First I must stress that anger is not, in and of itself, an ethical failure or an emotional excess. When stripped down to its evolutionary psychological function, anger is simply a coordinated mobilisation of an organism. It is as fundamental as fear or attachment. The expression of anger emerges when boundaries are violated; when the integrity of the body, the individual, the family, or the community is threatened. It mobilises defence. It sharpens perception. It sends an unmistakable message: a boundary has been crossed, and further intrusion will be met with force. In this sense, anger, in and of itself, is not necessarily opposed to reason; it is one of reason’s oldest instruments. A population incapable of anger in the face of dispossession would not be peaceful, it would be extinguished.

Under colonialism, anger is neither resolved or allowed expression; it exists in a state of chronic suspension. Interestingly, the coloniser often does not even attempt to eliminate anger in the colonised. In fact, the colonised person’s anger becomes narratively useful to the settler. Its distorted expressions are captured as confirmation of the settler’s own mythology: that the native is irrational, savage, barbaric and in need of discipline, correction, or eradication. What colonial domination first produces, it then points to as justification. It cultivates the rage while ensuring it cannot fulfil its defensive role. The native is humiliated, expropriated, surveilled, beaten, and insulted, but any attempt to respond is labelled criminal. It is astonishing to me how plainly the early European colonisers of Palestine, for example, acknowledged this as a matter of fact.

The settler produces the stimulus for anger while monopolising all legitimate means of acting upon it. Strikes and assemblies are banned; legal redress is blocked through military courts and administrative detention; peaceful marches are banned with military force; and then, when resistance turns violent after every civil avenue has been sealed, that violence is invoked as proof that repression was necessary all along. Negotiation with these people is obviously futile because they are born and raised ‘terrorists’ and ‘fanatics’. It is a methodological and refined cruelty. Anger is allowed to exist only as affect, never as force.

For a moment, consider with seriousness what it means to be born in Gaza. You enter the world already enclosed by fences, walls, and a naval blockade you did nothing to earn and cannot escape. Your future is not discovered gradually; it is pre-emptively narrowed. Movement is restricted long before ambition can take shape. Travel is not a right but a rare and revocable permission. Education offers knowledge without corresponding opportunity. Unemployment is not a personal failure but a statistical likelihood. Food insecurity is chronic rather than exceptional. Electricity arrives intermittently, clean water sporadically, and medicine conditionally. The sky itself is a source of anxiety, not weather. Then, strikes take out your apartment block, often in the early hours of the morning, when families are asleep, reducing your home to rubble in seconds. There is little warning, sometimes none at all. You run if you can, carrying children half asleep, unsure whether the next explosion will land where you are standing. By daylight, the dead are counted: neighbours, parents, your children, your siblings. Those who survive sift through debris for documents, clothing, bodies. Rescue is improvised, delayed, or impossible.

What kind of human response would we call sane if not anger? If not blinding rage?

Psychotherapeutically, if a mother mentions the molestation of her daughter, the violent death of her son, the burglary of her home, the infidelity of her husband, anger is not a symptom to be managed away. Anger is something I would expect and would want to see emerge in the room as evidence that reality has been registered correctly, that the ego is healthy and functioning. It is a sign of sanity. The absence of anger in such moments would be far more clinically concerning; a sign of dissociation, collapse, or injury to the self. Anger at our own injustice is intelligible and grounded in reality. It arises from a moment of clear injury and seeks acknowledgment, protection, or justice. The colonised native is suspended perpetually at the point of injury, of humiliation, of pain, denied the human dignity of release. Fanon describes this chronic state of mobilisation in bodily terms as muscular tension, nervous agitation, stammers, shaking, and explosive dreams. The individual is prepared for defence, yet forbidden to defend themselves. Over time, this contradiction becomes a psychological pathology. Anger, deprived of its natural trajectory outward toward the source of injury, turns inward or laterally.

Fanon’s clinical observations during his time in Algeria are pretty brutal and unfortunately closely consistent with my recent encounters with mental health patients from Gaza. Fanon describes how the anger deprived of outlet erupts in domestic conflict, inter-communal rivalry, ritualised aggression, and self-destructive behaviour. The colonised man beats his wife and resents himself for it, not because he is inherently brutal, but because the structure of power has made the true enemy unreachable. Anger becomes destructive when it is denied its rightful object. The body still demands discharge, the psyche still seeks equilibrium. When political action is foreclosed, pathology becomes the substitute.

This is why Fanon rejects moralising interpretations of colonial violence. To condemn the colonised for misdirected aggression without examining the system that blocked its proper outlet is, in Fanon’s view, another form of colonial mystification. The settler benefits twice: first by provoking anger, and second by pointing to its distorted expressions as proof of native inferiority. Rage is elicited, sabotaged, and then cited as evidence.

Fanon’s Clinical Cases

In the closing chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon abandons abstraction and writes as a clinician. What he writes is not illustrative or symbolic, it is diagnostic. The case studies are Fanon’s final argument. They demonstrate, with a horrible clinical sobriety, what sustained colonial violence does to the psyche when injury is repetitive, intimate, and structurally unanswerable.

The first case Fanon describes is regarding the sudden and persisting impotence in an Algerian man following the violent rape of his wife by French colonial soldiers. Crucially, there was no prior history of sexual dysfunction; the symptom appeared directly after the assault and resisted all conventional treatment.

Fanon’s interpretation was not psychosexual in the narrow Freudian sense. The impotence is not guilt, repression, or latent neurosis. It was a complete collapse of symbolic and bodily authority produced by total powerlessness. The patient had been forced to witness the absolute violation of his family, of those explicitly under his care and provision, without any possibility of defence, retaliation, or justice. He was rendered incapable of fulfilling even the most basic social role, protector, not because of personal inadequacy, but because the colonial structure made protection impossible.

His body registered this impossibility before language did. Sexual function, which presupposes agency, desire, and continuity, became untenable. Impotence here was not a private pathology; it was the somatic inscription of political humiliation.

