With the development of technology, access to pornography is becoming easier for the general public. According to previous findings, Pornhub, one of the top pornography websites, had at least 64 million viewers per day in 2016, and its videos were watched 92 billion times in the previous year (McKinstry, 2018). With such a large-scale popularity, pornography can have impacts on how people, especially youth, develop their perceptions on sex life and relevant topics.
While pornography can have an impact on every viewer, its influences on women should be particularly noted and will be discussed in this essay. Essentially, it has distorted the standards of female body image (Paslakis et al., 2020). It has consciously and unconsciously twisted the standard of body images for females (Paslakis et al., 2020). In most porns, female characters typically have large breasts, small waists, plump hips, and hairless, silky genitals. By molding women into such a model, the porn industry is essentially reinforcing the already-existing social norm that women should look thin and sexy (Erchull, 2015). And such twisted representations have consequences. Mindy J. Erchull, a professor at the University of Mary Washington, discussed the harsh expectation on women’s bodies and its consequences below:
“Women are now being told to be thin, fit, and sleekly muscled with voluptuous breasts. This means that women are essentially being told to reduce their caloric intake, increase their physical activity, and undergo surgery to achieve an “ideal” body that does not really exist in nature. Is it any wonder that discontent with one’s body is experienced as normative?” (2015).
Men who watch porn may consider the female body in porn to be natural and expect their female partners to look the same (Erchull, 2015; Tylka & Calogero, 2019). For example, they may ask their partners to remove their pubic hair. Women receiving this kind of message from not only pornography but also their male partners are likely to internalize this ideal and further associate “the perfect body” with all other positive experiences, such as a good sex life (Erchull, 2015; Tylka & Calogero, 2019). Consequently, they can develop a negative body image and engage in unhealthy weight-loss activities to achieve this ideal (Erchull, 2015; Paslakis et al., 2020). This involvement is further associated with a higher likelihood of developing eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, which is characterized by eating very little, and bulimia nervosa, which involves vomiting after eating too much (Tylka & Calogero, 2019). And eating disorders are related to several psychological outcomes such as depression (McCarthy, 1990).
In my next post, I will address another effect of pornography on women: an unhealthy view of sex life.
References
McKinstry, L. (2018, October 24). Porn used to be private but with 92bn Pornhub views – why don’t we do something?. The Sun. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7567281/92bn-views-pornhub-leo-mckinstry/.
McHugh, M. C., & Chrisler, J. C. (Eds.). (2015). The wrong prescription for women: How medicine and media create a “need” for treatments, drugs, and surgery. ABC-CLIO. Praeger.
Paslakis, G., Chiclana Actis, C., & Mestre-Bach, G. (2020). Associations between pornography exposure, body image and sexual body image: A systematic review. Journal of Health Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359105320967085
Séguin, L. J., Rodrigue, C., & Lavigne, J. (2018). Consuming ecstasy: Representations of male and female orgasm in mainstream pornography. The Journal of Sex Research, 55(3), 348-356. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2017.1332152
Tylka, T. L., & Calogero, R. M. (2019). Perceptions of male partner pressure to be thin and pornography use: Associations with eating disorder symptomatology in a community sample of adult women. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 52(2), 189-194. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.22991
Vandenbosch, L., & van Oosten, J. M. (2017). The relationship between online pornography and the sexual objectification of women: The attenuating role of porn literacy education. Journal of Communication, 67(6), 1015-1036. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12341