Should Porn Literacy Be a Part of Sex Education class in High Schools in the US?

2/9/2018 What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn – The New York Times

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rew was 8 years old when he was flipping through TV channels at home and landed on “Girls Gone Wild.”
A few years later, he came across HBO’s late-night soft-core pornography. Then in ninth grade, he found online
porn sites on his phone. The videos were good for getting off, he said, but also sources for ideas for future sex
positions with future girlfriends. From porn, he learned that guys need to be buff and dominant in bed, doing
things like flipping girls over on their stomach during sex. Girls moan a lot and are turned on by pretty much
everything a confident guy does. One particular porn scene stuck with him: A woman was bored by a man who
approached sex gently but became ecstatic with a far more aggressive guy.

But around 10th grade, it began bothering Drew, an honor-roll student who loves baseball and writing rap
lyrics and still confides in his mom, that porn influenced how he thought about girls at school. Were their
breasts, he wondered, like the ones in porn? Would girls look at him the way women do in porn when they had
sex? Would they give him blow jobs and do the other stuff he saw?

Drew, who asked me to use one of his nicknames, was a junior when I first met him in late 2016, and he told
me some of this one Thursday afternoon, as we sat in a small conference room with several other high school
boys, eating chips and drinking soda and waiting for an after-school program to begin. Next to Drew was Q.,
who asked me to identify him by the first initial of his nickname. He was 15, a good student and a baseball fan,
too, and pretty perplexed about how porn translated into real life. Q. hadn’t had sex — he liked older, out-of-
reach girls, and the last time he had a girlfriend was in sixth grade, and they just fooled around a bit. So he
wasn’t exactly in a good position to ask girls directly what they liked. But as he told me over several
conversations, it wasn’t just porn but rough images on Snapchat, Facebook and other social media that confused
him. Like the GIF he saw of a man pushing a woman against a wall with a girl commenting: “I want a guy like
this.” And the one Drew mentioned of the “pain room” in “Fifty Shades of Grey” with a caption by a girl: “This is
awesome!”

Watching porn also heightened Q.’s performance anxiety. “You are looking at an adult,” he told me. “The
guys are built and dominant and have a big penis, and they last a long time.” And if you don’t do it like the guys
in porn, Drew added, “you fear she’s not going to like you.”

FEB. 7, 2018

2/9/2018 What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn – The New York Times

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Leaning back in his chair, Drew said some girls acted as if they wanted some thug rather than a smart, sensitive
guy. But was it true desire? Was it posturing? Was it what girls thought they were supposed to want? Neither Q.
nor Drew knew. A couple of seats away, a sophomore who had been quiet until then added that maybe the girls
didn’t know either. “I think social media makes girls think they want something,” he said, noting he hadn’t seen
porn more than a handful of times and disliked it. “But I think some of the girls are afraid.”

“It gets in your head,” Q. said. “If this girl wants it, then maybe the majority of girls want it.” He’d heard
about the importance of consent in sex, but it felt pretty abstract, and it didn’t seem as if it would always be
realistic in the heat of the moment. Out of nowhere was he supposed to say: Can I pull your hair? Or could he try
something and see how a girl responded? He knew that there were certain things — “big things, like sex toys or
anal” — that he would not try without asking.

“I would just do it,” said another boy, in jeans and a sweatshirt. When I asked what he meant, he said anal
sex. He assumed that girls like it, because the women in porn do.

“I would never do something that looked uncomfortable,” Drew said, jumping back into the conversation. “I
might say, ‘I’ve seen this in porn — do you want to try it?’ ”

It was almost 4 p.m., and the boys started to gather their backpacks to head to a class known as Porn
Literacy. The course, with the official title The Truth About Pornography: A Pornography-Literacy Curriculum
for High School Students Designed to Reduce Sexual and Dating Violence, is a recent addition to Start Strong, a
peer-leadership program for teenagers headquartered in Boston’s South End and funded by the city’s public-
health agency. About two dozen selected high school students attend every year, most of them black or Latino,
along with a few Asian students, from Boston public high schools, including the city’s competitive exam schools,
and a couple of parochial schools. During most of the year, the teenagers learn about healthy relationships,
dating violence and L.G.B.T. issues, often through group discussions, role-playing and other exercises.

But for around two hours each week, for five weeks, the students — sophomores, juniors and seniors — take
part in Porn Literacy, which aims to make them savvier, more critical consumers of porn by examining how
gender, sexuality, aggression, consent, race, queer sex, relationships and body images are portrayed (or, in the
case of consent, not portrayed) in porn.

