Awais, but online.

The Long Wait: Delayed Marriage, Unlimited Porn, and What It Has Done to Pakistani Men

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by

Awais
in

There is this particular kind of conversation that doesn’t happen at the dinner table, because it would embarrass everyone sitting at it. It doesn’t happen at the mosque, because they have a single answer to it: “lower your gaze, problem solved.” It doesn’t happen between friends, because between friends the subject exists only as a joke. And it certainly doesn’t happen between a father and a son, because in most desi homes, a boy is either a child or a man, and there is no stage in between where such a thing could be discussed.

So it happens alone, at nights, on a phone, under a blanket.

I see men in their twenties and early thirties whose entire inner life has quietly reorganised itself around one particular kind of appetite. These are not bad men. These are in my opinion untreated patients. They have been asked to wait ten or fifteen years longer than their grandfathers waited, on average, in a world their grandfathers did not interact with.

This essay is my attempt to name the thing and then show you the sources linked at the bottom. If you think this is moral panic, read the sources. If you think it is not serious enough, read the sources once more.

Part One: We Have a Word for It

The biggest evidence of this phenomon is but a vocabulary!

In Pakistan we have a word for the act of going somewhere for the sole purpose of looking at women. In Lahore and much of Punjab the word is poondi. Elsewhere you will hear taroo (from taarna, to stare) or tharki. English-language Pakistani media have printed “poondi paradise” to describe a shopping mall on a weekend. A satirical column in The Express Tribune, written in the voice of a proud practitioner, lays out the method with an accuracy: the food court, because a girl who is eating cannot leave; the parking lot, because a girl waiting for her ride cannot leave either; and then the street, where “we whistle, leer and make smooching sounds.”

I studied at NUST in Islamabad. It is, by most rankings, among the best universities this country has given us. The students there are the ones who cleared entry tests that thousands of others failed, the ones their families moved cities for. And in the evenings, boys from that campus would announce, casually, in front of their friends, that they were going to a certain café to do poondi. Not whispered. Announced. The way one would announce going for tea after dinner. I am the eye-witness to this activity in my hostel’s mess hall and it’s certainly not only in NUST.

The word being added to the vocab of the culture of Pakistan means the activity now is slowly becoming disassociated with shame. It means there is an accepted social category for it, a recognised verb, agreed-upon venues, and an audience of peers who will laugh rather than object. The boys who don’t get into universities do the same thing on the street, at bus stops, outside girls’ colleges (writer has personally witnessed this time and time again outside his local Punjab College Campus) at the exact minute the gates open. The venues change depending on the location and routine of boys. The behaviour stays the same across country.

A culture does not invent a casual word for something rare. We have a word for it because it is a mass activity, and we have a funny word for it because we have collectively agreed not to look at it directly.

The age of Internet

None of this began with the internet. “Eve teasing” — that grotesque euphemism South Asia inherited — was being reported in Pakistan as far back as the 1980s. What the internet changed is the intensity of the appetite that arrives at the café.

Here is the data on the receiving end of it, and it is not ambiguous.

A UN Women Safety Audit conducted across five Pakistani cities in 2020 found that more than 80 per cent of women face harassment in public places and that 90.3 per cent of the women surveyed did not consider it a crime, having normalised it as part of daily life. Read those two numbers next to each other. It is not merely that it happens to almost everyone. It is that almost everyone it happens to has stopped classifying it as a wrong.

A World Bank survey in Peshawar found 32 per cent of women reporting at least one form of sexual harassment, and noted that the threat of it, not only the event, governs where women go, when, and whether at all. In an online survey of female university and college students across Islamabad, Lahore and Rawalpindi, only 2.8 per cent said they had never experienced non-verbal, verbal or physical harassment. In a study of over 200 young people in Gujranwala, 96 per cent of the girls reported street harassment.

And a study cited in the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women’s own material found that 99 per cent of women had no knowledge of Section 509 of the Penal Code, the law that defines harassment in public places. So the near-totality of the country’s women experience it, almost none of them call it a crime, and almost none of them know a law exists.

This is the environment. Now let us talk about what is filling the young men standing in it.

