What Porn Did to American Culture

Summary

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The world we live in has been molded by the porn we watch—and you don’t have to look too hard to find it. Instagram models hawk their OnlyFans subscriptions, sex workers post “Day in My Life” vlogs, and the market for erotic romance novels is a gold mine. People’s interest in sex is a demand that has long been met with ready supply, but porn is not an inert product: As Americans feed the multibillion-dollar industry’s growth, it gives something back to American culture.Growing up as a teenager against the backdrop of the late 1990s, “what was obvious to my friends and to me was that power, for women, was sexual in nature,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote in a recent article. “There was no other kind, or none worth having.” I interviewed her about her upcoming book on pop culture and girlhood to understand how porn became the defining cultural product of our time.Stephanie Bai: You write that “we are all living in the world porn made.” Can you describe what that world looks like for women?Sophie Gilbert: One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people. There’s a resurgence of the kind of offensive and dehumanizing behavior that we saw in popular culture during the 2000s, and this time it’s not being doled out by gossip bloggers and celebrity commentators, but by politicians and people with massive media platforms. And my theory for why it’s happening is that certain kinds of porn have inured so many people to cruelty.So that’s one part of it. But when I wrote that sentence, what I was thinking about was how so much of porn has really enforced the idea that men should be catered to, in all aspects of culture. That concept is...