HOW PORN CHANGES THE WAY TEENS THINK ABOUT SEX

How do you capture the attention of a roomful of extremely bored teenagers?

It turns out all you have to do is mention the word “PORNOGRAPHY”. It is an industry and it is a multi-billion dollar industry but the heart of it is young men and women who are asked to and agree to perform sex acts in front of a camera. The industry is flawed and we need to do something to protect other girls from being affected by it. Many girls are sex trafficked and forced into porn. I agree sometimes the way we are brought up influences us to watch porn because there’s no one to guide us and you can’t just out of the blue talk to your parents about it. We turn to porn to learn about sex but I feel it's overrated and reality is far from what’s shown in the porn videos.

Let me tell you how I first learned this….Today, let’s just talk about one more thing which is the seemingly intractable problem of dating violence. Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention demonstrate that one in five high – school attending youth experience physical and/or sexual abuse by a dating partner each year in the US. That makes dating violence more prevalent than being bullied on school property, seriously considering suicide or even vaping, in that same population but solutions were proving elusive. What’s an apt answer to the question: What’s causing dating abuse and can it be stopped at all?

Most of the teen girls say that they had been forced or threatened to do sexual things that the perpetrator saw in pornography. Isn’t that surprising? Well, this finding got me curious. Was pornography to be blamed for any percentage of dating violence? Or was it more like a coincidence that the pornography users also happen to be more likely to be in unhealthy relationships? I wanted to know what kind of sexually explicit media youth were watching nowadays, and how often and why, and see if I could piece together if it was part of the reason that for so many of them that dating relationships were apparently unhealthy. I tried to keep an open mind to this whole subject altogether, even though there were plenty of members of the public who had already made up their mind regarding the issue. Now you might think why would I keep an open mind about pornography? I am what people call sex-positive which means that I fully support people’s right to enjoy whatever kind of sex life and sexuality they find fulfilling, no matter what it involves as long as it includes the enthusiastic consent of all parties involved. Having said that, I personally wasn’t inclined towards watching pornography. I had seen some, didn’t really do anything for me. Being a girl in this modern society I had my own concerns and reasons.

I have been into the dating culture since my teen years and recently there is something that has been bothering me a lot and that is the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in our culture. So in an era where hardcore porn is more freely and widely available on the internet than ever before and where kids are therefore able to access it at a younger and younger age than ever before. There is an entire generation growing up that believes that what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex and this is particularly exacerbated because we live in a puritanical double standards culture where people believe that a teen abstinence campaign will actually work where parents are too embarrassed to have conversations about sex with their children and where educational institutions are terrified of being politically incorrect if they pick up these conversations and so it’s not surprising that hardcore pornography de facto has become sex education. Now as a mature confident woman when I encounter this I have no problem realizing that a certain amount of re-education, rehabilitation, and reorientation has to take place.

I noticed that while there were a lot of people who were denouncing pornography there were also people who were staunch defenders of it for a variety of reasons. So, in my exploration I genuinely tried to understand was pornography bad for us, or was it good for us? Was it misogynist or was it empowering? And there was no one singular answer that emerged clearly? One thing that clearly got me worried was that teenagers who saw pornography were subsequently more likely to perpetrate sexual violence. I felt tremendous pressure to pick a side about pornography owing to mixed results which showed both positive and negative consequences of pornography. I was even told that it was weak-minded of me not to be able to pick out the one correct answer about pornography. And it was complicated because there is an industry that is capitalizing off of the audience’s fascination with seeing women, in particular, not just having sex, but being chocked, gagged, slapped, spit upon, ejaculated upon, called degrading names over and over during sex and not always clear with their consent. Most people would agree that we have a serious problem with misogyny, sexual violence, and rape in this country and pornography probably isn’t helping with any of that. And a critically important problem to me was that for more than a century, the anti-pornography position had been used as a pretext for discriminating against gays and lesbians or people who have kinks or fetishes. So, I could see why, on the one hand, we might be very worried about the messages that pornography is sending, and on the other hand, why we might be really worried about going overboard indicting it. I looked into every scary, horrifying claim that I could find about the average age at which people first see pornography, or what it does to their brains or their sexuality. Here’s what I have to say. The free online, mainstream pornography, that’s the kind that teenagers are most likely to see is a completely terrible form of sex education. But that’s not what it was intended for. And it probably is not instantly poisoning their minds or turning them into compulsive users, the way that some ideologies would have you believe. It’s a rare person who doesn’t see some pornography in their youth. By the time they are 18 years old, 93% of first-year college males and 62% of females have seen pornography at least once. And though people like to say that the internet has made pornography ubiquitous or basically guarantees that any young child who’s handed a smartphone is definitely going to see pornography, data don’t really support that. A nationally representative study found that in the year 2000, 16% of 10- to 13-year-old youth reported that they had seen pornography in the past year. And by 2010, that figure had increased, but only to 30 percent. So, it wasn’t everybody. Our problems with adolescents and sexual violence perpetration are not only because of pornography. In fact, a recent study found that adolescents are more likely to see sexualized images in other kinds of media besides pornography. Think about all those sexualized video games, or TV shows, or music videos. And it could be exposed to a steady stream of violent media that instead of or in addition to the sexualized images is causing our problems. By focusing on the potential harms of pornography alone, we may be distracting ourselves from bigger issues or missing the root causes of dating and sexual violence which are the true public health crises. Having said that it turns out that adolescents are turning to pornography for education and information about sex. And that’s because they can’t find reliable and factual information elsewhere. Less than 50% of the states in the United States require that sex education be taught in schools, including how to prevent coerced sex. And less than half of those states require that the information presented be medically accurate.

