Children are learning about sex for the first time from social media algorithms designed to drag them toward ever-more degrading content. They are learning from sites like Pornhub, which use addictive tactics like infinite scrolling, variable rewards, autoplay features and subscription services to unlock more. This is the gamification of graphic porn.

Imagine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her childhood, when she mentions, somewhat casually, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He introduced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had gotten her first period, without her parents knowing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time something more extreme. By ten it seemed normal. By eleven, she was watching regularly on her own. She is calm about this, reassuring you that this has happened to most of her friends.

Would anyone think this was normal? Part of coming-of-age, her healthy development? Exploring her sexuality? Or would we call this abuse?

This is exactly what is happening to children today when we hand them a smartphone. But instead of one stranger introducing them to porn, it is a billion-dollar industry, profiting from their trauma.

These days we talk a lot about trauma. We worry about the impact of words, we agonize about our parenting, we inspect every inch of our childhoods. But one trauma being tragically ignored, potentially lasting trauma, changing the minds and souls of children, is porn.

By porn I mean what Common Sense Media calls any content showing “nudity and sexual acts,” like videos of people having sex. Today, in the U.S., the average age of first exposure is twelve. And this does not just happen on dedicated porn sites. Parents can block those all they want, or trust their children would never go there, but many access this content on Instagram, X, Snapchat, Discord, Twitch, and TikTok. Many stumble across it accidentally.

Modern porn is unlike anything else in history. Children are learning about sex for the first time from social media algorithms designed to drag them toward ever-more degrading content. They are also learning from sites like Pornhub, which use addictive tactics like infinite scrolling, variable rewards, autoplay features and subscription services to unlock more. This is the gamification of graphic porn. These platforms also use data mining to track people and provide endless, personalized videos. Users are categorized by their fantasies and fetishes; “See more like this” suggestions can escalate from incest to violence to “barely legal” content; viewing habits get leaked to third parties for targeted ads; rape and assault videos can be “Recommended For You.” And what we would immediately see as abuse for an individual child, we choose to ignore en masse. We pretend it has always been this way, because it is too painful to accept that it hasn’t.

This type of porn can traumatize children. Several studies have found that the earlier they are exposed to online porn, the more likely they are to view violent content, and have lower self-esteem. Later in life, porn use has also been linked to lower relationship satisfaction, and a higher likelihood of infidelity.

The impact is not only on individual children; this is doing something to our societies. What does growing up with limitless online porn do to our ability to love, to form lasting relationships? To our desire to start families? To our capacity to see people as people, instead of objects? My generation was taught to see each other not only as content to consume, and products to shop through, but as categories, sex objects, things to get pleasure from. We grew up watching what were often sex trafficking victims, likely seeing rape and abuse — and are somehow expected to file that away, to fall in love in the real world, to have romantic experiences just the same as previous generations did, to be tender and gentle and loyal, to know how.

We learned the wrong things about love. We girls learned that sex is brutal, that men are predatory and insatiable, that the only way to be loved is to become a better object. That intimacy isn’t something to be clumsily stumbled through together, but a performance to be delivered, “content” to be copied. Of course we did. If a girl grew up being shown hard core porn by a stranger, we wouldn’t be surprised if she couldn’t accept love as an adult, didn’t know how to function in relationships, couldn’t see her own worth, feared abandonment, and couldn’t fully trust. We worry that young women have learned to accept violence and being hurt. We don’t worry enough that they never learned how to accept being loved.

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