Gone are the baby boomers’ days of hiding pilfered Playboy magazines beneath the bed or Gen Xers’ surreptitious viewing of scrambled adult television channels, hoping for a glimpse of hidden anatomy beneath the static. Today’s teenagers are merely a few clicks away from seemingly infinite streaming pornography. Along with easy opportunities to send sexts and nude pictures, free access to pornography is one of the biggest changes digital communications technology has wrought on young people’s sex lives. The scientific evidence is mixed on the effects pornography exposure has on adolescents, but there is no doubt that much of the content presents a skewed look at human sexuality, often rife with misogyny and a lack of clear consent.
Some psychologists, sex educators, and public health experts are now pushing back with a new tool: porn literacy aimed at teaching teenagers to think critically about pornography and how it’s made, with a goal of combating the negative messages that much pornographic content conveys. This need is pressing because whether or not adults are comfortable talking about sexually explicit media, some teenagers are viewing it, says Lindsay Orchowski, PhD, a psychologist at Brown University who focuses on adolescent dating violence prevention. And they’re trying to process what they see, both in pornography and in sexually charged mainstream content.
“We’re finding in the context of prevention that students are talking more and more about the media that they see,” Orchowski says. “We know that some media can be sexual in nature, and it’s important for us to be able to talk to youth about it.”
“For a lot of kids, porn is becoming, unfortunately, their primary method of sex education because they’re not getting it in schools and they’re not getting enough at home,” says Al Vernacchio, MSEd, a nationally renowned sexuality educator from Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. “It is not a good entry into learning about sex or relationships, and because kids don’t have scaffolding or context for it, they can easily be led into misinformation.”
Providing scaffolding may help. Using their U.S. probability sample, Paul and his colleagues found that pornography exposure was associated with condomless sex in adolescents—but not if those teenagers had parents who spoke with them about sex. “The most important thing we are starting to take away from this is if you talk to your kids and say [pornography] shouldn’t be the standard you’re basing sex and sexuality on, the effect goes away,” Paul says.
A middle ground
Pornography is a controversial topic, encompassing issues of sexual morality, gender equity, and freedom of speech. These entangled issues make nuanced discussion challenging. “This is such a hot-button issue for so many people,” says Emily Rothman, ScD, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University. “They really almost try to insist that you’re either pro-pornography or anti-pornography.”
But researchers and educators like Rothman are trying to chisel out a middle ground—one that recognizes the toxic tropes common in mainstream pornography while still acknowledging that most people encounter, and many people enjoy, pornographic material. This approach also acknowledges that teenagers are naturally curious about sexuality and may seek out pornography to satisfy that curiosity.
Reports differ as to how prevalent porn viewership is among teenagers. There are limited reliable recent statistics on the age when adolescents start viewing pornography, and findings sometimes conflict. Work led by Rothman using the nationally representative Youth Internet Safety Survey found that the likelihood of a teen or preteen accessing pornography intentionally rose from 8% in 2000 to 13% in 2010, coinciding with the rapid expansion of the internet. A 2005 study led by Michele Ybarra, MPH, PhD, of the Center for Innovative Public Health Research, found that 15% of all 9- to 17-year-olds reported seeking out pornography in the previous year, while 25% reported an unwanted exposure in the past year. In that study, 87% of those who deliberately sought out porn offline were 14 or older. Of those who sought out pornography online, 60% were 14 or older. Ninety-five percent of respondents who deliberately sought out porn were male.
More recent data from a 2016 U.S. probability sample of 14- to 60-year-olds also hint at a major gender schism in experiences with sexually explicit material. In those data, Indiana University sex researcher Bryant Paul, PhD, and colleagues found that the advent of the internet did not alter the age of first exposure to pornography for boys, but it did lower it for girls. One-third of the teen respondents reported being 12 or younger when they first saw porn, says Paul, who is preparing a paper on those findings.
