We take care of what we eat. We take care of what we breathe.

But perhaps we pay much less attention to something we consume for hours every day: what we let into our minds.

Images, videos, and messages that we receive through social media and other digital channels, and which, repeated time and time again, end up becoming part of the everyday landscape.

Pornography is also included among this content. Not everyone consumes it, but its reach is far from marginal: according to Semrush Traffic Analytics, in July 2026 the four main pornographic websites accumulated nearly 9 billion visits worldwide in a single month. We’re talking about visits, not unique users; even so, the magnitude of the figure shows that it constitutes one of the major forms of digital consumption in our time.

And what a society consumes, tolerates, and normalizes ends up shaping its perspective.

That’s why I think we should dare to open an uncomfortable debate: should all content be acceptable simply because there is an adult willing to consume it?

My answer is no.

A society constantly establishes limits when it believes there is a greater good to protect. We cannot drive at any speed. We cannot cross certain traffic signals. We cannot sell any product under any conditions.

We do not necessarily understand these rules as enemies of freedom, but as limits that allow us to protect collective goods.

So why not also ask ourselves what limits we need to protect human dignity?  Let’s commit to valuable content, to a society that says NO in order to win a resounding YES.

For me, pornography poses precisely that problem. It should be banned in all its forms and channels, both physical and digital.

When another person’s body is by default turned into a product to provoke arousal and satisfy the desire of the observer, there is a risk that we will stop contemplating that person in their entirety and begin to consume them as an object.

And that’s the crux of the matter:  a person should never be an object of consumption. Not a woman. Not a man. Not anyone.

The problem, moreover, transcends the screen.

Consuming negative content often becomes a vice, while positive content becomes a virtue.

Our understanding of sexuality inevitably shapes our expectations, our intimacy, and how we relate to others. Our lives. And a culture that systematically separates sexuality, connection, responsibility, and dignity deserves, at the very least, profound reflection. The facts speak for themselves: the countless sexual crimes and lives shattered by the inability to control one’s passions.

Human beings possess something extraordinary: they can experience sexuality through encounter, through eye contact. Other animals don’t look each other in the face…

That’s why I think we need to be much more demanding.

I advocate for extremely restrictive regulation and, personally, the elimination of pornography and content whose essence is the objectification or sexual degradation of people.

But banning isn’t enough.  We need to build an alternative.

Educate to love. Educate to respect. Educate to understand that desire and dignity should never be enemies. Educate our young people so they discover that a human relationship can be infinitely deeper than consuming a body through a screen. That, in the medium and long term, knowing how to look, respect, and love is a guarantee of success.

Because freedom is not just about being able to consume what we want, it’s about being able to decide  what kind of person we want to become.

Perhaps we should start asking ourselves much more often:

Does what I’m consuming feed the person I want to be… or does it end up making me a slave to what I consume?

What your body consumes affects your body. What your mind consumes influences how you see things.

And the way we look at others largely determines how we treat them.

That’s the debate I think is worth opening.

Where would you draw the line between individual freedom and the protection of human dignity?