I thought the porn industry couldn’t shock me any more. Then PornHub released their 2015 stats
John Van Maren
I’m no longer shocked by anything I uncover when I’m researching the porn industry. But when PornHub, the Internet’s largest online sewage facility, released statistics for 2015, I felt sick.
A couple of examples:
People watched 4,392,486,580 hours of porn on PornHub in 2015. Just to put that in perspective, that means that in one year, people around the world spent 501,425 years watching pornography—on one porn site.
On PornHub, people watched 87,849,731,608 porn videos. As the porn site hastened to point out, that’s 12 porn videos viewed for every single person on the planet.
To help us put these numbers in context, we can look at a new study published by the Journal of Communication on December 29, 2015, titled “A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies.” Studies like this are very important—not because we don’t already know that pornography is creating a violent new ideology of sex, but because the porn industry is constantly trumpeting completely useless and misleading research that makes hilariously stupid claims, such as that porn could make you more feminist.
In their blunt abstract, the authors explain what they learned:
Whether pornography consumption is a reliable correlate of sexually aggressive behavior continues to be debated. Meta-analyses of experimental studies have found effects on aggressive behavior and attitudes. That pornography consumption correlates with aggressive attitudes in naturalistic studies has also been found. Yet, no meta-analysis has addressed the question motivating this body of work: Is pornography consumption correlated with committing actual acts of sexual aggression? 22 studies from 7 different countries were analyzed. Consumption was associated with sexual aggression in the United States and internationally, among males and females, and in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Associations were stronger for verbal than physical sexual aggression, although both were significant. The general pattern of results suggested that violent content may be an exacerbating factor.In other words, millions, if not billions, of people are consuming a harmful product that is impacting their view of women and, in many cases, leading them to develop violent fantasies, fetishes, and attitudes.
Don’t believe me? You don’t need to take my word for it. Increasingly, porn stars are coming out to warn the public that hey, getting ideas about sex from porn products may not be that particularly healthy for your relationship. Like Rocco “Italian Stallion” Siffredi, for example—a man “perhaps best known for sodomizing a woman while plunging her head into a toilet and flushing it.” Siffredi, The Daily Beast reports, has begun a new campaign to warn people of the dangers of watching the horrifying material he spent much of his career producing.
RELATED: This former porn star is exposing porn’s secrets: and it should make you very, very uncomfortable
From The Daily Beast:
He was an early champion of the rough and dirty before it went mainstream. James Deen, the former porn sensation now mired in rape allegations, once called Siffredi his idol…Siffredi, born Rocco Antonio Tano, warns Italy’s Minister of Education that young men’s knowledge of sex is largely informed by head-in-toilet anal sex scenes instead of “dialogue, listening, openness” at school.Before it went mainstream. Read that over again, and then think about it. That’s the kind of thing that has now gone mainstream. And why? Well, the production of “rough-stuff” was “driven by the market.” People wanted to watch women humiliated. Beaten. Violated. Millions and millions of them. And now, Siffredi wants to warn people that they have perhaps taken his films a bit too seriously:
For example, despite how it goes in the films, not all women react with unrestrained enthusiasm when their lover spits on them, pulls their hair, or slaps them in the face with his ‘truncheon.’Well, you don’t say.
It’s time for us to stop underestimating the porn problem. If we care about the women and girls in our society, we’ll start treating pornography like the cultural cancer it is. No more “boys will be boys.” No more “it’s a harmless sexual outlet.” No more “all guys do it,” as I heard one Christian speaker say recently—because no, they don’t. We need to take this seriously, or our churches will drown in a sea of filth right along with the rest of the culture.
RELATED: The James Deen porn scandal is so much worse than what’s being reported