Across multiple clinical cases, Fanon describes treating patients suffering from chronic insomnia, panic attacks, tremors, and chronic bodily pain with no organic cause. These patients lived in a state of constant anticipation, waiting for arrest, interrogation, disappearance, or bombardment. Their nervous systems were locked in a state of permanent alert. Fanon is explicit: these are not ‘war neuroses’ in the conventional sense. Unlike soldiers who can act, retreat, or discharge aggression outward, the colonised civilian is entirely immobilised. Fear and anger are chronically activated but never resolved. The result is what we would now recognise as severe trauma compounded by helplessness, an organism perpetually mobilised with nowhere to go.

Fanon also documented cases of acute psychosis; hallucinations, paranoid delusions, dissociation, even emerging in civilians with no prior psychiatric history. These breakdowns often followed episodes of extreme violence or prolonged exposure to terror without relief. In another heart-wrenchingly memorable case, Fanon treated a young man who was seized by recurrent, obsessive fantasies of homicide after surviving a brutal mass execution of his village. Twenty-nine Algerian men were shot in the head and chest at point-blank range by French colonial forces in front of him, and then he was shot twice in the arm and leg. He laid for hours among the dead bodies of his neighbours. Brutal complex, compound trauma. Below are Fanon’s chosen extracts from his statement that highlight the patient’s acute paranoid psychosis.

What is remarkable to me is Fanon’s refusal to see these cases as individual abnormalities or pathologies. He situates each and every one within the colonial structure itself. He insisted that they were rational responses to an irrational environment. When reality itself became unpredictable, lawless, and lethal, the mind fractured not because it is weak, but because coherence had been made impossible. Insanity in an insane environment is the only sane response.

Colonialism produces mental illness. Not metaphorically, not indirectly, but clinically. Symptoms emerge precisely where agency is destroyed, where anger is justified but forbidden, where defence is necessary but impossible. These patients were not failing to adapt. They were adapting exactly as a human nervous system does when trapped in sustained violation without outlet or escape.

Decolonisation, in Fanon’s account, is therefore not only political and social restructuring. It is the reorientation of anger back toward its legitimate target. This is why he insists that decolonisation is experienced as a ‘psychic rupture’. For the first time, the colonised subject’s anger ceases to be diffuse, shameful, or self-lacerating. It has direction. Whatever one may make of Fanon’s controversial endorsement of violence, it cannot be understood apart from this claim: that psychic health requires the possibility of effective defence. An anger that can act is no longer pathological; it becomes organising. An anger that recognises its source threatens the entire colonial architecture.

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This diffusion, that tends to be casually called “soft porn”, is neither soft nor peripheral.

Meta Preys on the Young

My younger brother recently joined Instagram for the first time. He’d been looking forward to it for months, finally able to join the digital conversations his friends had been having without him, to swap reels and jokes, to share the latest Real Madrid clips. I watched him pick out a username and then, out of nowhere, I felt a flicker of curiosity. I wonder what instagram, before knowing anything about my brother and his preferences, would suggest to him? What would his explore page look like? What would it expose him to given that all it knew at that point was his age (15) and his sex (male)? Well, I suppose you can guess. It was an endless stream of half naked women as far as you could scroll. I was stunned.

Reports have shown that my brother was not an anomaly. What many parents have intuited is, in fact, the case: social media platforms, particularly those designed for the young, have begun to serve minors content far more sexualised than the companies publicly acknowledge. Journalists who created accounts posing as children found themselves fed “overtly sexual adult videos,” ads for dating apps, promotions for AI-driven sexual chatbots, and in some cases content sitting disturbingly close to children’s brands. The lines separating childhood from adult erotic economies have thinned to the point of translucence.

At its core, this disturbing psychological targeting is simply the business model of social media laid bare. These platforms are free to download not because they are benevolent public goods, but because you are never the customer, you are the commodity. Advertisers are the customers, and we, or more specifically our attention, are the product. And attention, in the digital marketplace, is worth far more than any subscription fee.

Without charging users directly, companies like Meta and TikTok generate extraordinary profits through targeted advertising. Their revenue scales with one metric above all others: how long your eyeballs stay fixed to their interface. Every additional minute is another data point, another ad impression, another sliver of profit. It is therefore in their financial interest, not incidentally, but fundamentally, for you to spend as much of your waking life on their platforms as possible.

And the algorithms have learned, with unnerving precision, how to exploit the hormonal volatility, the curiosity, and the behavioural patterns of fifteen year old boys. Instagram appears to have determined exactly which kinds of content keep adolescent users transfixed, and it feeds them whatever will hold their gaze the longest, even if what holds it is sexualised, addictive, inappropriate, or psychologically harmful. The result is an economic logic that places children’s developmental vulnerabilities in direct tension with corporate profit.

The pornification of the neutral is not limited to porn sites, or even to explicitly sexual accounts. It is woven through TikTok dances engineered for virality; through fitness channels that quietly escalate their content’s erotic charge; through beauty influencers who unintentionally, or perhaps very intentionally, train millions of adolescents in the aesthetics of self-objectification. Soft porn is the new visual atmosphere. Children now breathe it before they know what air is.

I cannot emphasise enough why these everyday explore/for you page appearances matter. The human mind, especially the adolescent mind, is shaped less by occasional shocks than by persistent drips.

Parents often imagine the internet as a space where their children “might stumble” upon something inappropriate. That no longer holds. Algorithms are not passive landscapes; they are very hyperactive brokers of attention. They learn a user’s vulnerabilities with greater speed than any human observer could. They note what video you click, how many milliseconds you watch it for, who you then send it to, who you don’t send it to, how many times you return to it. And once an algorithm detects that sexualised content keeps a user on the platform longer, the acceleration begins.

The testimonies emerging from young adults who grew up online suggest not merely exposure but induction. Many report that their first encounters with sexual content came long before they understood it, and that the normalisation of pornography, through memes, jokes, micro-trends, influencers, created a culture in which intimacy itself arrived pre-distorted.

Take a moment to appreciate the cultural irony: platforms that sell themselves as creativity & connection hubs or community-building tools have quietly become pipelines delivering minors to predators, advertisers, and erotic economies previously confined to adult-only spaces. The predators themselves have not changed; what has changed is their access. And access, in human behaviour, is often a catalytic factor.

