europeanconservative.com
2024-03-20
In 2022, The Daily Wire released the documentary What is a Woman? The film featured conservative commentator Matt Walsh exploring the titular question through a combination of interviews and on-the-ground reporting, and the results were typically triggering for transgender activists outraged by the film's success. According to X (formerly Twitter), the documentary accumulated 177 million views on the platform within a week--which, even when adjusting for shoddy metrics, makes it one of the most successful documentaries of all time.
Walsh's film could only skim the surface of the transgender debate. A 2023 Pornhub press release noted that "transgender" is now the site's third-most popular category, and this data indicates, as Michael Warren Davis observed, that "statistically, the huge majority of Republican men are watching 'transgender' porn." This interest is not necessarily organic; an investigation released in December revealed that Pornhub actively pushes gay and transgender porn to help kids find their 'kink' and shape sexual attitudes. The evidence that digital pornography plays a key role in metastasizing sexual identities and proclivities is overwhelming.
There is another very important aspect to the porn-to-transgender pipeline that has been largely ignored. For millions of young people, masculinity and femininity are being defined by online pornography--with profound and ugly consequences. Porn addiction is now ubiquitous among young people, and a generation has grown up with their view of sexuality shaped by the extreme and violent content found on major porn sites such as Pornhub. An increasingly toxic sexual environment in which sexual violence has been normalized has been the result.