“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”
– Muriel Rukeyser
In March of 2025, WDI USA surveyed women, asking a simple, open-ended question: How has pornography impacted your life? Below is a selection of just a few of the many responses we received. Excerpts from others can be seen on our social media pages. We’ll let the stories speak for themselves.
“When our mortgage payment bounced, I found out my husband of 15 years had spent thousands of dollars on porn. He was slowly siphoning off the money from our checking account so I only noticed when the mortgage payment bounced. Our savings were gone too. I logged onto his laptop while he was at work and saw the thousands of photos, videos, and messages. He was having a parasocial relationship with one woman on Chaturbate. I was in tears after reading the messages. This wasn’t a Playboy magazine found under the bed. This was interactive porn, with a real woman. Lines were being blurred. Is this infidelity? She was nothing but a bunch of pixels but he was masturbating to her videos while turning me (actual flesh and bone) down in bed. I am ashamed to say I was so devastated that I tried to end my life. I ended up in the hospital and when my mother-in-law found out what happened to me, she had a heart attack and also ended up in the hospital. We both survived but what if we hadn’t? Would we be buried next to each other in the family plot? Two more added to the growing pile of victims of pornography.” – USA, 35-44
“My story isn’t an outrageous one, nor an extreme representation of the harms of pornography and its constituents: it’s merely another echoed version that millions of other men and women suffer through daily. I was ok with porn usage by my partners. As a self-proclaimed “progressive, sex-positive woman,” I also partook in pornography multiple days a week. I never put much thought into it. I’m not religious, and was quite sexually free, with a high libido to boot, so it always seemed to me just another tool that was useful for when our partners weren’t available. I met my current partner, an attractive, successful man a year younger than I at the time (29). He’s Catholic, and he ticked all the boxes of what I would consider in a life partner: loving, kind, thoughtful, active and motivated, shared values and better morals than I have, fun but the voice of reason to my impulsivity, healthily expressive, and he gave me a feeling of security and value that I’ve never had with another person.
Looking back, I should have known that his inability to get or maintain an erection, or to orgasm each time, during our intimate moments, was something deeper than his surface-level excuses (“I’m tired”, “My testosterone might be low”, “Work is so stressful”, etc.,). I believed him. Then, against the odds of endometriosis and over a decade of not having to worry about birth control or protection due to this, I became pregnant. We were scared but both wanted to keep the baby. He wanted to get married. I thought we should wait until we were at least a year into parenthood, so that was our plan. Fast forward to month 7 of my pregnancy: he had been denying my advances for months at this point. Now, I know I was pregnant, but I was still relatively fit and very much high-libido at this point. Once again, I chalked it up to the stress of becoming parents and let it go. Until one morning, I happened to walk to the bathroom around 6 AM, and found him passed out on our couch with his penis still in his hand, and his phone clutched in the other, and 2 hand towels. I had never gone through someone’s phone until this moment: I quickly looked at his open tabs and open apps. The porn on Reddit was hurtful, no doubt, but what threw me into a spiral, and has since forever changed me, was finding that he was trying to buy some leaked Snapchats of a freshly 18 year old girl that some guy was selling through Reddit/Telegram. Let me be clear: this girl was not on OF, she was not posting lewd content on socials. She had sent these videos to another boy in private that he was then selling to the internet, unbeknownst to her.
From there, the truth unraveled: he was watching porn at work, while driving to and from work, every night, every trip to the bathroom. His social medias were only thirst traps in the reels and FYP (not following, so he had some idea of how wrong it was what he was doing). He had subscribed to OF, Brazzers, SimpCity Forum, etc. I asked him to consider that he might have an addiction, and to stop consuming porn for a while. He could not stop. He tried every mechanism to still continue to use porn, including the day before our planned birth, while we were at the hospital, and the day we came home from the hospital. He tried to recover old nudes from ex-girlfriends on old devices and hard-drives. He turned to nudity in films and shows. VPNs and work computers. He could not stop. Would not stop is the more accurate sentiment. After warning him that I would if he couldn’t manage this on his own, I told his parents. His dad has a porn addiction. I told his brother. He had never once watched porn. I told him I was done. He has killed my love and my respect and my desire for him. He destroyed my pregnancy, the first year of our child’s life, the very integrity of our family. Gone. Worst of all, he has killed me: I rationally know that it’s not me, as I was the initiator, I’m attractive and passionate and love exploring with my partner, but I hate myself now.
