The brain remembers what it shouldn’t have seen. Pornography isn’t just entertainment, it’s a powerful neurological stimulant, capable of rewiring the developing brain. Currently 27% of eleven year olds have watched porn. And the average age of most people accessing porn is as young as thirteen years old. When young people engage with explicit content, they’re not just watching; their brains are being influenced by strong dopamine hits, lighting the stage for lifelong impacts. The birds and the bees can no longer stand against wifi. 

Neuroplasticity is a medical term used to describe your brain’s ability to learn and adapt. It's an internal rewiring process that allows your mind to grow and adapt to new demands. It can also physically change your brain. Which is obviously extremely prevalent when you are a child. Porn offers an artificial, exaggerated dopamine rush, far stronger and quicker than any natural reward, signalling the brain the same way addictive drugs can. This immediate, repeated gratification changes the brain’s threshold for pleasure and this can take place in children as young as eleven. Making their everyday life experience used to this high threshold for pleasure, the experiences of day-to-day life don't come close to what the brain has become used to.This can lead to desensitisation and escalation. This is the need to consume more porn, often in more extreme forms, or the frequency at which one is consuming porn to chase the same high they used to feel.

Porn has now replaced the space where healthy sex education should be. And is this because sexual education in schools lacks informativeness, leading children to look elsewhere. Children are learning about sex, gender roles, consent, and relationships from violent or performative porn. Algorithmic intimacy is a term that discusses that the concept of love and sex is shaped by what gets views. What's trending in the porn world. Girls learn to perform; boys learn to dominate. Consent becomes murky waters and pleasure becomes an oscar award winning performance that young women look to aspire to. It's a quiet epidemic, the world is naive about the extent to which this is harming the younger generations.

With Adolescence coming to our screens on Netflix, the conversation around protecting young people from early exposure to explicit content has risen, the series claims to unpack growing up in the digital age. In my perspective the series tiptoes around one of the biggest influences on how we view sex, power, and relationships: online porn. And even more so, social media. A no man's land that exists uncontrolled by schools, parents and even the app’s community guidelines. Adolescence nods to Andrew Tate, the walking red flag turned algorithmic king for boys who want to know how to ‘be a man’. The self identifying misogynist. And yes, he is a problem. But he’s also a product. 

In 2023 it was found that social media platforms failed to act on 90% of reported misogynistic content, even when it clearly violated community guidelines. This is not an oversight, this is a design choice. Vice conducted a test against the algorithm, setting up nine different TikTok accounts, all stating their age as thirteen years old which seems to be the recurring age for exposure to content and being online. They found that after viewing just ten videos related to masculinity, the ‘FYP’ was filled with more extreme content. Suggesting suicide, self harm and misogyny. The spectrum of harm that awaits young people online is far too readily available. If misogynistic and extremist content infiltrates young boy's FYPs with such ease whilst they're still in development and attracted to high dopamine hits, extremism amongst young men is going to get worse and worse.