Teenage Self-Pornification

While boys and young men receive one kind of distortion, an early erotic curriculum shaped by performance and spectacle, girls face another. The cultural pressure on adolescent girls to sexualise themselves online is now so ambient, so normalised, that I don’t think most even experience it as pressure at all. It feels like gravity.

A twelve year old raised in this atmosphere is not merely comparing herself to peers; she is comparing herself to hyper-designed, algorithmically boosted avatars of femininity, some edited by professionals, others by filters that morph a child’s body into something uncannily adult. The result is a generation attempting to mature into their own digitally enhanced sexualised projections. And they are brilliantly rewarded for it.

The platforms reward the very behaviours that make these girls the most vulnerable. They go viral: the likes are immeasurable, the views translate to personal revenue, the comments are irresistible. The ‘validation economy’ encourages self-exposure long before the brain’s executive functions develop the capacity to assess long term consequences. Girls too young to drive are coached, sometimes very explicitly, other times ambiently, to perform sexuality as content. And when some slide from soft porn into commercialised self-sexualisation, society has the gall to oscillate between celebration and moral condemnation, depending on political allegiance.

Both reactions fail to grasp the real dynamic: a commercial machine is shaping children into erotic commodities, and then leaving them to face the fallout alone.

Part of the difficulty in addressing all this is the ideological incoherence surrounding it. Certain progressives dismiss the pornification of girlhood as prudish panic, failing to consider how unfettered sexual “liberation” can be co-opted by predators and corporations faster than it can ever empower anyone. Meanwhile, certain conservatives focus their outrage almost exclusively on the girls themselves, ridiculing, shaming, or blaming, instead of the ecosystem that conditioned them.

Both stances misdiagnose the problem. The crisis at hand is neither a morality tale nor a partisan weapon. It is a developmental, psychological, and structural disaster that cuts across demographics.

And it is unfolding and mutating in real time.

What distinguishes today’s adolescents from those who came before them is not the content they encounter but the context. They reach adolescence with less real world experience, more anxiety, and weaker support structures. Yet they face more aggressive digital environments, where predators are algorithmically assisted, where identity is curated for an invisible audience, where self worth is tied to metrics, where sexualised performance is the cost of visibility. The tragedy is not that young people sometimes imitate the cultural scripts around them. The tragedy is that the scripts were written for profit, not for human flourishing.

The Public Health Crisis Continues

If pornography proper qualifies as a public health crisis because it rewires neural reward pathways, destabilises relationships, and distorts intimacy, then soft porn qualifies because it does all these things diffusely, silently, at scale, and at ages when the self is still unformed.

Soft porn does not overwhelm the brain through shock; it reshapes it through ubiquity. It constructs expectations before desire even has the opportunity to take shape. It primes young people for compulsive attention cycles long before they encounter explicit material. It nudges them toward self-surveillance, self-display, and self-doubt. And it prepares them, emotionally, cognitively, socially, for an adult sexual marketplace they are not yet equipped to understand, let alone navigate.

In this sense, soft porn is not the prelude to the crisis. It also is the crisis.

Children did not design these platforms. They did not write the algorithms. They did not conceive the cultural incentives that reward sexualised performance. Nor did they create the ideological haze that makes honest conversation about these issues so strained. Expecting adolescents to withstand forces that entire industries could not withstand is a profound misreading of human development.

The only meaningful intervention begins with adults: parents, educators, policymakers, and cultural leaders willing to acknowledge the scale of the harm. No public health challenge has ever been solved by telling children to bootstrap their way out of systems engineered to overpower them. We cannot give twelve year olds digital worlds built on sexualised attention economies and then feign surprise when they internalise the logic of those worlds.

Soft porn is not soft. It is structural and profoundly formative. If we do not confront it with seriousness equal to its influence, the next generation will inherit harms they did not choose, and did not understand until it was too late.

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He argued that in ‘liberal democracies’, the media doesn’t serve the public (ironically) it seeks to serve the powerful. But it doesn’t do this by censoring or lying outright (most of the time). It does so by shaping and flexing the boundaries of what is acceptable to think, feel, and believe.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” — Noam Chomsky

The propaganda today hijacks basic human psychology. It doesn’t just manipulate facts which can be resisted intellectually. It first manipulates our affect (how we feel, how we think, how we react). And that’s why such large portions of the population have ended up supporting wars we didn’t understand, or staying silent about violence we’d otherwise be horrified by.

Let’s break this down psychologically. How does manufacturing consent actually work?

(1) Fear Conditioning: Flood the Brain, Freeze the Thought

The first and easiest lever to pull is fear.

Fear is incredibly fast and the most physiologically rooted of our emotions. Anxiety inducing stimuli bypass our reasoning centres and immediately activate the amygdala: our brain’s panic hub. An activated amygdala triggers a very real palpable physiological response (elevated heart rate, adrenaline, blood pressure etc).This is why governments and media start every war narrative with a existential threat: “WMDs,” “imminent nuclear threat,” “terror tunnels,” “Iran is weeks away from building a nuclear bomb.” It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It just needs to stimulate real existential fear.

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
— Noam Chomsky

The existential threat is repeated across multiple media outlets and fear conditioning begins. If a population is scared enough, they won’t just accept military action, they’ll demand it. Think back to Iraq in 2002: “weapons of mass destruction” was repeated so often, it became a kind of spell. No evidence? Didn’t matter. The emotional groundwork had already been laid and 1 million Iraqi lives were terminated. We almost saw it to the same extent with Iran. Once people believe they’re in imminent existential danger, once they are emotionally fatigued, consent is just a byproduct.

(2) Emotional Baiting: Steering Empathy Where It’s Useful

People are generally deeply empathetic. That’s not a flaw, it’s a beautiful and often redeeming feature of humanity. But it also makes us incredibly vulnerable because our empathy as a population is a resource.

