Does Porn Empower Girls? The Big Lies that Hurt Your Daughter

The pornography epidemic has had a profoundly harmful impact on the well-being of girls, revealing a troubling trend — the grooming of young girls by the porn industry and masquerading self-exploitation as empowerment. This insidious manipulation can lead girls to believe that their worth comes from engaging in pornified sex, often leading to sexual violence, sexual exploitation, and assault.

Related: Porn Harms Girls in 12 Ways: Fight Back with 3 Empowering Mindsets!

In my time as a Pediatric Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE-P) I have interacted with thousands of victims. I noticed a disturbing trend where porn plays a major role with child sexual assault. So my team and I started to collect data on these trends by asking questions specifically to our adolescent patients. We found there are several ways that pornography is used in sexual assaults including:

• An adult perpetrator views porn and acts it out on a child.
• A child views porn and acts it out on another child.
• Perpetrators show porn or talk about it to their victims as a grooming tactic. 
• The sexual assault may be filmed and used as pornography.

4 Harmful Ways Porn Grooms Girls

We also found that porn grooms girls to be victims of sexual exploitation and violence based on a lie of empowerment. Here are four ways we identified how this occurs.

1. Porn grooms girls to believe that violent sex is cool

We found that porn grooms girls into thinking that self-exploitation and violence is normal. And not only is it normal, it's expected. Because girls are seeing so much violent pornography, they are specifically asking boys to be violent towards them. Violent porn grooms them to believe that “vanilla sex” (translation: normal sex without violence) is not desirable, and the only way to be cool or have street cred is to engage in pornified, violent sex which could include strangulation and other harmful acts.

2. Porn grooms girls to believe their appearance determines their self-worth

In an incredible act of irony porn devalues women to their sexual appearance.

This is evidenced by another significant discovery among our female patients, revealing a substantial emphasis placed on their physical appearance as a measure of their worth, with many expressing a heightened focus on "how hot I am." The high consumption of pornography is desensitizing kids, leading to a culture of nudes. Girls then see self-exploitation via sending nudes as a completely legitimate way to achieve self-worth.

These nudes may be shared around friend groups or even posted online and are often used as a social currency. Therefore, girls often feel that they have to be “hot” in order to feel validated as a human in this twisted social paradigm.

Related: Sending Nudes: Starting the Convo Early--3 Tips for Smart Parents

3. Porn grooms girls to believe that being sex-trafficked is empowering

Once nudes begin to circulate online, peers and unknown individuals may reach out asking for more “content,” or more appropriately named: CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material). In exchange they may offer a variety of payments such as money, gift cards, rides, or even skins or cryptos for online gaming. This has now become a sex act in exchange for something of value, which is commercial sexual exploitation or sex trafficking in all cases where minors are involved. But do you think a 13-year-old who sends nudes in exchange for something thinks they are being trafficked? Of course not. They often think it’s awesome that someone gave them money. They feel empowered by it.

4. Porn normalizes assault

Unfortunately, the societal grooming to believe that violent sex and sexual exploitation  is empowering leads to girls not recognizing when they have been assaulted. For example, I have seen many cases where teenage girls have been strangled during an assault, which of course is a huge theme in pornography, and they don’t see it as a big deal. They may find other parts of their sexual assault violating, but they won’t voluntarily tell us about strangulation because they don’t recognize it as harmful. I’ve seen this happen repeatedly where the girl thought that strangulation was the male trying to be sexy, because they had seen it over and over again in porn. 

The normalization of assault creates both victims and perpetrators. The following two stories illustrate each scenario.

A tween victim doesn’t recognize her assault‍

One 12-year-old female patient initially struggled to understand that she had actually been assaulted by an older teenage boy she met online. When our nurse started asking her about pornography, she told us that she had been viewing it every day since she was five years old. 

Her parents gave her an iPad when she was little, and she accidentally stumbled onto porn. She said if she didn’t look at it every day she felt like her body was going crazy, which is essentially a description of problematic porn use. Consequently, when she met this older boy online and was sexually assaulted, she didn’t recognize it as such because she had been viewing porn every day for seven years and thought it was normal behavior.

11-year-old girl assaults her younger brother

We often think of boys as the primary perpetrators of sexual assault. However, with the saturation of porn, we are finding that girls also commit sexual assault. One patient was a 4-year-old boy who had been sexually assaulted by his 11-year-old sister.

‍Their dad walked in on the assault, and the young boy disclosed that his older sister had been showing him pornography and then acting it out on him. In this particular case, porn was a tool for grooming twice. It groomed and desensitized the older sister to pornified sex, and was again used to groom the younger brother.

