Fact Check: Pornography Harms & Patriarchy Claims Analyzed

A few weeks ago, a man I know told me a story about something that happened when he was 12 years [music] old. A neighbor

boy had opened a secret box and shown his group of friends a Playboy magazine. He unfolded a picture of a naked woman

and the boys all went wild wanting to see more. But the man telling the story said very proudly, "I didn't like it.

>> [music] >> I was repulsed. I thought of my mother and my grandmother and I looked at that

naked girl and I thought, what kind of woman would do something [music] so disgusting?" As I listened to this man's

story, I appreciated part of what he was saying. He was trying [music] to regard women with dignity. He was invoking

images of his mother and his grandmother, women he loved and respected. But I was also troubled

because the man had framed the woman [music] as the problem. A woman whose sexuality was disgusting. He didn't talk

about the imbalance of power. He didn't mention the problem of the sexist [music] and exploitative structure that

went into producing, selling, buying, and showing that image. He [music] didn't talk about the problem of a

culture that had taught this 12-year-old boy >> [music]

>> that if he felt a sexual response to seeing a naked woman, that would make him bad.

>> [music] >> And so, without even realizing it, he needed to put the shame somewhere and he

foisted his shame onto her. What a mess. What an absolute psychological, theological, patriarchal quagmire of a

mess. >> [music] >> Flash forward to today and messes like

these have gotten a whole lot messier. Today pornography is everywhere. Anyone can see almost anything at any time,

anywhere on their own phone. Internet pornography has become one of the loudest sex educators in the room, which

is not ideal because the internet is many things, but it isn't exactly famous for its wise and emotionally healthy

content. [music] So, today I want to ask, is porn just a harmless private habit, or can it be a

healthy part of a sex life? Is it a moral cesspool that makes people impure, or is it one more way that patriarchal

beliefs get pumped into people's brains and into our relationships? Here's my thesis right up front. The

problem with porn isn't that sex is dirty or that desire is shameful or that bodies are sinful. The problem is that

mainstream pornography isn't actually about pleasure at all. It's an industry that takes an existing imbalance of

power [music] between men and women and monetizes it. Today, I'm going to walk you through three [music] topics. What

typical porn content actually looks like, what it does to our brains and our relationships, and who's getting rich

while the rest of us pay the emotional cost. Let's start with the facts. What is pornography? I'm guessing that many

people who follow this channel aren't spending tons of time on porn sites. That's just a hunch. So, if you don't

know what mainstream online porn use actually looks like, here's a quick survey of the landscape. Porn sites look

like YouTube crossed with a search engine. There are endless thumbnails, trending videos, search bars, category

tags, and suggested [music] videos. But, instead of video essays or cute animal content, all those thumbnails are full

of naked bodies, often performing exaggerated sexual acts, and it's all surrounded by some deeply troubling

language. The categories often feature phrases like barely legal, used, punished, destroyed, rough, humiliated,

and much worse. They're framed around denigration of women, non-consent, domination, age differences, and power

differentials like [music] boss-employee, teacher-student, and I hate to even say say one, but

stepfamily. [music] This is not about two adults having joyful connected pleasure. A huge

percentage of pornography explicitly eroticizes humiliation, coercion, and violence [music]

toward women. And far too often, women's mistreatment is not incidental to the fantasy. It is the fantasy. It's the

product. A study of 4,000 heterosexual scenes from Pornhub and Xvideos found [music] physical aggression in 45% of

Pornhub scenes. Women were the target in 97% of scenes where aggression appeared. >> [music]

>> And women's responses were usually neutral or positive, rather than negative. Also, this isn't just about

gendered categories. Among the most searched terms on major porn sites are racial and ethnic labels like Latina,

Asian, and Ebony, which are used not as simple descriptors, but as their own sexual categories, and each one is

loaded with specific demeaning [music] scripts. This intersecting racism and sexism goes way back. I remember in my

master's program learning about a South African woman in the 1800s [music] named Saartjie Baartman, who was captured by

white colonizers and put on display for European audiences who gawked at her body as proof [music] that black women

were hypersexual and almost subhuman. That same ugly script has continued for centuries. [music] What scholars call

controlling images. The Jezebel, the eroticized [music] Asian temptress, the submissive

stereotype. Now, of course, there is a spectrum. Some porn is almost certainly worse for viewers than other porn. But,

when we look at the dominant popular ecosystem, the free sites, the trending videos, the search terms, and the

thumbnails, they are blatantly patriarchal, objectifying, and abusive. So, what does repeated exposure to this

kind of material do to our brains. To answer that question, let's hear from an expert on this topic, Jeremy Lip quids.

