The research about the public health harms of pornography is clear, and now celebrity after public figure after icon — the latest being Kanye West — are increasingly willing to be vocal about the harms of pornography that they’ve personally witnessed and experienced.
“Playboy was my gateway into full-blown pornography addiction,” Kanye West told Zane Lowe in an extensive interview for Apple Music’s Beats 1, “My dad had a Playboy left out [when I was five] and it’s affected almost every choice I made for the rest of my life—from age five to now having to kick the habit. And it just presents itself in the open like it’s okay. And I stand up and say, you know, it’s not okay.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Kanye also commented on the connection between strip clubs and sex trafficking, the way instant access to hardcore pornography has changed the way we view sexual material, and compared the similarities between his addiction to pain killers and his addiction to pornography.
The 42-year-old performer hasn’t been shy about discussing pornography in the past, but the candid admission of addiction during his lengthy Beats 1 interview was a stark departure from his past commentary.
As recently as August of 2018, West confessed to Jimmy Kimmel that having daughters hadn’t affected his view of the opposite sex with a blunt “Nah, I still look at Pornhub“—an admission that netted him a free lifetime premium membership from the prominent pornography website. Kanye’s subsequent rejection of pornography stands in powerful opposition to the desperate attempts of the pornography industry to position itself as a “respectable” entity.
Kanye West’s 180-degree pivot on pornography appears to highlight a remarkable transition in perspective and his comments on how the addiction impacted him are reflected in the research related to porn, addiction, and the harms of pornography. Over 15 states have now declared pornography to be a public health crisis and still more are in the process of considering similar measures.
In our rundown of the research and data that explains and confirms the public harms of pornography, there are several buckets that stand out as important indicators of porn’s widespread destruction:
- Pornography is pervasive
- Pornography negatively impacts sexual violence
- Pornography has detrimental impacts on the brain
- Pornography is associated with increases in sexually transmitted diseases
- Pornography has negative physical, relational, and psychological impacts on males and females
There is so much information backing up the harmful effects of pornography on individuals and society that we had to dedicate an entire section of our website to covering it.
We’re glad to see more people speaking out about how dangerous and problematic porn and the pornography industry are, and we hope you will learn more and become a part of the movement to end sexual exploitation in all of its forms.
