We need to talk about porn – but how?

A 2023 Ofcom report revealed 49 per cent of respondents had viewed pornography in the month of its survey. With content becoming increasingly toxic and mainstream, the church needs to talk about porn. Ian Henderson from the Naked Truth Project explains how to get the conversation started

“I will never forget the girl who told me about her first kiss with her boyfriend, aged 12, who strangled her. He had seen it in pornography and thought it was normal.” So reads part of a 2023 report, “A lot of it is actually just abuse” – young people and pornography, by the Children’s Commissioner.

This is one of many reasons why we need to talk about porn.

But it’s not exactly a comfortable conversation – especially in church circles – so the question is, how?

The Naked Truth Project has spent the last decade helping schools, parents, churches, politicians and people addicted to pornography to do just that, through a variety of education and recovery programmes. With them having spoken at a Limitless leaders’ event recently, we turned to them for advice.

Porn impacts us all

The charity’s founder and CEO Ian Henderson says the conversation should begin by understanding the reach and nature of porn; abandoning age-old images of old men in macs emerging from dark alley sex shops clutching top-shelf magazines.

“In 2007 the landscape of pornography changed forever – the iPhone launched and this marked the switch from the sex shop to the smartphone,” Ian says.

“Today, pornography isn’t something for a few people on the fringes. Porn websites have the highest traffic on the internet and with that has come a sense of normalcy and acceptability.”

The stats back this up. A 2023 Ofcom report found that 49 per cent of the UK population had viewed porn in the month of their survey. The Children’s Commissioner report already mentioned revealed that on average children view porn by age 13. One in three porn users are female. And if you think this is a secular issue, think again. “We held a men’s event recently with around 100 Pentecostal Christian men. When we asked when they’d last viewed porn, 48 per cent answered ‘in the last week’,” says Ian.

It seems the first step to talking about porn is acknowledging that it impacts us all.

Porn is changing

The next step is understanding how porn has changed, says Ian.

“When I was a teenager it was top-shelf magazines, topless women, Playboy. Today, a simple online search opens you to extreme, hardcore, violent, abusive material.”

Around 80 per cent of the 100 most-watched videos contain some form of verbal or physical aggression towards women and this is becoming reflected in real life relationships. “In schools the police are talking about how they’re seeing toxicity in relationships among young people or violence against women.” The choking story above is a case in point.

As porn becomes more toxic, issues of justice, campaigning and legal action against website owners are increasing.

“One of the biggest websites, Pornhub, removed 10 million videos last year because they had no proof of consent,” says Ian. “And there’s been legal action where people have said, ‘I was abused, it was filmed and people have made money from that.’”

The problem is a lack of regulation and consent around website content, Ian adds, and it’s especially problematic around free sites.

“We’re no longer talking about top-shelf magazines but violent and abusive content which is impacting children, young people, adults and families.”

Porn is damaging

Next, we need to understand how harmful porn can be to us individually and to our wider society.

“One thing we talk about in schools is how porn is the junk food of sex and relationships,” says Ian.

Just as junk food can impact our physical health, so too can porn. “We’re seeing more scientific research and studies which indicate that porn is a super-stimuli which hijacks the brain’s reward system. One result is addiction and dependency – the same neuro impact that drugs have.”

Porn is affecting the ability to have healthy relationships too. People who engage with it adopt expectations and assumptions that simply don’t reflect normal, everyday life.

“The example we give is someone trying to pass their driving test when they’ve never sat in a car but have only played Mario Kart or watched James Bond car chases,” says Ian. “Both are entertainment that is deliberately over the top and designed to make money. They’re not meant to be educational.”

Porn can create isolation and dissatisfaction in relationships, he adds, and people can begin preferring fantasy to reality.

They can also become selfish.

“Porn sites offer filters that allow us to choose the size, ethnicities and body types we prefer. That conditions us to be selfish because it’s about what we want, what we get, which is the opposite of giving and receiving and coming to relationships with a mutual desire to love and learn from each other.”

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.

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