The media doesn’t feed us facts & information as it purports to. It crafts narratives, it tells us stories, it shows us faces, tears, grief. But it selects and curates those stories to steer and direct our empathy in a very specific direction.

When Israeli families cry, we’re shown up-close footage of their faces, their damaged homes, their grief. The values we hold dear as a society are closely integrated into the imagery we are presented (family, love, sacrifice, community etc). When Palestinians die in Gaza, we do not see family and community, we only hear about “militants,” “collateral damage,” or “death tolls.” Not lives. Not stories. Not people. Just numbers.

This is emotional baiting. It’s the manipulation of natural empathy. And it’s crucial, because war requires the public to feel a lot for one group and almost nothing for the other.

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

— Malcolm X, quoted by Chomsky in various interviews

(3) Moral Disengagement: Softening Violence With Language

Psychologist Albert Bandura called it moral disengagement: the ability to participate in or support real and significant violence while still seeing yourself as a good person.

Military operations aren’t described as ‘bombing residential neighbourhoods’ or ‘killing children’. They’re ‘precision strikes,’ ‘surgical operations,’ or ‘targeted eliminations.’ Entire apartment blocks are turned to rubble, but the headline reads: ‘Key infrastructure neutralised.’

The language used disconnects the action from the consequence. These euphemisms make the violence sound clean, necessary, even surgical. It makes the perpetrators sound responsible, and the victims sound like unfortunate background noise. The language allows us to support it, or at the very least look away, without feeling like monsters.

“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
— Noam Chomsky

In Gaza, this is everywhere. A school is obliterated? ‘Terrorists were operating nearby.’ A hospital was levelled? ‘A Hamas command centre was underneath it.’ The goal isn’t just to justify the action, it’s to prevent you from seeing it as real violence at all.

(4) Repetition and the Illusory Truth Effect: Say It Enough

There’s a well-documented and robustly tested phenomenon in psychology called the illusory truth effect. Put simply: the more often you hear something, the more likely you are to believe it’s true.

The media knows this. That’s why they repeat key phrases over and over: ‘Israel has a right to defend itself,’ ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ ‘terror infrastructure, ‘human shields.’ These phrases are embedded implicitly into our unconscious. They become the default framework through which we interpret everything else.

“The media want to turn the population into passive consumers of ideology.”

— Noam Chomsky

It’s about embedding assumptions so deeply that you stop questioning them. Even if new information emerges say, that Iran isn’t developing a bomb or that a bombing in Gaza killed 200 civilians, the emotional script has already been written. Your brain has already decided who the villain is

(5) Ingroup vs. Outgroup Psychology: Us vs Them

One of the deepest cognitive biases we carry is ingroup-outgroup bias. It’s evolutionary: we trust people who are like us and fear those who are not. The media plays this reptilian thread like a piano.

Media leverages this by constantly reminding us who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ are. “We” are democratic, civilized, rational. ‘They’ are irrational, ideological, uncivilised. ‘We’ don’t target civilians. ‘They’ use human shields. ‘We’ defend. ‘They’ provoke.

This constant binary is especially obvious in coverage of Gaza. Palestinians are rarely shown as fully human. No hobbies, no dreams, no dignity. Only militants or refugees. Just numbers. And once the outgroup is fully dehumanised, the public doesn’t have to wrestle with moral complexities. This isn’t politics, it’s psychology. The more distant and alien the outgroup feels, the easier it is to rationalise away their suffering.

“It's only terrorism when they do it.”
— Noam Chomsky

Manufacturing consent is a psychological system the powerful have used for decades. To sell you war. To dull your empathy. To keep you from asking the right questions at the right time. Recently, media outlets attempted to lay the emotional and linguistic groundwork for another possible war this time with Iran. At the same time, they’re actively minimising or reframing what many scholars, human rights and international law experts, and even Holocaust survivors have called a genocide in Gaza.

The machinery of consent is working exactly as designed.

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Reference:

• Al Jazeera, 2025. Why manufacturing consent for war with Iran failed this time. Al Jazeera, [online] 28 June. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/6/28/why-manufacturing-consent-for-war-with-iran-failed-this-time[Accessed 10 Jul. 2025].

• Bandura, A., 1999. Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), pp.193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3

• Chomsky, N., 2002. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. New York: Seven Stories Press.

• Chomsky, N., 2003. Interview with John Pilger. The New Statesman, [online] 17 March. Available at: https://chomsky.info/200303__/ [Accessed 10 Jul. 2025].

• Chomsky, N., 2011. The purpose of education and the media. RSA Animate, [video]

• Chomsky, N. and Herman, E.S., 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.

• Electronic Intifada, 2023. By dehumanizing Palestinians, media enabled genocide in Gaza. The Electronic Intifada, [online] 15 Dec. Available at: https://electronicintifada.net/content/dehumanizing-palestinians-media-enabled-genocide-gaza/50317 [Accessed 10 Jul. 2025].

• Hasher, L., Goldstein, D. and Toppino, T., 1977. Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), pp.107–112.

• Kahneman, D., 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Mondoweiss, 2023. NYT slights Palestinian civilian deaths and Netanyahu’s political motivation for attacks. Mondoweiss, [online] 11 May. Available at: https://mondoweiss.net/2023/05/nyt-slights-palestinian-civilian-deaths-and-netanyahus-political-motivation-for-attacks [Accessed 10 Jul. 2025].

• Pratkanis, A. and Aronson, E., 2001. Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. Revised ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

• Reuters, 2025. “Ghost camp”: Israeli operations in West Bank push wave of Palestinians from their homes. Reuters, [online] 9 Jul. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/ghost-camp-israeli-operations-west-bank-push-wave-palestinians-their-homes-2025-07-09 [Accessed 10 Jul. 2025].

• The Link, 2024. Your definitive Palestine media toolkit. The Link Newspaper, [online]. Available at: https://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/your-definitive-palestine-media-toolkit [Accessed 10 Jul. 2025].

