Everyone born since the year 2000 has lived with unregulated Internet pornography. Among children, recent litigation demonstrates that widespread pornography leads to unstable future relationships, sexual aggression, unhealthy sexual behaviors, and even mental illness. Among adults, as I have shown, porn use has made people more callous, less loving, and less energetic.
Pornography’s critics have always worried that making the content more widely available would increase crime and delinquency and undermine family life, fidelity, public decency, and happiness. Social science has vindicated many of these claims. Pornography leads users to pursue increasingly debased content, produces a range of mental and physical health effects, and ruins relationships.
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Social scientists have advanced the pornography “escalation theory.” According to this hypothesis, those who watch pornography become bored with “mundane” sex acts and are drawn to more frequent, intense, kinkier material.
Recent studies and anecdotes have bolstered this theory. A 2023 article in Scientific Reports, based on in-depth interviews with 67 frequent porn viewers, found that many sought more “extreme” content or longer porn viewing sessions to feel aroused. In a 2024 article in Addictive Behaviors, the same authors surveyed nearly 1,500 male pornography users and found that frequent users developed “quantitative” tolerance (the ability to consume more porn, leading to binges) and “qualitative” tolerance (the ability and desire to watch more exotic genres). The existence of “gooners”—members of porn-viewing and masturbation clubs, recently profiled in Harper’s—also testifies to this escalation thesis.
The incredible variety of pornography also buttresses the escalation theory. Pornhub’s 2024 “Year in Review” catalogues the volume and array of available pornography. Obi Ogas and Sai Gaddam’s 2012 book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells us About Sexual Relationships, does the same.
A perverse culture will be less offended by perversion, such as sex trafficking or child pornography. As the late Harry M. Clor wrote, “Children will not be protected . . . if adult standards of decency are corroded.” Today’s opposition to child pornography, such as it is, depends on a willingness to defend childhood innocence.
Social science confirms that those who view floods of Internet pornography adopt cynical attitudes toward innocents. While frequent users do not rape more, they care less about the crime of rape. They also become desensitized to heinous crimes like bestiality.
Frequent porn use is also linked to a range of mental-health effects. A 2017 study in Society and Mental Health found that depressive symptoms are 36 percent higher among frequent porn users than among those who abstain. A 2024 study in Sexual Health & Compulsivity noted a close relationship between “problematic pornography use” and depression. An article from that year published in Psychology and Addictive Behaviors reported that increased porn use related to an uptick in suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
Another effect is erectile dysfunction. In 2007, Kinsey Institute researchers were among the first to identify “pornography induced erectile dysfunction.” Among young men, ED is “alarmingly high,” increasing from 2 percent to 5 percent of young men in 1999 to 20 percent–30 percent in the late 2010s, per a 2021 study in Journal of Medical Internet Research. A 2019 article in Dignity noted that many pornography users can maintain an erection only by watching “extreme and fast-paced pornography,” and find sex with a real-life partner “bland and uninteresting.”
The explosion of Internet porn has coincided with a global decline in sex, marriage, and dating. This is no coincidence. A 2024 literature review in Archives of Sexual Behavior found that people aroused by porn show “significant declines in sexual satisfaction and relationship quality and stability over a 2-month period.” Another Archives article, from 2020, reported that no study has clearly demonstrated that “pornography use [is] . . . positively associated with relationship quality.”
Porn appears to be a factor in an increasing number of divorces. Divorce lawyers think so. So do some sociologists and Science magazine, which holds that divorce rates double when a spouse starts watching porn. Using pornography generally reduces relationship quality, and as studies show, it lowers marital quality among religious people more than most.
The social science is clear: frequent porn use pushes people to view extreme content, undermines public morality, harms users’ health, and ends marriages. Any solution to our culture’s relationship woes must address these problems—and their source.
Photo: Justin Paget / DigitalVision via Getty Images