The Wait Got Longer Across Generations

Start with the least controversial fact in this essay: across almost the entire world, men are marrying later than they ever have.

In the United States, the median age at which men first marry has climbed past thirty — around 30.2 in 2024, up from roughly 22.8 in the 1950s. In Britain, the share of men who had ever married by age thirty fell from more than eight in ten in 1976 to about one in four. Across rich countries, the average age at first marriage rose by roughly four years between 2000 and 2025 alone.

Pakistan is not exempt, though we like to pretend we are. Gallup Pakistan’s analysis of the 7th Population Census (2023) found that roughly a third of the country has never married, with that share crossing thirty per cent in Lahore, Islamabad, Karachi and Quetta, and with men making up the clear majority of the never-married population above thirty-five. The singulate mean age at marriage, the demographer’s way of saying “the age people actually marry”, has been climbing here for six decades.

The reasons are not mysterious, and no single person is to blame. For those only looking to blame, blame the institution of Parliament, that is usually held for brief periods by various members of politics, and from where the policies flow downwards. The general reasons are given below:

  • Jobs arrive later and pay less. Pakistan’s Labour Force Survey 2024-25 put youth unemployment (ages 15-24) at 12.6 per cent, up from 11.1 per cent four years earlier, while the labour force grew by nearly 14 million. The Economic Survey revised overall unemployment up to 7.1 per cent. Graduate unemployment has been reported by PIDE at levels far above the official headline.
  • Weddings cost more than a year’s salary. Between the hall, the jahez (dowry), the barat, the valima and the family’s terror of being judged, a wedding in Pakistan has become an act of competitive ruin. Punjab has legislated against ostentatious weddings more than once; the laws are ignored roughly as fast as they are passed. Enforcement via Adult Education is close to none.
  • Housing is a fantasy for a young man on a salary, in a country where inflation has repeatedly run at double digits.
  • Families want the boy “settled” first — and “settled” is a finish line that keeps moving. First a degree. Then a job. Then a good job. Then a plot. Then a house. Then, when he is thirty-four, a bride who must be twenty-four.

Every one of those reasons is rational to someone. Add them up and the output is still the same: a healthy young man is handed a decade or more of enforced celibacy at exactly the age when his body is loudest.

That decade of “gap” is the subject of this essay.

The gap is sealed shut on both ends

Here is what makes Pakistani version of the problem sharper than the Western version.

In Europe or North America, the delay in marriage is partly a delay in ceremony. Young men there date, form attachments, have unremarkable friendships with women, get rejected, learn what a woman is actually like when she is bored or tired or annoyed with you. Their appetite is still commercially exploited, but their picture of women is being constantly corrected by contact with real women.

Here the delay is total. Marriage is postponed to thirty, and everything that might otherwise have humanised the wait is forbidden. No dating. Often no friendship. On most campuses, not even a shared table.

At the University of the Punjab, students have described canteens where girls are not permitted at all, and canteens where curtains are drawn between the sexes; one student described being made to stand at the back of a chemistry lab, “as long as we can hear the lab attendant’s voice.” In 2019 the University of Lahore expelled two students for a proposal and a hug on campus, after the video went viral. In 2016, a group of students with clubs marched through Punjab University looking for a boy who had been seen sitting with a girl.

So the architecture is this: a woman is not a classmate, not a colleague, not a friend, not a possible wife for another twelve years; she is only a forbidden category until Nikkah (marriage ceremony). And a forbidden category in a young man’s mind is exactly the thing he will think again and again about.

Segregation is defended as the cure for fixation. In practice it is the factory. The boys in the curtained canteen are not thinking about chemistry. They are thinking about the other side of the curtain and mark my words, in the evening they will go and do poondi where you don’t have curtains drawn.

What Fills the Gap

A young man in 1975 who had to wait until twenty-eight also had to wait in the world. His frustration was real, but it was bounded by geography and scarcity. He was bounded by the simple physical difficulty of finding anything to look at. The waiting was hard but pseudo-solution was not industrialised.

