‘I think the woman belongs to the man’ are the words of sex criminal Andrew Tate. In a video where Andrew Tate and Dave Portnoy go Toe to Toe, Tate expresses his harmful attitudes of women as property.
The impact of porn on young boys leads to harmful attitudes on gender roles that encourages the degradation of women by depicting a lack of respect, encouraging and promoting the sexual objectification of women. ‘Make me a sandwich’ and ‘shut up woman’ become common phrases disguised as ‘banter’ in friendship groups and classrooms. However, there is little emphasis on the effect of porn on girls. Porn, as a male dominated industry, has made boys the focus of porn addiction recovery, with videos catered to the male gaze and male satisfaction through narrative structures that typically involve dominance.
Addressing the impact of misogynistic content online and the inadequacies of sex education
Firstly, we must place our attention at the beginning: anyone can pick up their phone and go on TikTok to search misogynistic content. Ofcom research ‘Teens on screens’ shows that 53% of children between 3 and 17 use TikTok regularly, despite the app being aimed at those aged 13 and over. YouGov also reported that 1 in 6 boys aged 6-15 have a positive view of Andrew Tate (an infamous sex offender), and 1 in 8 agree with his views on women.
This directly impacts girls, starting at school. When I was in secondary school, consent was one lesson in citizenship; using the synonymous ‘unconscious people don't want tea’ video. Spoiler alert: I didn't walk out with a new understanding of consent. It was actually quite the opposite; I found the topic shameful because I had engaged in no open conversations around consent outside of my household. This lack of open dialogue can easily lead to misogyny and violence in (and out of) porn because it fails to truly delve into the importance of clear communication in consent. As a result, men will assume consent to be a minor issue, leading to the porn industry not prioritising showing active consent, as its main demographic does not truly understand what consent is, or they simply do not care about it as a result of societal conditioning.
Lack of meaningful sex education topics in schools then gives way to the rabbit hole of violent porn, with young people significantly more likely to see violence against a woman than a man in pornography. The distorted reality in girls' minds creates a vulnerability to silence in sexual abuse, as gender-based violence is popular in mainstream porn. This alters a girl's ability to know the difference between harmful and pleasurable sex.
Failing to knack the basics of consent can lead to other invaluable topics being missed, including female pleasure and LGBTQIA+ sex. Sex Education having no mention of female pleasure perpetuates a notion that sexual experiences should be centered around male pleasure, with a total disregard for women's desires. The concentration remains on penetrative sex without enough focus on foreplay and clitoral stimulation, which most women need to climax. How are women supposed to feel their voices are heard during sex if we are coerced into thinking that our pleasure is not important from an early age? No mention of LGBTQIA+ sex also forces a heteronormative view of sexuality that leads to a lack of inclusive information on safe sex, isolating many students with only 71% of Generation Z identifying as straight in 2022. The government crackdown on trans pupils further highlights this isolation with schools told not to teach about gender identity.
Sex education still skirts around misogyny and violence against women and girls (VAWG) despite it being declared a national emergency. Yet consent is not emphasised in school as much as learning Pythagoras theorem. To this day, I have never had to use Pythagoras - I have, however, had to navigate consent by learning on my own, and many girls are being forced to learn through enduring their own bodies being violated. How learning the circumference of a circle held more urgency than teaching a potentially lifesaving lesson is beyond me. It creates a really dangerous rhetoric that consent is still a taboo subject and should be hidden rather than confronted - or an even scarier concept, that it is not important at all.
Examining the damaging consequences of the male gaze
‘You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur’. This quote from Margaret Atwood's novel, ‘The Robber Bride’, emphasises how the male gaze is inescapable for women, with girls unable to break free from viewing the world from a male gaze. For example, a sexualisation of young people review found there is a clear link between consumption of sexualised images and a tendency to view women as objects, with acceptance of aggressive attitudes and behaviours as the norm. Ultimately, this desensitises girls to sexualised images, contributing to the normalisation of objectification.
The female gaze promotes the human side of sex, with emotions and imperfections that lift them from being perceived as objects of desire to actual human beings. What they find pleasurable is heard and acted upon, rather than being reduced to irrelevance, creating healthy attitudes around equality in sex. Challenging the damage of violent porn, the female gaze depicts two partners finding their pleasure together rather than one man enjoying himself, and a silenced woman. The male gaze does no such thing. Pornographic content focuses on women with exaggerated features, leading to men and boys viewing women as an object to lust over and conditioning the opinion that only one body type is sexually desirable. By promoting such a lack of diversity, mainstream porn fuels the radical concept that women must conform to men’s expectations of how they should look and behave. No longer do women view their body as their own, but an object that must meet what a man wants, or it is not worth anything, consequentially paving the way for young girls to believe a man’s opinion of her appearance is something to prioritise. In ‘Ways of Seeing’ by John Berger, he emphasises ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.'
Male desires impacting the expectation of women’s bodies can be traced much further back than porn sites. From Marilyn Monroe to Kim Kardashian, body images for women to attain in order to remain desirable to men has created a never-ending battle for a woman to find peace in how her body looks. Bleached skin, bigger boobs, white veneers; anything to prevent persecution for not looking like that girl she saw on a porn site last night. We are in an epidemic of VAWG. Social media, the male dominated porn industry and sex education curriculum are all fueling the problem and they need to become part of the solution. Children are being inadequately educated, and girls are being directly and indirectly persecuted and discriminated against online, giving anonymity and protection to the dangerous weapon that is misogyny.
A call to collective action
Social media is enforcing stereotypes into girls' minds of their value to a man through dangerous criminals like Andrew Tate on popular platforms like TikTok. Without a sufficient challenge of these views in sex education, girls are susceptible to the damaging impacts of normalised violence in the porn industry. This can easily translate to violence in real life with a study by GOV.UK finding a range of potentially harmful narratives played out in pornography that may act as a template for behaviour among high risk individuals. If I can leave you with anything, especially if you are a man, it is to actively use the power of calling VAWG based misogyny out. If a friend of yours is ‘making a joke’ around VAWG, say something. Breaking the silence challenges such behaviour, creating a safer environment for women that protects them from being exposed to violent content in pornography. The change comes when we unmask social media.