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The philosophical soil from which modern secular psychology grew was not neutral in. As modernity unfolded, materialism replaced metaphysics and the philosophy of the West became individualistic in essence and capitalistic in manifestation. The physical world became the only world that mattered, and all higher realities were reduced to chemical, biological, or neurological processes. This is demonstrated in its obsession with mental health & wellness. Much of Western psychological research is conducted with the overarching objective of curing mental & emotional suffering (e.g. depression & anxiety) and producing happiness, pleasure and productivity.

Among others, René Descartes, one of the founding minds of Europe’s philosophical renaissance, pioneered this shift. He split the world into res cogitans and res extensa: the mind and the body as separate entities. This dualism laid the groundwork for the scientific objectification of nature and, eventually, of man himself. Once the soul was split from the body, the psyche could be dissected, measured, and explained as mechanism. It’s ironic to contemplate what has become of psych-ology when the etymology of the word itself (‘psyche’ ψυχή, meaning soul or spirit, and ‘logos’ λόγος, meaning rational study) still suggests a study of the spiritual rather than the material (mind & brain). What was once mystery became machinery. After Descartes, psychology, in an effort to prove itself a material science among sciences, abandoned the soul it was named after (ψυχή) and adopted the language of neurons and neurotransmitters.

In this materialist framework, value no longer derived from moral hierarchy but from the individual’s experience of pleasure and pain. Morality dissolved into preference. The good life was redefined as the comfortable life: the maximisation of happiness and the minimisation of suffering. The individual, detached from community, became the final arbiter of meaning and purpose. However, without a common conception of the good, moral discourse loses coherence; it becomes negotiation rather than truth-seeking. In such a world, the moral language survives, but its substance is gone. We speak of ‘rights,’ ‘authenticity,’ and ‘values,’ yet these words float free from any metaphysical anchor. They are fragments of an older moral architecture whose foundations have long since eroded. It falls on the self to now continually redefine itself, its commitments, and its virtues in response to an ever-shifting social terrain. A fixated commitment to our individualistic pursuit of happiness now lies at the heart of what we perceive as mental and emotional ‘health’.

But if happiness and enjoyment of life is ‘health’, is unhappiness and struggle ‘ill-health’? Isn’t struggle natural and inevitable? Are sorrow and grief not a part of the human condition? Are we to pathologise every ache of the soul? I used to believe that emotional pain was something to be solved, something that signified to me a failure in my personal growth. The realisation that we cannot escape emotional pain in this life and shouldn’t expect to has been utterly liberating. Happiness can never be guaranteed. We are all bound to experience loss, grief, failure, and shame. Nobody is above the laws of life. To set happiness and the absence of suffering as your goal, is to set yourself up for a life of misery.

Furthermore, if happiness is an individualistic pursuit, then it only makes sense to become self-serving. If the self is both subject and object of devotion, then self-interest becomes virtuous. We now find ourselves in a society where self-care and self-development dominate the wellness discourse. ‘Self-love’ now stands as one of the clearest examples of how philosophical shifts manifest as psychological imperatives. Today, self-love is placed as the epitome of mental well-being. The collective history of psychological research robustly indicates that we all have a number of fixed psychological needs that, if unfulfilled, dictate our psychological health the same way unfulfilled physical needs dictate our physical health. For the largest part of human history and across most cultures, these needs have remained relatively fixed around three major themes: (1) autonomy/choice, (2) competence/dignity, and (3) belonging/connection.

However, when a profit-driven, materially-oriented, and hyper-individualistic society finds itself incompatible with our inherent psychological makeup, those needs are simply replaced with artificial and distorted needs (consumerism, hedonism, cosmetic perfectionism, recognition, hyper-productivity, entertainment escapism etc). The result in doing so is that construct a fragile and misleading psychological theory of self based on the social condition rather than the human condition. This substitution not only breeds personal dissatisfaction but it also alienates us from the very sources of meaning, connection, and stability that sustain true psychological well-being and that has been self-evident. In what follows, I intend to use self-love as an example of one of these distortions and as a pathway toward what I believe may be the most critically undervalued psychological need of all: self-respect.

Self-Respect

Self-respect is fundamentally different to self-love in that it is not contingent upon self-affirmation or external validation. Self-love encourages a self-acceptance without challenge or accountability, while self-respect demands integrity, discipline, and, most importantly, a steadfast alignment with one's values. If your worldview is one of higher purpose and one that acknowledges the reality that struggle is a condition of life, ‘feeling good’ is peripheral. What becomes central is dignity, self-confidence, resilience, and an ability to rely on yourself. Unlike self-love, which has few, if any, conditions and can drift into narcissism or self-indulgence, self-respect demands a lot from us. It requires that we honour our commitments and uphold our moral principles practically. It requires that we repeatedly do what we say we will do.

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Bandura (1977) frequently referred to a behavioural concept called ‘self-efficacy’ in his work. It refers to how deeply an individual believes in his or her capacity to exert control over their own motivation, behaviour, and social environment. Bandura’s discovery was that despite having the tools and skills to complete a task, a person with a low sense of self-efficacy would not have the capacity to utilise them. You will not succeed if you do not believe you can. It’s a rather basic and seemingly fairly obvious concept, however, it is particularly meaningful in relation to self-respect.

In every situation, you are simultaneously both the actor and observer of your life. In every interaction with another person you are simultaneously interacting with that person and watching yourself interact with that person. This is meaningful. Self-respect is a psychological need that can only be fulfilled independently of others; it is established by you, within you, in front of you.

You develop your self-respect when you say you’ll wash the dishes, start to wash the dishes, and observe yourself finish washing the dishes. You develop your self-respect when you say you’ll do the assignment, write the assignment, and observe yourself submit the assignment. You develop your self-respect when you say you’ll spend more time with the kids, set out the time to play with the kids, and observe yourself play with the kids. We don’t often think of ourselves as an audience or a spectator to our choices, but we are. Every decision we make is witnessed by the sitting observer within us; the part of ourselves that knows when we have honoured our word or betrayed it. This observer does not judge with external standards; it registers, with quiet certainty, whether we are living in alignment with our values or falling short of them. Over time, these observations accumulate, shaping how we see ourselves. When we consistently follow through on our commitments, no matter how small, we reinforce a sense of integrity, of competence. Conversely, when we repeatedly neglect our own promises, we erode our self-respect, fostering guilt, disappointment, and a low self-esteem.