Today the gap is filled before the boy knows there is a gap. Research by the Children’s Commissioner for England, a nationally representative survey of over a thousand 16-to-21-year-olds, found that the average age at which a child first sees pornography is thirteen. Twenty-seven per cent had seen it by eleven. Ten per cent by nine. When the survey was repeated in 2025 with the same method, nothing had improved: seventy per cent said they had seen it before turning eighteen, up from sixty-four per cent, and the share whose first exposure was accidental had jumped from 38 per cent to 59 per cent. Most of them were not looking. It found them.

That is Britain, which has an Online Safety Act, an age-verification regime, and a government office that publishes surveys about it. We have hushes and silence in its place.

“But porn is banned here”

It is, and that is part of the problem.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority began blocking pornographic websites in November 2011. In 2016, on the Supreme Court’s direction, ISPs were handed a list of 429,343 domains to block. In 2019, around 800,000 more were added. By 2020 the PTA was telling a Senate committee that it had also blocked 11,000 proxies, and admitting the obvious: the content is still reached, routinely, through VPNs.

What the ban has actually achieved is not the removal of pornography. It is the removal of the conversation. You cannot run a public-health campaign about a thing the state insists does not exist here. You cannot put it in a school curriculum. You cannot let a psychologist discuss it on a morning show. You cannot even collect honest national data on it, which is why this essay leans on British and American studies, and why that is itself an indictment.

A word on the claim you have certainly heard: that Google data once showed Pakistan as the world’s number-one country for pornography searches. Please stop repeating it. That story ran in 2010 and again around 2013, sourced to loose readings of Google Trends. Google publicly disputed the accuracy of the figures, and Pakistani journalists in The Express Tribune went back to the same tool and found Pakistan nowhere near the top for the relevant terms. I would rather lose a good weapon for this argument than keep a false one. The honest statement is narrower but still just as damning: the state has blocked over a million URLs and concedes that access continues via VPN, which tells you the demand did not go anywhere. So the state’s solution did not work.

Why the Brain Never Had a Chance

Your brain runs on a chemical called dopamine. The popular description of this chemical industrialized by Reels on Instagram and Shorts on Youtube as “the pleasure chemical” is wrong. Dopamine is closer to a wanting chemical. It is the system that decides what you pursue, not the system that decides what you enjoy. Researchers call this the difference between wanting and liking, and in addiction the two come apart: the wanting grows enormous while the liking stays flat or shrinks. That is why an addict of any kind will tell you he no longer even enjoys it, and will still, an hour later, do it again.

In 2014, a Cambridge team led by Valerie Voon put nineteen men with compulsive sexual behaviour and nineteen without into an fMRI scanner and showed them explicit videos. The compulsive group reported greater desire but similar liking compared with the controls — exactly the wanting/liking split seen in drug addiction. Their brains lit up in the same regions that light up in cocaine and alcohol cue-reactivity studies. One more finding from that paper was that the younger the man, the stronger the response. The developing brain is the more reactive one. Ours is a country where the median age is around twenty-two.

The same year, Simone Kühn and Jürgen Gallinat published work in JAMA Psychiatry linking hours of pornography consumption to differences in brain structure and connectivity; there was less grey matter in the right caudate and weaker connectivity to the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex of the Brain is the part responsible for saying not now but the connection to that part becomes weaker and weaker as the addiction grows.

Why would ordinary sexuality do this, when it never did the same to our grandpas? Because what is on the screen is not ordinary sexuality. Biologists have a term for a stimulus exaggerated beyond anything in nature: a supernormal stimulus. A bird will abandon its own speckled egg to sit on a plaster one that is bigger and bluer. The bird is not stupid. The bird’s instincts were built for a world in which no such egg existed.

No man in history has had visual access to thousands of novel partners in an evening. The novelty itself is the drug, and a reward system tuned for scarcity is now being fed at industrial scale. Layer that onto a fifteen-year enforced wait and a society where a real woman cannot even be a friend, and you do not have a bad habit. You have a machine that won’t be stopped by banning millions of domains!

