In 1969, Denmark became the first country in the world to fully legalize audiovisual pornography. At the time, many believed that removing restrictions would lead to healthier attitudes toward sex. Openness, the reasoning went, would reduce shame and allow sexuality to flourish in more honest and positive ways.
More than 50 years later, Denmark’s experiment has spread far beyond its borders. Pornography is now legal in most Western countries and nearly impossible to avoid. Pornography has evolved from print to film, from film to the internet, and now toward increasingly immersive technologies of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
Has this cultural shift harmed us?
Many people don’t think so. In a large study of Danish young adults, participants reported that pornography had little to no negative impact on their lives. Many even believed it improved their sexual knowledge and attitudes. Similar findings appear elsewhere. A representative Norwegian study found that 41% of adults reported no effect from pornography on their sex lives, while about a third believed it had positive effects.
One study that asked open-ended questions of people mainly from Canada and the United States, but also Australia, France, Italy, Japan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, found that the most frequent report of pornography’s effect on their relationship was “No Negative Impact,” followed by reports that it was a “Source of Information” or useful for “Sexual Experimentation.”
In other words, if we simply ask people whether pornography has harmed them, many will say it has not.
As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who studies the effects of pornography, I’ve learned how hard it can be to explain why I believe pornography is inherently harmful. When concerns about harm arise, they are frequently met with counterarguments from academics.
Conversations tend to go something like this:
Dysregulated Use
Me: Pornography use can become dysregulated. Some people experience patterns resembling addiction with loss of control, escalating use, and distress.
Counterpoint: Yes, some people struggle with dysregulated use. But research suggests this is only a minority of users. Depending on how it’s defined, estimates range from roughly 1% to 15%. If people keep their use under control, then pornography itself may not be inherently harmful.
Moral Conflict and Shame
Me: What about the shame that comes from pornography use? Research shows that people can experience distress from moral conflict even without addiction-like patterns of use.
Counterpoint: If you and society don’t believe pornography is wrong, you won’t experience shame from use. No shame, no distress.
Relationship Betrayal
Me: What about betrayal trauma from finding out a spouse is using pornography? Some experience reactions similar to discovering infidelity. Recent research on married women’s responses to spousal pornography describes it as a threat akin to infidelity.
Counterpoint: That reaction depends on expectations. Couples can negotiate their boundaries. If partners mutually agree on its role in their relationship, the sense of betrayal disappears.
Violence and Sexual Aggression
Me: How about the way it promotes violence? Content analyses of popular pornographic videos show high levels of aggression toward women. Other studies have linked pornography consumption to sexually aggressive attitudes.
Counterpoint: But causation is unclear. Are people becoming more aggressive because of pornography, or are people with aggressive tendencies drawn to certain types of pornography? Maybe pornography functions more like gasoline on an existing fire rather than the spark that starts it. Also, if problematic content is the issue, then maybe the solution is to make the content more empowering toward women.
Exploitation
Me: What about exploitation in the industry? There are stories about coercion, manipulation, and poor working conditions for performers.
Counterpoint: Some performers report negative experiences, but others say they’re relatively satisfied with life. If exploitation is the problem, then let’s have better regulation and working conditions. Also, artificial intelligence could eliminate the issue by replacing human performers entirely.
The Debate That Never Ends
After years of these conversations, it felt like every argument about pornography’s harm generated a counterargument.
If we simply ask people whether pornography has harmed them, many will say it has not
The problem was never the pornography. The solution was always to change everything around it.
The debate goes on. Eventually, seeing the mixed messages and counterarguments from research, I began to wonder whether we were asking the wrong question.
What Is Sexuality For?
I decided to take a step back in thinking through why some people report harm, benefits, or no effect from their pornography use. I realized that we need to think about what we truly want from sexuality. Without a clear destination of what we want from sexuality, every path can look equally valid.
Lewis Carroll illustrates this idea in “Alice in Wonderland.” When Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which road she should take, the cat asks where she wants to go. When Alice admits she doesn’t much care where she goes, the cat replies that it doesn’t matter which road she takes.
The same problem appears in debates about pornography. Before asking whether pornography harms us, we should ask a deeper question: what kind of sexuality do we want to cultivate?
Sexual Drive, Love, and Attachment
Research on relationships suggests that sexuality is driven by three motivational systems: sexual desire, romantic love, and attachment.
Sexual desire motivates attraction and arousal. It can be directed toward many different people and responds strongly to novelty.
Romantic love motivates exclusivity to a particular person. That person becomes special and irreplaceable. Their traits, even their quirks, become endearing.
