The Problem With Everything Being Pornified

Don't let your daughters on social media

Screenshot: @tanamongeau, ‘X’.

I read this week that Instagram is pushing “overtly sexual adult videos” to young users. For a Wall Street Journal investigation, journalists created accounts that could belong to children, following young gymnasts, cheerleaders and influencers. The test accounts were soon served sexual and disturbing content on Instagram Reels, alongside ads for dating apps, livestream platforms with “adult nudity” and AI chatbots “built for cybersex”. Some were next to ads for kids’ brands like Disney.

This is something I’ve been trying to get across to parents about social media. The problem is not just porn sites. They are of course a massive concern. Kids as young as nine are addicted. The average age to discover porn is now 13, for boys and girls. And many in my generation are now realising just how much being raised on porn affected them, believing it “destroyed their brain” and distorted their view of sex.

But the problem is bigger than that. Porn is everywhere now. TikTok is serving up sex videos to minors and promoting sites like OnlyFans. The gaming platform Twitch is exposing kids to explicit live-streams. Ads for “AI sex workers” are all over Instagram, some featuring kids’ TV characters like SpongeBob and the Cookie Monster. And there’s also this sort of “soft-porn” now that pervades everything. Pretty much every category of content that kids could stumble across, from beauty trends to TikTok dances to fitness pages, is now pornified or sexualised in some way for clicks.

I think this does a lot of damage to Gen Z. I think it desensitises us to sex. I think it can ruin relationships. But beyond that, I also believe a major problem with everything being pornified is the pressure it puts on young girls to pornify themselves. To fit the sex doll beauty standard; to seek validation through self-sexualisation, and potentially monetise all this like the influencers they’re inundated with.