On average, boys are around 13, and girls are around 14, when they first see pornography, says Bryant Paul,
an associate professor at Indiana University’s Media School and the author of studies on porn content and
adolescent and adult viewing habits. In a 2008 University of New Hampshire survey, 93 percent of male college
students and 62 percent of female students said they saw online porn before they were 18. Many females, in
particular, weren’t seeking it out. Thirty-five percent of males said they had watched it 10 or more times during
adolescence.

Porn Literacy, which began in 2016 and is the focus of a pilot study, was created in part by Emily Rothman,
an associate professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who has conducted several studies on
dating violence, as well as on porn use by adolescents. She told me that the curriculum isn’t designed to scare
kids into believing porn is addictive, or that it will ruin their lives and relationships and warp their libidos.
Instead it is grounded in the reality that most adolescents do see porn and takes the approach that teaching
them to analyze its messages is far more effective than simply wishing our children could live in a porn-free
world.

2/9/2018 What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/magazine/teenagers-learning-online-porn-literacy-sex-education.html?mcid=nyt&mc=einternal&subid=retention_hd%20subs&… 3/12

Imagine that you are a 14-year-old today. A friend might show you a short porn clip on his phone during
the bus ride to school or after soccer practice. A pornographic GIF appears on Snapchat. Or you mistype the
word “fishing” and end up with a bunch of links to “fisting” videos. Like most 14-year-olds, you haven’t had sex,
but you’re curious, so maybe you start searching and land on one of the many porn sites that work much like
YouTube — XVideos.com, Xnxx.com, BongaCams.com, all of them among the 100 most-frequented websites in
the world, according to Alexa Top Sites. Or you find Pornhub, the most popular of the group, with 80 million
visitors a day and more traffic than Pinterest, Tumblr or PayPal. The mainstream websites aren’t verifying your
age, and your phone allows you to watch porn away from the scrutinizing eyes of adults. If you still have
parental-control filters, you probably have ways around them.

Besides, there’s a decent chance your parents don’t think you are watching porn. Preliminary analysis of
data from a 2016 Indiana University survey of more than 600 pairs of children and their parents reveals a
parental naïveté gap: Half as many parents thought their 14- and 18-year-olds had seen porn as had in fact
watched it. And depending on the sex act, parents underestimated what their kids saw by as much as 10 times.

What teenagers see on Pornhub depends partly on algorithms and the clips they’ve clicked on in the past.
Along with stacks of videos on the opening page, there are several dozen categories (“teen,” “anal,” “blonde,”
“girl on girl,” “ebony,” “milf”) that can take them to more than six million videos. The clips tend to be short, low
on production value, free and, though Pornhub tries to prevent it, sometimes pirated from paid sites. Many of
the heterosexual videos are shot from the male point of view, as if the man were holding the camera while he has
sex with a woman whose main job, via oral sex, intercourse or anal sex, is to make him orgasm. Plot lines are
thin to nonexistent as the camera zooms in for up-close shots of genitals and penetration that are repetitive,
pounding and — though perhaps not through the eyes of a 14-year-old — banal. (There are alternative narratives
in L.G.B.T. and feminist porn, and studies show that for gay and bisexual youth, porn can provide affirmation
that they are not alone in their sexual desires.)

We don’t have many specifics on what kids actually view, in large part because it’s extremely difficult to get
federal funding for research on children and pornography. A few years ago, frustrated by the dearth of large,
recent United States studies, Rashida Jones, Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus, creators of the 2017 Netflix
documentary series “Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On,” about technology and porn, paired with several
foundations and philanthropists to fund a national survey about porn viewing, sexual attitudes and behaviors.
As part of the survey, led by Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health and
director of the university’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion, along with her colleague Bryant Paul, 614
teenagers ages 14 to 18 reported what their experiences were with porn. In preliminary data analysis from the
study (Herbenick is submitting an academic paper for publication this year), of the roughly 300 who did watch
porn, one-quarter of the girls and 36 percent of the boys said they had seen videos of men ejaculating on
women’s faces (known as “facials”), Paul says. Almost one-third of both sexes saw B.D.S.M. (bondage,
domination, sadism, masochism), and 26 percent of males and 20 percent of females watched videos with
double penetration, described in the study as one or more penises or objects in a woman’s anus and/or in her
vagina. Also, 31 percent of boys said they had seen “gang bangs,” or group sex, and “rough oral sex” (a man
aggressively thrusting his penis in and out of a mouth); less than half as many girls had.

