When investigators rifled through then 38-year-old Lorcan Murphy’s computer, they found an unsurprising amount of pornography. Considering that his murder of Mackenzie Michalski resembled a level of sadomasochism seen only in pornographic content, none were shocked at his online presence. 

Murphy was also found to have been previously using a ‘spy pen’ and surveillance devices to film women in Dublin and beyond. He used one of these devices to film Michalski’s dead body as he lay with her for four hours post-mortem. In his legal defense, Murphy’s team argued that Michalski enjoyed BDSM, and claimed it was another case of ‘rough sex gone wrong’. 

Murphy was convicted in a Hungarian court in 2024. 

For many, the erotic appeal of watching pornography is in the fantasy becoming a reality. Murphy succeeded. But ask any woman sitting in Trinity’s lecture halls, and she’ll tell you he is not an anomaly; he’s just the natural result of a culture women must navigate on and off campus. 

Michalski’s tragedy is an example of the new brutal, pornographic sexual terrain. One where strangulation and BDSM practices without consent are regularly used in casual encounters–and where seemingly innocuous sadism can have fatal endings. Long past are the times of theatrical releases for adult films, and of high production quality. We have minimized sex to a tripod, an unmade bed, and a woman with no face. 

Unfortunately for women entering university, it quickly loses its abstract qualities and becomes the default language of hookup culture. What sells online as standard abusive tendencies has led its way into the bedroom. BDSM and choking are no longer negotiated preferences but a tax women must pay for participating in casual student life. 

The initially liberative elements of porn– once women pleasured on the big screen– are now free, amateur, and, if you wanted, could be viewed on your route to work. ‘Teen’ images and infantilized imagery permeate the opening window of XVideos or PornHub.

Control is at the remedial center of this new topography.

The current state is not one of inclusivity but rather of imposition. Young boys report being introduced to such media before even finishing primary school. A text chain or an algorithmic glitch could push a child from one world to another. 

It’s no longer eroticism either, but rather aggressivity disguised as lust. It’s difficult to mitigate when children are introduced to the sexual ‘standard’ in the classroom, but exposed to the ‘normal’ behind the screen. 

When an entire generation of young men arrives at Trinity and other Irish colleges, having learned most of their human intimacy from violent algorithms and of an infantilizing and pedophilic nature, campus becomes the primary testing ground.

‘Repeat exposure’, Peggy Orenstein writes in her 2024 New York Times feature, ‘can render the once appalling appealing’, when pornography becomes the default educational source. A study quoted by Orenstein, of 5,000 U.S. College Students, found that nearly two-thirds of women ‘said a partner choked them during sex’.

This extends beyond closed, domestic doors and into student accommodation and campus halls. The HEA’s national Speak Out dataset, collating disclosures across Irish higher education institutions, reveals that sexual violence and harassment accounted for 25% of all student-reported abuse. Between 2022 and 2024, students logged 55 reports of rape, 106 reports of sexual assault, and 108 cases of sexual harassment.

That said, only 12% of students made a formal complaint to their university, and 4% reported to An Garda Síochána. It’s a less shocking statistic when we watch the evolving context, where violence is gradually being rebranded as a kink or bad hookup. Women I know personally have felt the weighing inevitability that the report will end up at the bottom of a recycling bin. 

‘Sexual violence’ and ‘sex’ have become synonymous. In Ireland, the National Freephone Helpline found that porn ‘features the strangling of women, […] verbally degrading them and spitting in their faces, among countless other acts of callousness and cruelty is now […] freely available’. 

When over 60% of Irish men report watching porn regularly, and porn addiction has entered the Dictionary, many women are apprehensive about the next man who walks in their door. 

The regular vulnerabilities of student life compound this apprehension. 

In the midst of a relentless housing crisis, gender dynamics are weaponized by circumstance. Some students are left to ‘shag or shiver’; to stay in a toxic or sexually coercive relationship simply to keep a roof over their heads forces women to tolerate pornified aggression because the alternative is sleeping in a car or commuting three hours a day.

When we’re inundated with Meta glasses footage of women stopped on the street, or insults like ‘whore’ or ‘slut’ becoming colloquially deceptive terms, ‘bop’, etc., we begin to see the market as its true unregulated self. One in which women, once again, become the figurative target. 

Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan is now seeking approval to legislate the epidemic. He released a Fianna Fáil policy document in 2022 for ‘tackling’ violence against women. As of mid-July 2026, O’Callaghan plans to introduce offences ‘relating to the possession, production or distribution of extreme or violent pornography, and acts of necrophilia’. 

The question then becomes: how can we regulate an industry so imbued with violence without biblically purifying it? 

It’s figuratively a band-aid, one in which students are left vulnerable to the mechanical and ossified systems on Trinity’s campus. It also ignores the campus as the transitional point between fantasy and reality, and as the ‘testing ground’ for sexual violence to paint itself as benign. New female students are the casualties in a burgeoning culture each year. 

Men who disregard will always find a way– as they did during the Censorship of Publications Act, and as they have done for time immemorial. Porn will become lucrative once it relies on illegal imports, underground video rentals, or cross-border travel. 

To ban it is to ignore the culprit entirely, and is unrealistic in the face of mass production. It seems for O’Callaghan, the proposal relies on a standard of morality which would produce no substantive change behind closed doors. 

There is an intentionality behind such ineffectual legislation against pornography– one which Catherine Itzin questions: why most are drafted ‘in such a manner as to be unenforceable.’ 

We must conclude, she writes, ‘that it has never been the intention to prevent the […] distribution of pornography’.

Legislators have long ignored a so-called ‘protected’ population in the country: students. 

However, the same bureaucratic walls which shield students also trap them. Rape culture can contaminate campuses more easily if the violence feigns itself as innocuous.  

There is a guise, a curtain, which must ultimately fall between sex and the definitive fantasy of rape, and the label we must begin to regularly use: abuse.