The Effects of Pornography on Women’s Health: a Literature Review

Abstract

The fact that pornography (filmed sexual violence) has an impact on viewers’s life and mental health is a reality that is becoming more self-evident and is being studied more frequently by the scientific community. To document the direct and indirect consequences of pornography on women (either those who watch it, are being filmed themselves, or even those who live with men who watch pornography and reproduce sexual violence in their private lives), we must? first identify any gender biases present in the current scientific literature.

This work is the result of a systematic literature review of all papers published since 2021 that include the ?keywords “pornography” and “health”. Our results answer the following research questions: the total number of papers published; whether they talk about health; whether they specify any mental or physical impact segregated by the sex of the viewer; whether they establish a connection between pornography and sexual violence; whether they refer to pornography use as a positive/harmful/neutral habit.

We found that specialized scientific literature does not generally segregate the effects of its use by sex, and it does not identify men as the perpetrators of sexual violence in this context. Moreover, the literature we reviewed overwhelmingly focuses on the effects on man, and it pathologizes both the high consumption of pornography as well as the reproduction of behaviors learned from pornography. The very few papers we found ?describing the effects of pornography on women tend to focus only on psychological distress and unspecified physical issues. ?We couldn't find any study drawing a connection between women's health and the pornography viewing habits of their male sexual partners. Finally, we couldn’t find a single study that investigates the physical and psychological consequences for those women filmed in pornography.