter S. DeKeseredy, PhD, Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of Sociology, West Virginia University

Authors: Bill Yousman, PhD, and Lori Bindig Yousman, PhD

Primary authors: Sharon Lamb, EdD, PhD, and Julie Koven, MSEd, MPhilEd, with assistance from University of Massachusetts Lamb Research Group: Charlotte Brown, Melanie Dusseault, Cara Forlizzi, and Lindsey White