By Peggy Orenstein
Parents often say that if they try to have the sex talk with their teens, the kids plug their ears and hum or run screaming from the room. But late last month, those roles were reversed: After a workshop for high school juniors at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School promoting critical thinking about online pornography, it was parents who flipped out. Some took to the media — The New York Post, Fox News, The Federalist and other like-minded outlets jumped on the story — accusing the school of indoctrinating children.
While I don’t know the precise content of that presentation, I can say this: Refusing to discuss sexually explicit media, which is more accessible to minors than at any other time in history, won’t make it go away. As far back as 2008 — basically the Pleistocene era in internet terms — a study found that more than 90 percent of boys and close to two-thirds of girls had viewed online pornography before turning 18, whether intentionally or involuntarily.
I’ve been interviewing teenagers about their attitudes and expectations of sex for over a decade. When talking to boys, in particular, I’ve never asked whether they’ve watched porn — that would shoot my credibility to hell. Instead, I ask when they first saw it. Most say right around the onset of puberty. They not only learned to masturbate in tandem with its images but also can’t conceive of doing it any other way. “I have a friend who was a legend among the crew team,” a high school senior told me. “He said that he’d stopped using porn completely. He said, ‘I just close my eyes and use my imagination.’ We were like, ‘Whoa! How does he do that?’”
Curiosity about sex and masturbation is natural: good for girls, boys and everyone beyond those designations. And I am talking about children here, many of whom have yet to have a first kiss; adult porn use is a different conversation. One could also debate the potential for sexual liberation of ethically produced porn, queer porn or feminist porn, but those sites are typically behind a pay wall, and most teenagers don’t have their own credit cards.
The free content most readily available to minors tends to show sex as something men do to rather than with women. It often portrays female pleasure as a performance for male satisfaction, shows wildly unrealistic bodies, is indifferent to consent (sometimes in its actual production) and flirts with incest.
The clips can also skew toward the hostile. In a 2020 analysis of more than 4,000 heterosexual scenes on Pornhub and Xvideos, 45 percent and 35 percent, respectively, contained aggression, almost exclusively directed at women. Black women have been found to be the targets of such aggression more frequently than white women, and Black men are more likely than white men to be depicted as aggressors. In other words, teens are being served a heaping helping of racism with their eroticized misogyny.
Boys I interview typically assure me that they know the difference between fantasy and reality. Maybe. But that’s the response people give to any suggestion of media influence. You don’t need a Ph.D. in psych to know that what we consume shapes our thoughts and behavior even — maybe especially — when we believe it doesn’t. Any troll with a Facebook account could tell you that.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that adolescents who frequently use porn turn out to be more likely than others to believe its images are realistic. They’re also more likely to try out some of its dangerous moves like choking a partner during sex (a potentially lethal behavior), which, like heterosexual anal intercourse, appears to have been on the rise among adolescents.
Among college men, pornography use has been associated with seeing women as disposable and, for both sexes, a stronger belief in rape myths — such as that a woman “asked for it” because of what she wore or how much she drank. The combination of exposure and perception of porn’s accuracy has also been associated with an increased risk of sexual aggression, which was defined as pressuring someone into intercourse who has already refused.
To be fair, though, mainstream media use is associated with many of the same beliefs and behaviors, so even if you could block all the triple-X sites on the internet (and good luck with that), it wouldn’t be enough. Nor am I suggesting that viewing porn will turn a tenderhearted teen violent, though it could validate existing impulses among some.
Parents tend to underestimate their children’s consumption of explicit content, perhaps because the only thing ickier than thinking about your mom or dad watching porn is thinking about your daughter or son doing it. So, sorry to be the one to tell you, but teens watch significantly more porn and more-hard-core porn than their same-sex parent. Boys ages 14 to 17 have been found to be at least three times as likely as their fathers to have seen such things as double penetration, gang bangs and facial ejaculation. The differential between girls and their mothers was even higher.
Now consider that a nationally representative study released this year found that among 18-to-24-year-olds, pornography was cited as the source of the “most helpful information about how to have sex” — edging out talking to your partner.
It would seem a little education is indeed in order.
Pornography use is one of the issues teens most wanted to discuss in our conversations, and since I was often the first adult they felt they could talk to candidly about it, they had questions. They wanted to know how real, in fact, what they were seeing was and whether the behavior depicted in video clips — or some version of it — would be expected of them someday. Boys often asked about dose: How much was too much? They wanted to know whether their porn habits would affect their predilections, their desires, their performance, their satisfaction with a partner. Regarding that last concern, the answer may be yes: Frequent porn users (those who watch it once a month or more, a metric that made boys I met either burst out laughing or blanch) may be less happy than others with real-life sex.
“Porn literacy” may sound salacious, and it certainly makes for sensationalist headlines. But like other media literacy courses (including those aimed at reducing teen use of tobacco, drugs and alcohol or offsetting damaging messages about body image), when they’re done right, the aim is to reduce risk, help identify and question the incessant messages that bombard teens, encourage them to hone their values and give them more agency over their experience.
Emily Rothman, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University and the author of the upcoming book “Pornography and Public Health” (for which I provided a jacket quote), found that after taking a nonjudgmental, science-based course that she developed with colleagues, teens were less likely to believe that sexually explicit media was realistic, an easy way to make money or a viable form of sex education. They also better understood the legal implications of sending nudes when underage. And they weren’t more likely to watch porn — that is, just as comprehensive sex education does not prompt sexual activity (in fact, quite the opposite), talking about porn does not appear to motivate teens to seek it out
Adults who balk at such lessons often declare that children’s “innocence” is at stake, but one has to ask who is ultimately protected — and who is harmed — when we censor open discussion of healthy sexuality, bodily autonomy, pornography, sexual harassment and assault. Consider that a week after the Columbia Prep ruckus, parents at the Dalton School, where the same educator was the director of health and wellness, also took to The New York Post to protest an evidence-backed curriculum for first graders that suggested they should have a say in who hugs them and used anatomically correct names for body parts — crucial to preventing abuse.
And earlier in the school year, parents at Greenwich High School in Connecticut petitioned to have an adaptation from my book on boys, sexuality and masculinity removed from the 10th-grade curriculum, claiming it was too graphic. Among other things, I’d quoted the precise sexually degrading language that groups of male high school and college students used to describe their female classmates. Different ostriches, same sand.
Dr. Rothman’s porn literacy curriculum doesn’t include explicit images, though the language can sometimes be direct. Its larger mission is to build healthy relationship skills. “Teens need information about how what mainstream porn shows is not necessarily what is going to work in their sexual and dating relationships,” she told me. “It’s not a how-to manual. So we get them to be more skeptical of what they’re seeing and not accept it at face value.” Without that counterbalance, she added, they may develop expectations about sex that are, at the very least, unhelpful and often hazardous.
Honestly? I’d rather we didn’t have to talk to kids about explicit media, and I wish pornography weren’t, for so many, their first encounter with human sexuality, that it didn’t arrive so early to hijack their imaginations with its proscribed fantasies. But given all that, parents and educators need to work together to help kids develop a critical stance — to help them understand what’s untrue and what’s missing from those images — to ensure that, here in the real world, they proceed with consent, mutual respect and authentic intimacy. Awkward as it may be, we can no longer afford the luxury, or the false comfort, of silence.
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