This is why self-respect is not something that can be granted to us by others; it is built through action, and a deep and personal accountability to oneself. Self-respect is a need and, unlike self-love, we cannot hope to be psychologically healthy without it. Lacking it, we deplete self-esteem, we become unanchored, disconnected from ourselves and the deeper sense of dignity that gives life meaning. It is not about grand gestures or public recognition, but about the everyday moments where we prove to ourselves that we are dependable and worthy of trust. The way we speak to ourselves, the standards we uphold in private, the things we do when no one else is watching; these define our relationship with ourselves far more than anything external ever could.

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References

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.

Romantic stories of autonomy and liberation algorithmically fill the feeds of young women on social media, while the psychological toll of sustained sexual commodification remains largely absent from any public discourse. Like many young women, I recently came across two female adult-content creators who marketed a challenge to sleep with over 100 men in 24 hours, and later 1000. I make no claims about the personal histories or motivations of these specific women; it may well be the case that they are fully agentic actors making deliberate, self-directed choices. However, the broader connection between early sexual trauma and sex work is a very well-documented reality and yet is rarely acknowledged publicly, including by the industry’s most prominent figures, who seldom use their platforms to raise awareness of it.

The sex industry does not exist in a vacuum; it overwhelmingly preys on the vulnerable and exploits the traumatised. Research consistently shows that a very significant percentage of women in the sex industry have histories of childhood sexual abuse, with estimates ranging from 60% to 80%, a figure far higher than in the general population. It is not always, but it is certainly way too often, the case that the sex industry becomes a place to re-traumatise the traumatised. Early sexual trauma influences patterns of thought and self-perception in ways that are often lasting and unconscious. What emerges from the research is not a singular explanation but a convergence of psychological, social, and economic factors that I will briefly introduce in this essay.

Self-Concept

Self-concept refers to the way we perceive and define ourselves, our sense of identity, worth, value, and role in the world. Psychologically, it develops through a combination of early experiences, social interactions, and internal reflections. A healthy self-concept is typically fostered in environments where a child experiences consistent care, emotional security, and autonomy. This enables psychological resilience and the ability to form healthy relationships. However, when disrupted, through trauma and neglect, for example, the continuity of childhood development is disrupted, and self-concept can become distorted. This leads to identity confusion, dissociation, low self-worth, or cycles of self-sabotage, shaping how a person navigates their world and relationships. Sexual trauma, especially at a young age, completely disrupts the very foundation of selfhood. A child is not at all equipped to process a violation of that kind, especially when the perpetrator is someone they trust: a parent, a relative, a family friend (which is often the case).

It is a devastating and utterly isolating experience for a child. The kind of violence that sexual trauma entails is defiling and degrading, and terrifying in every sense of the word. It is so brutally intrusive that it rewires neural networks and alters the way a person understands intimacy, boundaries, self-worth, and their own somatic experiences.

One of the most common effects of early sexual trauma is dissociation. When a child is overwhelmed by an experience they cannot escape, their mind often detaches from the event itself, almost as if they were a bystander watching from a distance. Over time, this can become a coping mechanism, a way of surviving distressing situations by ‘mentally checking out’. Many women in sex work describe this exact experience: the ability to detach from their bodies, to dissociate from the physical act. It’s not that they want to be there, but rather that they have learned, from an early age, how to tolerate being there by disconnecting.

Then there’s the issue of self-worth. Sexual abuse at a young age often instills a deep-seated belief that one’s body is not truly one’s own. That it exists at the behest and for the desires of others. This is not a conscious belief, but one that takes root beneath the surface, unconsciously influencing choices in ways that might not be immediately obvious. If your earliest experiences of intimacy involved coercion, manipulation, or violation, it can distort the very concept of what intimacy is. It can create a world where sex is not something to be shared, but something to be given away, traded, or used as currency.

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Repetition Compulsion

One of the most compelling psychological explanations for the link between early sexual trauma and sex work is what’s known as repetition compulsion, a concept first introduced by Freud, but later expanded upon by trauma researchers like Bessel van der Kolk. Repetition compulsion is the unconscious drive to recreate unresolved trauma. To return, again and again, to the scene of the original wound, almost as if trying to rewrite the ending. For some women, entering sex work might not be a conscious choice to relive trauma, but rather an unconscious gravitation toward something that feels familiar. The early sexualisation, the conditioning to equate sex with worth, the learned detachment, all of these factors can make transactional sex feel strangely normal, even when it is harmful.

It is also important to acknowledge the economic and social factors that often play a role. Many women who have experienced childhood sexual abuse also come from unstable home environments, poverty, neglect, addiction, or other forms of dysfunction. In these cases, survival often takes precedence over self-exploration or healing. When traditional opportunities feel out of reach, sex work can appear as one of the few viable options. Not because it is empowering, as some would like to frame it, but because it is available.

Childhood sexual trauma is, at its core, an experience of powerlessness, a moment where a child is forced to face malice with no agency to stop it, no ability to escape, no say in what happens to their own body. In this light, for many women, entering sex work can sometimes become a method of reclaiming control over a dynamic that was once completely beyond their grasp. If trauma is defined by the absence of choice, sex work, in its most self-directed form, can seem like the image of choice. A chance to dictate the terms, to decide when, where, and with whom. But this is where the narrative becomes more complicated.

The reality is that sex work, for many, rarely provides the control it appears to offer. Many women in the industry face coercion, violence, and continued exploitation, not just from clients, but from ‘pimps’ and traffickers. The idea of "control" can often be more psychological than practical; it may feel like a reclamation of agency, but in practice, the power dynamics of the industry often replicate the very lack of autonomy that early abuse introduced. Studies consistently show that sex workers, particularly those with histories of trauma, are at higher risk of further abuse, rape, and even homicide. In some ways, sex work does not always break the cycle of trauma; it can perpetuate it, trapping women in a world where their bodies remain a site of external control.