What It Costs

In 2019 the World Health Organisation added Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder (code 6C72) to the ICD-11, the manual doctors use to classify illness. It is defined as a persistent failure to control intense, repetitive sexual urges, continuing despite negative consequences and despite deriving little actual satisfaction. Problematic pornography use is its most common form. Estimates of risk vary by measure and country; one large validation study across 42 countries put the range at 3.2 to 16.6 per cent of the population; reviews put high-risk compulsive sexual behaviour at roughly 4.2 to 7 per cent of men. If we the lowest number in these statistics, we are still looking at millions of Pakistanis.

It shows up in the body. Until about 2006, the year free streaming “tube” sites arrived, erectile dysfunction in men under forty was rare. Kinsey’s mid-century work found it in under one per cent of men below thirty; a 2002 meta-analysis of high-quality studies found rates around two per cent for men under forty. Then the numbers moved: Swiss researchers found ED in thirty per cent of men aged 18 to 24; an Italian study found one in four patients presenting with new-onset ED was under forty; a 2021 international survey of 3,419 men aged 18 to 35 found associations between problematic pornography consumption and erectile dysfunction. The 2016 review by Park and colleagues, seven of its eight authors were US Navy medical officers, argued that traditional explanations cannot account for a rise of that speed, and proposed that internet pornography’s specific properties (endless novelty, easy escalation to more extreme material, video format) can condition arousal to things a real partner cannot reproduce.

Conditioning arousal to something a partner cannot reproduce. A man spends a decade training his body to respond to a screen, then marries and wonders why the room is so silent. In our context he cannot tell his wife, cannot tell a doctor, cannot tell his mother who is asking about grandchildren so he tells nobody, and a quick conclusion is handed to him: it is your fault.

It shows up in how men see women. Paul Wright’s 2016 meta-analysis in the Journal of Communication pooled twenty-two studies across seven countries and found pornography consumption associated with sexually aggressive behaviour in the US and internationally, among men and women, in cross-sectional and longitudinal designs. The association was stronger for verbal than physical aggression, and violent content appeared to worsen it.

The attitude figures from young people are, to me, the most frightening numbers in this essay. In the Children’s Commissioner survey, 47 per cent of 16-to-21-year-olds believed girls expect sex to involve aggression, and 42 per cent believed most girls enjoy it. In the 2025 follow-up, 44 per cent agreed that “girls may say no at first but then can be persuaded.” More than a third of 18-to-21-year-olds had actively sought out content depicting sexual violence.

These are not beliefs a boy reasons his way into. They are absorbed from a curriculum he never enrolled in via the internet and if that is what it produces in a country with sex education, consider what it produces in dear Pakistan.

The Comments Section As the Evidence

If you want the Pakistani version of the attitude data, you do not need a survey. Open any public post by a Pakistani woman and scroll down.

You already know what is there. The evaluation of her body under a post about her business. The “marry me” under a post about her father’s death. The “yeh hamari tehzeeb nahi” under a photograph of her in a graduation gown. The men who arrive in her inbox in the hundreds, who have never met her, whose opening message is a proposition. The screenshots of her face circulated in groups. The instant, coordinated move from lust to moral rage the moment she declines, because lust and moral rage were always the same feelings, just separated by the curtains on the canteen.

The formal record backs up what the scrolling shows. The Digital Rights Foundation’s helpline has received over 20,000 complaints since December 2016, including 3,171 in 2024 alone, an average of 264 new cases a month. Women are the primary targets: they account for 85 per cent of all non-consensual intimate image cases the helpline handles. In 2022, 58.6 per cent of complainants were women, and the harasser was typically male and a stranger.

And it does not stay online. In 2025, when 17-year-old Sana Yousaf was killed in Islamabad after reportedly rejecting a man’s repeated advances, platforms filled not only with graphic content but with praise for her killer. In Quetta, a father confessed to killing his 15-year-old daughter over her TikTok activity. These are not stories about technology. They are stories about what a certain kind of man does when a woman turns out to be a person with a will of her own; and the digital record is simply the first time in our history that this appetite has been written down at scale, in public, by the men themselves, with their names attached.

That is what I mean by backwardness. Not that we are poor, or rural, or religious. Backwardness is a thirty-year-old man with a smartphone and a degree, typing something under a stranger’s photograph that he would be beaten for saying aloud in a bazaar, and then going for Jummah prayers.

