Elisha Krauss, a political commentator and journalist, delivered a lecture on the issues of the adult film industry Tuesday at the Memorial Union.  

Krauss spoke at the event, organized by the student groups Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and University Lecture Program, on how the industry affects society. 

Specifically, Krauss spoke on how porn affects society at large, the different aspects that cause certain issues, how it affects relationships and more.  

Caleb O’Gara, a senior studying meteorology and the president of the YAF Chapter at ISU, spoke on why this topic is important to his organization. 

“We think that pornography is one of the most impactful things on our generation right now, that so many people consume it, but nobody really talks about it,” O’Gara said. 

He went on to say how it negatively affects people’s health and the industry itself has legality issues. 

“Unfortunately, pornography consumption is linked to a whole host of negative health effects to the people who consume it,” O’Gara said. “But also the people that they are partners with or the people, the woman and the sex, the foreign industries were trafficked.”

O’Gara also spoke on why his organization chose Krauss to speak.

“She wrote an article, I believe it was either June or July this year, talking about the Diddy trials and kind of hooking and how pornography played into that and the whole mess that Diddy got into,” O’Gara said. “So she does have some history with this. She’s covered issues like this before.”

The first issue Krauss spoke on was children being exposed to pornographic content. She expressed how since 2020, children have had more and more unrestricted access to screens.

“Every single line of every age had access to a screen device and the worldwide web at their finger tip,” Krauss said. “Including children. Prior to COVID, the average age of a child viewing pornography for the first time was 11. Recent studies show that by 12 years old now, kids are actively Googling things that they’ve seen in photographic material, and obviously do not understand.”

She continued speaking on this issue, moving on to say how progressives and left-leaning people are the ones against proposed protections.

“Without fail…it is progressives that are arguing against these ID laws that would do so much to protect children from seeing these images that they’re not old enough to comprehend,” Krauss said.

Later in the lecture, Krauss further illustrated and emphasized her belief that porn is as large an issue as drugs, even comparing it to heroin, arguing that it is an addictive substance that alters people’s minds, their relationships and their impact on society. 

Krauss went on to talk about how in the modern age, online influences that promote unrealistic body image creates anxiety and depression in young women and porn is the leading cause of that in men. 

“It’s scientifically proven that repeated viewing of pornography can literally rewire the brain’s reward system and men’s testosterone levels,” Krauss said. “It creates cognitive function issues, contributes to behavioral problems.” 

Krauss began ending her lecture speaking on how minority women were displaced during the pandemic, because they had nowhere to go and fell into prostitution, either by force immediately or by their own accord, and had no support to leave it. She called the entire conversation around sex work a human rights issue. 

Krauss drew connections to human trafficking and drug use in both the adult films industry and sex work, criticizing how such a large issue spanning multiple human rights issues could become socially acceptable. Her final criticism was over the foster care system that exists in much of the USA, and how the majority of young women who age out of the system fall into sex work. 

Abigail Larson, a sophomore majoring in architecture, attended the lecture and shared her thoughts. 

“Overall I have to say she had some very good statistics and I appreciated that a lot, since it’s such an informational topic and as she said, a human rights issue,” Larson said. “One thing that was really uncompelling for me as a listener, she said she’d be as unbiased as she could be but sprinkled in a lot of politics. At some points, she was more rambling than addressing.”