KEI Conference: “The Influence of Pornography on Youth”

Pornography websites get more visitors than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined. It could be asked why this statistic is necessary to point out. Well, consider these statistics: nearly one in five women have been assaulted, one in four women have been beaten by an intimate partner, and erectile dysfunction rates have gotten up in the last decade among younger men in the US. Viewing women as sex objects, shaping men’s sexual expectations of women, acceptance of sexual aggression toward women to name just a few issues of the pornography industry. The viewing of pornography, especially violent pornography, desensitizes people to realistic sexual experiences and physical conditions people to find violent, oftentimes non-consensual sex to be erotic. How can this problem be solved? To answer this question, we invited Chelly Maes, a doctoral researcher from the School for Mass Communication Research in Leuven.