It’s hard to know if, and how, this translates into behavior. While some studies show that a small number of
teenagers who watch higher rates of porn engage in earlier sex, as well as in gender stereotyping and in sexual
relationships that are less affectionate than their peers’, these findings only indicate correlations, not cause and

2/9/2018 What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/magazine/teenagers-learning-online-porn-literacy-sex-education.html?mcid=nyt&mc=einternal&subid=retention_hd%20subs&… 4/12

effect. But surveys do suggest that the kinds of sex some teenagers have may be shifting. The percentage of 18-
to-24-year-old women who reported trying anal sex rose to 40 percent in 2009 from 16 percent in 1992,
according to the largest survey on American sexual behavior in decades, co-authored by Herbenick and
published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine. In data from that same survey, 20 percent of 18-to-19 year old
females had tried anal sex; about 6 percent of 14-to-17-year-old females had. And in a 2016 Swedish study of
nearly 400 16-year-old girls, the percentage of girls who had tried anal sex doubled if they watched
pornography. Like other studies about sex and porn, it only showed a correlation, and girls who are more
sexually curious may also be drawn to porn. In addition, some girls may view anal sex as a “safer” alternative to
vaginal sex, as there’s little risk of pregnancy.

The Indiana University national survey of teenagers asked about other sex behaviors as well. Though the
data have not been fully analyzed, preliminary findings suggest that of the teenagers who had had sex, around
one-sixth of boys said they had ejaculated on someone’s face or choked a sex partner. The survey didn’t define
choking, but the high school and college-age students I spoke to referred to it as anything from placing a hand
gently on a partner’s neck to squeezing it.

We don’t have longitudinal data on the frequency of ejaculating on a girl’s face or choking among American
teenagers to know whether either practice is more common now. And, as David Finkelhor, director of the
Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, told me, fewer teenagers have
early sex than in the past (in a recent study, 24 percent of American ninth graders had sex; in 1995 about 37
percent had), and arrests of teenagers for sexual assault are also down. But you don’t have to believe that porn
leads to sexual assault or that it’s creating a generation of brutal men to wonder how it helps shape how
teenagers talk and think about sex and, by extension, their ideas about masculinity, femininity, intimacy and
power.

Over the year in which I spoke to dozens of older teenagers at Start Strong and around the country, many
said that both porn and mainstream media — everything from the TV show “Family Guy” (which references
choking and anal sex) to Nicki Minaj’s song “Truffle Butter” (with an apparent allusion to anal sex followed by
vaginal sex) to the lyrics in Rihanna’s “S&M” (“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips
excite me”) — made anal and rough sex seem almost commonplace. Drew told me he got the sense that girls
wanted to be dominated not only from reading a few pages of “Fifty Shades of Grey” but also from watching the
movie “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. “She’s on the table, and she’s getting pounded by
him. That’s all I’ve seen growing up.”

These images confound many teenagers about the kinds of sex they want or think they should have. In part,
that’s because they aren’t always sure what is fake and what is real in porn. Though some told me that porn was
fantasy or exaggerated, others said that porn wasn’t real only insofar as it wasn’t typically two lovers having sex
on film. Some of those same teenagers assumed the portrayal of how sex and pleasure worked was largely
accurate. That seems to be in keeping with a 2016 survey of 1,001 11-to-16-year-olds in Britain. Of the roughly
half who had seen pornography, 53 percent of boys and 39 percent of girls said it was “realistic.” And in the
recent Indiana University national survey, only one in six boys and one in four girls believed that women in
online porn were not actually experiencing pleasure: As one suburban high school senior boy told me recently,
“I’ve never seen a girl in porn who doesn’t look like she’s having a good time.”

2/9/2018 What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/magazine/teenagers-learning-online-porn-literacy-sex-education.html?mcid=nyt&mc=einternal&subid=retention_hd%20subs&… 5/12

It’s not surprising, then, that some adolescents use porn as a how-to guide. In a study that Rothman carried out
in 2016 of 72 high schoolers ages 16 and 17, teenagers reported that porn was their primary source for
information about sex — more than friends, siblings, schools or parents.

“There’s nowhere else to learn about sex,” the suburban boy told me. “And porn stars know what they are
doing.” His words reflect a paradox about sex and pornography in this country. Even as smartphones have made
it easier for teenagers to watch porn, sex education in the United States — where abstinence-based sex education
remains the norm — is meager. Massachusetts is among 26 states that do not mandate sex ed. And a mere 13
require that the material be medically and scientifically accurate. After some gains by the Obama administration
to promote more comprehensive sex ed, which includes pregnancy prevention, discussions of anatomy, birth
control, disease prevention, abstinence and healthy relationships, the Trump administration did not include the
program in its proposed 2018 budget; it also has requested increased funding for abstinence education. Easy-to-
access online porn fills the vacuum, making porn the de facto sex educator for American youth.