The Children Nobody Counts

There is one more Pakistani-specific problem, and this is the one I find hardest to write.

Sahil, an Islamabad-based organisation, has monitored newspaper-reported child abuse cases since 1996. Its Cruel Numbers 2024 report documented 3,364 cases of child abuse reported in the press across Pakistan in 2024 — an average of nine children a day. Of these, 1,791 victims (53 per cent) were girls and 1,573 (47 per cent) were boys. The most vulnerable age group was 11 to 15, and in that band more boys than girls were reported. Abusers were most often acquaintances, along with strangers and, the report states this, religious teachers. In the first half of 2024 alone, Sahil also logged 48 cases of pornography produced after sexual abuse.

These are only the cases that reached a newspaper, in a country where stigma is the single strongest force in family life. The real figure is unknowable and larger.

I include this for a reason that goes beyond horror. We talk about the boys in this country as perpetrators; and the poondi, the comments, the harassment are perpetration and I will not soften that. But a very large number of the men doing these things were, at eleven or twelve, a statistic in a report like this one. They were abused by a cousin, a tutor, a qari sahib, a shopkeeper. Nobody was told. Nothing happened. There was no counselling because there is no counselling, and no language because we refuse to teach the language.

A boy whose first sexual experience was abuse, whose second was pornography at thirteen, and whose first sanctioned experience will arrive at thirty, has been handed something no amount of “lower your gaze” will repair.

We are producing damaged men in bulk and then acting surprised by the damage.

Where I Might Be Wrong

If I gave you only the evidence on my side, you would be right to distrust me. Here is the strongest case against what I have argued.

Correlation is not causation. Almost all the human data above is observational. Men who use a great deal of pornography differ from men who don’t in a hundred other ways — loneliness, anxiety, impulsivity, unemployment, poor sleep. Some of what looks like damage caused by porn may be distress that drove someone to porn in the first place. Honest researchers on all sides say this.

The “addiction” label is genuinely contested. The WHO deliberately classified Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder as an impulse-control disorder, not a behavioural addiction which is a real scientific disagreement, not a technicality. A substantial body of work led by Joshua Grubbs argues for something called moral incongruence: the finding that self-reported “addiction” to pornography is predicted far more strongly by how much a person morally disapproves of it than by how much he actually uses it. A religious man who watches once a week may suffer more distress than a secular man who watches daily. If you are reading this in Pakistan, that finding is about you, and you should sit with it rather than dismiss it. Shame is itself a harm. Some of the suffering in our community is shame doing the damage, not dopamine.

Poondi is older than the internet. Men stared and whistled in Lahore in 1965. I am not claiming pornography invented Pakistani misogyny; our misogyny predates electricity. My claim is narrower: that an old cultural pattern has been handed an engine it never had before, and that the engine is running at a volume the culture has no solution for.

Most of my hard data is Western. The neuroscience, the ED studies, the attitude surveys come from Britain, America, Europe. I have used them because the equivalent Pakistani research largely does not exist, and it does not exist precisely because of the silence this essay is about. Applying it here requires judgement, and you are entitled to weigh my judgement lower than you weigh the data.

I still believe the core argument stands. But I would rather you hold it with the objections attached than without them.

Part Nine: What the Tradition Already Knew

There is a narration reported in both Bukhari and Muslim in which the Prophet PBUH addresses young men directly: whoever among you is able to marry, let him marry, for it restrains the gaze and guards chastity; and whoever is not able, let him fast, for it is a shield.

I am not a scholar and this is not a fatwa. But look at the structure of that instruction, because it is remarkable. It does not say suppress it. It does not say it will pass and it certainly does not say lower your gaze. It names the appetite as real, gives the primary solution, and then provides a fallback for those who cannot access the primary solution. It assumes a gap will exist for some men, and prescribes something active for the gap.

What our families have retained is the gaze-lowering and discarded everything else. We kept the prohibition, removed the provision, extended the wait by fifteen years, handed the boy a smartphone at eleven, forbade him from so much as sharing a table with a woman; and then expressed disappointment in his character.

You cannot raise the difficulty, remove the support, and call the result a moral failure.

Marriage Is A Solution. It Is Not The Solution.

