Treating pornography as sex education is like treating “Grand Theft Auto” as driving lessons. You might pick up a thing or two, but you’re going to run over a lot of people along the way. And right now, a lot of kids are enrolled in that driving school.
A 2023 Common Sense Media survey of more than 1,300 U.S. teens found that 73% of 13- to 17-year-olds have seen online pornography, whether they went looking for it or it found them first. The average age of first exposure is 12, which is roughly when most kids are still trying to figure out how to open a locker. So what exactly are they learning?
A Pornucopia of Bad Information
Close to half of the teens who had seen porn, 45%, told researchers it gave them helpful information about sex. That is like saying a Michael Bay film taught you about fire safety.
The lesson plan gets worse from there. Among teens who had seen pornography, 52% said they had seen violent or aggressive content, including what looked like rape, choking or someone in pain. Only about a third said they had ever seen porn where someone asked for consent first. This is the accidental curriculum nobody signed up for.
The Content Got Meaner, Folks
McGill University sociologist Eran Shor and co-author Xuanchi Liu analyzed 255 of the most-viewed videos on Pornhub uploaded between 2000 and 2024. Their study was published in The Journal of Sex Research. Visible physical aggression showed up in about 44% of the videos overall. The trend is what stands out: The rate nearly tripled, from roughly 20% of early-2000s videos to about 55% to 60% of videos from the last decade.
Most of that jump came from spanking. The researchers also found smaller but significant increases in hitting and choking, and Shor singled out strangulation as especially worrying because it could normalize something that can injure or kill. Clearly nonconsensual aggression, for what it’s worth, stayed rare. Next to today’s most popular videos, the porn of the early 2000s looks like a tea party. A slightly rowdy tea party, but still.
There’s a twist. Shor’s own earlier study, which covered 2008 to 2016, found no upward trend in aggression. The increase only shows up once the last decade of data comes in. This is not a story about porn always being this way. It’s a story about where it went recently.
Empathy Takes a Beatdown
A 2026 review in Current Addiction Reports looked at seven studies on porn use and empathy. Across survey, long-term and lab research, the authors found that porn exposure, especially to violent content, is associated with lower empathy and more emotional desensitization.
One of the larger data sets comes from Spain. A 2025 study of 3,607 adults ages 18 to 35 found that men who watched violent porn scored lower on empathy than men who watched nonviolent porn. Violent porn viewers of both sexes were also more accepting of violence against women. The researchers were upfront that a one-time snapshot can’t show which comes first. It’s possible men with less empathy seek out violent content, not the other way around.
Correlation is not causation, sure, but the pattern is consistent enough to make you want to lie down on the floor for a minute.
Nobody Is Handing Out a Syllabus
Porn is a few taps away on every phone and laptop, and for a lot of kids it shows up years before any real-life romance does. The adults aren’t exactly filling the gap. According to the same Common Sense survey, 57% of teens had never talked about pornography with a trusted adult.
So nobody is sitting them down to explain that choking someone you just met is not standard operating procedure. Without that conversation, kids can pick up what researchers call sexual scripts, the unwritten rules for how sex is supposed to go, straight from the screen. That’s a recipe for a very awkward first date and possibly a very confused therapist.
The fact that 45% of teens think porn taught them something useful is genuinely alarming. Useful how? Useful in the way that watching “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” teaches you about home renovation?
The Research Has Holes, But the Direction Is Clear
No single study speaks for every teenager. The surveys rely on kids reporting their own habits, the content study only looked at the most-viewed videos on one site, and no one can ethically run a controlled experiment that hands kids porn. The evidence can’t prove porn use erodes empathy. But the findings keep pointing the same way. Early exposure is common. A meaningful share of young viewers treat it as educational. The most popular content has grown more aggressive over 25 years. That is three for three on the concern meter.
Someone Should Probably Do Something
Researchers keep calling for more study, and Shor’s team has suggested widening the lens to more websites and more types of content. That is a polite way of saying we have a bunch of kids learning about intimacy from videos that treat choking like a handshake. This generation is moving into young adulthood and real relationships armed with scripts they never questioned. Maybe we should talk to them before the credits roll.
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