At last! As of 25 July 2025, British children of all ages will be better protected from easy access to hardcore pornography. This is thanks to the UK government’s implementation of provisions regarding age verification for pornography in the Online Safety Act 2023. In practice it means sites and platforms that contain pornography will have to have a robust mechanism in place to check the age of potential users to prove they are 18 years or over. Otherwise, such companies will face enforcement action from the regulator, Ofcom. This may affect their profits and ability to operate.
Why was this legislation necessary?
Since the arrival of broadband or high-speed internet and then smartphones in the mid-noughties, children have been able to access an endless supply of violent, degrading and extreme pornography without any obstacle. Hardcore porn in adult sex shops is heavily regulated, but not online. It’s available for free on the open web. According to research by the UK government 10 years ago in its run up to previous attempts to introduce this legislation, it seems 20-30% of users are children. According to Ofcom (BBC website), there are currently 14 million pornography users in the UK, that means 2.8-4.2 million children.
Brain changes resulting from intense and sustained use of Internet pornography over months and years are cumulative. Bingeing on strong sexualised stimuli on a regular basis can drive addiction-related brain changes. Pornography sites, much like social media services, hook users with constant novelty and hyper stimulating sexual content. Internet pornography is not a safe product. For some it is a harmful, defective product by reason of its content. A huge array of research has been showing the risks this easy access has on malleable young minds. Here are a few examples:
Physical risks for users
Recent research from a team of urologists shows that: “Of the participants who had started masturbating to porn at a very early age (<10 years), 58% (11/19) had some form of ED (P=.01), compared with… 24% (17/70) in the group who started at an age of 18 years or older…Conclusions: This prevalence of ED in young men is alarming high, and the results of this study suggest a significant association with problematic pornography consumption.” (Emphasis added)
Mental health risks for users
Recent Italian research from 2024 shows that problematic pornography use was associated with higher levels of anxiety, depression, stress, loneliness, and suicide ideation, as well as lower life satisfaction. Gender comparison analysis revealed significantly higher scores for problematic pornography use and loneliness among men, while women scored higher in stress, anxiety, and life satisfaction.
Impact on Relationships
Rape culture is everywhere in schools, colleges and society at large. Sixty percent of rape trials in Scotland involve sexual strangulation. The porn industry euphemistically calls it “air play” or “breath play”. It is promoted as if it were a game, progressive and somehow liberating. It’s not safe! It’s not “sex positive” and it’s not liberating. Add to that the fact that sexual strangulation is the second most common cause of stroke in women under 42 years of age. Neurosurgeons say there is no way to gauge how much pressure a person can safely use on someone else’s neck. Strangulation, for even a few moments, can block the blood supply to and from the brain leading to physical harm. It doesn’t matter if someone consents to being strangled, it is always a high risk activity. A person can pass out within seconds.
Porn culture promotes these dangerous behaviours. Problematic porn use means users cannot feel sexual satisfaction from or even interest in real life sex when, over time, they have trained their brains to need extreme arousal from porn. How difficult is that for young people? As a woman you try to look and be your best to attract a partner and guys aren’t interested in you or only want to act out some weird, violent sex act they’ve seen in porn videos performed by paid actresses or worse, in non-consensual videos uploaded by rogue partners? Or they have a sexual dysfunction as a result of too much porn.
Performance Anxiety?
It isn’t all performance anxiety that’s causing men to fail at sex either. That’s an excuse porn industry associates promote to blame anything other than porn for men’s sexual dysfunctions. That’s not to say performance anxiety doesn’t exist. Users need to quit porn first to see if there problem is really in the mind or as a result of porn-induced desensitisation. Young men are confused about how to engage with women, especially when influenced by misogynistic podcasters like alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate. It is difficult for young men and women to form loving relationships when their expectations are moulded by violent, degrading porn. Rates of suicidality amongst young men are already at an all time high. Porn culture has to be a significant contributing factor in all of this stopping them forming beneficial relationships.
Social media porn
Young men and women are being groomed by porn from an early age. TikTok and X are rife with it. Women are bigger users of social media compared to men who prefer porn sites, but there is a lot of overlap. Content creators on TikTok are encouraging young women to become porn performers on OnlyFans as soon as they turn 18. Popular sites like the Bop House, where a group of sexy young women create porn videos for money, receive thousands of requests from young fans to join the Bop House too.
This apparently glamorous lifestyle in a Playboy-style mansion in Florida belies the truth of the mental distress caused to many. Vanilla porn is boring. Soon fans want more shocking acts if the girls are to keep earning. Many young women go on to become escorts and find it hard to function in normal life thereafter. Few women performers last more than 3-6 months in the industry because of the toll on their mental and physical health.
Boys too are being groomed and softened up by porn over months and years ready to be influenced by the likes of Andrew Tate. His violence and misogyny towards the women is characteristic of a sadistic psychopath.
We need young men and women to grow up to become loving, kind trustworthy partners with whom they can feel safe and loved. Men and women all want this.
Porn industry’s earnings
Sex is nature’s number one driver from puberty onwards. When finding sex in real life is a challenge or is forbidden because a user is underage, porn looks like a good substitute. It may seem to scratch an itch, but in fact it makes the longing and “itch” worse. Sex sells so the porn industry takes advantage of that natural longing by pushing ever more risky porn towards users to keep them hooked.
According to research in 2019 analysing 22,000 porn companies, 93% were found to have “leaked” private information to third parties. This is the business model of the porn industry. It knows everything about users’ behaviour, age and preferences, more often than they know about themselves. Companies sell that information to others for the purposes of advertising. Pornhub gets 4.2 billion ad impressions a day. They make a fraction of a cent on every one ad impression, that adds up to a lot of money. It’s why they push so much stimulating and increasingly shocking material to users to keep them watching and hooked. Here is a useful debate about this new legislation on the BBC website.
Only Fans
Only Fans has 305 million users with 500,000 new subscribers a day. Users spent $6.6 million on Only Fans in 2023. It’s owner has made $1.3 billion from the site since 2020. Bonnie Blue, the young women who infamously had sex with 1,000 men in one day, was pushed off the site. This cut her income instantly from £1.5 million a month to zero. She has set herself up on another platform. Bonnie Blue has said, “It’s going to be difficult when I’m ready to date, because of what I do.” Sadly the lure of big money is attractive to many young women. They see it as an easy and glamorous lifestyle. They couldn’t be more wrong.
