Why Porn Is a Terrible Form of Sex Education
5 Different Reasons Pornography Doesn’t Work as a Type of Sex Ed
5 Different Reasons Pornography Doesn’t Work as a Type of Sex Ed
If you ask someone in the porn business — an actor, a writer, director, a distributor — whether porn counts as a form of sex education, they’ll tell you, in no uncertain terms, that it doesn’t.
Adult actor Avery Black might have said it the best:
“I don’t necessarily think that porn viewers will take away what they see on the internet as what sex is ‘supposed’ to be like. It’s filmed entertainment, and proposing that realistically you can get sucked off by your best friend’s wife or casually 69 standing up on a Wednesday afternoon is like saying you’re taking driver’s ed advice from the ‘Fast and the Furious’ series.”
It’s a pithy retort to those who blame porn for people’s sexual misbehavior. The takeaway? People who make porn work hard to create a product that will titillate and make money. They shouldn’t be blamed for the reality that what sells is high on entertainment and low on education.
If you think about it, it makes sense. A blockbuster that’s 50 percent action movie, 50 percent actual driving lesson simply wouldn’t sell as many tickets as a movie that’s 100 percent burnt rubber road rage. What people want to see is the big explosions and the stunning feats, not the minutiae of how a stick-shift works, or how to successfully pull off a tight parallel parking job.
The same principle applies to porn, as it facilitates your orgasm through spectacle, not to hand-hold you through the basics of sex.
However, that reality doesn’t change the fact that, as a society, we acknowledge driving to be an important and necessary skill that also requires immense amounts of training. But while you’re unlikely to accidentally kill dozens of people by making a sexual mistake, that doesn’t mean ignorance in the bedroom can’t also have serious, life-changing impacts.
A condom improperly applied (or not applied at all) can lead to an unplanned pregnancy, a sexually transmitted infection or both. A poor understanding of consent can mean rape — trauma both physical and emotional — and ill-thought attempts at bondage or edgeplay like choking can lead to injury, brain damage or death.
A proper understanding of how different facets of sex actually work is fundamental to our sex lives being a source of pleasure, not of pain, for both ourselves and others. Unfortunately, we live in a world where high quality sex education is hard to come by, and often doesn’t make its way to people until long after they’ve already begun having sex, if ever.
In the interim, porn steps in to function as a sort of ersatz replacement sex ed. But while porn can give you a certain idea about what sex looks like, it is an incredibly inaccurate picture of what sex is like.
Why the Differences Between Porn and Sex Are Important
Once you’ve been having sex for a few years, it’s not hard to recognize many of the ways in which porn and sex differ. For starters, real-life sex is full of unscripted moments that don’t exactly scream ‘sexy.’
“I think most of us are smart enough to look at porn and know this isn’t how sex works,” says says Yvette d’Entremont, a scientist, writer and co-host of the “Two Girls One Mic: The Porncast” podcast. “Real sex involves hitting your head on the headboard, the dog licking your ass, fumbling for condoms, and a 55 gallon drum of lube for anal.”
While all of that may be true of experienced adults, many of the people watching porn don’t yet have that sense of perspective. That means there can be consequences for them and their sexual partners if they’re using porn as a model to go off for their earliest encounters.
And unless someone puts in the effort to teach them they’re doing something wrong, they might never learn another way to have sex.
Porn Was Never Intended to Be Watched by Minors
Before internet porn became a thing, the sale of pornographic materials was strictly (and more easily) regulated.
For starters, there was a sale. A significant chunk of people today watch porn for free on popular tube sites rather than paying for a single video or subscription to a specific producer’s output. It’s a lot easier to ensure a porn magazine or videotape doesn’t get sold to a 17-year-old in a store than it is to make sure than an unmonitored 13-year-old doesn’t type “porn” into a search engine query on their smartphone while alone in their bedroom.
As Sarah Valmont, head copywriter for PornDiscounts.com, puts it, “The Internet is not a babysitter.”
“Porn is not sex education class, nor does it pretend to be, or otherwise market itself as sexual education,” she adds. “Porn is about fantasy — for adults.”
But what is clearly fantasy for adults might not as clearly register as fantasy for children, tweens and teens.
“I’m sure some porn watchers do look at porn like it’s an instructional video, which is part of why I understand the concerns people have about the easy and free access to online pornography,” says Angie Rowntree, founder and director of Sssh.com. “Trust me when I tell you that free access to porn, especially by minors, wasn’t what any of us in the industry had in mind when we first started launching adult sites.”
Lots of Minors Are Watching It Anyway
With information on the internet so easily accessible, it’s difficult to imagine a future where people with little sexual experience can’t get access to hardcore porn for free.
“Sadly, I think the free online porn genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not about to be stuffed back in any time soon,” says Rowntree. “Given that fact, I’d say the best approach is to make sure we teach young people from a very tender age to understand that the sex they see in videos is not something they should try to copy. We need to teach them about consent, communication, and acceptance. We need to provide top-notch sex education. Adult movies were never meant to do that.”
And that 13-year-old looking up porn on their smartphone? Hardly a rarity.
“There are multiple stats, but at least 70% of teens have admitted to accessing porn prior to the age of 18,” says Alice Vaughn, d’Entremont’s “Two Girls One Mic” co-host — a staggering statistic.
