Elizabeth, a senior under a pseudonym, was just seven years old when she began watching internet pornography. Having never been exposed to sex before, she became curious to learn about something that she saw as mature and for adults. Soon, she was habitually exposing herself to videos full of violent sex and objectification that would go on to change her perception of sex for the worse. Elizabeth is 18 years old now, and though her enthusiasm for porn has long faded, she continues to watch it on a regular basis, attempting to chase the excitement it gave her as a child.
Elizabeth, like several other Lowell students, has been negatively impacted by pornography consumption.
The growing accessibility of internet pornography has caused issues for Lowell students. Many students have grown up watching porn from a young age, causing them to have warped views of sex or women. Some Lowellites have developed addictions to internet porn, which eat away at their time, freedom, and self-respect. Although students like Elizabeth have grown aware of its impact, some find it hard to move past the habits and ideas that porn has forced on them.
Pornography often depicts women in degrading ways, which can seep into consumers’ views of women and sex. In Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Gail Dines, Wheelock College’s professor emerita of sociology and women’s studies, writes that porn desensitizes men to violence against women through “gonzo sex,” which she defines as “hard-core, punishing sex in which women are demeaned and debased.” According to Dines, this “gonzo” porn often shreds the humanity of the women depicted in it. “The first and most important way pornographers get men to buy into gonzo sex is by depicting and describing women as fuck objects who are deserving of sexual use and abuse,” Dines writes. This is often done by putting these women through extreme, embarrassing, and sometimes painful sexual acts, most of which focus little on the woman’s enjoyment of the act compared to the man’s. Although many are aware that these depictions of sex are unrealistic, Dines claims that pornography can cause its consumers to expect or seek out these experiences during real sexual encounters. “Men may think that the porn images are locked in that part of the brain marked fantasy, never to leak into the real world, but I hear over and over again from female students how their boyfriends are increasingly demanding porn sex from them,” Dines writes.
Experts worry that the rise of internet pornography has made our current generation of teenagers more vulnerable to this “gonzo” pornography than ever before. “Before the advent of the internet, it used to be that men sporadically used porn when growing up; it was the more soft-core type of porn, and they often had to steal it,” Dines writes. “While past generations of men who used porn had limited access to the material, this generation has unlimited access to gonzo porn.” This is especially relevant due to the young age at which people are watching internet pornography. In a January 2025 survey conducted by The Lowell of 173 students, 23 percent of students said that they consume internet porn on a regular basis. Out of the 59 students who provided the age at which they began watching pornography, 27 percent said that they were first exposed to internet porn before the age of nine, and 72 percent were first exposed before the age of 13. According to the peer-reviewed journal Handbook of Children and Screens, adolescents without sexual knowledge or experience may lack a frame of reference for the topic, causing many to believe that porn is representative of real world sexual activity. In her TED talk How the Evolution of Porn Changed Adolescence, which she authorized The Lowell to use, Dr. Megan Maas, an assistant professor in Human Development and Family Studies at Michigan State University, shines a light on how little most students know about sex prior to being exposed to pornography. “Only 24 states actually mandate sex education in schools, and of those, only ten require that it be medically accurate,” Maas said. “Only nine require a discussion of consent, and zero require a discussion of pornography or pleasure.” In The Lowell’s January 2025 survey, over 62 percent of 60 participants who answered an optional question considered internet porn to be their first significant exposure to sex, with 32 percent of 56 respondents of another optional question reporting that pornography had impacted their expectations surrounding sex. According to experts, that impact is profoundly negative, especially with boys. “Unlike before, porn is actually being encoded into a boy’s sexual identity so that an authentic sexuality — one that develops organically out of life experiences, one’s peer group, personality traits, family and community affiliations — is replaced by a generic porn sexuality limited in creativity and lacking any sense of love, respect, or connection to another human being,” Dines writes.
