APP Staff MindGeek is one of the largest porn conglomerates in the world, despite the fact that its website refuses to identify it as anything but a leading tech company. Though porn is mentioned nowhere on its site, MindGeek owns multiple porn companies, including PornHub, RedTube, YouPorn, and Brazzers. PornHub alone, according to its 2020 Tech Review, receives 130 million visitors a day.
It’s no secret that porn has detrimental effects on children and family life. It comes between couples, fostering feelings of inadequacy and dissatisfaction within intimate relationships as well as increasing sexual compulsive behavior and addiction. It normalizes degenerate sexual behavior such as group sex, bestiality, and sadomasochistic activity. It also destroys the very image of love and affection that is central to marriage and family life.
Beyond this, when children are introduced to porn at an early age, they are more likely to engage in sexual activity earlier than their non-exposed peers, which puts them at an increased risk of contracting life-altering illnesses, such as STDs. It fosters the idea that affection for one’s partner is not essential to sexual activity, making marriage and family life seem unappealing and confining. It can even condition viewers to trivialize rape.
MindGeek is not a threat simply because it is one of the industries promoting porn, but because it is the industry promoting and producing pornographic content. It began its life as a small porn company, and grew by absorbing smaller porn companies until today, where it owns nearly every major (and minor) porn venue in the world.
This company has flown under the radar for years, partly because its monopoly on the industry minimizes any major lawsuits among competitors, and partly, perhaps, because no one wants to acknowledge the extent we’ve allowed porn to infiltrate the internet. Their relative anonymity coupled with their focus on tech advancement only makes them more dangerous to American families and particularly our children.
While porn was once confined to the pages of lewd magazines, nearly every child has the ability to privately access porn today.
According to a 2019 study by Common Sense Media, 19% of 8-year-olds own their own smartphone, with the number climbing to 53% by age 11 and climbing steeply to reach 91% by age 18. In 2020, 83% of PornHub’s U.S. traffic came from smartphones. Whether it’s a raunchy ad, a typo when googling “prom”, or a deliberate curiosity search, access to porn is only a click away. And while kids don’t always know what’s good for them, they do know how to wipe their browser history.
This is a real threat to childhood innocence, teen development, adult relationships, and marital health. If we don’t expose it, denounce it, and fight it for our children, it will only continue to drag them down into degeneracy.
