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Eighteen-year-old Matthew Kidman (Emile Hirsch) is a straight-arrow overachiever who has never really lived life… until he falls for his new neighbor, the beautiful and seemingly innocent Danielle (Elisha Cuthbert). When Matthew discovers this perfect girl next door is a one-time porn star, his sheltered existence begins to spin out of control. Ultimately, Danielle helps Matthew emerge from his shell and discover that sometimes you have to risk everything for the person you love.
“My first reaction was, ‘There’s no fat girls in porn,’” Ms. Shibari said. And there were definitely no fat Asian girls. “The stereotype of Asians in porn is that they’re long and lean and not very curvy,” she said. “That’s how white Americans see Asian sexuality.”
He’s a little different from many of the porn activists, because he was sexually active at a young age and consumed porn only as a side dish. But it came to dominate his diet, and some years after high school, “I got with a gorgeous girl and we went to have sex and my body had no response at all,” he says. “I was freaked because I was young and fit and I was super attracted to the girl.” He went to his doctor. “I said, I might have low T,” Deem says, using slang for a testosterone deficiency. “He laughed.”
Having a partner with ED isn’t the primary problem most young women face with porn, and only a fraction of women report feeling addicted, yet they are not immune to the effects of growing up in a culture rife with this content. Teen girls increasingly report that guys are expecting them to behave like porn starlets, encumbered by neither body hair nor sexual needs of their own.
In April 2015, Alexander Rhodes left a good job with Google to develop counseling and community-support sites for those who are struggling with a porn habit. He had started the NoFap subreddit–a list of posts on one subject–on the popular website Reddit and a companion website called NoFap.com in 2011, but it’s now a full-time endeavor. (The name derives from fap, Internet-speak for masturbation.) The 26-year-old says his first exposure to porn was a pop-up ad–no, really, he swears!–when he was about 11. His father was a software engineer in Pennsylvania, and he had been encouraged to play with computers since he was a 3-year-old. “For as long as there had been an Internet, I had relatively unfiltered access,” says Rhodes. The ad was for a site that showed rape, but he says he only understood there was a naked lady. Pretty soon he was printing out thumbnails of his image-search results for “women’s tummies” or “pretty girls’ boobies.” By the time he was 14, he says, he was pleasuring himself to porn 10 times a day. “That’s not an exaggeration,” he insists. “That, and play video games, was all I did.”
In his late teens, when he got a girlfriend, things did not go well. “I really hurt her [emotionally],” says Rhodes. “I thought it was normal to fantasize about porn while having sex with another person.” If he stopped thinking about porn to focus on the girl, his body lost interest, he says. He quit porn a couple of times before finally swearing off it for good in late 2013. His two sites have about 200,000 members, and he says they get about a million unique users a month.
Perhaps because it depicts aggression as sexy, porn also seems to desensitize: female porn users are less likely to intervene when seeing another woman being threatened or assaulted and are slower to recognize when they’re in danger themselves. Boys, not surprisingly, use porn more than girls. Slightly under half of male college students use it weekly; only 3% of females do.
“I’ll be hooking up with some guy who’s really hot,” confided a high school senior in Northern California, “then things get heavier and all of a sudden my mind shifts and I’m not a real person: it’s like, This is me performing. This is me acting … And I don’t even know who it is I’m playing, who that ‘she’ actually is. It’s some fantasy girl, I guess, maybe the girl from porn.”
Revenge porn, of which Crystal was a victim, is devastating wherever it is experienced. But in Fiji, a Pacific nation with a population of just under one million, closely-knit communities and conservative attitudes to sex and gender, the social stigma around being a victim of such a crime is particularly pronounced.
“Banning porn will not change anything if attitudes towards women and girls don’t change and they are still seen as less,” she said.
The women were all victims of Girls Do Porn, whose owners have been charged with offences by US officials.