One Thursday afternoon, about a dozen teenagers sat in a semicircle of North Face zip-ups, Jordans,
combat boots, big hoop earrings and the slumped shoulders of late afternoon. It was the third week of Porn
Literacy, and everyone already knew the rules: You don’t have to have watched porn to attend; no yucking
someone else’s yum — no disparaging a student’s sexual tastes or sexuality. And avoid sharing personal stories
about sex in class. Nicole Daley and Jess Alder, who wrote the curriculum with Emily Rothman and led most of
the exercises and discussion, are in their 30s, warm and easygoing. Daley, who until last month was the director
of Start Strong, played the slightly more serious favorite-aunt role, while Alder, who runs Start Strong’s classes
for teenagers, was the goofier, ask-me-anything big sister. Rothman also attended most of the classes, offering
information about pornography studies and explaining to them, for example, that there is no scientific evidence
that porn is addictive, but that people can become compulsive about it.

In the first class, Daley led an exercise in which the group defined porn terms (B.D.S.M., kink, soft-core,
hard-core), so that, as she put it, “everyone is on the same page” and “you can avoid clicking on things you don’t
want to see.” The students also “values voted” — agreeing or disagreeing about whether the legal viewing age of
18 for porn is too high, if working in the porn industry is a good way to make money and if pornography should
be illegal. Later, Daley held up images of a 1940s pinup girl, a Japanese geisha and Kim Kardashian, to talk
about how cultural values about beauty and bodies change over time. In future classes, they would talk about
types of intimacy not depicted in porn and nonsexist pickup lines. Finally, Daley would offer a lesson about
sexting and sexting laws and the risks of so-called revenge porn (in which, say, a teenager circulates a naked
selfie of an ex without consent). And to the teenagers’ surprise, they learned that receiving or sending
consensual naked photos, even to your boyfriend or girlfriend, can be against the law if the person in the photo
is a minor.

Now, in the third week of class, Daley’s goal was to undercut porn’s allure for teenagers by exposing the
underbelly of the business. “When you understand it’s not just two people on the screen but an industry,” she
told me, “it’s not as sexy.”

To that end, Daley started class by detailing a midlevel female performer’s salary (taken from the 2008
documentary “The Price of Pleasure”): “Blow job: $300,” Daley read from a list. “Anal: $1,000. Double
penetration: $1,200. Gang bang: $1,300 for three guys. $100 for each additional guy.”

“Wow,” Drew muttered. “That makes it nasty now.”

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“That’s nothing for being penetrated on camera,” another boy said.

Then, as if they had been given a green light to ask about a world that grown-ups rarely acknowledge, they
began peppering Daley, Rothman and Alder with questions.

“How much do men get paid?” one girl asked. It is the one of the few professions in which men are paid less,
Rothman explained, but they also typically have longer careers. How long do women stay in their jobs? On
average, six to 18 months. How do guys get erections if they aren’t turned on? Often Viagra, Rothman offered,
and sometimes a “fluffer,” as an offscreen human stimulator is known.

Daley then asked the teenagers to pretend they were contestants on a reality-TV show, in which they had to
decide if they were willing to participate in certain challenges (your parents might be watching) and for how
much money. In one scenario, she said, you would kneel on the ground while someone poured a goopy
substance over your face. In another, you’d lick a spoon that had touched fecal matter. The kids debated the
fecal-matter challenge — most wouldn’t to do it for less than $2 million. One wanted to know if the goop
smelled. “Can we find out what it is?” asked another.

Then Daley explained that each was in fact a simulation of a porn act. The goopy substance was what’s
called a “baker’s dozen,” in which 13 men ejaculate on a woman’s face, breasts and mouth.

“What?” a girl named Tiffany protested.

The second scenario — licking the spoon with fecal matter — was from a porn act known as A.T.M., in which
a man puts his penis in a woman’s anus and then immediately follows by sticking it in her mouth.

“No way,” a 15-year-old boy said. “Can’t you wash in between?”

Nope, Daley said.

“We don’t question it when we see it in porn, right?” Daley went on. “There’s no judgment here, but some of
you guys are squeamish about it.”

“I never knew any of this,” Drew said, sounding a bit glum.

