i watched "beyond fantasy" on youtube yesterday, and as an 18 year old girl, i am now even more terrified men and am unable to calm down my anxieties about the future of dating

so, this is a cry for help from me to be honest, because i have no female role models or women older than me to confide in and get advice.

recently, these past few days, i've been going down the rabbithole of how harmful porn, but most importantly "mainstream" porn is (the stuff that is on the front page of pornhub when you don't have an account with a curated feed), which is becoming more and more extreme, misogynistic, a power fantasy and in a survey, it was determined that up to 45% of porn videos contain acts of violence against women.

i've also read a very worrying article about how choking is becoming "vanilla" now, and an act that isn't even discussed beforehand (a huge surge of men in college just choke their partners without consent because of how normalised it is). and i have seen various ways being "vanilla" is used as a way to insult and shame women.

i have a pretty nuanced point of view, by which i mean that porn and porn production that actively abuses, r*pes, manipulates, drugs and exploits women is not in the same boat as women drawing manga for women and selling them, and professional voice actors selling audio CDs. i'm posting here, because i don't want a debate right now, i want a way to cope.

back to my point: i am an 18 year old girl, and part of one of the first generations to grow up with what i'll call "as soon as you hit 13, almost everyone has seen porn". the first time i saw porn, was when i was 11, and googled it because we were warned about it in s*x ed. i didn't really become a girl that watches a lot of porn, but i'd seen it, and masturbated to it before. i'd started masturbating when i was 8.

later, when i became a fan of BTS, i started reading wattpad fanfiction. and watching what was called "21+ imagines" on youtube. after a while, i realised that i didn't really like them as much as i thought, because the popularised daddy/babygirl, male dominance, "punishment" stuff was not my cup of tea. it's through yaoi and BL manga, that i was truly able to discover what sexually aroused me, and what didn't, due to the simple absence of a woman to objectify. now you might call me an evil fetishizer for reading yaoi and BL, but again, please, i'm not looking for a debate, but for possibly advice and help for my feelings. i also discovered otome content a year later.

a few years ago, i started watching irl porn from time to time, which was mostly solo male stuff because couple's porn disgusted me, and turned me off immediately, because of the clearly male gazey shots. but most importantly: the violence, degradation, spitting, slapping women's vulva, and those horrid titles implying incest, barely legal, forced, and all those degrading ways to describe women's reproductive systems, and women themselves. because i only watch solo male videos, my feed is only male focused, when i do open up pornhub. but i always saw the "popular in your region" underneath my feed, where i saw all these horrifying things, whether i wanted it or not.

my brother and father make porny jokes around me all the time, and it honestly makes me uncomfortable to hear "haha put your spermidium in this sauce for some extra protein and rejuvenation" every second sentence. my father was always what i call "too open" about s*x with his children. he is determined of not making it a taboo, but he went too far. i know he likes anally fricking women, that he bought a sounding device for himself, that he downloads porn, caught him masturbating thrice, etc.

now i've watched "beyond fantasy", a documentary about porn. and yesterday, i cried when finishing episode 3. maybe i feel even more pain because of my own history with (non-sexual) child abuse, but still. no matter how you look at it, it's horrible.

and i know for a fact, all men my age watch porn. almost all of them. enough of them, that making porny jokes infront of your own daughter is okay. enough, that porn has become this normal thing that every man and teen uses. and porn isn't what it used to be.

i read a comment from someone that used to be in the porn industry back in the day, and she said something along the lines of "back then, anal was the most non-normal thing in porn, the most extreme. today it's become this mandatory part of porn".

i can't get what i saw in this documentary out of my head. it's like the ceiling came crashing down on me. will this be the reality of dating? will i be called a prude for disliking mainstream porn? will i have to sift through endless amounts of men that watch extreme porn, to find someone to love me? will porn continue to literally detroy women's bodies, and drive them to suicide?