Increasingly, explicit content is simply an internet search — or perhaps an accidental journey down a rabbit hole — away. Given the ease with which teens are able to access pornography, youth engagement with pornography is inevitable: 93% of boys and 62% of girls are exposed to internet pornography before the age of 18. Consequently, porn literacy education doesn’t aim to prevent teenagers from engaging with pornography, but to teach them to critically engage with it. When teaching sex education, biology teacher Lora Lerner emphasizes that porn literacy should be approached as a form of media literacy.
“Like any kind of media that people encounter online, people should understand what’s out there,” Lerner said. “They should know what it means, who’s producing it, whether it’s reliable, and the greater issues in terms of how consuming that particular media might impact them or the larger society.”
Most notably, porn literacy education addresses concerns that teens adopt harmful views of sex and sexuality prevalent within pornography. Children, in particular, are particularly predisposed to acquiring behaviors from the content they watch: media provides a constant supply of models for them to mimic, for better or for worse. Thus, Lerner emphasizes that, when teaching sex education, pornography should not serve as an “instruction book” for having sex.
“It’s not intended to show people these are good ways to have sex, or how to have sex in general,” Lerner said. “It never was made for that. It never will be made for that. And so as part of comprehensive sex ed, we want to recognize what it is and what it isn’t.”
However, simply acknowledging that pornography is an inaccurate portrayal of sex fails to address all the harmful issues presented by porn: not only does it promote unrealistic body image standards, but it also reinforces harmful gendered power dynamics. It perpetuates ideas of male-centeredness through the constant portrayal of “sexual scripts” for both men and women, in which men are expected to take on the dominant role and women lack sexual agency, prioritizing the male’s desires above her own.
Pornography ultimately reinforces gender hegemony through its commodification of the female body and its decentralization of female pleasure, and these male-centered ideals put forth by pornography bleed into how we approach our sexual relationships. Dubbed the orgasm gap, women are often left far less satisfied after sex: one study found that 95% of heterosexual men said they usually or always orgasm when sexually intimate, while only 65% of heterosexual women said the same. Sexual relationships are portrayed as purely recreational in pornography, lacking the emotional significance they have in real life and encouraging harmful beliefs on how women should look and act during sex.
Blurred lines of consent and a recent uptick in sexual choking portrayed in pornography have led to a troubling increase in non-consensual choking during sex. One study found that often, women permit this choking not because they derive their own sexual pleasure from it, but instead for their partner’s pleasure. Not only does pornography’s portrayal of sex translate to a real-time dismissal of female pleasure, but instances such as this can have serious health repercussions: sexual choking is, after all, a form of strangulation, and can quickly be fatal.
Additionally, pornography often does not portray the use of a condom — California residents voted against Proposition 60 in 2016, which would have allowed legal action against pornographic films without visible condoms. Subsequently, if students adopt these behaviors in real life, it can lead to unwanted pregnancies, STDs and STIs.
While teenagers might not run into these issues in high school, sex education courses we take now may be the last courses of those kinds that we take. Thus, it is imperative that these courses give students the knowledge to safely interact with pornography in a healthy way if they choose to do so in the future.
Pornography is not, and will never be, a model for how students should approach relationships, sexual or otherwise, and it is critical that we recognize that. Actively stopping teenagers from watching pornography in the first place is a tempting solution — AB 3080, a California bill mandating age verification on pornography sites was recently proposed. This bill comes after amid a slew of state legislation restricting pornography — Florida, too, banned Pornhub for all Floridians. However, not addressing potential harmful effects of pornography would leave students ill-equipped to be mindful of their engagement with pornography in the future, if they choose to do so.
Current recognition of pornography’s unrealistic depictions of sex is just a start. While Lerner does address issues like misogyny and a lack of consent in porn while teaching sex education, students would be able to understand the harmful power dynamics within pornography far better after further studying critical lenses. Thus, implementing porn literacy education alongside instruction on critical gender lenses in students’ junior year literature classes
would allow students to better understand the gender power dynamics present within pornography.
Ultimately, Lerner asserts that the most valuable thing students can do for their future selves is to learn to create and maintain healthy relationships with others outside of the context of sex.
“My biggest advice to people is to learn the skills to build good relationships with actual human beings, and learn how to treat them well,” Lerner said. “Learn how to talk about sexuality and consent. That’s what’s going to lead to your happiness in life and good relationships.”
