The Netflix series Adolescence, which debuted earlier this year, brought greater public attention to a timely and important topic—the effect of online sexualized content on young boys and, concurrently, on young girls.

The series follows the story of a 13-year-old boy named Jamie, who is convicted of killing a classmate, Katie. Jamie’s parents discover their son has been radicalized by unsupervised exposure to online content leading him to identify with the “incel” community—the term stands for “involuntary celibate,” and members of the community harbor extreme resentment over their status and their conviction that they deserve female sexual attention and activity.¹

The false belief that one deserves and is unfairly being deprived of female sexual attention can be instilled even in school-aged boys exposed to some of the incel community’s lowest-hanging-fruit theories, such as that 90 percent of the girls are attracted to 10 percent of the boys. A middle-school boy who doesn’t see himself among that fortunate 10 percent could easily become devastated by the false belief that he’s fated never to have a girl like him.

From there resentment can grow—fertile ground for toxic narratives that cultish influencers are happy to supply in their videos and podcasts. One such promoter of harmful ideologies is Andrew Tate, described by the AntiDefamation League as “a social media influencer and a self-described misogynist, . . . [who] uses his platform to cannily deliver his disturbing views on rape, relationships and power.”²

The lies of incel influencers are poison for young men’s relational development and sex education. Compounding this is easy access to pornography that often poisons young men’s brains as early as age 12 or even younger. According to a 2023 report by Common Sense Media: “73% of teen respondents aged 13 to 17 have watched pornography online—and more than half (54%) reported first seeing pornography by the time they reached the age of 13 . . . online pornography is shaping their views about sex and sexual relationships, as nearly half (45%) of teen respondents said that they felt online pornography gives ‘helpful’ information about sex.”³

Unfortunately, one is hard-pressed to think of a worse educational tool about sex than pornography.

Lest we need reminding, pornography relies on the objectification of people, treating them as mere sources of our pleasure, and leaving no room for true human intimacy. What’s more, pornography depicts aggression and painful experiences as pleasurable. The women in porn gaze toward the cameras with intense longing, seeming to look at the viewer as someone extremely desirable, even though the viewer has done nothing to “earn” her liking. According to Culture Reframed,⁴ “What porn and incel culture definitely do have in common is that both degrade women and portray them as objects who deserve and enjoy sexual abuse.” Repeated exposure to porn rewires viewers’ brains⁵ to become accustomed to achieving sexual gratification with no effort, no personal interaction, and no consequences.

That includes no pregnancies.

Remarkably, today’s public sex-education campaigns align with a pornified view of sex. Pleasure is promoted as the primary goal, committed relationships are irrelevant, and pregnancy is framed as an avoidable risk through “safe sex.” Many of us gawk at the fringe ideology of people like Andrew Tate, but few gawk at Planned Parenthood’s advice to young people on its website, where it explains, “Having a healthy sex life is about taking care of yourself, whether you have a partner or not.”⁶ Of course, partnerless sex would be one-sided sexual pleasure, aka masturbation. What both porn and Planned Parenthood’s understanding of sex have in common is their assumption that sex is primarily a personal and essentially self-absorbed experience, rather than an interpersonal one that expresses union between two people and has the potential to create a third.

When our cultural outlook assumes sex has more to do with personal pleasure than with reproduction, we have lost sight of the bigger picture—such as how we got here and what we want to leave behind when we’re gone—including any view of sex that goes beyond just ourselves.

While extramarital sexual desires are nothing new to fallen man, easy and free online access to sexualized content has encouraged hordes of people to develop entitled, selfish attitudes about sex—and at such a quick rate that in just a couple of generations this view of sex has become normalized throughout media.

Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that our cultural acceptance of pornified sex has grown in correlation with the work of abortion-advocacy groups.

Years ago when I heard that Planned Parenthood and other abortion advocacy organizations had determined to take a new approach by portraying sex as “pleasurable,” I had to laugh—was this ever in doubt? Perhaps they thought those cultures with traditional mores needed more temptation—er, education—to abandon their values. The result was campaigns like “Treasure Your Pleasure,” promoted in 2022 by International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in Africa, with a video that exclaims, “maximum enjoyment is the name of the sex game,” and “everyone who wants it deserves sexual satisfaction”⁷ (words that could just as well have been written by the incel community).

Alongside these initiatives, a sex-educational group called the Pleasure Project has grown, “an international education and advocacy organization working to eroticize safer sex by building bridges between the public health world and the pleasure and sex industry.”⁸ The Guardian reports that IPPF is joining groups like the Pleasure Project, which has influenced “19 organizations around the world [to use] their ‘pleasure principles,’ designed to help people embark on the journey towards a sex-positive, pleasure-based approach to sexual health; 12 [of these organizations] are based in the global south.”⁹

It’s interesting that the Pleasure Project talks about helping make sex “safer” in the sex industry—the very industry that produces pornography. What the Project perhaps neglects to foresee is the collision course ahead between pleasure and safety. In a morality-free landscape, there’s no place to shame the person who prefers not to use a condom for their own pleasure, or for porn viewers’ pleasure. And in porn, any display of women’s consent to sex acts is routinely absent, while nonconsensual, abusive scenarios are found in abundance.