These warped expectations are especially detrimental to students’ perceptions of a woman’s role in sex. Many students said that pornography had caused them to internalize the idea that sex was focused around pleasuring a man, and that women were supposed to be submissive to men during sex. Henry, a senior under a pseudonym, believes that porn promotes the idea that sex is about women letting things happen to them, rather than taking on a more active role. Similarly, Meredith, a junior under a pseudonym, feels that heterosexual porn is made solely to cater towards men, with no attention being given to the perspective of women. She claims that most pornography is filmed from a perspective that allows male viewers to imagine themselves engaging in intercourse with the women depicted in the videos, leading to the women in the videos being objectified in a way that the men in the videos aren’t. “They’re turning a woman into an object to be watched, to be lusted after, and they don’t really do the same towards men,” she said. “When I was young, I don’t think I fully grasped the concept of misogyny yet, so I just [thought that] they’re doing something they both like.” It wasn’t until around age 14 that Meredith began to question what she saw. “I started noticing that I couldn’t tell if the girl was in pain or not, or if it was consensual or not,” she said. “[Noticing] the fact that we couldn’t even see the guy, but we could see this girl’s whole face and body, is when I realized [it].”
Although not everyone will seek out especially violent content, aggression towards women is so common in porn that many students have grown used to it. Out of the Lowell students surveyed, over 40 percent of those who watch pornography reported watching pornography containing real or staged physical or sexual violence towards women. Elizabeth can recall an especially aggressive video that influenced her idea of a woman’s role during sex. “I remember watching some a while ago where [the man] tied [the girl] up and fucked her, and it gave me this idea that the guys are dominant and the girls sometimes, in some videos, want to be treated like that.” Although Veronica, a senior under a pseudonym, initially felt uncomfortable about this aggression towards women, she grew more used to it the more porn she consumed. “I feel like at the beginning, I was a little bit like, why are you doing that? Why would a woman let a man do that to her?” she said. However, her exposure to this aggression increased with each pornography video she watched, and she began to relent. “I’ve kind of accepted it,” she said.
Because porn caters so strongly to male pleasure, it can make sex seem less appealing to women. Elizabeth has become uninterested in the idea of having sex with men altogether. “I think because I watch porn, I don’t really want to have sex,” she said. “I see it as being for the man. It doesn’t seem like it’s for the woman’s pleasure…It’s not very fun.” Porn has caused Elizabeth to see women as having a set role during sex, and doesn’t associate the idea of sex with having her sexual desires fulfilled. This has drawn her to the idea of lesbian sex, despite Elizabeth herself identifying as a straight woman. “I guess it’s appealing because there’s no man involved,” she said. “Being able to do the same things on another person that you can do with yourself, and having someone recognize what you need in sex…That seems appealing, I guess.” Similarly, Meredith takes issue with porn’s lack of emotional connection, which she sees as essential to a positive sexual experience. “[In porn], there’s no communication and there’s no aftercare,” Meredith said. “You’re not talking to the person about what you like or what they like.” She feels that communication and consent are downplayed in most pornographic content, and worries about the impact that could have on viewers’ perceptions of sex. Meredith recalls her friends talking about a lack of communication in their first sexual experiences, as their partners didn’t take the time to ask questions or discuss boundaries with them. “It was very fast and it was kind of harsh, and I feel like that could be tied to porn consumption. The most important part of sex is love, I think, and that’s what porn completely diminishes.”
Porn’s “gonzo” depiction of sex has led students to have issues in their own sexual experiences. Henry feels that his exposure to the unrealistic depictions of sex in porn has made it difficult for him to perform in sexual situations, which makes his partner feel insecure. “They think that it’s the fault of their performance, when it’s mine,” he said. Consuming pornography has caused Meredith to feel that there are high expectations for her performance during sex. “The girls are always feeling pleasure, they’re making noises and stuff like that,” she said. “It’s very exaggerated. I feel like I have to do those same things, even if it doesn’t feel that good…I feel like I have to fake it myself sometimes.” Veronica believes that watching pornography from a young age has caused her to develop stronger, often unwanted sexual thoughts, and describes herself as hypersexual as a result of this consumption. “I think my brain chemistry has been altered because of it,” she said. “I oversexualize everything. and I do it subconsciously. I don’t even realize I’m doing it.” She says that sexual situations constantly appear in her head, and she struggles to get rid of them, recalling a situation where she was unable to focus in class because she was thinking about sex. She also frequently imagines herself in sexual situations with her peers, even when she doesn’t feel any sexual attraction towards them. She feels that these thoughts are often out of her control, and is ashamed when she recognizes the implications of her actions. “If I think about someone doing that to me, I would be really disgusted,” she said. “So I’m disgusted by the fact that I do that to other people.”