>> So, what does repeated porn use actually do to somebody's [music] brain? The more often you use certain neural pathways,

the stronger those pathways become. So, if a guy is repeatedly thinking thoughts of lust, objectification, craving, he is

quite literally strengthening those pathways in his mind. He's making it more likely that those types of thoughts

[music] are going to fire again in the future. Until eventually, it's not a choice anymore, it's just the default

patterning that his mind runs. >> Thanks, Jeremy. This industry isn't healthy for anyone, and there are real

consequences for all people, regardless of gender, especially when it comes to our relationships. [music] Porn can

shape what people expect sex to look like. It can shape what bodies are expected to look like. It can shape how

partners are expected to behave, and that [music] shapes people's most intimate relationships. A meta-analysis

of 50 studies with more than 50,000 participants found that pornography [music] consumption was associated with

lower interpersonal satisfaction outcomes, especially among men. And of course it does. First, [music] there's

the comparison. Researchers studying men's body image found that pornography trains viewers toward social body

comparison. The same mental habit that makes Instagram so damaging for teenage girls, except [music] here it's aimed at

men comparing their own bodies and their partners' bodies to professional actors. How can a person be present and joyful

if they're consumed with thoughts of not measuring up? Then there's the disconnection.

>> [music] >> Clinicians who treat compulsive porn use say that men tend to disconnect from

their real partners [music] because of the Madonna-whore split. This is where men view the women they see in porn

[music] as the [ __ ] and their sexual desire starts getting attached to that [music] fictional archetype that they

see on the screen, which includes zero vulnerability, zero risk of being truly seen, truly known, or potentially

[music] rejected. Meanwhile, they start to see their real-life partner, maybe their

wife and the mother of their children, as the Madonna, and they can lose sexual attraction for her because they find it

hard to desire [music] a partner that they deeply respect. And just imagine what that does to real-life women. I've

talked to women, and you probably know some, too, who describe a very specific, very lonely feeling of lying next to a

partner and feeling like they're competing with an endless, scrollable feed of bodies. Infinite women, each one

younger, each one more [music] into it than any real person could or should perform on demand. Porn, by design, sets

an impossible bar for women to [music] live up to. Pornography models a fantasy where bodies never age, never get tired,

never say no. >> [music] >> Real intimacy requires the opposite. A

body that ages, a person who sometimes isn't in the mood, >> [music]

>> a partner whose no you have to actually hear and respect. So, how widespread is it? Mainstream internet pornography is a

free, easy-to-access algorithmic commercial product that millions and millions of people encounter every day.

One study found that roughly six in 10 American adults report having watched pornography, and more than one in four

report watching it in the last month. And that's just the people who admitted it, and those are the adults. Of teens

ages 13 to 17, 73% have reported that they've watched online pornography. In fact, the average first exposure was age

12. Age 12. And 45% of those teens, nearly half, said that internet porn gives helpful information about sex.

Yikes. That means a lot of kids are learning from the most commercialized, most extreme, and most patriarchal

versions of sex as their first and sometimes only teacher. Let's hear from Jeremy about how kids and young teens

are being exposed to [music] porn and how habits start. >> You don't go looking for porn. Porn

comes looking for you. It's in the group chat. It's in the random pop-up. It's a buddy pulling out his phone at a

sleepover. And so, what happens the first time a kid sees it is his brain gets this hit of something new and

exciting and pleasurable all at once. He learns at an early age that this kind of media is a quick way to feel good. It

becomes his go-to for boredom, for loneliness, for anxiety. Then, you add shame on top of that. So many guys have

this exact memory of getting caught looking at something and getting shamed [music] for it. And you would think that

that might make it stop. But, actually it does the opposite. Rather than stopping the behavior, it simply pushes

it into hiding. >> [music] >> And once something is secret and

shameful, it tends to get a stronger grip on you, not a weaker one. >> Clearly, we aren't just talking about

adults making [music] private choices. We're talking about huge numbers of young people, largely young men, [music]

learning women's pain is sexy, women's punishment is [music] hot, and that when you're bored with one woman, you can

just click to another. They learn this before many of them have had real conversations about things [music] like

consent or intimacy or pleasure or care. What starts as a natural curiosity about sexuality [music] can quickly become a

sex education from the worst possible teacher. And because [music] it's so widespread, these private habits become

a public sexual culture. One question I hear sometimes is, does this content contribute to real-life violence? A

meta-analysis of 22 studies from seven countries found that pornography consumption was associated with

real-life acts of [music] sexual aggression. Another meta-analysis found a significant association between

[music] pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against women. What sort of attitudes are we talking about?

