Emboldened by the powers granted to them during the pandemic, public health officials apparently think everything has become a public health issue.
The Public Health Ontario web portal offers proof of this expansive view. Plug almost any topic into the search bar and you will get a long list of public-health related documents and advice. This includes everything from sexually-transmitted diseases, opioids, and alcoholism to climate change, racism, income inequity, hate, and misinformation. Even hoarding is now a public health issue.
Yet there is one topic the public health community seems to have no opinion on. Type “porn” or “pornography” into Ontario’s public health search engine and you get... “no results.” Why is that?
It can’t be for lack of access. Today porn is instantly available online in great quantities, and mostly for free. Many of the world’s most popular websites are pornographic. XVideos is currently the 11th most visited website, one spot ahead of Amazon; controversial Canadian site Pornhub is 13th with 38 billion visits annually.
Cory Hrushka, an Edmonton-based psychologist and sex therapist, calls the current offering of online porn “a never-ending buffet.” But while it may be free, this smorgasbord is certainly not costless.
Viewing online pornography can affect a person’s brain in a manner similar to addictive drugs since it stimulates the release of dopamine. Over time this can create a dependency effect in certain people who find themselves seeking out ever-greater stimulation to reproduce past levels of pleasure.
Hrushka said he has adult patients who “go home on Friday night and watch eight to 18 hours of porn. I’ve had people binge the whole weekend.” Others will watch porn nine or ten times every day. For the still-developing brains of teenagers, this effect can be even more severe. Australian research suggests 1.2 percent of women and 4.4 percent of men can become hooked on porn in this way.
Numerous other academic works link pornography viewing to other physical and mental health problems, including loneliness, anxiety, depression, and feelings of shame, as well as anti-social behaviours like drug use, drinking, and violence.
These effects are even more pronounced in young children. Canadian research reveals the median age at which Canadian children first encounter porn is 12 years old. Nearly one-third of those surveyed say they first saw porn when they were 10. For a majority of kids, this first glimpse of porn is accidental rather than deliberate.
Unfortunately, this proliferation of online porn appears to have far-reaching negative effects on children’s self-esteem, mental health, and views about sexuality into adulthood. Young boys who view pornography report feeling sexually inadequate, while young girls say they feel physically inferior.
Ironically, consuming porn may even reduce sexual performance in adults. A 2021 survey from Belgium of nearly 3,500 men aged 18 to 35 concluded that the “prevalence of erectile dysfunction in young men is alarmingly high, and the results of this study suggest a significant association with problematic pornography consumption.”
Add to these scientific results the well-documented connection between the production of porn and the exploitation of young women plus many horrifying cases of sex trafficking and you have a long and convincing list of serious health issues arising from online pornography.
All of which makes the total lack of interest in pornography from government and the public health community in Canada uniquely striking.
Ottawa is so concerned about the prevalence of smoking that it will soon require warning labels on each and every individual cigarette. Warning signs are equally ubiquitous on online gambling websites. So where are the warning labels for porn sites?
And governments aggressively enforce age restrictions on problematic-but-legal substances such as alcohol, tobacco and cannabis to keep them away from kids. Yet they have no interest in doing the same for online porn.
While some private members’ initiatives in the House of Commons and Senate have sought to bring a sense of balance and common sense to the pornography debate, the issue is studiously avoided by the public health community.
Proponents of “sex-positivity,” particularly in academia, frequently claim concern about porn is just a fixation of a few religious nuts who want to impose their own morality on society. But how does keeping children away from X-rated adult content constitute life in Gilead? No one is talking about banning porn for adults, just letting them know about the harms it can cause.
While there may be reasonable concerns about how to implement online age restrictions on porn, that hasn’t stopped several U.S. states, as well as France, Germany, and the UK from demanding porn website owners do more to verify the age of their users. Warning labels require even less effort.
If the public health community thinks racism, climate change, and hoarding are issues worthy of its concern, how can we continue to ignore the worrisome proliferation of online porn?