This essay is not a moral judgment, nor an attempt to deny the agency of women who enter the sex industry. It is simply a frank acknowledgment of reality, one that is too often drowned out by romanticised narratives of empowerment and autonomy. Sex work is rarely the liberating adventure it is framed to be, especially for young women who enter it believing they are reclaiming control over their bodies and their choices. More often, it is a continuation of patterns shaped by trauma, conditioning, and survival. The statistics on abuse, violence, and exploitation within the industry are not incidental; they are inherent to its structure. When we strip away the rhetoric, what remains is a cycle that overwhelmingly preys on the vulnerable, not a pathway to empowerment. And if we truly care about the well-being of women, we must be willing to look at sex work for what it is, not just what it is marketed to be.

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References

1. Farley, M., Cotton, A., Lynne, J., et al. (2003). "Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Journal of Trauma Practice, 2(3), 33–74.

2. Hossain, M., Zimmerman, C., Abas, M., et al. (2010). "The Relationship of Trauma to Mental Disorders Among Trafficked Women." American Journal of Public Health, 100(12), 2442–2449.

3. Raphael, J., & Shapiro, D. (2004). "Violence in the Lives of Women in Prostitution." Violence Against Women, 10(2), 150–159.

4. van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

5. Putnam, F. W. (1997). Dissociation in Children and Adolescents: A Developmental Perspective. Guilford Press.

6. Trickett, P. K., Noll, J. G., & Putnam, F. W. (2011). "The Impact of Sexual Abuse on Female Development: Lessons from a Multimethod Longitudinal Study." Development and Psychopathology, 23(2), 453–476.

7. Freud, S. (1920). "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922).

8. Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.Basic Books.

9. Coy, M., & Garner, M. (2012). "Definitions, Discourses, and Dilemmas: Policy and Academic Engagement with the Sexual Exploitation of Women and Children." Gender & Sexuality, 13(1), 23–39.

10. Wilson, H. W., & Widom, C. S. (2010). "Sexually Transmitted Diseases Among Adults Who Had Been Abused and Neglected as Children: A 30-Year Prospective Study." American Journal of Public Health, 100(12), 2442–2449.

11. Dworkin, A. (1997). Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women. The Free Press.

12. Silbert, M. H., & Pines, A. M. (1982). "Victimization of Street Prostitutes." Victimology: An International Journal, 7(1-4), 122–133.

13. Baldwin, S. B., Fehrenbacher, A. E., & Eisenman, D. P. (2015). "Psychological Coercion in Human Trafficking: An Application of Biderman’s Framework." Qualitative Health Research, 25(9), 1171–1181.

We have been conditioned to define sadism as an unfortunate condition confined to the individual malfunctioning minds of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Albert Fish. Society has damned the individuals but reasoned with the condition. The reality that sadism is only a short spiritual plunge down into the Inferno is too terrifying to cope with. Well that reality became abundantly clear for me over the last 469 days. There are societies and ideologies among us that not only normalise, but reward the dehumanisation that forms the most fertile grounds for sadism to thrive.

The IDF in Gaza

I wonder where Dante would place the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in his Inferno. I have never seen acts of sadism so blatant en masse as I did in the reports of IDF activity in Gaza. I saw soldiers gathering from far to watch bombs the size of tanks fall on civilian homes as if it were a fireworks display. I saw soldiers wearing the lingerie of dead Palestinian women stolen from their homes. I saw the countless bullets extracted from children’s brains after they were sniped in hospital courtyards. What is most chilling in these reports is the capacity, in a war-zone, for play. The IDF, presumably, have strategic military aims, and yet there is a temptation from the soldiers to exhaust resources (sponsored by US taxpayer money) on perverted gameplay. The IDF soldiers indulge in the torture, torment, and they delight in the suffering of the Palestinians, for their own amusement. I am stressing this point because that is what most essentially defines it as sadism. The unnecessary yet irresistible inclination to torment and inflict pain on your victim. Group acts of sadism such as these do not arise in a vacuum. They are symptomatic of an ethnosupremist culture that systematically rewards sadistic rhetoric towards a specific demographic. Palestinians have been reduced to targets and playthings in the collective consciousness of Israeli society.

The psychology behind such cruelty is rooted in dehumanisation, which strips away the victim’s personhood, making their suffering seem inconsequential—or in this case pleasurable. When Palestinians are framed as subhuman or inherently threatening, soldiers can rationalise their actions as not only acceptable but necessary. The cultural narratives in Israeli society reinforce this dynamic. Propaganda and institutional impunity create an ecosystem where violence against Palestinians is not just tolerated but valorised; it is an experience to be had, an opportunity of a lifetime. Sadism in this context is not a personal failing; it’s a byproduct of an environment built around and founded on dehumanisation.

The group dynamics of the military further exacerbate this. Within the hierarchical and insulated structure of the IDF, sadistic behaviours often become bonding rituals. Soldiers are celebrated, not reprimanded, for cruelty. Acts of brutal military violence are transformed into acts of camaraderie. The collective validation ensures that sadism is perpetuated and embedded into the system that upholds it—a vicious feedback loop.

US Guards in Abu Ghraib Prison

The abuses at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War offer another grotesque example of sadism granted social permission by systemic dehumanisation. In 2003-2004 it was revealed that American soldiers subjected the thousands of unconvicted Iraqi detainees to mock executions, molestation & rape, forced nudity, and other forms of psychosexual degradation, with photos documenting their cruelty. Like the IDF example, these acts were not isolated incidents. They were the predictable outcome of a propaganda-induced ethnosupremist attitude and unchecked power.

In the “war on terror,” Iraqis were portrayed by mainstream media and the film industry as less than human, barbarians to be subdued, terrorists to be broken. This narrative fuelled a culture of supremacy, where cruelty towards such backwards creatures was reframed as a form of justice and even a source of pride. The soldiers at Abu Ghraib were operating within this narrative, internalising it until it warped their sense of morality entirely. Psychologically, this dynamic is consistent with the findings of experiments like the Stanford Prison Study. When given unchecked authority over others, people often resort to cruelty.