I realized we could cover all of the same topics that we might normally talk about under the guise of healthy relationships education like, what’s a definition of sexual consent? Or, how do you know if you’re hurting somebody during sex? Or what are healthy boundaries to have when you’re flirting? All of these same things we could discuss by using pornography as the jumping-off point for our conversation. It’s sort of like when adults give kids desert-like brownies, but they secretly baked zucchini or something healthy inside of it. We could talk to the kids about the healthy stuff, the stuff that’s good for you, but hide it inside a conversation that was about something that they thought they wanted to be talking about. There’s a fantastic way to have a conversation with teenagers about pornography and that is, keep the conversation true to science. Admit what we know and what we don’t about the impact of pornography. Talk about where there are mixed results or where there are weaknesses in the studies that have been conducted. Invite the adolescents to become critical consumers of the research literature on pornography as well as the pornography itself. That really fits with adolescent development. Adolescents like to question things and they like to be invited to think for themselves. What we call pornography literacy, is about presenting the truth about pornography to the best of our knowledge, given that there is an ever-changing evidence base. The secret ingredient is being non – judgmental. I don’t think that youth should be watching pornography but, above all I want them to become critical thinkers if and when they do see it. There are a lot of parents and a lot of teachers who really do want to be having these more nuanced and realistic conversations about pornography with teenagers.

I believe that sex and pornography addiction is a myth. The association for the treatment of sexual abusers a worldwide organization states that sex and pornography addiction is not an accurate clinical diagnosis. An addict is actually defined as someone who uses a specific substance particularly an illegal drug. Addiction comes from the medical model, not from the mental health model yet labeling it as sex and pornography addiction has become rampant. Some people use it as an excuse for overarching self-sabotaging behaviors. Other people use it as an escape from consequences such as prison or legal ramifications. The idea of sex and pornography addiction is really a compulsive preoccupation with fantasy to include compulsive masturbation, the excessive viewing of pornography, the unhealthy pursuit of casual sex. In 2017 pornhub.com had 81 million visits per day which they further broke down to 50, 000 searches per minute or 8800 searches per second. If you were to watch everything that was downloaded in 2017 alone you would have to watch 68 years of pornography continuously. The obsessive use of pornography is a worldwide issue. The United States comes in first for the highest amount of traffic, the United Kingdom is Second, India is number 3 with Japan being a close fourth. In the Philippines, they have the highest average viewing time approximately 13 minutes whereas in Russia the average viewing time is about 8 minutes. There was this guy who tells me that he is ashamed to talk to somebody about how much pornography he’s been viewing, sometimes up to 4 hours a day to avoid the stress that he is having at work yet it’s causing him to push people away like his friend’s and he’s not going out with them to movies or on hikes or biking or even to dinner because he wants to rush home and watch pornography. He wasn’t always like this. There was a time in his life when he wasn’t aware of sex or pornography and when he wasn’t dealing with sexually compulsive behaviors. A study in 2008 by cyberpsychology and behavior that states that 93% of boys and 62% of girls have been exposed to online pornography during their adolescence. So our youth especially teenagers are being bombarded by images of sex and fantasy at the rate of 68 million pornographic search engine requests every single day. So if you find yourselves spending hours on the internet looking for pornography or you are going outside to meet strangers and have casual sex instead of developing a meaningful real-life relationship with someone you are lacking connection and all of us deserve to have a connection so how do we move from this negative behavior and into something more positive.

My concern is both with the young guy who believes because hardcore pornography has taught him but my concern is particularly with the young girl whose boyfriend wants to come on her face although she does not want him to come on her face hardcore pornography has taught her that all men love coming on women’s faces and that all women love having their faces come on and therefore she must let him come on her face and she must pretend to like it. So I would like to say make love not porn because porn is far away from reality. It’s important to say by the way that this is absolutely not about judgment, this is not about good and bad sex. Sex is the area of human experience that embraces the vastest possible range of proclivities. Because the porn industry is driven by men, funded by men, managed by men, directed by men, and targeted at men porn tends to present one world view. Porn says this is the way it is and what I want to say is not necessarily. Be aware this is an issue because I would have never realized it if I have not encountered it myself.