For her part, porn director, screenwriter and producer Erika Lust is particularly worried by “young people who are watching porn who have not yet had their first sexual experience, and who are not receiving adequate sex education that teaches them about sexuality or pornograpy.”
“This is especially concerning because the type of porn these young people will easily access is the films on the free tube sites,” she says. “Most of this content is problematic at best. It presents unrealistic depictions of sex, body type, racial slurs, mysogynistic language. The films blatantly neglect women’s pleasure and consent — open one of those tube sites and there is coercion everywhere!”
Regardless of the type, however, at the end of the day, porn isn’t intended to be a model for what sex can or should look like, period — it’s made to excite, not educate.
Porn Is an Incredibly Powerful Visual Stimulus
Porn exposure isn’t some trivial thing, and watching video footage of sex can and does have a serious impact on people.
From porn addiction to porn-induced erectile dysfunction, porn isn’t just a passive piece of culture that we consume. In reality, it’s one that can significantly impact our desires, our thoughts and our actions.
To Ben Lawson, founder of Tantra Punk, it makes sense that porn is more intense than real-life sex, if only because it’s mimicking the earliest fantasies of people for whom sex is just that — a fantasy.
“I think all of our erotic minds tend to develop by indulging in countless hours of idle fantasies about wild unattainable experiences with movie stars, models, etc,” says Lawson. “In that sense, porn is often intentionally unrealistic by design, reflecting our intense desires for more exciting and edgy experiences, if only to be enjoyed vicariously through a screen.”
However, there can be consequences to seeing fantastical, over-the-top sex, particularly as opposed to simply imagining it.
“As a porn performer/producer who is sex positive and pro-porn, I have deep concerns about the negative impacts of conditioning through marketing,” admits Lawson.
As well as what’s popular among adults subtly influencing what teenagers see, illicitly accessing porn sites before turning 18 can also impact an understanding of what sex is capable of being, and what it’s meant to be.
“’Normal’ unadventurous hetero, monogamous, coupled sex, is to be expected and settled for, and the more wild and glorious pansexual and polyamorous depictions of sex in porn are to be considered painfully out-of-reach,” he adds.
Understanding that sex can be whatever you and your partner want it to be might be tricky to pull off for someone who’s been consuming hundreds and thousands of hours of porn since they were a sexually inexperienced teenager.
Kids Don’t Always Have Access to Sex Ed
With Americans losing their virginity at the age of 17 on average, millions and millions of teens are beginning to have sex long before they’re ever old enough to encounter sexual education resources on a college campus. As well, college is increasingly financially unrealistic for many teens in the United States.
Unlike college, there’s no such barrier to accessing internet porn — if you have a smartphone, a laptop or a tablet that can access the internet, you’re capable of filling up your alone time with a steady stream of sexual content from a seemingly infinite list of sources.
Further, the sex education kids do receive in school is often focused on ensuring they don’t cause a pregnancy or catch a sexually transmitted infection — or in many cases, trying to convince them not to have sex at all — rather than attempting to give them a full picture of what sex is or can be.
But unlike elementary or high school sex ed, there’s tons of high-quality porn out there. And when put up against a curriculum about the basics of sexual health that often ignores notions of sexual pleasure almost entirely, it’s hard for the latter to compete with the former.
It’s also all-too-easy to mistake entertainment for education when you have no background whatsoever, Vaugh notes, using the worldwide popularity of the kink-heavy ‘50 Shades of Grey’ book and movie series, which is fully of similarly inadvisable bad BDSM practices, as a reference point.
“When ‘50 Shades of Grey’ came out, [adults] everywhere made the assumption they suddenly knew BDSM basics, when in reality, the BDSM community condemned the book for promoting unhealthy practices.”
Lust agrees. “We need better sex education,” she says. “Good, up-to-date sex education is lacking pretty much everywhere. Our kids aren’t oblivious to sex, and when parents or schools don’t properly educate their children, they are letting porn step in as their de-facto educator.”
“Porn is always going to exist,” she adds. “Giving kids the tools to be critical and aware of what they’re watching is unbelievably important!”
We’re Ashamed to Talk About Sex in a Real Way
So why is there an epidemic of good quality sex ed out there? It all stems back to a deep, systematic discomfort with talking about sex in a real and healthy way.
To fix that, Valmont thinks sex education is something that today’s parents should take a bigger role in.
“Limit your kid’s tech access (they need less screen time and more books anyway), and have articulate, age-appropriate discussions with them about sex,” she says. “Don’t put it off and trust ‘the sex talk’ to the idiots at the public school who put the condom on the banana and break it, or accidentally launch the tampon across the room. A healthy understanding of intimacy and a basic understanding of one’s body should really begin at home.”
Regardless of where the teaching is occurring, though, if things are going to get better, it’s going to require a sea change from the sex ed status quo.
Today’s newest generation of adults — that is, millennials — having grown up with the openness of the internet, might be just shame-free about sex enough to be better about this, both in the home as parents and in schools as teachers.
As Rowntree notes, while this is an issue that affects young people, it’s adults who most need to work on their attitudes around it.
“As entertainment, [porn isn’t] going to include a lot of the things that are present in real-life sex,” she says. “The bigger challenge might be getting enough adults to agree that this lesson needs to be taught, rather than getting young people to hear the message.”
What Humans Did Before Internet Porn
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Source: AskMen
