It’s time for a real conversation about porn

Editor’s note: This commentary covers adult themes and platforms. 

The average American boy today first encounters pornography around age 12. By the time he graduates high school, he will have spent years consuming content that bears little resemblance to what researchers have studied over the past 20 years, or what most parents imagine.

Today, sexually explicit content is woven into the same platforms that young people use for everything else, whether or not they’re looking for it. It flows freely through Telegram channels, Discord servers, Reddit communities, and on X. It lives on TikTok and Instagram in forms just calibrated enough to avoid detection. Webcam platforms like Chaturbate have seen rapid growth, and OnlyFans is increasingly a mainstream cultural institution. Sites like PMVHaven aggregate hyper-stimulating “porn music video” compilations that function more like dopamine delivery systems than depictions of sex. And now AI-generated content — on platforms like candy.ai, PornTubeAI, and nudify.online — has removed human creators from the equation entirely.

The pornography research field has not kept up with these developments. Nor have parents, educators, policymakers, or funders. Our collective avoidance of a fact-based, honest conversation about porn means that we are failing young people, who are navigating unprecedented, ubiquitous access to sexually explicit media — without guidance, support, or honest conversation.

The polarizing debate over pornography is often a proxy for other concerns. Conservatives mostly see porn as a moral crisis requiring prohibition. Progressives, while increasingly attuned to potential downsides, are more likely to focus on threats to online privacy and the open discussion of sexuality. Both sides are more interested in maintaining their positions than understanding what is actually happening to young people — and what, if anything, we should do about it.

Here’s a radical proposal from the scholars Emily Rothman and Kim Nelson: let’s follow the evidence, wherever it leads. We ought to treat pornography for what it is: a fast-evolving technology-mediated experience that is tightly interwoven with adolescent development, sexual socialization, and relationship formation, especially for boys and young men.

An honest conversation depends on better evidence. It’s time for funders and policy organizations to strengthen the under-resourced field of empirical pornography research. And to do so effectively, popular discourse must stop pathologizing young men’s sexuality and start listening to what they seek from romantic relationships.

Not your parents’ Playboy (or Pornhub)

Five years ago, concerns about pornography centered on tube sites — Pornhub, XVideos, and their equivalents — where algorithmically curated videos to this day draw billions of monthly views. That landscape is rapidly changing.

While scrolling through social feeds, young men are one tempting click away from an 18-year-old dancing naked in her bedroom on Chaturbate, OnlyFans, and dozens of other webcam sites. OnlyFans creators Sophie Rain and Anna Paul have millions of followers on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat — mostly young men, who collectively pay tens of millions of dollars to access their sexually explicit livestreams.

Figure 1

AI has transformed pornography further still. Platforms like PornTubeAI are filled with a wide range of AI-generated videos, from deepfaked depictions of the “girl next door” to sexually explicit portrayals of recent news events. AI-powered nudification apps generate startlingly realistic, explicit video clips based on a single photograph. One of the most popular versions allows users to import photos directly from Instagram.

The age of first exposure to pornography — whether intentional or accidental — is getting younger with every passing year. For many adolescents, and especially boys, pornography is now the most readily available “instruction manual” for sex. We have never been more exposed to sexually explicit content, and yet we are still learning how to speak plainly about it. We have, in effect, outsourced sex ed to the internet and walked away.

Figure 2

While media and financial literacy have moved into the policy mainstream, porn literacy is a minor part of sex education, if discussed at all. Of course, parents and educators were never going to be adolescents’ most trusted guides on sexual knowledge, and chatbots have introduced new risks and opportunities into that mix. The honest answer is that we still don’t know what works.

Porn’s impact

Researchers can tell us with reasonable confidence that most young men consume a lot of pornography, and they are starting earlier than previous generations. Beyond that, the evidence thins out quickly.

Pornography platforms attract billions of views and rank among the most trafficked platforms on the internet. And yet, compared to social media and gaming — where dedicated funding programs have built robust research infrastructure — pornography research is remarkably under-resourced. There are relatively few social scientists focused on pornography as a primary topic, and the research pipeline has not kept up with the pace of technological change.

