Corrupting Pornography

Nicki: What's this? Videodrome?
Max: Torture. Murder.
Nicki: Sounds great.
Max: It isn't exactly sex.
Nicki: Says who?

— Videodrome

Pornography is a controversial subject at the best of times, but it has also been prevalent throughout time. However, worries around pornography have been mainstreamed by computers and the belief that The Internet Is for Porn. Expect stuff that argues New Media Are Evil to portray Internet pornography as especially bad. And so these topics made it into the media through this lens.

Here we have the first form of corrupting pornography: when pornography itself is portrayed as so exploitative that it's tantamount to watching sexual assault. This will portray the porn industry as horrible, and the performers as traumatized victims and/or cavalier rapists. This is sadly Truth in Television, as while pornography does have legal avenues, not all sex workers are as blessed or benign enough to make use of them. There have been multiple examples of performers being treated horrifically, and/or being trafficked into pornography.

The second type is when pornography is portrayed as inherently corrupting to the viewer. The argument goes that it normalizes violence and warps "natural" sexual impulses. This also can be Truth in Television, but it can also go hand-in-hand with the attitude that Sex Is Evil or Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny. It also typically presents masturbation as an unnatural behavior that may even have physical consequences. The subjects of this type will almost always be male, since All Abusers Are Male and All Women Are Prudes. This can be justified as a portrayal of the consequences that stem from pornography addiction.

Both flavors are likely to be present in portrayals of BDSM because Bondage Is Bad. This trope operates on a sliding scale. At the lightest end, you have Innocent Inaccurate viewers who may be genuinely confused about how sex works due to exposure to pornography. At the darkest end, you have perverse, sadistic maniacs whose brains have been warped by pornography. Most examples fall somewhere in the middle.

Predatory Prostitute is a sister (or brother) trope. Contrast Unproblematic Prostitution for works and situations where sex work is considered perfectly fine or at least acceptable. See also Horrible Hollywood, The Wicked Stage, and Music Is Politics for other entertainment industries being depicted as evil and corrupting.

Pornography has certainly been a popular subject for many Moral Guardians throughout the ages. However, it's also a controversial subject, so in-universe examples only, please!

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Black Lagoon: "Hansel and Gretel" are a pair of twins who were sold to child pornographers by their orphanage when its funding dried up after the fall of communism in their native Romania. They were shunted into snuff films and made to brutally murder other children, and grew to enjoy it probably as much as a survival tactic as anything else, then were trained to fight on top of it. In the series proper, they're brought to Roanapur by The Mafia in an attempt to start a Proxy War with Hotel Moscow.

Fanworks

• In Every night you stay I'll be watching you, Luo Binghe derides his teacher's partner Liu Qingge as a terrible lover who obviously never read a "spring book" because he listens when Shen Qingqiu bluntly admits he's uncomfortable when having sex. Lacking personal experience of his own, Binghe genuinely believes telling "wait" or "stop" is merely playing coy instead of expressing distress, and hurting your partner is actually a good thing.

Film — Animated

• In the Soviet parody cartoon Passion of Spies, a guy collaborating with the foreigners receives a porn magazine from them as part of the payment. After deciding to come clean to the authorities, he turns it in and gets a forest landscape painting in return.