I constantly think about getting plastic surgery and cosmetic enhancements, about dressing more provocatively, about being thicker and thinner and tanner and all the things that he was watching. I’m breastfeeding my baby, and I’m terrified of how my breasts will look once I’m done. I’m a really natural person. I’ve never had any type of procedure. I wear makeup a handful of times a year. I never, ever would have considered a boob job, jaw surgery, lip injections, or any of that, if this had not occurred. I also refuse to ever be pregnant with him again. He wants more kids, but I cannot and will not go through that deep anxiety while trying to nourish and grow his baby in my body. I don’t even want to touch him anymore. I fantasize about leaving all the time. He’s been “porn-free for months now”, but I don’t trust that. Not at all. I don’t trust him at all. He has had so many opportunities to be honest with me, to work through this together, but he consistently and repeatedly lied to my face. I’ll never forgive that.” – USA, 25-34
“It’s difficult to know the true impact that pornography has had on me. I was exposed to it at such a young age, at a time when my sexuality was just beginning to develop…Even though I thought porn was kind of gross and it made me feel weird in a way that I didn’t understand until I was much older, I believe that being exposed to it at such an important point in my development contributed to the hypersexual behavior I engaged in during my late teens and early twenties. And even though I never sought out porn on my own, I was exposed to it over and over again throughout my sexual experiences with men, by men. Now I understand that the weird feeling I got the first time I saw porn was the feeling of being degraded, a sense that this is what men want to do to women, this is how they see women, as sexual objects. Porn ingrained itself in my psyche the same way it ingrained itself in society.” – USA, 35-44
“As a victim of early childhood sexual assault, I did not know until recently that my involvement in porn was a repetition compulsion common for women who were sexualized as children. I first started making porn, I convinced myself that Pornhub was liberating for women. There are fat women and skinny women. Women with huge breasts and women who are flat like me. There are white women and black women and brown women. There are hairy women and shaved women. There are women with amputations. I thought it was empowering that women like me, who are not considered attractive by mainstream culture, were validated. I was told I was beautiful, a goddess, the sexist woman alive, the hottest babe on Pornhub. Pornhub, I thought, is a place where all women are beautiful. The therapist I was seeing at the time encouraged me to make porn, suggesting I was like a social worker as I filmed myself performing the various requests that were made. He congratulated me on finding something I was good at as I quickly became one of Porn Hubs top 20 amateur performers. While making a video one day, I looked up and saw a man watching me. We made eye contact. He hurried away. He could just has easily have stood there as I frantically searched for my shirt and underwear blushing with embarrassment. Or he could have attacked me. I was naked in the mountains, far from any trails, incredibly vulnerable. I pulled on my shirt and pants without bothering with my bra or panties. I was shaking so hard that I struggled to put my socks on. I threw my things into my backpack and then grabbed my cell phone. It was still video recording. I stuffed it into my pocket ran down the mountain, berating at myself for being so stupid. When I recounted my experience to my therapist, he laughed, then I laughed, then we laughed together. As requests for me to dress up and behave like a little girl increased, I expressed concern to my therapist that I might be, in some way, contributing to the abuse of girls. “What if” I wondered, “a man watched my video and then decided to act out on an actual girl?” My therapist dismissed my concerns telling me that I was actually helping to prevent sexual abuse because men who got their fantasies indulged via porn were less likely to act them out in real life. It never occurred to me that making porn was bad. It gave people pleasure. It was far safer than prostitution. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was good at something. Slapping or hitting myself in specific places on my body were common requests. Hot candle wax and needles were other common requests. When I was making videos, I didn’t feel pain. Only afterwards would I realize how much I’d hurt myself. I started doing things I never thought I’d do, things that could cause permanent damage to my body. In my hunger for approval, I pushed passed lines I’d promised myself I would not cross. One of the most disturbing requests I got, and one which shook me out of my compulsion was when a regular patron asked me to stick a light bulb as far into my vagina as I could and then hit myself in the belly to shatter it, then pull out the bloody shards. It makes me shudder to this day thinking about it and that I considered doing it. I realized these men didn’t like me, they liked what I did for them. I no longer felt special and valued. I felt used. I felt scared. I felt ashamed. And most of all, I felt replaceable. I realized I was just a body. Porn reduces women to replaceable sexual objects.” – USA, 55-64
“Porn has totally destroyed my self esteem and self worth. I have had two partners in my adult life. Both of whom were addicted to pornography, and, as such, heavily into BDSM. I feel like I have been coerced into situations I would have never chosen on my own. I have pushed my own boundaries to fulfill these men’s needs, having sex and engaging in sexual activity more frequently than I would like, and still waking up to them masturbating to porn, using my hands as tools for porn, refusing to attend important meetings because I was not prepared to wait for them to watch porn. I feel like I will never truly trust any man and porn is extremely damaging in every sense.” – Wales, age 25-34
“I started watching pornography at the age of 16, at the same time I started exploring masturbation. I was encouraged by my girlfriend at the time, and believed that it was both a normal part of human sexuality and a normal part of a lesbian relationship. I fully bought into the narrative that porn is a “healthy” way to “explore your sexuality.” I thought that it was not only not harmful, but GOOD for me as a 21st century woman. I associated it with freedom and empowerment. I found the first porn site I ever went on linked on a Tumblr blog that had the general mission of “empowering women to achieve orgasm,” which was cloaked in all sorts of feminist language and provided fairly tame sex advice as well as promoting lesbian and “feminist porn.”