We're talking about accepting rape myths, [music] beliefs like women secretly enjoy coercion, or aggression

is just a normal part of sex. If a video eroticizes a woman being pressured, hurt, or humiliated, and then shows that

performer responding as if she likes [music] it, that can train the viewer to see women's distress as irrelevant

>> [music] >> or even arousing. This is what happens when a whole culture eroticizes women's

degradation over and over and over again, and [music] then pretends it's not happening, keeps it a secret, and

refuses to talk about it. More sexual aggression aimed at women, >> [music]

>> less satisfaction for men, and more distance, alienation, and shame in our relationships with each [music] other.

So, why does this continue? When we know porn is warping kids' [music] sex education, affecting relationships, and

normaling aggression against women, why does the industry keep producing more of it? The answer is sadly very simple.

Money. There is a massive commercial ecosystem where women's denigration and men's isolation are driving demand for a

product designed to make billions of dollars. And the people raking in money in the porn economy aren't the people on

screen, which is actually why I'm not going to talk very much about the performers or sex workers. [music]

Individual people do what they do for all kinds of reasons, including economic and personal reasons that are often very

complicated. My target today is the machine, the platform owners, the investors, the executives, the ad

networks, and payment [music] systems that turn other people's bodies, loneliness, shame, or curiosity into

heaps of cash. Let's name names. Pornhub is owned by Aylo. In 2023, Aylo was acquired by a Canadian private equity

firm named, ironically, [music] Ethical Capital Partners, chaired by this man, Rocco Meleandro. So, next time

you're watching porn, you can just picture this guy and all the money you're putting in his pockets, because

these are not faceless algorithms. These are companies run by human beings making decisions based on personal greed. In

2025, the FTC and the state of Utah took action against Aylo over charges that operators of Pornhub and other sites

deceived users about efforts to block child sexual abuse material and non-consensual sexual content. Utah's

[music] press release alleged that since 2012, Aylo had distributed tens of thousands of videos and photos featuring

child sexual abuse and non-consensual material. [music] It also alleged that a member of Aylo's internal compliance

team reportedly described Pornhub as a goldmine for rape [music] content, and that Aylo ignored hundreds of thousands

of flags for years. Patriarchy depends upon men holding more power than women. The porn industry feeds on that power

imbalance. Domination becomes erotic. Women's bodies become consumable objects for men's pleasure. There's no

connection, no shred of equality, or even basic decency. It runs on exploitation fantasies, showing the very

worst people can be, >> [music] >> and all of them feeding a worldview

where men not only hold power, but are encouraged to abuse that power. Remember, porn platforms don't want

people [music] to feel whole and healthy. They need people to come back. They don't need to teach consent,

tenderness, mutuality, or pleasure. They only need to generate engagement. [music] And if humiliation, aggression,

domination, and women's pain keep people clicking, then those are the videos the machine will keep serving. So, what do

we do? First, we need to talk to young people earlier and more honestly about [music] sex, porn, bodies, consent,

pleasure, and respect. And yes, I [music] know it's difficult, especially with kids who seem too young. But if we

don't talk to them, the internet will. And the internet will not wait until they're ready. So, it's up to us as the

adults in their lives to have the hard talks and guide [music] them toward responsible sex education. Second, we

should not rely on shame. Shame drives secrecy, and secrecy is where harmful habits flourish. People who feel stuck

need support, [music] whether that's therapy, recovery groups, trusted friends, honest conversations with

partners, or all of the above. Because shame cycles are incredibly hard to break alone. You are not alone. And

third, we've [music] got to teach media literacy in our homes, schools, and communities. Porn is staged. It's

[music] edited commercial content. It was never intended as a model for healthy sex, for [music] caring sex, or

even pleasurable sex. Our goal is not prudishness. It's not less sexuality. [music]

The goal is more intimacy, better sexual health, and more [music] wholeness. The goal is happier, healthier, pleasurable

sex for everyone who wants it. Because sexuality can be joyful. [music] It can be funny. It can be awkward. It can be

tender. It can be a deeply human way of connecting to another person. >> [music]

>> And that is worth protecting. Thanks so much for watching. Make sure to like this video, subscribe if you

haven't yet, and hit the notification bell [music] so you never miss an episode.

>> Hey.