Noelle Perdue is a writer, researcher, and media commentator focused on pornography, internet culture, censorship, and digital sexuality. She is known for bringing a nuanced, sex-positive but critical perspective to debates about pornography’s effects on relationships, intimacy, technology, and culture, including in the Netflix documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story. I first saw pornography when I was 19. Noelle’s experience was different. She first watched pornography around age 10 or 11 — much closer to the norm for today’s adolescents. Like many young people growing up online, pornography was available long before she had a lived experience of sex, intimacy, or relationships. I wanted to speak with Noelle because we approach pornography from different perspectives and generations. Noelle often defends the pornography industry against censorship, moral panic, and surveillance. I’m more concerned about pornography’s negative effects on relationships and compulsive digital habits among boys and young men. Unexpectedly, we ended up agreeing more than not. Noelle reminded me that society’s approach to sex before online pornography wasn’t ideal either. Ignorance, shame, coercion, and poor communication all pre-dated PornHub and the “tube sites.” Pornography did not create all of today’s many challenges facing sexual development. Rather, it filled a gap left by parents, schools, and policymakers unwilling to talk honestly about sex. Too often, pornography debates become moral arguments about whether porn is good or bad. But pornography is not one thing. It can support sexual exploration, but it can also replace it. It can help couples communicate about desire, or it can help them avoid difficult but necessary conversations. It can affirm a young person’s sexuality or convince them that sex is primarily a performance to be evaluated by body types, stamina, novelty, dominance, and escalation. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, and we each reveal how our respective thinking has changed about pornography addiction, AI-generated porn, infidelity, sex education, and the ingredients of the good life. Much like gambling and gaming, the question is not whether pornography is good or bad in the abstract. My concern is less that pornography exists, and more that sexual desire is increasingly mediated by companies whose business model depends on attention, escalation, and habit formation. So where do we go from here? To start, researchers must go a level deeper: when does pornography help people live fuller embodied lives, and when does it pull them away from the lives they actually want? They’ll need funding to finance the studies, something most foundations and federal agencies have been reluctant to provide. As a starting point, and with Noelle’s helpful input, I’ve developed a list of potential positive and negative uses of pornography that ought to be tested as hypotheses, not taken as assumptions: Positive uses of pornography * Pleasure: Porn can be a source of sexual pleasure and fantasy. * Relief: Like any entertainment media, porn can offer a temporary escape from stress, anxiety, boredom, or loneliness. * Sexual curiosity: Porn can help people explore identities, fantasies, and boundaries privately before involving another person. * Affirmation: For anyone whose body type, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, age, or desires are rarely represented as attractive, porn can offer validation. * Inspiration: Porn can give individuals or couples ideas for new sexual acts, scenarios, conversations, or forms of play. * Arousal support: Porn can help some people get into an erotic mindset, especially when stress, fatigue, or mismatched libido makes desire harder to access. * Couples’ intimacy tool: Some couples use porn together to discuss desire, reduce inhibition, introduce novelty, or make sex feel more playful. * Sexual knowledge: Some people assess their sexual readiness and learn vocabulary, possibilities, or basic sexual concepts from it. Negative uses of pornography * Substitute for sex education: Porn can teach young people scripts about sex before they understand consent, communication, contraception, pleasure, or emotional intimacy. * Compulsive or habitual use: Porn can displace sleep, work, school, dating, exercise, friendships, or the life a person desires. * Avoidance of intimacy: Porn can become an easier substitute for asking someone out, repairing a relationship, tolerating loneliness, or having difficult conversations about desire. * Algorithmic escalation: Tube sites and social platforms often push users toward more extreme or attention-grabbing content, making it harder to know whether consumption reflects genuine desire or platform conditioning. * Shame and moral conflict: Some users feel guilt because their porn use conflicts with their values, politics, or religion. Shame can worsen secrecy and compulsive patterns rather than resolve them. * Unwanted exposure: Porn is no longer only something people seek out; it often finds and follows users through algorithmic feeds. * Distorted sexual scripts: Porn can normalize performance-heavy, aggressive, or one-sided sex. Some young people, especially women, report feeling pressured to engage in sexual practices they do not necessarily want. * Body image and performance anxiety: Porn can teach men that normal sex requires an unusually large penis, extreme stamina, muscular bodies, constant erection, and instant arousal. * Relationship conflict or secrecy: Pornography can be positive inside some relationships, but damaging when it is hidden, used to avoid a partner, or experienced by a partner as betrayal. * Parasocial dependency: OnlyFans and other camming platforms can blur the line between erotic entertainment and pseudo-intimacy, especially for lonely users. * AI pornography and dehumanization: Generative AI porn may remove the remaining human presence from sexual media, raising concerns about antisocial fantasy, isolation, and sexual habits increasingly detached from real human connection. What we still don’t know I’m grateful to Noelle for our conversation and for helping me think through the potential benefits and risks of pornography as it rapidly evolves from pixelated JPEG images to AI-generated, immersive virtual reality. Attempts to prohibit access to pornography rarely work and may backfire. Boys and young men will always have sexual desire and seek sexual fantasy. The task ahead is to ensure they can become men capable of restraint, consent, confidence, and real intimacy. Pornography can become less central to sexual formation if young people have access to better guidance, technology companies have fewer incentives to exploit human vulnerability, and research produces more practical answers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.menonline.org