Daley went on to detail a 2010 study that coded incidents of aggression in best-selling 2004 and 2005 porn
videos. She noted that 88 percent of scenes showed verbal or physical aggression, mostly spanking, slapping and
gagging. (A more recent content analysis of more than 6,000 mainstream online heterosexual porn scenes by
Bryant Paul and his colleagues defined aggression specifically as any purposeful action appearing to cause
physical or psychological harm to another person and found that 33 percent of scenes met that criteria. In each
study, women were on the receiving end of the aggression more than 90 percent of the time.)

“Do you think,” Daley said, standing in front of the students, “watching porn leads to violence against
women? There’s no right or wrong here. It’s a debate.”

Kyrah, a 10th-grade feminist with an athlete’s compact body and a tendency to speak her opinions, didn’t
hesitate. “In porn they glamorize calling women a slut or a whore, and younger kids think this is how it is. Or
when they have those weird porn scenes and the woman is saying, ‘Stop touching me,’ and then she ends up
enjoying it!”

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Tiffany, her best friend, snapped her fingers in approval.

“Yes and no,” one guy interjected. “When a man is choking a woman in porn, people know it is not real, and
they aren’t supposed to do it, because it’s violence.” He was the same teenager who told me he would just “do”
anal sex without asking a girl, because the women in porn like it.

Pornography didn’t create the narrative that male pleasure should be first and foremost. But that idea
is certainly reinforced by “a male-dominated porn industry shot through a male lens,” as Cindy Gallop puts it.
Gallop is the creator of an online platform called MakeLoveNotPorn, where users can submit videos of their
sexual encounters — which she describes as “real world,” consensual sex with “good values” — and pay to watch
videos of others.

For years, Gallop has been a one-woman laboratory witnessing how easy-to-access mainstream porn
influences sex. Now in her 50s, she has spent more than a decade dating 20-something men. She finds them
through “cougar” dating sites — where older women connect with younger men — and her main criterion is that
they are “nice.” Even so, she told me, during sex with these significantly younger nice men, she repeatedly
encounters porn memes: facials, “jackhammering” intercourse, more frequent requests for anal sex and men
who seem less focused on female orgasms than men were when she was younger. Gallop takes it upon herself to
“re-educate,” as she half-jokingly puts it, men raised on porn. Some people, of course, do enjoy these acts. But
speaking of teenagers in particular, she told me she worries that hard-core porn leads many girls to think, for
example, that “all boys love coming on girls’ faces, and all girls love having their faces come on. And therefore,
girls feel they must let boys come on their face and pretend to like it.”

Though none of the boys I spoke to at Start Strong told me they had ejaculated on a girl’s face, Gallop’s
words reminded me of conversations I had with some older high-schoolers in various cities. One senior said that
ejaculating on a woman’s face was in a majority of porn scenes he had watched, and that he had done it with a
girlfriend. “I brought it up, or she would say, ‘Come on my face.’ It was an aspect I liked — and she did, too.”

Another noted that the act is “talked about a lot” among guys, but said that “a girl’s got to be down with it”
before he’d ever consider doing it. “There is something that’s appealing for guys. The dominance and intimacy
and that whole opportunity for eye contact. Guys are obsessed with their come displayed on a girl.”

Many girls at Start Strong were decidedly less enthusiastic. One senior told me a boyfriend asked to
ejaculate on her face; she said no. And during a conversation I had with three girls, one senior wondered aloud:
“What if you don’t want a facial? What are you supposed to do? Friends say a boy cleans it with a napkin. A lot of
girls my age like facials.” But a few moments later, she reversed course. “I actually don’t think they like it. They
do it because their partner likes it.” Next to her, a sophomore added that when older girls talk among
themselves, many say it’s gross. “But they say you gotta do what you gotta do.” And if you don’t, the first girl
added, “then someone else will.”

These are not new power dynamics between girls and boys. In a 2014 British study about anal sex and
teenagers, girls expressed a similar lack of sexual agency and experienced physical pain. In the survey, of 130
heterosexual teenagers age 16 to 18, teenagers often said they believed porn was a motivating factor for why
males wanted anal sex. And among the guys who reported trying it, many said friends encouraged them, or they
felt competitive with other guys to do it. At the same time, a majority of girls who had tried anal sex said they
didn’t actually want to; their partners persuaded or coerced them. Some males took a “try it and see” approach,

2/9/2018 What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn – The New York Times

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as researchers called it, attempting to put their finger or penis in a girl’s anus and hoping she didn’t stop them.
Sometimes, one teenager reported, you …