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The lie of empowerment

Predators look for vulnerabilities. They look for kids who do not feel loved or seen, exploiting their vulnerabilities to establish trust. This manipulation mirrors the notion of 'empowerment,' as vulnerable girls, often grappling with trauma or familial instability, seek control and validation. The fake feelings of self-empowerment come from having their needs met through a sense of control and attention, despite the inherent abuse,

Similarly, the porn industry preys on individuals with low self-esteem who find dopamine hits from self-exploitation, offering false empowerment. These individuals, often burdened with unprocessed trauma, fail to grasp the long-term consequences of their actions.

Who is vulnerable?

The net is wide of who is vulnerable to this false notion of empowerment. The porn industry does not discriminate. The trends that we see in our patients for vulnerabilities include:

• Someone who has been sexually assaulted before
• Kids in unstable living environments
• Kids on the run
• Any kid with a smartphone who has too much unsupervised time on it

Adults can empower vulnerable girls in healthy ways

Adults can play a crucial role in mitigating these challenges in several ways. Some effective ways include:

• Be a role model. Recognize vulnerable kids and take an active role in their lives. Take them under your wing. Provide environments where they feel seen and loved. This could look like volunteering as a youth leader in a local church or community program, being a coach, or inviting the child over for a family dinner or activities.

• Encourage girls to recognize their inherent worth beyond physical appearance or what they can offer the world sexually. They need to know they can derive their worth from the many things they are good at.
• Teach girls the importance of setting sexual boundaries and empower them to assert their autonomy. They don’t have to go along with things they aren’t comfortable with.
• Give girls a healthy sexual template. This doesn’t mean granting permission to have sex with whoever. But it does mean learning about mutuality where two people have an experience where both benefit—this does not happen with porn sex. This crucial element of healthy sex is often overshadowed by the mantra of consent. While adults can consent to sex, kids can not. And even if they believe they have consented, they may not understand the importance of a mutual experience and therefore exploit themselves.

Related:

• 3 Important Reasons Why Kids Should NOT Be Taught 'Consent'

• Healthy Sex vs. Porn Sex: 7 Crucial Comparisons to Teach Your Kid (Before XXX Hijacks Their Future)

‍Have honest conversations

Most adults would prefer to avoid talking to kids about porn and sex because it’s uncomfortable. The reality is, when adults aren’t willing to have these conversations, kids learn about it from the porn industry. They then must fend for themselves in a pornified culture, being groomed and preyed upon from young ages. Adults have a moral obligation to step in and help kids navigate this culture, as confusing and ugly as it is. In most cases, parents and other invested adults should have these conversations with kids. See the following section for tips and suggestions.

Health care providers play an important role

Health care providers also play a crucial role in the development of kids and adolescents. Conversations around pornography will become a standard of care practice in the near future.  These conversations with patients will look a little different for younger kids versus older kids.

For younger kids

Health care providers should focus more on prevention with younger kids. Conversations could include:

• a definition of pornography, 
• a warning that it’s harmful, and
• a plan for what the child should do if they encounter it.

Both Good Pictures Bad Pictures books can help with these conversations:

1. Good Pictures Bad Pictures Jr: A Simple Plan to Protect Young Minds is a read aloud book that offers a comfortable way to have this conversation with kids ages 3-6. It empowers children with the Turn, Run & Tell plan and five important safety rules that every kid growing up in the digital age needs to know.
2. Good Pictures Bad Pictures: Porn-Proofing Today's Young Kids is for ages 7-12 and teaches kids what pornography is, why it’s harmful, and how to reject it.

The free guide, How to Talk to Kids About Pornography is another resource that helps start and continue the crucial conversations about porn.

Tweens and teens

Porn exposure skyrockets when kids have smartphones, so we need to have honest conversations with this age group to identify risky behavior. Health care providers may need to make referrals so they need to ask specific questions. Some of these questions could include:

• Have you been exposed to photos or images online that have made you uncomfortable? Or images of people or cartoons without clothes on?
• Do you share nudes?
• Are you talking to strangers online?
• Have you ever met them in person?

When health care providers can identify risky behaviors, honest conversations can occur with teens and tweens about the dangers and getting appropriate help.

*Note: These tools and conversations can be used by all adults with influence over girls (and boys!), especially parents.

Foster true girl empowerment

True girl empowerment hinges on adults’ willingness to engage in open, honest conversations about pornography, online safety, and healthy relationships. Kids are very resilient and can make really good choices when they're armed with the right information. They want to thrive, they want to succeed, they want to feel mentally healthy. We can help them do that when we're willing to talk about the hard stuff, and empower them to reject the false messages that porn teaches.