Film — Live-Action

• Cam: Played with.
  • Alice's dedication to her job as a cam girl is presented as a positive thing. However, the corruption happens when Alice is "picked up" and copied by a computer code that selects cam girls on the rise, stealing their money and doing a number on their sanity. This is not portrayed as a reflection on her, though.
  • The men that Alice sees who watch her feeds are pathetic and unpleasant, from promising to save her and then masturbating to her digital doppelgänger to trying to elicit Sex for Services from her. However, possibly justified as they are not the only men who watch her, but the men who make an effort to infiltrate her real life.
• Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life is a 2005 Lifetime Movie of the Week that has high school student Justin's life fall apart when he becomes addicted to internet porn.
• Don Jon: Jon's consumption of porn ruins his relationship with Barbara (though he does see there was a lot else wrong with it) and it's treated as extremely strange that he prefers porn over having sex with "actual" women — because, as he notes, he has no problem finding women to hook up with him.
• The Hunt (2012): A friend of Klara's older brother Torsten shows Klara a pornographic picture. After she kisses her teacher Lucas and he gently but firmly rebuffs her, Klara — who is in kindergarten — is embarrassed and impulsively accuses him of abusing her. She uses the details that she gained from seeing the picture to describe the abuse, which causes Lucas's life to fall apart and destroys his relationships with everyone around him. This is emphasised because Klara is not malicious by nature, and quickly feels guilty for her lie, but the pornography led to her accusation being backed up.
• Men, Women & Children: Chris is so into apparently "abnormal" porn that he isn't able to perform when he hooks up with Hannah, a girl in his class, resulting in her breaking up with him.
• Clay Walsh's Dark and Troubled Past in Old Fashioned is that he was once involved in a Girls Gone Wild-esque series of exploitation films (with implications that roofies and sexual abuse were involved) and it filled him with so much shame that he converted to Christianity, became a handy-man in his home town and developed a Madonna-Whore Complex in the process.
• Invoked and exaggerated in Videodrome. "Videodrome" is a Brown Note television station that shows hardcore porn, including torture and murder. It is also literally physically corrupting; people lose their minds and literally grow tumors. Brian O'Blivion dies of a brain tumor after exposure; Nicki is murdered after going in search of further kink at Videodrome; and Max completely loses his mind and commits mass murder after watching it. And then it turns out the people behind Videodrome are anti-porn puritans who deliberately want to murder anyone who seeks out hardcore pornography.
• Discussed and subverted in X (2022). All of the porn participants are shown to be extremely liberal and open-minded about the purposes and intentions of porn. The only two people who accuse them of corruption are the director RJ, who is very defensive and high-minded about his "art" until it turns out that his girlfriend Lorraine wants to participate (and he's not able to overrule her), showing his hypocrisy, and Howard, who is Pearl's husband and accuses them of corrupting her — while Howard and Pearl sexually harass and murder them.
• A Serbian Film: Unquestionably the most horrific example on this list, if not in all of cinema. Read the main work page at your own risk.

Literature

• Dreaming is a Private Thing has a scene where a government agent comes to discuss the recent wave of bootleg dreamies porn with Jesse Weil (the head of a large legitimate dreamies company), and complains that these are "a mortal danger to the moral fiber of the nation". Mr. Weil, himself, has a somewhat higher opinion on the durability of said fiber.

