Among the many contributing factors to sexual violence, one influence that has received less public attention is the socializing influence of pornography that is increasingly violent and degrading.
Scholar Gail Dines has been a central force in raising awareness about this connection. After publishing a 2010 text titled “How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality,” she started Culture Reframed to educate people on the science-based “harms of pornography to children and adolescents.”
During a panel Thursday titled “Young Women Speak Out Against Porn Culture,” Dines underscored the dangers of an increasingly “pornographied” modern culture surrounding many children — so much so that loving romantic relationships can be hard to imagine.
Positive sexual socialization as ‘miraculous’
Panelist Ashley Staggers has worked in sexual violence prevention and survivor advocacy — recently focusing on these issues as Miss Manhattan 2026. She described watching old movies recently and being struck by how “the climax of the film is often just the two main characters kissing” — with everyone reacting, “Oh my gosh!”
That changes, Staggers implied, when pornography has become so “normalized” that “you don’t even need to go to a porn site to see porn.”
“It’s everywhere,” she said, referring to popular Amazon Prime and Netflix shows filled with sexually explicit scenes.
“It would be a miracle for someone to come out of this culture with a healthy understanding of what love, sex and relationships actually look like,” Staggers said — making her want to ask someone like this how they managed to miss the harmful messages coming at them.
So ‘warped’ she didn’t recognize the abuse
YouTube content creator Katie Ramsay has shared with her 230,000 YouTube subscribers the impact of hypersexualized media on youth — emphasizing on the panel what she called “a pornification of intimacy.”
“I was in a sexually abusive relationship and I didn’t even realize it at the time,” she recalled. “Part of the reason I didn’t understand it was because my sexual boundaries had become warped and blurred from years of exposure to pornography.”
Ramsay explained, “Porn pushes the idea that the worst thing you can say to your partner is ‘no.’ Because saying no ruins the moment. And it isn’t sexy.”
“So women grow up feeling like they have to say ‘yes’ in order to be the perfect sexual partner,” she continued. “And sex stops being something mutual. Instead, it becomes something that is done to you as a woman.”
“The normalization of pornography plays a huge role in women not even realizing they’ve been raped or sexually assaulted,” Ramsay said, “because when the exact scenario you experienced is plastered across porn websites, it becomes difficult to recognize it as violence.”
‘Fantasy’ or ‘reality’?
When people say pornography is “not reality,” Dines added, they miss how deeply viewers “internalize the images, the norms and the values of the pornographic script.”
In that sense, she said, pornography becomes “reality” for people — explaining, “You don’t have two brains — one that says, ‘This is my life,’ and another that says, ‘This is media and I’ll just put that over there and go back to my real life.’”
“We have one brain. And that brain processes what goes on around us,” Dines said, underscoring how, at a deep level, humans “take those images as real … and then we act upon them.”
Respectful romance as ‘revolutionary’
“I don’t want to sound like a negative Nancy,” Staggers said. “But where we are culturally right now, consent is revolutionary. Understanding your own desires, knowing your own boundaries, and having the ability to say them out loud — that’s revolutionary.”
In her experience, modern culture “punishes girls who deny access to their bodies. Sometimes it’s small things. Sometimes it’s big things. But girls learn quickly that refusing access comes with consequences.”
In pornography, she said, “girls are being taught that violence is sexy — that being choked or restrained is something they should enjoy.”
At the same time, “boys are taught that when girls say no, they’re just playing hard to get.”
How would they know anything different?
“Young people are learning from pornography what sex looks like, what relationships look like and what pleasure should look like,” summarized sociologist Mandy Sanchez, director of programming at Culture Reframed. “If that’s the only teacher they have, then how do they know anything different?”
These youth learn at an early age “who we are and who we should be,” she said, along with “what we like, what we don’t like, who we emulate” and what “sex looks like, what we should find enjoyable.”
“How do we know what we really want when there’s no real teacher other than pornography?” Sanchez asked.
Unlearning society’s socialization
“If we can learn these things,” Sanchez continued, “then I think we can unlearn them. But what does that unlearning look like?”
In addition to thinking critically about media, Staggers encouraged reconnecting with internal signals of desire and discomfort, which she says are often “socialized out” of girls. “You have to learn what it feels like when you want something, and what it feels like when you don’t.”
One challenge Staggers noted is that some adults fail to recognize abuse because they themselves experienced similar incidents that were never labeled as assault, recalling a moment when she had to tell her own mother she was a survivor.
This kind of growing awareness, panelists say, can help to reestablish sexual boundaries and genuine consent — while opening more opportunities for healthy, sweet romance to thrive.