I've seen the type of violent snuff porn Peter Madsen viewed before he murdered Kim Wall – anyone who denies a connection is deluded

Content warning: This article includes graphic descriptions of sexual violence

This article includes graphic descriptions of sexual violence

The day that Peter Madsen, a sadistic necrophiliac, is handed down a life sentence for premeditated murder, desecration of a corpse and aggravated sexual assault seems like an appropriate time to talk about the harms of pornography.

Madsen murdered Kim Wall, a journalist, for sexual pleasure. Let’s have a think about this – a man, torturing, dismembering, raping and extinguishing the life of a woman for sexual pleasure. The same day that Madsen met Wall, he searched the internet for “beheaded girl agony”, and watched a film of a woman having her throat slit.

There are people reading this who have never encountered extreme pornography, and most of them will be women. The kind of porn now available for free involves gagging, choking, slapping and beating, and horrendously painful acts such as penetrating an orifice, such as a mouth, vagina or anus, with multiple penises and weapons.

The porn that the boys at my school would look at in the early 1970s is now what we see on MTV. The mainstream, easily accessible stuff I can find online within seconds is often sadistic, brutal, and misogynistic in the extreme.

I have seen the type of porn that Madsen enjoyed. In the 1980s I watched a snuff movie with other anti-porn activists, journalists and experts in special film effects. One of the activists had gone into a porn shop in England and asked if the owner had something “really extreme”. The storeowner gave her a film of a woman in South America being raped, tortured and murdered. We saw her hand sawn off while she was still alive. Even the hardened crime reporters had to leave the room to be sick. The feminists stayed. We knew what to expect, because we had heard about snuff from activists in the US who were campaigning against the torture and murder of women for men’s sexual pleasure.

Prior to this viewing, many porn apologists claimed that snuff did not exist, and that feminists, along with religious moralists, had invented it in order to add weight to our anti-porn campaigns. We proved the sceptics wrong. The film experts verified that there were no camera tricks involved. A local journalist wrote about the screening, and urged police to take action. They did not.

This all happened before the internet. Now, men like Madsen who enjoy women’s agony can film themselves abusing women and children, and distribute to other sadists, or to people who are simply “curious”.

Throughout the trial, prosecutors presented irrefutable evidence of Madsen’s prolific use of violent pornography. Police discovered a hard drive in Madsen’s workshop that included snuff films of women being beheaded, tortured and impaled on metal spikes. Madsen’s motive, said the prosecutors, was that the killer sought sexual pleasure from the death and torture of women. The jury accepted that this is what had happened, and the judge’s sentence – life without the possibility of parole – suggests that she did too.

Madsen and other men who consume torture porn know that in order for them to access it, women are raped, abused, hurt and sometimes even killed. Real women. The women who survive have to live with the knowledge that a record of the abuse will exist long after they are dead, and that men will be masturbating to their pain and humiliation.

Why do most liberals appear to defend porn? Are they afraid of being labelled “anti-sex”? In 2013, the academic, peer-reviewed journal Porn Studies was launched, edited by two female academics who appear to be totally uncritical of the porn industry. They have published critiques of the feminist anti-porn position, and have an editorial board made up of pro-porn activists.

I and other anti-porn activists are often asked to “prove” a direct causal link between viewing porn and sexual violence. Seriously? They want “proof” that seeing the level of hate and abuse directed to women by men in porn is both a cause and a consequence of hatred of women?

Without misogyny, porn would not exist. The porn that fuelled and validated Madsen’s sadistic fantasises is created by abusing women on camera. To deny that constantly viewing the torture of women for sexual pleasure has no material effect and does not lead to men seeking to “try out” the scenes they view online is as illogical as claiming that advertising of any kind does not work.

We need to accept that pornography legitimises the horrific sexual debasement of women, and that it serves no purpose except to link violence and abuse with sex in the minds of boys and men. Kim Wall is a victim of Peter Madsen, and of pornography.