Why Are We So Pornsick?
It’s obvious that, for good reason, women don’t like our pornified sexual culture. But it’s not easy to coordinate a society-wide renegotiation of its terms. And so the sexual and relational landscape is increasingly bleak and barren. Americans are less likely to be married, or even partnered, and they report having less, and less satisfying, sex. Instead of the happiness, authenticity, and pleasure that sexual liberation promised, there is a loneliness epidemic and sexual dysfunction as men and women are driven further apart.
And these problems become self-reinforcing as vicious cycles set in. For instance, easy access to porn makes men less likely to pursue real relationships, and less capable of sustaining them. Porn teaches men poor relational and sexual habits, and it inspires nothing of worth—it makes men passive rather than active. Porn is easy, a sedative that weakens male drive and initiative. Predictably, all of this pushes women away, which then makes men even more likely to rely on pornography. And younger men, in particular, have been formed by it; they have never known a world without endless porn on demand streaming right to their computers and smartphones.
Most young men won’t reach the depravity detailed in a recent Harper’s Magazine profile of “gooners,” but there are a lot of pornsick virgins out there who have seen everything under the sun sexually but are too scared to ask a real woman out. They model their sex lives (if and when they have them) on what they have seen in porn, and they learn their relational approach from online influencers.
Porn is a key contributor to men’s and women’s despairing of dating, marriage, and family. And the advent of AI will make it worse. Porn has become both more degrading and more adept at offering fake intimacy. Webcam sites offer real-time, interactive (for cash, of course) stripteases and sex shows. Sites such as OnlyFans offer men the opportunity to message women and order custom photos and videos (again, for a fee). Of course, there is a lot of fakery already. It is not just that these women don’t mean any of their flirty messaging, but that it is often not even coming from them. As the New York Times explored in 2023, there is a complex international industry of e-pimps who manage these things—a “sex worker” in Eastern Europe may hire an e-pimp in Miami who subcontracts to some guys in Manilla the task of pretending to be her via chat services.
AI will accelerate these trends, offering immediate and customizable gratification and affirmation—a more immersive relational and sexual blue pill. It will replace the inefficiencies of models, camgirls, and e-pimps (who are, after all, still real people) with instant porn and an affirming chatbot. AI sex bots will only exacerbate the stupefying effects of porn—that Futurama bit about not dating robots is starting to look depressingly accurate. But a man can’t spend all of life in bed with his Marilyn Monroe–bot. And porn, whatever form it takes, often leaves users alienated and angry when not under its soporific effects. It is not just that they’ll happily ignore society’s burning down around them, but that they’ll throw some accelerants on the blaze.
Conservatism presumes that there is something worth conserving, but many young men (and women, too) feel that they have little of value to preserve. Ours is an age of unprecedented material comfort and plentiful entertainment, but these are not enough for happiness, for we crave a sense of meaning and long for love. We flourish when we believe that our lives have significance, and when we are bound to others through love in the communion of family, church, and community.
Many men, especially young men, keenly feel the absence of these sources of well-being. And so, though they might be on the political right, this does not mean that they are conservative. Cultural and economic forces that make it harder for young men to get married, have children, buy a home, and so on are often self-reinforcing and radicalizing for those caught in them. And though they are hardly blameless, much of their litany of complaints is true. Housing is too expensive. So is higher education, which has become more of an economic gatekeeper than ever, even as the intellectual value it provides has cratered as standards collapse. Young men are understandably rebelling against a cultural and educational system that despises manliness and teaches young men (especially white men) that they are the problem.
These young men are alienated in the present while also believing that they have little stake in the future. Their bitterness makes them easy recruits for radicals and grifters who promise to burn it all down. Conservative leaders must recognize that there will be no conservative future without giving young men something to conserve, and that even those who are working in conservative politics and activism may be radicalized: this is in part because that career path often requires living in places that are not only very liberal, but also very expensive, making it both culturally and economically difficult to marry and start a family.
We cannot blame young men’s woes on a single culprit. But the Sexual Revolution has had a hand in much of it, from increasing the social scourge of fatherlessness to poisoning relations between the sexes. And the sexual solipsism of porn makes it all worse. Porn use turns desire inward upon itself, rather than directing it toward another who is real and beloved. We become more fully ourselves by being drawn out of ourselves. The combination of porn and AI will, conversely, enclose people, chaining them in the cave of their own desire.
Yet we should not despair, for this darkness reveals the church as a beacon of hope in a broken culture, shining brightly amid sexual and relational darkness. The wreckage of the Sexual Revolution provides believers an opportunity to guide young men and women into rightly ordered, fulfilling relationships. Churches will often need to teach young men (and women) things earlier generations took for granted. For instance, the young men who have seen everything sexually imaginable online, but are afraid to go up to a real woman and ask her out, require both spiritual and relational mentorship. It is not just that they need to break the grip of porn, but that they need to learn how to be a man—to have male desire, strength, and aggression tamed and put in the service of love and wisdom, to protect and build. This instruction will largely need to happen offline; even the best advice from the internet cannot replace watching and interacting with men of experience and practiced knowledge and virtue. To imitate, we must be able to see more than the packaged presentations of the online world.
Spiritual renewal and discipleship are essential to resolving the sexual and relational crises young men face, but there are other areas to tend as well. And when it comes to porn, much might be done with some simple, and often popular, policy changes. The obvious place to start is with real age verification for porn sites. This is both easy and popular—states such as Texas and Virginia have already implemented it with broad bipartisan support. Real age verification will hamper children’s ability to access porn, and it will probably also reduce porn use by adults, some of whom will be deterred even by simple gatekeeping—indeed, some men might welcome a barrier between themselves and internet porn. The results from states that have implemented age-verification laws suggest that porn consumption could be dramatically lowered by simply asking for identification.
More ambitiously, we could crack down on the online prostitution of webcam sex shows (and the human trafficking that supplies many of the “performers”). And we could restrict the production and distribution of porn itself. The current Supreme Court might be willing to roll back some of the radical liberal decisions that had crippled the government’s ability to restrict obscenity, even though the First Amendment does not protect obscenity. We could start by challenging the protection of digitally created “virtual” child porn, established by the Supreme Court in 2002. Back then the justices might not have realized the evil they were empowering, but now a flood of AI child porn is coming, and it must be restrained. There are already fights and threats over Elon Musk’s Grok being used to produce sexualized images based on real people, including children.
Another tool in reducing the evils of AI porn production will be enacting laws to hold AI companies to account for allowing their products to be used to generate child sex abuse material, or to create fake “revenge porn” of real people. If Sam Altman of OpenAI wants to open the AI porn floodgates, he should be held responsible for the predictable evils inflicted by his product.
This is not an exhaustive list of ways to roll back porn culture. There is more that could be added, but the crucial point is that we do not have to live like this. We do not have to accept our children’s being exposed to porn before they even hit puberty. We do not need to tolerate our sons’ being warped by porn and our daughters’ suffering the violent and degrading repercussions. And though the crisis of young men is about more than just internet porn, it is clear that porn has made everything it touches worse.
There is a better way to live, and forming young men will be a lot easier if we remove the filth that is choking out loving and flourishing complementary relationships between men and women.