I want to be precise here, because this is where essays like mine usually go wrong in one of two directions; either “just get them married” or “marriage has nothing to do with it.” Both are false.

The case for marriage being part of the answer is real. The appetite is real and the wait is artificially extended by things that are not sacred: wedding costs, dowry expectations, the plot-before-nikah rule, the demand that a man be financially complete before he is allowed to be a husband. None of those is religion. All of them are custom, and custom is changeable. A society that has decided a man must be earning such and such amounts before he may marry should not be shocked by what the wait makes him be.

But marriage alone will not fix a conditioned brain. Married men are among the heaviest consumers. A habit compounding for twelve years does not resign on the wedding night; it simply acquires a witness. Worse, “marry him off and he’ll settle down” has produced a specific Pakistani tragedy: a young woman handed the job of fixing a man nobody ever treated. She is not a therapy. She is not a filter. She is not a cure. If your plan for your son’s compulsion is your future daughter-in-law, your plan is simply to throw off the responsibility of your product on to someone else’s shoulders.

So: one of several. Here are the others.

For the individual man

  • Understand that wanting and liking have come apart. If you no longer enjoy it and still do it, that is not weak character; that is the signature of a sensitised reward system, and it is why willpower keeps failing you at the same hour every night. Treat it as an engineering problem before a moral one.
  • Remove the access path, don’t fight at the moment of craving. DNS-level filtering, no phone in the bedroom, a device that is not yours to unlock at 2 a.m. You will lose the 2 a.m. fight every time; win at 9 p.m. instead.
  • Replace the hour, don’t just subtract it. An emptied hour refills with the same thing. Gym, a craft, a second income, anything with a scoreboard.
  • Get treated if it has become distress or impairment. There is a formal diagnosis and a small but real treatment literature; cognitive behavioural and acceptance-based therapies have the most support. Asking for help is not exotic and not un-Islamic.
  • Stop doing poondi, and, harder, stop laughing when your friends do. This behaviour is sustained by an audience. The group is the point. One man declining to laugh changes the maths for everyone in the car.

For families

  • Stop treating marriage as a reward for financial completion. A boy who must own a house before he may marry will be thirty-five, and you chose that for him.
  • Kill the wedding economy in your own house first. Not by waiting for a law. By being the family that does one dish, no jahez, and dares the relatives to say something.
  • Talk to your sons before thirteen, because thirteen is when the internet will do it for you. The choice is not between an innocent son and a conversation. It is between a conversation and whatever an algorithm decides to teach him.
  • Learn what child sexual abuse looks like, and believe your son when he tells you. Nine children a day, and nearly half of them boys.

For institutions and the state

  • Sex education, called whatever you need to call it. Life-skills-based education; consent, body safety, what is and is not normal, who to tell; is what Sahil’s own leadership has been demanding for years. Every year we refuse, another cohort learns it from a tube site.
  • Mosques and schools need more than two words on the subject. If “lower your gaze” is the complete curriculum, the curriculum has failed and the failure rate is visible in every café in Islamabad.
  • Enforce Section 509 and make women aware it exists; when 99 per cent of women don’t know the law and 90 per cent don’t classify harassment as a crime, the law becomes useless.
  • Age verification is not censorship. Other countries have implemented it; we have implemented a blanket ban that stops nothing and silences everything. A design requirement on platforms is policy and required desperately.
  • Fund the helplines and the cybercrime wings properly. DRF found that only 36 per cent of its 2024 harassment cases came from cities where an FIA cybercrime wing even operates.

And one thing I cannot put under a heading

Let young men and young women be ordinary around each other. Not in a way that offends anyone’s faith, in classrooms, in canteens, in offices, on the same side of the curtain. Every hour a young man spends near a woman who is simply a person, bored and tired and unimpressed by him, is an hour in which she is being converted from a category back into a human being. That conversion is the single cheapest intervention available to us, let’s not outlaw the solution.

Why I Wrote This

Because I keep meeting men my age who are funny, capable, kind to their mothers, generous with their friends, and whose inner lives have been colonised by a single appetite they never chose and cannot discuss with a living soul. They are not degenerates. They are the products of a specific historical accident: the first generation asked to wait the longest, while being offered the most, with the least permission to speak about either.