What research does exist is almost entirely correlational. Several studies, for instance, associate pornography consumption with having multiple sexual partners. But the causal arrow could easily point in the opposite direction, or both patterns could be driven by a third factor, like personality traits associated with novelty-seeking. We simply don’t know.

Consider one of the most common concerns raised about pornography consumption by boys: that it leads to sexual violence and the degradation of women. Critics rightfully point to emerging trends — the increase in choking, hitting, and unwanted anal sex reported by young women — and ask whether pornography is normalizing aggression. That concern cannot be dismissed, and deserves serious study.

But we should also be honest about an alternative possibility: some young men may be predisposed to aggression, and that predisposition may lead them both to seek out violent content and to behave aggressively in real life.

The Croatian researcher Aleksandar Štulhofer examined this directly, testing whether callousness — a lack of empathy for others’ suffering — or pornography consumption better predicts self-reported sexual aggressiveness among male adolescents. He found that callousness, not pornography, was the stronger predictor. Strikingly, among callous teenagers, exposure to pornography was associated with fewer self-reported acts of sexual aggression. Štulhofer speculates that pornography may function as an outlet rather than an accelerant of sexual aggression. He also notes an equally plausible alternative: heavy pornography use may shape how adolescents perceive consent, making them less likely to recognize their own behavior as coercive.

These are uncomfortable questions that most of us would prefer to ignore. An implication of the callousness hypothesis may be that, for some aggressive young men, pornography could reduce real-world harm — if paired with strong norms about consent and mutual respect. That is not your usual birds-and-bees talk, and it’s a conversation most parents don’t feel equipped to have. But discomfort is not a reason to avoid seeking the truth.

Our uncertainty about the link between pornography and sexual aggression should inspire humility, and the history of violent video games is an instructive comparison. Widespread alarm from the 1990s that violent games would produce a generation of violent young men was unfounded. Violent crime by young men declined significantly in the years that followed, thanks largely to better policing and an improved labor market. It turns out, the vast majority of young men are capable of distinguishing between fictional engagement with extreme content on their consoles and how they ought to behave in the real world. Young men may be similarly capable of making that distinction about pornography.

While the analogy is imperfect, a broader lesson still applies: policymakers should be cautious about assuming that all boys are unable to distinguish fiction from reality, and researchers should study which young men struggle, when, and why.

Let’s stop pathologizing male sexuality

Before we can have that honest conversation with young men, we need to have it with ourselves. When the New York Times covers the rise of “romantasy” — sexually explicit, erotic fantasy novels targeting women — it emphasizes empowerment and the safe exploration of domination and submission within a protective framework. But popular coverage of boys’ consumption of pornography centers on pathways to misogyny and degradation while rarely considering the role of fantasy exploration.

Both perspectives are legitimate, but the asymmetry is not lost on young men, and it poisons any productive conversation before it can begin. If we want to reach young men, we need to apply consistent standards — to acknowledge that sexual fantasy and desire are complicated for everyone, that the distance between what we want in fantasy and what we want in relationships is a universal human experience, not a uniquely male pathology. We should lead with open curiosity before assigning our moral assumptions.

Sexual desire often feels irrational, and sits uncomfortably beside our stated values. That tension is part of being human. But it is easier to exploit and harder to manage in a world of high-stimulation, ubiquitous content – and little space to discuss it openly. The result, for some young men, is that the path of least resistance runs straight to a screen.

The loneliness loop

While most debate about pornography focuses on the extremes of porn addiction and sexual aggression, a less emphasized concern may be quietly affecting more young men: the substitution away from offline romantic relationships. Fewer than half of high school seniors today report that they are dating — down from more than 80% in the 1990s. Teenage boys, aware that a clumsy or rejected approach could go viral, are increasingly reluctant to take romantic risks at all. Meeting our sexual needs has never been easier online, while pursuing real relationships has never felt more perilous.