What is clear, at any rate, is that online pornography has not created a generation of sexually irresponsible hedonists. Between 2011 and 2015, the percentage of 15- to 19-year-olds who had ever had sex was 42% for females and 44% for males, a continued steady decline from 1988, when the numbers were 51% and 60%, respectively (CDC, National Health Statistics Reports, No. 104, 2017). Contraceptive use during a first sexual experience also climbed upward. The proportion of teenage girls who reported using contraception during their first sexual intercourse rose from 74.5% in 2002 to 81% by 2015, according to the report.
Still, some educators and researchers have concerns about the availability of pornography as a first exposure to sex for adolescents. Because popular streaming sites for pornography are formatted like YouTube, tiled with dozens of thumbnails of video clips, a 14-year-old who types in a web address for one of these sites could immediately see video titles and stills referencing misogyny, incest, and racist tropes. Work led by Paul and his Indiana University Bloomington colleague Niki Fritz found that out of 4,009 scenes available on two major free pornography websites, 35% and 45% depicted violence, and that women were the target of that violence 97% of the time (Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 49, No. 8, 2020). In addition, Black women are more likely than White women to be depicted as targets of aggression, and Black men are more likely than White men to be depicted as aggressors (Gender Issues, No. 38, 2021). Alarmingly, a study by Rothman using nationally representative data from 2015 found that a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds said pornography was their most helpful source of information about how to have sex (Archives of Sexual Behavior, online first, 2021).
In longitudinal research by University of Amsterdam communications researchers Patti Valkenburg, PhD, and Jochen Peter, PhD, both male and female Dutch adolescents who viewed pornography reported being less satisfied with their sexual lives, with the strongest effect for those with little or no real-life sexual experience (Human Communication Research, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2009). Orchowski and colleagues have found that exposure to violent pornography—pornography in which a person is forced into a sexual act against their will—is correlated with the perpetration of teen dating violence (Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 48, No. 7, 2019). Boys exposed to violent pornography were up to 3 times more likely to perpetrate sexual violence and to be victimized themselves, and girls were 1.5 times more likely to threaten their romantic partners with violence. This work doesn’t show that violent pornography causes violent behavior, Orchowski says, though it does raise concerns that it’s reinforcing violence in teenagers who already have aggressive tendencies.
Though small in scale, some qualitative research has found that teenagers do use pornography to learn about sex. Work by Renata Arrington-Sanders, MD, MPH, has found that same-sex-attracted Black adolescent males report learning about sexual positions, roles, and behaviors from pornography, sometimes imitating behaviors like skipping condoms (Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2015). Rothman and colleagues interviewed 23 urban, low-income Black and Hispanic youths and found that many reported that they used pornography for educational purposes. One 17-year-old girl reported trying anal sex because it looked pleasurable in pornography but then found it painful in real life (The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 52, No. 7, 2015).
Getting educated
While smartphones have put porn in adolescent pockets, access to sex education is still spotty: According to the Guttmacher Institute, 29 states and the District of Columbia now mandate some kind of sex education in public schools, but the content of that education varies widely. Only 17 states require that if sex ed is taught, it must be medically and factually accurate, and only 10 mandate that if sex ed is taught, it must include information about consent.
But a handful of programs are including pornography literacy in sex education. One of the most comprehensive is “The Truth About Pornography: A Pornography-Literacy Curriculum for High School Students Designed to Reduce Sexual and Dating Violence.” Developed by Rothman, Nicole Daley, MPH, and Jessica Alder, MPA, the curriculum (often called simply “Porn Literacy”) is delivered through the Start Strong: Building Healthy Teen Relationships initiative at the Boston Public Health Commission. Students sign up through community organizations, such as youth service programs. The course is offered online during COVID-19.
Students are never shown porn in the program, but instructors talk candidly about the history of pornography and obscenity laws, sexual norms, and gendered double standards, and the research on pornography and compulsive use. The curriculum also includes sessions on healthy relationships, the unrealistic sexual scripts portrayed in pornography, and sexually explicit selfies. A pilot study led by Rothman found that students were less likely to see pornography as lucrative, realistic, or a good way to learn about sex after taking the class, and that they had a better understanding of the legality of sending nude selfies for underage individuals (American Journal of Sexuality Education, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2018).