Of course, the truth of the matter was that I was not “exploring” my sexuality but having my sexuality molded by the hands of the worst, most misogynistic men out there. I ended up watching porn for the next ~5 years. During this time, I came to believe that I enjoyed being submissive (this was also exacerbated by online fandom culture). I would parrot this to my friends and sexual partners with no evidence. I later realized that I actually exhibited no submissive behavior when I was in the bedroom; it was just something I thought I was supposed to say because I was a girl. I feel rather lucky that I was not more taken advantage of for saying that to teenage boys. I also started to develop penis envy. Many porn videos are filmed in the “POV” style, i.e. the male point-of-view. I came to associate sexual desire with the male role in sex and found myself wishing that I could penetrate women. Even in lesbian videos or videos of solo females, it felt like there was no place for a woman’s perspective. Women existed to be fucked and watched being fucked.
Even before I was introduced to radical feminism, I started to suspect that porn was bad for my sex life. It started out as a vague feeling, which solidified into the realization that I was not fully present during sexual encounters. I was dissociating, watching the porn in my mind instead of feeling embodied in the present moment. When I was making out with sexual partners, I felt feelings of closeness and lovingness. But as soon as it went further than that, I was tempted to think of porn to facilitate my arousal.
I stopped watching porn a few months before I became a radical feminist, with a couple of lapses in the next year or so. Once I realized that porn was not only harmful to my own mind, but was in fact torture to the women portrayed in porn, I was horrified. Yet I still found it difficult to stop. I had no idea how to be sexual without the influence of porn (sometimes I feel like I still don’t, and wonder if I can ever access a sexuality within me that has been left untouched by it). I felt a lot of shame for my lapses, and I feel very sorry for how I treated my partner during that time. Still, life goes on, and I make an active effort to do better and practice self-forgiveness. I recognize that my brain had been hacked by one of the most powerful psychological forces known to womankind. During my time watching porn, I was both a perpetrator and a victim of a vast system of woman-hating.
Today, about 4 years after my last time seeing porn, I feel largely healed. I still carry scars and there are still feelings that I don’t like in myself that originated in my experience with porn. Admittedly, sex is still sometimes difficult despite having a loving, supportive female partner. But I have made great strides from where I was. I want any woman who has watched porn to know that she is not broken. It will take time, but it is possible to heal and work towards a healthy sexuality. Love yourself, love your fellow woman and keep fighting for our collective liberation!” – USA, 25-34
If you’d like to support WDI USA’s work fighting pornography, prostitution, trafficking, and other forms of exploitation of women, consider signing the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, volunteering with us, and/or setting up a monthly gift of any size. Most of all, share these stories to help raise awareness of the many harms of pornography.
My father had a porn issue, which I should not have known but I did. The fights filled the whole house, and he even ended up admitting to my sister and I in a “my wife is controlling” way that he would stare at underwear advertisements in stores and masturbate in my sister and I’s shower. My first boyfriend played games where the “prizes” were hentai and admitted to daily use- he was generally shitty but it didn’t affect our relationship too much, and I found my next boyfriend purchasing hundreds of dollars worth of onlyfans and watching strange content. People with dwarfism, pregnant women, step mom/step siblings, sexting chat bots, and “surprise anal”- some of which he ended up repeating on me non consensually. I’m just hoping and praying that my current partner isn’t going the same thing and lying to me.
I was exposed to porn by my step-father and mother around 8.
It was used to groom me until I was 16 and he tried to get me to have sex with him.
In my mom’s porn addled brain, since she’d heard women somewhere in the world shared men with their own daughters… there wasn’t anything wrong with what he’d done.
Porn helped turn me into a sexual object for men’s consumption most of my adult life.
Trying to become whole while surrounded with pornified culture is swimming against the current.