Since 2020, there has been an arguably steady increase of pressure on the porn industry. This renewed criticism appears to be having a substantive impact on younger women’s perceptions of the misogynistic plagues liberal feminism wrought.
While the sentiment is still germinating and has plenty of pushback from the other side of the aisle, the increased momentum of anti-porn videos on TikTok, memes on social media, and even coverage critical of unfettered “sex positivity” in mainstream liberal news outlets are all welcome.
But where did it all come from? It’s not as though there was a feminist revolution in the West, zapping consciousness into girls with a laser gun. No, it likely can be at least partially chalked up to the chickens coming home to roost, so to speak. Actual material consequences manifest in the form of trauma after earlier exposure to sexual violence, erectile impairments cropping up in young men, and, of course, the very bleak tragedies.
In Australia, a 16 year old girl experienced bowel injuries so severe she’s now sentenced to a life wearing a colostomy bag after her male friends wanted to imitate an anal gangbang they saw in porn. In India, a 6-year-old girl was stoned to death after refusing to reenact a porn scene with a group of young boys who were addicted to the crap.
There are plenty more than can be listed, but beyond those present in direct attempts to replicate the violent hypersexuality in porn on an individual level, many parallel tragedies are running adjacent to the industry as a whole.
PornHub has met its fair share of lawsuits related to hosting videos in which the women featured were either sex trafficked or exploited underage girls. The prevalence of “rape porn” has similarly come under scrutiny, with some of the largest porn websites in the world getting a fair amount of its keyword traffic from people searching for genuine rape videos.
But I don’t think any other case quite drives home the tragedies of the porn industry and the violent sexual culture it has gestated more than the case of Dr. Piryanka Reddy, a young veterinarian whose brutal fate prompted mass protests in India.
On November 27, 2019, Reddy’s scooter was sabotaged by a group of four men who were stalking her. She’d parked her vehicle at a toll plaza in Shamshabad and taken a taxi to a nearby suburb. The men, knowing she’d be back to retrieve the scooter, punctured its tire and waited for her. When she returned and discovered it was undrivable, the men then pretended to offer her assistance. One took her scooter under the pretense of bringing it to a repair shop while she waited at the toll plaza. During this time, Reddy called her sister and told her she felt scared. It would be the last time they ever spoke.
When the men returned, they claimed all of the repair shops were closed and offered to help her get home, but instead corralled her to a private area where they gang-raped her. Reddy was suffocated during the assault and died. Her body was then dumped beneath the Chattanpalli Bridge and left until the next day when the men returned to set her corpse ablaze in an attempt to destroy the evidence of their crime.
The rapists ultimately confessed to their crime and were killed while in police custody in what some claim was an accident, and others say was a deliberate extrajudicial execution.
While on the surface, Reddy’s case might not seem all that much different from the dozens of brutal gang rapes that happen regularly in India, the aftermath provided unique insight into a subject often avoided.
Namely: the deep, dark hole of immorality porn has pushed us down.
In the days following the avalanche of outrage prompted by Reddy’s horrific murder, her name began trending across porn sites where men were eagerly attempting to search for flip-phone video footage some say existed of her final moments. Most notably, Reddy trended for days on XVideos where her name was searched over 8 million times, primarily in India and Pakistan.
XVideos isn’t some niche, darkweb snuff site. As of August 2021 it was the number one most visited adult site (besting PornHub by almost one billion visits) and the seventh most visited website in the world. Its parent company, WGCZ Holdings, also owns Penthouse.
XVideos never apologized or even made a statement on the incident, even following ample outrage from Indian politicians on the discovery and a whole Change.org petition. They quietly made Reddy’s full name an unsearchable keyword, but that can easily be circumnavigated by simply dropping one letter… much like how “rape” is an unsearchable keyword on XVideos but “rap” is not, and yields over 600 results that have nothing to do with music.
The impact porn has had can be understood as a cyclical one. Porn prompts desensitization, which in turn prompts more extreme porn, which leads to more desensitization. In 2008 Dr. Ana Bridges, a psychologist and professor at the University of Arkansas found that more frequent pornography consumption was associated with a shift to “degrading” materials over time for the consumer to maintain a similar level of arousal.
Similar findings have been demonstrated in countless studies completed over the years, though it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that porn today is nothing like porn 50 years ago.
Consider the 1972 hit Deep Throat, which, at the time of its release, prompted protests as it marked the most “extreme” porn film that had been made. It was even investigated by the FBI! But if released in 2022, Deep Throat would likely be considered a joke if not borderline televisable.
Today, once-outrageous sexual perversions can be found on TikTok, where anyone can log on and see fully grown men calling their young girlfriends ‘whores’ or get instructions on how to be choked ‘safely’ during sex. On Twitter, videos of women getting beaten black and blue get hundreds of thousands of clicks. And if that’s what’s happening on public non-adult platforms, just imagine what’s festering on the porn sites. The level of degradation, primarily of females, is off the charts and getting worse with every passing year.
This deep-rooted, progressive desensitization is what led to Priyanka Reddy trending on porn sites after her horrific death. While it prompted outrage then, that anger only manifested because it was a rare instance of the extent of the tragedies caused by increased desensitization to porn being unearthed for all to see.
This didn’t start with Priyanka Reddy, and it most certainly has not ended with her. Porn’s tragedies simply continue to fester and accumulate, and sometimes — just sometimes — we get a tiny peek at one or two and it horrifies us.
While Reddy’s video is now a thing of internet urban legend, nightmare-inducing photographs of the crime scene still exist and are widely circulated to this day. They show Reddy’s charred, crippled corpse curled in a display of her final moments of pain. She’s seen crumpled in the dirt, body so blackened you might not be able to identify her as a human being at all.
But it’s not as though the men who searched for her on XVideos saw her as one anyway.
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