With pleasure as the guiding principle, the definition of safety has to be adjusted. We see this as states grapple with whether to incriminate those infected with HIV who don’t disclose their status and knowingly expose sexual partners to the risk. We see this as definitions of sexual orientation expand to include adults attracted to minors. We see this as women en masse are prescribed contraceptive medications and devices that pose risks to their health,¹⁰ so their partners and they can have sex with less fear of pregnancy. And we see this in every scenario where a new human being is conceived in sex but, in the face of abortion, cannot find safety in her mother’s womb.

Many of our friends writing in and reading these pages have seen this coming. My father, a physician, says it all started with pharmaceutical birth control. Once our culture adopts the view that sex is solely a matter of personal pleasure and reproduction is extraneous, we lose sight of the big picture. We lose sight of where we all started. We objectify ourselves and we objectify our children.

In the Netflix series Adolescence, Jamie’s consumption of sexualized imagery moves him to dehumanize and kill his classmate Katie. No matter how successful such extreme online content may be in gaining clicks, over time objectifying imagery and scripts can bankrupt our sense of humanity. They lead down a dangerous path that feeds addictions and fuels the demand for sex trafficking in prostitution and sex abuse of children. Groups like the National Center on Sexual Exploitation¹¹ in Washington, D.C., see how these many social ills are interconnected. Reviewing their research or attending one of their conferences will make it hard for you to un-see it as well. Their work should be followed and shared to spread the truth about objectifying media: Exploitation begets exploitation, and the multitude of casualties of our hypersexualized culture include not only those used in sex but the young lives cut short in the womb.

If we want to advance the health of women and children and foster genuine intimacy in our relationships, we can no longer treat pornography and abortion as separate issues; we must actively fight against the powerful current of objectifying media that sell lies demeaning to women and men and imperil the lives of the unborn. We must curb our kids’ unsupervised Internet access, which means we must keep smartphones out of their hands as much as possible. We should stop consuming X-rated content ourselves, and partake of more of what’s good, true, and beautiful. We should spend more time connecting in person with families in our communities, because true fellowship lifts up all of us. The truth will always be more powerful and lasting than counterfeits, but given the distractions of the day, we may need to more actively seek it.

NOTES

1. Anti-Defamation League. (2024, June 26). Incels (Involuntary Celibates). Retrieved July 2, 2025, from https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/incels-involuntary-celibates

2. “Tate is a social media influencer and a self-described misogynist . . . with millions of social media followers. He uses his platform to cannily deliver his disturbing views on rape, relationships and power. Many in his audience are teenagers who are just beginning to understand their own sexuality . . . [Tate] teaches his acolytes that women are inferior and morally deficient beings who are good only for sex and status building, and who deserve to be physically, sexually and emotionally abused.” Anti-Defamation League. (2024, March 1). Andrew Tate: Five things to know. Anti-Defamation League. https://www.adl.org/resources/article/andrew-tate-five-things-know

3. Common Sense Media. (2023, January 10). Teens and pornography. Retrieved July 2, 2025, from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-pornography

4. Culture Reframed. (n.d.). “Understanding the dangers of the Incel movement and its harmful views of women.” Retrieved July 2, 2025, from https://culturereframed.org/understanding-thedangers-of-the-incel-movement-and-its-harmful-views-of-women/

5. Neuroscience News, “Watching pornography rewires the brain to a more juvenile state,” December 29, 2019, Neuroscience News, accessed July 2, 2025, https://neurosciencenews.com/ neuroscience-pornography-brain-15354/

6. Planned Parenthood. “Sex and Pleasure.” Sex, Pleasure, and Sexual Dysfunction. n.d. Retrieved July 2, 2025, from https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/sex-pleasure-and-sexual-dysfunction/ sex-and-pleasure

7. IPPF APO. (14 June 2022). Treasure Your Pleasure—Our Manifesto. [Video] YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSbCSvPVxOQ&

8. The Pleasure Project. “The Pleasure Principles.” The Pleasure Project. n.d. Retrieved July 2, 2025, from https://thepleasureproject.org/the-pleasure-principles/

9. Johnson, S. (2022, November 22). ‘It’s always fear-based’: why sexual health projects should switch the focus to pleasure. The Guardian. Retrieved July 2, 2025, from https://www.theguardian. com/global-development/2022/nov/22/pleasure-sexual-health-projects-reproductive-rights/

10. Natural Womanhood. (2024, July 24). Birth Control Side Effects. Retrieved July 2, 2025, from https://naturalwomanhood.org/topic/birth-control-side-effects/

11. National Center on Sexual Exploitation. https://endsexualexploitation.org/

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Original Bio:

Mary Rose Somarriba is editor-in-chief of Verily Magazine and a contributor to the Human Life Review. In 2012, she completed a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship on the connections between pornography and trafficking.