Start Strong’s “Porn Literacy” course is one of only a few internationally. In Australia, a program called “Reality & Risk: Pornography, Young People and Sexuality” has been available since 2009, and community-based sex educators in County Kerry, Ireland, have been delivering a “Healthy Sexuality” program that has provided pornography literacy since 2012. “Your Voice Your View,” a violence-prevention workshop that Orchowski and colleagues evaluated in their study on violent porn use and aggression, includes an open-ended discussion of pornography with 10th graders.
Addressing pornography in school-based sex education is still a hard sell in most districts, and states vary widely in how much they address sexual media and the emotional side of sex. Some comprehensive curriculums do cover sexually explicit media. The “Our Whole Lives” (OWL) sex education curriculum, published by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and the United Church of Christ (UCC), includes a workshop on sexuality, social media, and the internet for seventh through ninth graders. OWL is taught by trained facilitators at some schools, youth programs, and other community organizations.
But direct discussion of pornography is not part of the standard OWL curriculum. For that, there is the “Sexuality and Our Faith” program, a companion to OWL that includes faith values and is only taught within UUA and UCC congregations. Among the “Sexuality and Our Faith” workshops is one on pornography. “This workshop acknowledges the curiosity many young teens have about pornography,” says Melanie Davis, PhD, the UUA OWL program manager and a certified sexuality counselor. “It also increases their awareness of the difference between media that can foster healthy sexuality and media that may have the opposite effect.”
At least one porn site has gotten into the sex ed game. In 2017, with the help of Montreal clinical psychologist Laurie Betito, PhD, streaming site Pornhub launched a sex education site called the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center. The site is linked on the bottom of Pornhub’s homepage and covers a variety of information, from basic anatomy to advice on sexual communication within relationships. “We get a lot of really basic questions, and I can tell they come from different parts of the world where there is very little sex education,” Betito says. “For me, it’s about having a larger reach to educate people.”
Rothman and her colleagues are also working to broaden their reach. One population that is almost always overlooked in sex education is people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, says Barbara Gross, a sex educator at Missouri Behavior Consulting. Gross is now adapting Rothman’s porn literacy approach into a course for this community, which will focus on teaching the same critical-thinking approach to sexual media. Meanwhile, Rothman and Daley have developed an online parent curriculum called Pornography Literacy for Parents of High School Students. The first session took place last February, and there are plans for more in the future.
“Often you hear people say, ‘That’s a conversation best left to parents’” about pornography, says Daley. “So how do we prepare parents to begin to have this conversation with their young people?”
The political winds may also be shifting in favor of comprehensive sex education. In May 2019, the Guttmacher Institute reported that legislators in 32 states and the District of Columbia had introduced 79 bills designed to mandate more education on consent and healthy relationships and to improve inclusivity for LGBTQ students. Meanwhile, Rothman says, more educators are acknowledging they need to be open with teenagers about sexually explicit media.
“I don’t know how you can ignore the fact that pornography really is available and easy to access and that so many teenagers have seen it,” Rothman says. “To not address it in any way as part of sex education seems like a real oversight.”
The Most Important Pornography Statistics
As of 2020, more than 42 billion visits were made to Pornhub from all around the world.
Approximately 25% of all search engine requests are pornography-related.
A sizable percentage of internet porn users, roughly 40% are women.
69% of the pay-per-view internet content market is composed of adult entertainment.
In 2019, a study by IFOP established that almost all men (97%) ages 18 to 24 in France access pornography at some point during the year.
The most frequently searched terms on Pornhub are ‘lesbian,’ ‘hentai’ and ‘milf’.
It is estimated that 30% of the internet industry is made up of pornography.
According to a 2021 report, there are 420 million pages of pornographic content on the internet.
Nearly 35% of all internet downloads are related to pornography.
About 25% of workers have accessed pornography on a work computer, according to a study by Nielsen.
A 2015 survey reveals that 73% of women and 98% of men reported internet pornography use in the last six months.
From a 2018 survey, 81% of women have watched pornography at least once, compared to 99% of men.
According to a 2014 study, over half (56%) of divorces involved one partner having an obsessive interest in online porn.
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