We must also protect women and girls from sleaze culture:
While we often tend to think that it is mainly men who are consuming and becoming addicted to pornography, there is an increasing number of women who are also getting hooked on porn and are also being damaged in the process. The truth is, porn harms all of us.
Here I want to appeal to two very new discussions of this – one book and several articles. The volume I will explore and quote from is Girls: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything by Freya India book, (Swift, 2026). It is a wide-ranging look at the many problems girls face in contemporary Western culture. She is a young woman herself (in her twenties) so she is discussing her own world in this book.
India says this in the Introduction: “This is not the story of a generation falling apart. This is the story of a generation being remade, from people into products, from girls into GIRLS®. We did fall apart, long ago. We were pulled apart from the pressure. But then we were remade, the fragments of us forged into products on display, objects to be optimized, things without feelings.” (p. 1)
Part of what is discussed in the book is the harm of porn to females – especially girls and young women. She speaks of the growing magnitude of this problem: “More and more women are watching porn too. Searches for ‘porn for women’ rose by 1,400% in 2017 alone, and by 2019 nearly three in every ten Pornhub visitors were female.” (p. 175)
There is plenty of harm to women that can be mentioned here. She writes:
One indication that girls and young women are hurting today is the rise in relationship anxiety and attachment issues. More and more of us have started identifying with anxious or insecure attachment styles. . . . There are many reasons for our pessimism, but one might be the influence of porn. Watching porn has been associated with anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and lower self-esteem. Over time, its use has also been associated with lower relationship satisfaction and a higher likelihood of cheating. (pp. 188-189)
And all the mainstream exposure to porn in various social media sites is a real worry:
Then there is the danger this puts girls in. Predators are all over TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, where algorithms can deliver them more underage content and steer them towards children’s profiles. Some even upload TikToks of underage girls to sites like Pornhub. ‘Meta has allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for predators,’ alleged a 2023 lawsuit against the company. In 2024, Senator Ted Cruz confronted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Instagram’s failure to remove child sex abuse content. ‘Mr Zuckerberg, what the hell were you thinking?’ he asked, referencing an Instagram prompt warning users that they may be about to see images of child sex abuse, before asking if they want to ‘see the results anyway’.
According to internal Meta documents leaked that year, around 100,000 children are sexually harassed every day on Instagram and Facebook, with many receiving ‘pictures of adult genitalia’. And yet when a Meta employee had asked, ‘What specifically are we doing for child grooming (something I just heard about that is happening a lot on TikTok)?’, the answer was ‘Somewhere between zero and negligible.’ (pp. 191-192)
Women are being lied to about porn just as men are. As India said to Jonathon Van Maren in an interview:
Essentially, if you are a girl or a young woman who has issues with porn or wouldn’t want a partner to watch it or be addicted to it, then you have an insecurity. If you have some instinct about it, that’s yours to deal with it. The main narrative I remember growing up wasn’t so much that porn was complained about or even celebrated that much. It was just taken as this inevitable part of life. It was only as I got older and I actually started to spend time with conservatives and Christians that I ever really heard an opposing perspective on it.
Every generation of girls has sometimes felt insecure in relationships, been confused by new sexual feelings, and craved safety and security. But we were the first generation of girls to cope with all of this in the world where flirting meant Instagram DMs and Snapchat nudes. For us dating was swiping through people like they were items in a catalogue; the only way to be loved was to become a better object; and the most romantic gesture we could hope for was a ‘Super Like’ on Tinder. Many of us watched violent porn before we even had a first kiss, before even holding hands with a boy. We saw intimacy not as something to be clumsily stumbled through but a performance to be delivered, ‘content’ to be copied. And for every flicker of fear, insecurity or distrust we felt, there were always apps, algorithms and influencers to amplify it. (pp. 192-193)
GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everythingby India, Freya (Author)
One quite new article looks at related issues about the porn problem. Michael Foster’s “The Normalization of Female Sexual Degeneracy: The Porn Nobody Calls Porn” is worth quoting from. He looks at how seemingly innocuous romance novels pitched at females are becoming yet another hot house of sleaze and porn. And it is found in both secular and ‘Christian’ forms.
Foster looks at how men and women differ when it comes to sexual arousal and then says this:
Strong data also shows that women are more likely to engage erotic content through text-based or imagination-driven formats: fan fiction, romance novels, and audio erotica. Women are underrepresented in datasets tracking visual pornography use not because they’re disengaged, but because they engage through a different medium.
Explicit content aimed at women doesn’t primarily live on screens. Story is the medium best suited to the architecture of female arousal. That’s exactly what I stumbled into as a teenager reading those so-called “clean” Christian romance novels. They weren’t graphic, but they were deliberate. They built emotional tension, relational fantasy, and psychological immersion, scratching the same itch through a different form. What we’re now seeing with the rise of BookTok and the explosion of modern romance publishing is not harmless escapism. It is the industrialization of that same dynamic.
Romance and erotica have surged dramatically in recent years. Self-published titles now make up roughly 70% of romance e-book sales. The genre accounts for about 20% of all book sales. Much of that growth is driven by increasingly explicit content, written to bypass the visual and go straight to the imagination. The content is getting more graphic, more immersive, more addictive. It is engineered to do exactly that, in the form most effective for the female mind.
And this is not just found in secular circles:
A great deal of what passes for Christian women’s literature traffics in the same tropes and the same arousal architecture as its secular counterparts, with a redemption arc bolted on. The explicit content is softer. The delivery mechanism is identical. And increasingly, none of that distinction matters, because many of our young women are not stopping at the Christian version. They are finding BookTok and going straight to the source.
Several years ago, a local controversy made the rounds. A handful of elders’ wives from a nearby church posted, proudly, that they were going to see the sequel to Magic Mike. This was a fairly conservative church. People were a little shocked. More revealing was how many people rushed to defend it. It wasn’t a big deal, they said. Guys do stuff like this anyway. Harmless fun.
If the elders themselves had gone to see that kind of movie, it would have been a scandal, at least in this part of the country. But when women do it, a strange normalization kicks in. There are quick excuses, laughter, the whole thing reframed as innocent or playful. The behavior is shifting, and so is the moral reflex underneath it.
He concludes his article this way:
We should care about what forms the imagination of our daughters, our sisters, our wives, our friends. What shapes imagination will, sooner or later, shape desire, and desire does not stay contained. Porn is twisting our men. We are right to decry it. It warps their understanding of female sexual enjoyment, fetishizes sex, diminishes their self control, and encourages depraved desires. We should war against it.
However, we must understand that what is being called women’s literature is twisting our women. It warps their sense of male romance, fetishizes sex, diminishes personal responsibility, and encourages depraved desires. And yet the cries are few and far between. This is a growing danger and one that deserves much more attention. https://www.thisisfoster.com/p/the-normalization-of-female-sexual
Pornography is an equal opportunity destroyer. It harms men, women, children and society as a whole. But we can be thankful that more and more Christians and non-Christians alike are speaking out against it.