Attachment develops in a relationship from being reliably responsive to each other’s needs over time. By supporting rather than obstructing dreams and protecting rather than exploiting vulnerabilities, trust and emotional security develop from knowing and caring for someone.
These systems work together in healthy relationships. Sexual desire may spark initial attraction, but romantic love and attachment transform desire into a lasting bond between two people.
Pornography clearly stimulates sexual desire. It’s designed to capture attention, increase novelty, and provoke arousal. But can pornography strengthen the romantic love and attachment that sustain long-term intimacy?
Objectification
The heart of pornography’s inconsistency with romantic love and attachment is objectification. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum describes objectification as treating a person primarily as a tool for one’s own purposes rather than as a full human subject. Philosopher Roger Scruton argued that sexual morality ultimately revolves around whether we encounter another person as a subject or reduce that person to an object of appetite.
Before asking whether pornography harms us, we should ask a deeper question: what kind of sexuality do we want to cultivate?
Pornography alters that structure. It reinforces novelty and replaceability. Desire becomes oriented toward stimulation from endless interchangeable bodies, rather than toward knowing another person.
Romantic love and attachment depend on recognizing another person’s unique personhood rather than an interchangeable source of stimulation. Because pornography is structurally objectifying, it cannot promote the personhood-focused romantic love and attachment that sustain long-term sexual intimacy. We cannot love someone completely for who they are if we accept a message of sexuality without identity.
For Latter-day Saints, this vision of sexuality is not merely philosophical. It is theological. The vision cannot be reduced to pleasure, consent, or private preference alone. The restored gospel places sexuality within a vision of embodied love, covenant loyalty, family, and divine personhood. Within that vision, sexual intimacy is not merely a source of depersonalized stimulation or private gratification, but a sacred expression of mutual love and commitment. That doctrine on sexual intimacy does not settle every empirical question about pornography, but it does give us a vision for where to go.
Countering the Counters
Defenders of pornography will still raise reasonable questions. I don’t think, however, that the concern about objectification can be fixed. Some of my conversations have looked like the following.
Change the Content
Counter: Just change the content! Make it more relational, focused on identity and people who care about each other. What if it portrayed loving relationships instead of anonymous encounters?
Me: That change wouldn’t resolve the deeper issue. The interaction remains fundamentally one-sided. The people on screen still exist to produce an experience for someone else. The viewer receives stimulation without participating in the mutual recognition that defines real intimacy.
Use It to Strengthen Your Relationship with Your Spouse
Counter: What if couples watch pornography together? It could spark ideas, increase communication, or deepen intimacy.
Me: Even then, the focus shifts outward. Instead of discovering what’s unique about their relationship, the couple turns toward other bodies and other scenarios for stimulation. This introduces comparison, increases reliance on novelty, and can weaken the process of discovering one another more deeply. Real intimacy grows as someone becomes less replaceable, not more. Anything that consistently shifts attention away from that process can begin to reshape what sexuality feels like within the relationship.
What about Interactive AI Sexual Experience?
Counter: What about interactive artificial intelligence? What if technology could simulate attention, responsiveness, and emotional connection?
Are we becoming the kind of people who can experience sexuality with deep intimacy?
Choosing Connection Over Consumption
Critics and defenders of pornography often focus on measurable harms from addiction, shame, relationship conflict, or violence. These are important to understand, but pornography’s deeper influence may lie not in immediate outcomes, but in how it quietly trains our desires and expectations about sexuality itself.
Denmark’s decision in 1969 launched a cultural transformation that has spread across the Western world. Pornography is widely accessible, socially normalized, and often perceived as harmless. If we ask people whether it has harmed them, many will say it hasn’t. But that may not be the only question worth asking. People may be so immersed in pornography’s consumerist vision of sexuality that they struggle to see its inconsistency with authentic human connection.
We need to think about what vision of sexuality we want to cultivate as a society. Pornography presents a vision of sexuality where stimulation is central, identity is optional, and relationship is secondary. It teaches that desire can be separated from the person who embodies it. It suggests that connection can be simulated without mutual knowing. It trains us to imagine bodies can be experienced without truly encountering the self behind them. Do we want to treat each other and ourselves as if we’re casual sexual partners?
The kind of intimacy most people ultimately want isn’t just about pleasure. It’s about being known. It’s about being chosen, not for what we provide, but for who we are. It’s about becoming irreplaceable to another person and allowing them to become irreplaceable to us. That kind of intimacy doesn’t come from treating sexuality casually. It comes from learning to see more in the same person over time.
Pornography doesn’t just shape what we do. It subtly reshapes what we learn to desire. Are we becoming the kind of people who can experience sexuality with deep intimacy? The answer may depend on whether we choose a sexuality of consumption or a sexuality of connection.