Figure 3

No wonder men are increasingly seeking emotional companionship online from sexually explicit content creators. A recent report found that nearly 80% of messages from the biggest spenders on OnlyFans aren’t sexual in nature — they’re about pets, food, and daily routines. As one writer for Vice concluded, “the real OnlyFans hustle isn’t selling sex. It’s monetizing loneliness.”

Some men are going further still, skipping human creators entirely and engaging with AI porn avatars. Ironically, at the same moment that AI-generated content offers the least authentic depiction of sex, Pornhub’s own data show rising demand for authenticity — amateur aesthetics, ordinary bodies, and unscripted scenes in bedroom settings. Young men may be seeking and simulating the ordinary intimacy that they are not pursuing in real life.

Every hour spent on OnlyFans or scrolling through Pornhub is an hour not spent learning how to talk to someone, getting rejected, and trying again — the slow, unglamorous work that actually builds a romantic life. Beyond compulsive use and distorted norms, modern pornography could cause the substitution of romantic relationships for the simulation of sex on our screens. While this has long been a concern of science fiction writers, we ought to have better evidence whether it’s actually happening, and at what scale.

Young men are already telling us something

One of the most striking developments over the past five years is that young men themselves are increasingly supportive of restricting access to online pornography, and more so than middle-aged men. Inspired in part by podcasters like Andrew Huberman and Chris Williamson, more young men are trying to reduce or eliminate their consumption, using apps like Quittr, building communities of accountability, and treating pornography reduction as part of a broader project of self-mastery.

Figure 4

A meaningful share of young men are telling us, clearly, that they feel pornography is eroding their agency and sense of self. That is important evidence that deserves a serious response.

Whatever you think of the policies that have followed — seventeen states have declared pornography a public health crisis, and 25 states have passed age-verification laws — they contain an important signal about public concern. So far, users have largely circumvented these restrictions by switching to offshore sites and using VPNs, which tells us something important about the limits of blunt regulatory instruments. A more nuanced policy research agenda would address the core problems facing boys today, surfacing pathways to form a realistic, healthy relationship with pornography, sexuality, and modern dating.

What we owe young men

Many foundational questions about porn are currently unanswered. To what extent can young men effectively distinguish between pornography’s depictions and real-world sexual relationships? Do they build the social and emotional skills to navigate consent, read cues of interest, and build genuine intimacy? Do they have the tools and support to resist compulsive consumption when they want to? And when they consume pornography occasionally, does it generate secrecy and shame that corrodes their sense of self-worth?

Most importantly: what does a realistic, healthy, and aspirational relationship with pornography, sexuality, and romantic life actually look like for a young man in 2026? What would help him get there?

Parents and educators need better tools too — not scripts for moral lectures, but honest frameworks for effective conversations with young people about pornography, sexuality, and dating.

The boys growing up in today’s rapidly changing landscape deserve better than silence, better than moral panic, and better than the false choice between prohibition and indifference. They deserve adults who are willing to follow the evidence, sit with discomfort, and ask hard questions. That is what we are trying to do, and we hope you will join us.

An invitation

Everyone: Please join us for a webinar on April 2, where Bailey Way, Shane Kraus, and Josh Grubbs will present their findings alongside Marc Potenza and Emily Rothman. The goal is not just to share results but to explore a field-wide research agenda.

Researchers: If you are studying these questions and want to be part of a research convening we are planning for this summer, please get in touch by writing to [email protected].

Funders: Pornography’s effects on boys and men represent one of the most significant evidence gaps in adolescent health research. The investment required is modest relative to the scale of the problem — and relative to what is at stake for young people growing up in this environment.

Parents & educators: Know that your discomfort is both understandable and surmountable. The young men in your life are navigating something genuinely difficult. They need you in the conversation — not as a moral authority, but as an honest, curious, and caring adult.

Boys and men: You are navigating a transformed world in terms of access to sexual and erotic material. If you are struggling, you’re not broken, and you’re not alone! We need to figure this out together, and we need your insights and help.

David Sasaki

Boys & Men Online Director