And because on the other side of it are women who have stopped walking to the shop at certain hours, who have learned to type around a comments section, who have decided that the internet is not for them.

Naming it is not the cure. But nothing gets cured while it stays unnameable and right now the only name we have for it is a joke.

Sources

All links checked at time of publication. Where a finding is contested, I have linked the contesting work too.

Pakistan: harassment and public space

  1. UN Women Pakistan / Women’s Development Department Punjab, Women’s Safety Audit in Public Places (2020) — 80%+ of women harassed in public; 90.3% did not consider it a crime. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Field%20Office%20ESEAsia/Docs/Publications/2021/03/Final%20Womens%20Safety%20Audit%20Report%202020.pdf
  2. UN Women, National Report on the Status of Women in Pakistan 2023 — A Summary. https://pakistan.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/summary_-nrsw-inl_final.pdf
  3. World Bank, Sexual Harassment in Public Spaces: Analysis of New Survey Data from Peshawar, Pakistan — includes the Islamabad/Lahore/Rawalpindi student figure (2.8% never harassed). https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/099100002222213022
  4. Punjab Commission on the Status of Women, “On Road to Success” — awareness of Section 509. https://pcsw.punjab.gov.pk/node/246
  5. Stop Street Harassment, statistics compilation — Gujranwala study (96% of girls). https://stopstreetharassment.org/resources/statistics/statistics-academic-studies/
  6. The Express Tribune, “A ‘taroo’s treat’ in Karachi” — satirical first-person account of poondi. https://tribune.com.pk/article/34839/a-taroos-treat-in-karachi
  7. Dawn, “Campus diaries: Forbidden friendships in Pakistan’s universities” — segregation at Punjab University. https://www.dawn.com/news/1309234

Pakistan: online abuse

  1. Digital Rights Foundation, Digital Security Helpline Annual Report 2024 — 20,020 complaints since 2016; 3,171 in 2024; 85% of NCII cases target women. https://digitalrightsfoundation.pk/digital-security-helpline-annual-report-2024/
  2. Digital Rights Foundation, Cyber Harassment Helpline Annual Report 2022. https://digitalrightsfoundation.pk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Cyber-Harassment-Helpline-Annual-Report-2022-1.pdf
  3. Digital Rights Foundation, Case Study: Viral Misogyny and the Killing of Sana Yousaf (2025). https://digitalrightsfoundation.pk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Case-Study-Viral-Misogyny-and-the-Killing-of-Sana-Yousaf.pdf

Pakistan: children

  1. Sahil, Cruel Numbers 2024 — 3,364 cases; nine children a day; 47% boys. https://sahil.org/cruel-numbers/
  2. Dawn, “Over 3,350 child abuse cases reported across Pakistan in 2024: report.” https://www.dawn.com/news/1908682
  3. Dawn, “Over 1,600 cases of child abuse reported during last six months” — includes 48 cases of pornography following abuse. https://www.dawn.com/news/1851068

Pakistan: the ban, and the claim you should stop repeating

  1. Wikipedia, “Pornography in Pakistan” (with primary citations to PTA actions, 2011-2019). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_Pakistan
  2. The Express Tribune, “2,384 child porn sites blocked, PTA tells senate panel” — PTA concedes VPN access continues. https://tribune.com.pk/story/2015838/2384-child-porn-sites-blocked-pta-tells-senate-panel
  3. Dawn, “Pakistan top on porn search: Google denies.” https://www.dawn.com/news/933521
  4. The Express Tribune, “Did Pakistan really top the ‘porn-searching’ list?” — a Pakistani debunking of the Pakistani claim. https://tribune.com.pk/article/25840/did-pakistan-really-top-the-porn-searching-list

Marriage timing and economics

  1. Gallup Pakistan, Marital Status in Pakistan — analysis of the 7th Population Census 2023 and PDHS. https://gallup.com.pk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Marital-status-in-Pakistan.pdf
  2. Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, Labour Force Survey 2024-25 — youth unemployment. Coverage: https://www.thenews.pk/tns/detail/1430882-those-whose-future-is-at-risk
  3. U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Marital Status Tables. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html
  4. Office for National Statistics (UK), “Married by 30? You’re now in the minority.” https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2019/04/01/married-by-30-youre-now-in-the-minority/
  5. National Center for Family & Marriage Research, Median Age at First Marriage, 2023 (FP-25-09). https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/FP-25-09.html

