How porn changed society

“As a woman, I think porn is a shame. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest, I started when I was like 11. I think it really destroyed my brain", said Billie Eilish on the Howard Stern Show. If in the past the singer had fought to clear the issue, today she has retraced her steps, highlighting the problems (sexual, psychological and relational) related to the consumption of porn in young age, a debate whose contradictions anthropologists, psychiatrists and psychologists have considered for decades. According to statistics 80% of Gen Z follow porn sites and 1 in 4 have unprotected sex, The Middlesex University of London in a study in collaboration with the Postal Police found that globally 30% of children between 11 and 12 years old watch pornography online. Porn confuses teens about the type of sex they want or think they should have and it does. that young people, unable to distinguish reality and fiction due to a lack of literacy in porn and how it actually translates into real life - are condemned to a future full of disappointed expectations and insecurities, but not only. As the age at which children have free internet access gets lower, BDSM, kink, soft-core, hard-core as well as creating unrealistic and often chauvinist expectations, would seem to fuel sexist attitudes, leading men to have less willingness to accept the needs of the other sex and to develop the desire for domination, understood as prevarication and aggression.

Anal, facial ejaculation, unprotected, multi-partner sex, deepthroat - this is the idea of ​​normality that comes with a lot of teenagers on their first few times. Just now that porn is literally within reach and the freedom to experience sexuality freely is almost a generational manifesto, with OnlyFans and the hyper-sexualization of pop culture, the skin on display no longer necessarily equates to desire. In fact, libido levels have dropped by 20% since the 2000s according to the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, and less than half of the world's population does it once a week, possibly confirming fears that the pandemic would make people even less capable and willing to relate to others.

The porn industry - which bills over 100 billion annually - from worn magazines and blurry VHS tapes, to HD streaming and virtual reality, has changed tremendously over the past two decades. Yet in the era in which one click is enough to access the deep web, on social networks that are today the method of cultural dissemination par excellence, instead of press and television, paradoxically, sex is more taboo than ever. Today fashion photography and sex no longer go hand in hand. Just think of Helmut Newton, Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, Oliviero Toscani and Mario Testino, the aesthetics of American Apparel, the Gucci advertisement in which a model's pubic hair was shaved in the "G" logo, the controversial spring 2017 campaign by Eckhaus Latta in which sexual acts are represented in real life, to the iconic Wolford campaigns or to an undressed and underage Kate Moss for Calvin Klein.

Now, however, Sex doesn't sell, above all because the diffusion of a content passes through the algorithm and it is up to the artificial intelligence to distinguish between nude art and pornography. For the risk of being censored, therefore, we self-censor ourselves, or worse, we look at the final product already with the limits of the platform on which it will have to land. Was it the introduction of digitized pornography that caused sexual images represented to be so separate from fashion? The result of a flattened, eroticized and profoundly capitalist culture in which sexual attraction is channeled exclusively for commercial purposes, almost as if the desire for objects has been replaced by the desire for objects, as in pornography. In porn the individual is only a pretext, he is no longer irreplaceable and unique, but he is interchangeable and no longer distinguishes himself from an object, a partial and fragmented body that cancels many of the categories that characterize the individual: the self and the other, freedom and bond, acceptance and rejection. The denial of sexuality and what it brings into play, the encounter between two people who accept the sharing of physical desire and the involvement of oneself.