Richard Hogan: Say 'au revoir' to pornography access for teens

'This is an adult website': age verification on Pornhub. Picture: Getty

This week, French visitors to the adult sites Pornhub, Youporn and Redtube will be greeted with a message designed to put pressure back on the French Government to stop their age verification laws.

This angry message denouncing age verification is one of the most important messages, parents, policy makers, adolescent advocates and politicians will view. 

Because now we have evidence that these website providers do not want our children protected from dangerous content.

If ever there was a moment to wake us up to the machinations of these content creators, this is it.

Aylo, the parent company, of these sites has said that these age verification laws impinge on privacy. 

Solomon Friedman from Ethical Capital (owner of Aylo) told reporters that these laws are “dangerous, potentially privacy — infringing, and ineffective”.

By pulling out of the French market, they are hoping to cause huge backlash against the French government. 

But it looks like the French government is resolute and more concerned about protecting children from consuming hardcore extreme material than potential vote loss. 

Culture minister Aurore Berge explained on X that if these providers leave the French market ‘so much the better’.

We must all learn from France. We must all stand up to these providers and say: 'That poison you are feeding our children, that ends now!".

For years I have been writing about the dangers of pornography. When you speak out against something like pornography, people position you as some sort of religious zealot or some right-wing nut. I’m neither.

But I have seen the fallout from pornography in my clinic — young teenagers stuck in a lonely, isolating habit of porn use. 

I have seen it rip families apart. Young couples struggling to be intimate, I hear the same narrative... early exposure to pornography.

So, I cannot be quiet about what I am seeing. I receive calls to my clinic every week from young boys who want to stop viewing pornography. That is not an exaggeration, that is a fact. 

They have heard or read something I have said about the dangers of hardcore material and they contact me. I find it incredibly sad to hear the pain in their voices as they shamefully describe their habit.

But the shame is on us. The shame lies in the fact that we have allowed our children to be sent damaging material, that has disturbed their cognition. Our children are victims to our ambivalence on this topic.

Richard Hogan: "I receive calls to my clinic every week from young boys who want to stop viewing pornography. That is not an exaggeration, that is a fact."

Intimacy is such an important part of being a health human being. When we are intimate with someone we love, we feel more connected to everything. Oxytocin and all those lovely hormones flow.

But when we consume hardcore material dopamine fires, which is the reward anticipation centre of the brain. And it also programmes memory. This is vitally important to understand.

Dopamine impacts on our memory, so when we get food from the fridge we know where to go the following day. 

Likewise, when we become sexually aroused we also know where to go, and if pornography has interrupted intimacy we will seek out more extreme images to get that dopamine hit.

This is such a dangerous road for our children to traverse. I have spoken with many people who have consumed extreme taboo content and they all say the same thing: early exposure to sexual content primed their brain to seek out content that was more extreme.

But we know all of this already. The research is clear. This is not anecdotal or some sort of hypothesis, there is well-documented research on the harms of early exposure to hardcore material.

So, what is our government waiting for?

Is it the fear of what the electorate will say? If so, they must do what is right and not what is popular. That’s why we vote for them. To make difficult decisions that will improve our society. They need to be more like the French, and stand up to these providers.

For too long we have been complicit in the corruption of our children’s minds. We want them to develop healthy sexual curiosity, and to meet that curiosity with a healthy exploration of that interest.

As I write this I am listening to the joyful voices of the Badjao community in Davao, Philippines. Pornography has not infiltrated this tribe. They are a joyful, open, loving people. Their cognition has not been disturbed by hardcore content, and they are better for it.

We must take back our children’s childhood, because once pornography comes into it, it is a hard full stop on that joyful innocence, the innocence I’m listening to right now in Davao.

Parents have often sat with me and explained the change that has come over their son. Teenage girls have sat with me and explained what they were asked for in a recent relationship. 

They are confused as to why the boy they liked would have attempted to do something like that with them.

We are surrounded with statistics about gender-based violence. Removing content that promotes strangulation, degradation of women, spitting and forcefully taking consent from girls has to be the starting point of changing those statistics. 

So that we can finally utter the words spoken by culture minister Aurore Bergé and say ‘au revoir’ to those providers that for years damaged our children.