Despite these issues, many Lowell students find it hard to shake their porn consumption habits. Out of the students in the survey, over 29 percent of the 58 who responded to an optional question consider themselves to be addicted to porn. “There’s a dopamine rush when I’m watching it,” Veronica said. “It’s like when you’re scrolling on TikTok or something, [I feel like] it has the same effect on your brain.” Veronica often loses sleep by staying up late to watch pornography, and feels that she lacks the self-control to stop herself from consuming this content. “[Pornography is] pretty detrimental to mental health, I’d say,” she said. “If all you’re looking forward to is watching stupid fucking porn, it just feels weird.” Although Meredith no longer watches pornography, at the peak of her addiction she was watching it on an everyday basis. “Around COVID, I would watch it every day, not even for pleasure, just out of pure interest,” she said. Henry compared his pornography addiction to a drug addiction, in the sense that the more he consumed, the higher his tolerance became, making him turn to more intense content in order to receive that same hit of dopamine. “My brain just got used to what it was given at the start, which was pretty heavy already, and then it just wanted more,” he said. For Henry, this meant seeking more niche, extreme, and unrealistic porn categories to satisfy his cravings, including BDSM, a sexual fetish involving uneven power dynamics and, in some cases, physical violence towards women. Although he has tried multiple times to stop watching porn, his cravings for dopamine have kept him coming back. Some students have continued watching porn despite feeling negatively about themselves for it. “[Porn] has lowered my self-esteem, making me feel really guilty,” an anonymous survey respondent said. “I always think, ‘What would others think about me if they knew this part of me?’”
According to experts, there is a direct link between the growing accessibility of porn and the growing intensity of its content. According to Dines, the easy accessibility of internet porn has forced pornography studios to produce increasingly extreme content to appeal to viewers in a competitive market. “As the market becomes saturated and consumers become increasingly bored and desensitized, pornographers are avidly searching for ways to differentiate their products from others,” Dines writes. As a result, teenagers like Henry are being exposed to pornography that is significantly more intense than the porn of previous generations. Meredith doesn’t think she would have thought about dangerous acts like choking as sexual if she hadn’t seen them in pornography, and believes that porn had made dangerous things seem normal to her younger self. “[Porn] normalized things that I wasn’t necessarily supposed to see, which only made me more curious…Things that could be harmful to myself if I were to put myself in that situation,” she said. Elizabeth recalls seeing an excess of videos focused on inappropriate dynamics, such as incest and inappropriate age gaps. “Even just scrolling, you’ll see ‘new 18 year old girl’ or something like that,” she said. As someone who has recently turned 18, these videos make Elizabeth especially uncomfortable.
Experts agree that discussing sex and pornography in class is necessary for young people to develop a healthy relationship with sex and with women. “I am afraid that if we continue to ignore what’s going on in teens’ brains and their bodies, and we do not give them the education that they need, then the porn industry is going to be doing the education for us,” said Maas. “We won’t like those results any more than if we let the fast food industry educate them about nutrition and eating.” For some students, watching educational content about porn helped kickstart realizations about the impacts of pornography on their own lives. For example, Veronica did not recognize that she had a porn addiction until she saw a TED talk on YouTube describing what that meant. She considered the video to be a wake up call, allowing her to reflect on her porn consumption habits for the first time. As another supporter of stronger sex ed curriculums, Dines has held discussions in which young adults were successfully pushed to reevaluate their own relationships with porn in a classroom setting. “In the decidedly nonsexual arena of a college auditorium, men are asked to think about what [pornographic] images say about women, men, and sexuality,” Dines writes. “Stripped of an erection, men are invited to examine their porn use in a reflective manner while thinking seriously about how images seep into their lives.”
Because internet pornography is so available, students have been encountering extreme content at young ages. This has long-term impacts on their perception of sex and relationships. As someone who began consuming pornographic content at age nine, Veronica hopes that future youth won’t be impacted in the same way that she was. “I don’t want them to have their expectations set that this is what a woman should do, that this is what a man should do, that this is what sex should look like, that this is what you should look like,” Veronica said. “I feel scared for them because I don’t want them to be scarred. I think I kind of was.”