Exposure and prevalence

  1. Children’s Commissioner for England, “A lot of it is actually just abuse”: Young people and pornography (January 2023). https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/resource/a-lot-of-it-is-actually-just-abuse-young-people-and-pornography/
  2. Children’s Commissioner for England, 2025 follow-up survey — press notice with headline findings. https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/news-and-blogs/press-notice-children-see-violent-pornography-by-accident-via-social-media-and-as-young-as-six-new-research-from-the-childrens-commissioner-reveals
  3. Bőthe et al., cross-cultural validation of problematic pornography use measures across 42 countries (3.2-16.6% risk range), summarised in: https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2006/11/3/article-p643.xml
  4. “Prevalence of problematic pornography use: a meta-analysis,” Sexual Health (2025). https://doi.org/10.1071/SH25054

Brain and mechanism

  1. Voon V. et al., “Neural Correlates of Sexual Cue Reactivity in Individuals with and without Compulsive Sexual Behaviours,” PLOS ONE 9(7): e102419 (2014). https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0102419
  2. Kühn S. & Gallinat J., “Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated With Pornography Consumption,” JAMA Psychiatry 71(7):827-34 (2014). doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.93
  3. Brand M. et al., “Ventral striatum activity when watching preferred pornographic pictures is correlated with symptoms of internet pornography addiction,” NeuroImage 129:224-232 (2016).
  4. World Health Organization, ICD-11, 6C72 Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder. https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en

Sexual function

  1. Park B.Y., Wilson G., Berger J. et al., “Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports,” Behavioral Sciences 6(3):17 (2016). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5039517/
  2. Jacobs T. et al., “Associations Between Online Pornography Consumption and Sexual Dysfunction in Young Men,” JMIR (2021). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8569536/
  3. Kirby M., “Pornography and its impact on the sexual health of men,” Trends in Urology & Men’s Health (2021). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/tre.791

Attitudes and behaviour

  1. Wright P.J., Tokunaga R.S. & Kraus A., “A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies,” Journal of Communication 66(1):183-205 (2016). https://academic.oup.com/joc/article-abstract/66/1/183/4082427

The case against my argument — read these too

  1. Grubbs J.B., Perry S.L., Wilt J.A. & Reid R.C., “Pornography Problems Due to Moral Incongruence: An Integrative Model with a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2019). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-018-1248-x
  2. Kraus S.W., Krueger R.B., Briken P. et al., “Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder in the ICD-11,” World Psychiatry 17(1):109-110 (2018) — on why it was classified as impulse-control rather than addiction.
  3. “Treatments and interventions for compulsive sexual behavior disorder with a focus on problematic pornography use: a preregistered systematic review,” Journal of Behavioral Addictions 11(3) (2022). https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2006/11/3/article-p643.xml

Disclaimer

I am not a doctor, a psychologist, a psychiatrist or a religious scholar, and nothing in this essay is medical, psychological or religious advice. It is one person’s argument, built from published research that I have linked in full so you can check it against my reading of it.

Most of the research cited here is observational, which means it can show that two things travel together but cannot prove that one causes the other. A large share of it comes from Western samples and may not transfer cleanly to Pakistan; where I have applied it to our context, that is my judgement. I have deliberately included work that contradicts my thesis, and I would rather you read those sources than take my word for anything.

The Pakistani figures on harassment, cyber abuse and child abuse come from newspaper monitoring, helpline records and survey samples, all of which undercount by their nature. Treat them as floors, not ceilings.

Individual experience varies enormously, and no statistic describes any particular person. If the patterns described here match your own life and are causing you real distress or affecting your relationships, your work or your health, please speak to a qualified mental health professional rather than relying on an essay from a stranger on the internet.

Nothing here is intended to shame anyone. If any part of it reads that way, that is a failure of my writing and not my intention.