Live-Action TV

• Blue Bloods: In "Sins of the Father", a man targets the personnel of a porn studio after his daughter commits suicide after being fired from it, believing them responsible for her death.
• CSIVerse: This trope appears throughout the franchise.
  • CSI: Miami: A porn star in "Innocent" is strangled to death by an obsessed fan who then brings his girlfriend to the scene so he can keep the body in sight while they have sex. He had been unable to "perform" while with her due to having been desensitized from watching so much porn.
  • CSI: NY: A high-school wrestling coach in "Rush to Judgement" is killed by the father of a student on his team because the man believed the coach had emailed child pornography to him and several other boys. Sheldon finds the file on the coach's laptop and shows the pictures to Mac, who is so disgusted that he turns away, saying, "That's enough." It's later revealed the coach had been framed by his killer's son.
• Dietland: Feminist group Jennifer believes that all forms of pornography — especially Internet pornography but also "lighter" soft porn found in tabloids — are corrupting. Jennifer proves their point by killing a porn star (their first female victim) and showing that the viewers' way of saying "goodbye" to her was to watch the most violent and degrading pornography she'd starred in.
• Dragnet: "The Big Starlet": Friday and Gannon take a missing persons case for a sixteen-year-old girl. Their investigation leads them to an underground porn studio the underage girl was recruited into, and eventually to the girl herself, dead of a drug overdose. This was a Very Special Episode: porn was illegal in the United States at the time, but Denmark had legalized it the previous year and legalization had become a freedom of expression-related issue in the US as a result (ending in its 1973 partial legalization in Miller v. California).
• Euphoria:
  • Nate is one of the few characters confirmed to consume porn. Admittedly, it includes his father's sex tapes. Nate is also a domestic abuser and psychotic bully who becomes obsessed with Jules after seeing her in one of the tapes, catfishes her, and almost destroys her life as a result.
  • Cal, Nate's father, makes sex tapes of his hookups with very young men and trans people, presumably to watch later. He doesn't just film them without their consent but also exposes his son Nate to them (admittedly without knowing he'd done it).
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Given that the show revolves around a sex crimes unit, every possible variation on this trope has appeared:
  • In "Web", the teenage Teddy was already traumatized by being sexually abused by his father. But he also met child pornography viewers online, and they groomed him and paid him to upload videos of him molesting his younger brother, ensuring that the abuse continued.
  • "Unorthodox" plays this straight. It deals with a young boy who, left home alone frequently, accessed porn online. It's revealed that under the corrupting influence of the videos he'd watched, he'd assaulted several other kids at his school, regardless of gender. In fact, his crimes came to light when another boy came to school with rectal bleeding. The lawyers say that this happened because the porn teaches him nothing about consent.
  • Invoked in "Smut", where Eric Lutz claims that porn made him drug and rape at least five women. His strategy ultimately fails and he goes to prison.
  • Invoked in "Pornstar's Requiem", a porn star, Evie, is gang-raped by her classmates because she's been starring in rape fantasy pornography. Their argument is that they were "confused" by seeing Evie behave provocatively on screen and that this led to them raping her in reality. Evie and the unit are horrified, but they still get away with it.
• The Orville features a literal example in "Primal Urges" when Bortus accidentally uploads a Computer Virus into the ship's computers via an unauthorized pornographic holodeck simulation. Also deconstructed when Bortus is subsequently forced to undergo counseling for his addiction; he confesses that the addiction began when his husband Klyden went behind his back to force their child Topa into "corrective" surgery so that she would pass for male (as their species is so sexist that they refuse to acknowledge the existence of females). He can't look at Klyden or Topa without remembering that betrayal, and so he turned to pornographic simulations to get the sense of intimacy that he'd lost.
• Sons of Anarchy: Explored. SAMCRO gets involved in the porn business when Jax takes over the Cara Cara studio, seeing it as a fast way to make legitimate money. Clay finds it personally offensive (pretty hypocritical, since SAMCRO already sells military-grade weapons to gangs in Oakland and he wants to expand their profits by trafficking drugs), especially when the Sons start hanging out at the studio most of the time. The studio also introduces the club to various unsavory characters, including a porn producer who murders the previous owner Luann; Ima Tite, a high-strung porn star who causes repeated problems for the studio; and a group of underground torture porn specialists. On the more positive side, the actual productions are usually seen as just everyone having fun and enjoying themselves.
• The White Lotus: Ethan prefers masturbating to porn (especially extremely pornified women) to having sex with his wife Harper, openly turning her down to the point where he makes her feel unattractive and unwanted. This seriously damages her self-esteem and their marriage, and it's implied that it leads her to cheat on him with his former best friend, Cameron.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: SCP-1004, Factory Porn, is a computer program that gives the user access to whatever kind of porn they want for free. If someone views it for long enough, they'll start developing disturbing sexual fetishes like scat, murder, bestiality, and pedophilia, and will start trying to perform those acts in real life.

Western Animation

• Futurama: The episode "Godfellas" has Bender housing an asteroid of tiny aliens called the Shrimpkins, a peaceful and religious people who call him their new god. One of the ways he ends up inadvertently corrupting them is by constructing a pornography theatre, which is one of the places he checks for survivors of their eventual nuclear war.
• South Park: Butters Stotch becomes a Gollum-like creature after being exposed to a particularly raunchy porn video that accidentally got left in the case for The Lord of the Rings.

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