It’s important to note that sadism in these contexts often masquerades as duty. Soldiers, after the fact, claim they were “just following orders,” but the glee and pleasure derived from humiliation, evident in their recorded actions and expressions, expose the truth. War is always ugly; it is one of the ugliest things to behold as a human. Far far uglier, however, is to witness the utter delight on the face of a sadist after they have reduced a fellow human to a lifeless and bloodied corpse. The devastating reality of Abu Ghraib was not simply due to bad-faith geopolitical agenda or an abuse of power; it was the grins and smiles, the joy and delight, that shook us to the core.

Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of sadism is its accessibility. It hides in plain sight, where cultural and systemic forces validate fascist rhetoric and smaller acts of cruelty as normal, necessary, or even noble. It is not the distant anomaly we assume it is, but a near potential. To truly reckon with sadism is not just to condemn its manifestations but to introspectively and extrospectively interrogate the conditions, cultural, ideological, and psychological, that allow it to thrive.

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Neural Manipulation

To understand what pornography and its imagery do to us, we must first consider the nature of the brain. It is not a passive receiver of experience. The human brain is a learning prediction machine. It has a phenomenal capacity for forming habits and associations to allow the majority of our mental processes to happen implicitly and below our conscious awareness. This tendency to habituate is a cornerstone of human behaviour and has been observable since the genesis of human existence. Pornography, in its modern precision, has been meticulously designed to exploit these, and a few other, mechanisms in order to create and reinforce neural pathways that lead to addiction.

When consumed, pornography triggers an atypical release of dopamine (a neurotransmitter associated with motivation and reward). However, dopamine itself is not the issue. We are actually releasing the chemical moderately and consistently throughout our lives at a consistent baseline level. This level is altered based on motivation and success. When we take out the trash, when we complete an assignment, when we make our beds in the morning, we are triggering a small short burst of dopamine above baseline that peaks at task completion and returns to baseline afterwards. The more productive we are and the more we commit to and complete the things we say we will, the more consistent dopamine bursts we experience, and the more pleasure and fulfilment we experience in life over time. When damaged or disrupted, this dopamine balance can become dysregulated and difficult to repair. The dopaminergic pathway is susceptible to manipulations that can only be triggered by atypical stimulants like heroin, and cocaine, or behavioural stimulants like gambling and video games, or sexual stimulants like pornography.

However, unlike much of the other varying stimulants out there, pornography’s effects are profound because of its ability to tap into primal and evolutionarily ingrained sexual impulses. Pornography exploits our hardwired sexual desire and organic sexual gratification and, using video imagery, sound, and ease of access, creates a dopaminergic distortion so large, a return to baseline is out of the question. A return to baseline dopamine levels requires a point of achievement - a finish line. With every consumption of pornographic material, dopamine levels spike higher and higher above baseline with no return in sight and mundane commitments become undesirable and pointless - including relational and familial commitments.

Repeated exposure to pornography results in cognitive desensitisation. Like other addictions, porn users will progressively require increasingly extreme/taboo material to achieve the same level of satisfaction (or the same level of dopamine release). This escalation often leads to an aggressive brutalisation of the individual’s imagination, fostering distorted views of intimacy and sexuality. Moral objections aside, this creates a very practical relationship problem. Porn is first and foremost visual, therefore it engages an entirely different neural pathway than physical sexual interaction does. The brain’s reward system becomes rewired to prioritise the artificial visual stimuli of pornography over visceral, physical sexual connection. This creates a serious relational dilemma. When sexual intimacy where you are an active participant is neurologically less stimulating than the visual stimulus of watching other people engage in sexual intimacy, your ability to form or maintain healthy romantic relationships is fundamentally impaired.

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Fetishisation

Beyond addiction, pornography's influence extends to shaping individual sexual preferences and fetishes through Significant Emotional Events (SEEs). When tied to intense emotional or physiological responses, any exposures to specifically extreme or inorganic sexual imagery can create very lasting imprints. These SEEs perpetuate unhealthy behaviours, similar to how childhood traumas influence adult relationship patterns. For instance, early exposure to violent or degrading pornography can, not only normalise such acts, but embed them into neural pathways as arousal triggers.

This psychological manipulation undermines the natural development of sexuality, replacing it with artificial constructs that are often unattainable, unethical and unhealthy. Individuals trapped in this cycle often struggle with crippling guilt, shame, and an inability to achieve intimacy outside of the pornography-induced framework.

Societal Impacts

Pornography’s effects ripple through society, challenging the foundations of interpersonal relationships and family structures. One of the most troubling aspects of pornography is its role in perpetuating misogyny and degrading perceptions of women. Mainstream pornography often portrays women as utterly sexually submissive objects existing solely for male handling and pleasure. This portrayal fosters harmful attitudes among male and female viewers, who may begin to internalise these narratives. Studies have shown that men who consume pornography are more likely to exhibit sexist attitudes, engage in aggressive behaviour, and struggle with empathy toward women.

For women, the impact is equally damaging. Pornography contributes to the hyper-sexualisation of women, limiting their value solely to the sexual dimension. This objectification erodes self-esteem and reduces women’s value to their physical appearance, undermining their autonomy and agency in personal and professional interactions.

The hyper-sexualised narratives promoted by pornography also prioritise short-term gratification over long-term commitment. As a result, users tend find it difficult to form stable, loving relationships. This inability, again, stems from the diminished capacity for emotional intimacy and tendency to view partners as objects rather than equals that pornography causes.

The consequences undoubtedly extend to the institution of the family. The erosion of pair-bonding, which is critical for raising healthy children, leads to higher rates of divorce and single-parent households. The decline of the family undermines the social fabric as a whole.

Pornography is objectively bad for society. Whatever benefits are proposed by those in the industry are either disingenuous and manipulative at worst or simply not significant enough to outweigh the cons at best. Countless clients hold pornography accountable for the havoc and destruction in their lives. I have seen how excruciatingly difficult it is to abstain from it and how deeply it can reach inside a person to rip out their self-esteem. I have no societal solution but I felt compelled to at least share what I have learnt from the problems it imposes on us all.

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