
Gen Z woman here, I didn’t get exposure to the internet till like 13 and then suddenly had exposure to both p*rn AND Instagram.
Instagram was very clearly 1000x more damaging to my mental health than the strangeness of p*rn.
I think seeing ppl in hyper-perfect versions of your reality is much more damaging than porn as a kid because of how alien porn is?
Seeing "other people" on IG, being performed versions of girls my age, having experiences that I felt like I wasn’t popular, hot, social, smart enough to achieve myself, made 13 yr old me so insecure. I was comparing to a very clear reality I could see every day!
Looking at porn as a teen is just such an alien and curious experience. I got into much deeper rabbit holes on pornhub of alien egg laying videos, giantess, weird hentai, tentacles, vacuum pumps, water bondage, and these were all really just quite strange and freakish to me. I was a socially awkward autistic virgin. Porn felt like some freak internet land that was completely incomparable to anything I could ever see in reality/day-to-day life.
When I had my first kiss at almost 15, I was frankly very shocked and a bit disgusted at this lanky, stubble-covered boy sticking his tongue down my throat like he was trying to touch my tonsils.
I had my eyes OPEN the whole time, and he had to tell me to close them.
but the experience of seeing other ppl have hyper-social/romantic/fixed & posed images of their body was much more damaging because of the para-social element.
Like before the internet, everyone cool than me, I would never have seen their private lives, I was like
“oh shit, wait ppl have been having these experiences behind closed doors in private rooms away from me?”
“How disgusting, I wish I were eating Lady M cake with 6 teen girls in Brandy Melville.”
that shit is like heroin to a 13yr old. Watching some Ukrainian woman get deep-fisted was just such a foreign and strange visual experience that it was totally separate from anything that impacted my view of reality/psychological state.
Chris Williamson@ChrisWillx
Are Women Struggling With P*rn?
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