The more we dehumanize someone, the easier it becomes to hurt them, strip away their humanity, and suddenly violence feels possible. That’s exactly what pornography does every single day.

One of the most shocking studies I’ve read recently, involved brain scans of men watching porn. Scientists wanted to see what parts of the brain lit up. You’d expect areas linked to attraction, intimacy, or empathy. But no. The brain activity was in the region that processes objects, not people.

Read that again: when men watched pornography, their brains didn’t recognize women as human beings, they recognized them as things.

Porn doesn’t just “entertain.” It rewires the brain. It teaches viewers, especially men, to see women not as people but as consumable products. And when you start seeing someone as an object, violence against them doesn’t feel shocking anymore.

Here’s the hard truth: studies show that 35% to 88% of popular porn scenes contain physical violence or aggression. And nearly every time, the target of that aggression is a woman (Fritz, Malic, Paul, & Zhou, 2020).

This isn’t just screen performance. It’s cultural conditioning. Pornography normalizes aggression and whispers: this is normal, this is sexy, this is what women want.

But it isn’t. It’s violence dressed up as pleasure. It’s dehumanization on loop. And when men consume this day after day, year after year, it bleeds into the real world: in harassment, in abuse, in sexual violence.

Pornography is not harmless fantasy. It’s a training ground. A system that blurs the line between intimacy and abuse, and the cost is carried by women and girls every single day.

At Protect a Girl’s Image, we will not sugarcoat this. Pornography is not freedom. Pornography is not empowerment. Pornography is violence in disguise!

Until we start naming it for what it truly is, we will keep raising generations who cannot tell the difference between love and exploitation.