You may think you know what porn is today but unless you’re a fairly savvy Internet user who surfs the countless free porn sites available online and have had a really good look at what’s available now, trust me, you have no idea what’s really going on. Mainstream pornography today is far more brutal, more graphic, and more violent than most could imagine if they hadn't seen it for themselves.

 What shocked me the most when I started investigating on-line porn and what was not just available, but seemed to be the most popular, was sex with varying degrees of brutality. I felt physically sick that men, or women, could watch scenes where girls, often young and most likely not yet 18, are left bruised or even bleeding after a particularly brutal sex scene. I thought, something is very, very wrong here. There was one common thread through every pornographic scene I watched, from the most mild – even girl on girl scenes – to the most extreme. They all depicted women being punished or humiliated, mostly by men, sexually. This is porn today. Make no mistake.

 As I became more consciously aware of how porn bothered me I knew I could never date someone who watches a lot of porn. The same way I wouldn’t date a guy who frequents strip clubs. I think that kind of behavior says a lot about the way that a man views women, whether or not he is consciously connected to those views or not. And this is where the connection between the two things – how women are portrayed in porn and how men subsequently view them - became an issue for me. How do you differentiate? How does a guy watching some faceless girl be sexually degraded on some porn site and gets off watching it, then not have this seep into his sub-conscious and effect his views of what is and isn’t okay? Are we all that evolved? Sadly, I don’t think so.

 To me, porn debases the morals and dignity of the people who make it, as well as those who consume it. There is no way around this. No matter how much a porn star tells you she’s comfortable and happy with what she does, that it’s ‘empowering’ for her to be making money doing something she ‘likes’ or feels like she’s ‘good at.’ You are participating in an industry that is misogynistic to it’s core.

I don’t think that pornography represents and champions sexual liberation, quite the opposite. Men learn from porn and you don’t have to do much searching of online-porn to see that most of it nowadays sexualizes violence against women. And the more this happens, the more it normalizes and legitimizes sexually abusive behavior, giving permission to it’s consumers to treat women the way they’re treated in porn. And this isn’t just limited to men anymore, although they definitely make up the majority. There are women who, although they may not be into this kind of thing in their personal lives, like watching porn which degrades women as well, which does not suggest the most healthy psyche to me.

 A battle of power and subjugation has always existed between men and women. It’s widely accepted that a woman’s most powerful weapon in this power struggle is the granting of sex to a man. As it is also widely accepted that men always crave more sexually than women will usually freely give them. Maybe the undeniable drive for male domination and female humiliation that is embedded in most porn is why it’s so popular - because it fulfills that fantasy for men, and a smaller percentage perhaps of women, of watching women do whatever they please sexually. Things they could most likely never get a woman to agree to in real life, which is titillating.

 But where do we draw the line? Is everyone capable of separating the pornographic images they routinely seek out with what turns them on in real-life sexual encounters? I don’t think so. What are the effects of this kind of de-sensitization to sexual humiliation and violence against women? I wonder if the overwhelming exposure to this kind of emotionless, voracious sex on the Internet will socialize men to find degradation of women sexually arousing? And how will it affect women’s psyche’s as well? Will it stop a developing teenage boy or girl from developing an authentic sexual identity?

 According to Gail Dines, the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality,"We are now bringing up a generation of boys on cruel, violent porn," she says, "and given what we know about how images affect people, this is going to have a profound influence on their sexuality, behavior and attitudes towards women." That doesn’t sound good.  She goes on to say, "I have found that the earlier men use porn, the more likely they are to have trouble developing close, intimate relationships with real women. Some of these men prefer porn to sex with an actual human being. They are bewildered, even angry, when real women don't want or enjoy porn sex." Sound familiar at all? This is what’s happening.

 I realize this not a new argument, in the same way that so much has been written about the effects of playing hours upon yours of violent video games. The difference here is that most of us are not engaging in day-to-day situations where violence is readily used. Sex, on the other hand, is something many people do regularly, opening up the argument that it’s far easier and more likely that the things that turn us on when we watch porn will be the things we want to bring into our real-life sex lives. And whilst this isn’t a problem if it’s consensual, my question is will men, and maybe women too, eventually need to try more and more new things to become turned on in the bedroom? In this respect, it’s just not credible to say that porn is just fantasy for people. There will always be people who aren’t capable of separating the two.

 I would hope that a well-adjusted boy or man, regardless of the porn they’ve watched, could have a normal and healthy sex life, one that doesn’t include sex that in any way humiliates a woman. What does concern me though, is that will violent porn become so normalized that in two or three generations that’s all there will be? Is this where we’re headed? It seems to me that the answer is yes.

 Something else I find troubling is how the sex industry has affected how sexuality is transmitted back to us. This filtering of pornographic images into mainstream culture only contributes to stripping women of full human status and reducing them to sex objects and thus robbing girls of their sexual identities. Or even worse, hyper-sexualizing women and then, in turn, blaming them for their sexuality.

 So how does the proliferation of online-porn affect the way both men and women develop their sexual identities and how we perceive sex? The mere fact that it’s easier for an 11 year-old to look up some hard-core sex on an iPhone in class than send a text their best friend is nothing short of disturbing to me. Porn, including hard-core stuff, is no big deal, and an extension of that is that sex is no longer a big deal. And what I mean by being a ‘big deal,’ is that it’s losing it’s meaning, or it’s meaning is changing. Because sex and intimacy can’t be separated, when sexual violence and humiliation is normalized, the messages that are sent to those who watch it is that this is the way sex and intimacy, and maybe even love, are.

 Market research conducted by Internet providers found that the average age a boy first sees porn today is 11. And I’m not talking about your dad’s Playboys that were hidden on top of the bathroom cabinet. I’m talking about the most popular acts depicted in internet porn such as vaginal, oral and anal penetration by three or more men at the same time; double anal; double vaginal; a female gagging from having a penis thrust into her throat; and ejaculation in a woman's face, eyes and mouth. These images are how an average 11 year-old boy is learning about sex, or how a similarly-aged girl is seeing the way women are portrayed sexually for the first time.

 Porn highlights an emotional ambivalence to sex and I get that some people have no issue with this at all. I’m not saying that sex needs to be ‘special’ and full of intense, emotional intimacy every time. How boring would that be? Is it exciting to push the consensual boundaries in the bedroom? Sure, but I still think that no matter how hard we try, sex is never without some underlying emotion.