All I Really Need To Know I Learned From Porn — Or Not
Porn is not sex education.
I’ll say it again: Porn is not sex education.
I’m saying this to everyone who’s reading this. But I’m especially saying it to parents: Porn is not sex education. So you need to make sure your kids are getting actual sex education. Because if you don’t, then all they really need to know about sex they’ll learn from porn — and they’re going to get it completely wrong.
This came up because of a piece I heard on the NPR radio show, “This American Life.” The program was on the topic of “talking to kids,” and it had a whole segment on talking to kids and teenagers about sex. The entire segment was excellent . . . but the part that jumped out at me was the teenagers saying that they didn’t have good information about sex. Specifically, they didn’t have good information about the actual mechanics of sex, what goes where and how.
And so they looked at porn.
And I didn’t know whether to vomit, throw things, or cry.
It wasn’t just the appalling state of sex education in our country that made me want to cry. Although that was a big part of it. The sex education these kids are getting from their schools is pathetic and insulting, and they know it.
No, what was really making me want to throw bricks through windows was that these teenagers were getting their sex education from porn . . . and I know, in great and vivid detail from the many years I’ve been watching porn, exactly how lousy that education will be.
Here is a very short list of things that people will get grotesquely wrong if they get their sex education from porn.
What women’s genitals look like. This is a biggie. If you’re looking at porn video to satisfy your curiosity about what a pussy looks like — well, standards of female beauty in porn are almost as rigid with pussies as they are with basic body types, and female genital cosmetic surgery in the porn industry is getting increasingly and depressingly common.
What male genitals look like. Another biggie — literally. Every time I read a letter to a sex advice columnist from a guy complaining that his dick is pathetically small — not like the guys in the porn videos — I want to scream and bite people. Male porn actors are specifically selected for their large genitalia. They are not a statistically representative sampling. Statistically speaking, they represent the far, far end of the bell curve.
The realities of female sexual response. This may be the worst offender of the bunch. There’s already enough ignorance about what gives women sexual pleasure and what gets us off, without “porn as sex ed” adding to the mix. Look, I have no doubt that there are some women out there who don’t need foreplay, get very aroused by giving blowjobs, have intense multiple orgasms from intercourse alone, and couldn’t care less if you touched their clit. But if that’s how you’re trying to get a woman off, you’re really not playing the percentages. Trust me on this.
The realities of male sexual response. If you’re getting your sex education from porn, you’re going to think that it’s normal for men to get rock-hard immediately, at will, and to stay rock-hard throughout the encounter until they come. You won’t necessarily know that (a) male porn actors are specifically selected for their ability to get wood and keep it; and (b) the omnipresence of wood in porn videos is due in large part to the miracle of video editing (and more recently to the miracle of Viagra).
To round it all off, we have the actual mechanics; the “What happens during sex?” stuff that the teenagers in the NPR story were desperately looking for. The sex in porn videos is choreographed to give a clear, unobstructed view of the penetration. It’s choreographed to look good — not to feel good. I shudder to think of a generation coming into their sexual prime thinking that reverse cowgirl and that stupid position where the woman sticks her leg up on the wall are the gold standard of the sexual nuts and bolts.
And all of that is just the tip of the sexual misinformation iceberg.
So I want to say a few things to parents:
1. Sex education in our country is in an appalling state. It has huge holes in it at best, and dispenses gross misinformation at worst.
2. If you think your kids aren’t seeing porn, think again. Even before the Internet, kids and teenagers were looking at porn. (How many of us swiped our dad’s Playboys for a peek? I sure did.) And with the Internet, the horse is definitely out of the barn
So do something. If you’re not comfortable talking frankly with your kids about sex yourself — and I have more sympathy for that position than you might imagine, I sure didn’t want to talk with my parents about sex — you need to make sure they have a way to get the information they want and need. Get them books. Point them at the Scarleteen or San Francisco Sex Information websites. Make sure there’s an adult in their life they can talk about sex with. Or suck it up, get over your discomfort, and talk to them yourself.
But for the love of all that is beautiful in this world, do not let them grow up thinking that they can get accurate, useful sex information from porn. They can — once they’re adults, of course — use porn to get entertainment, inspiration, arousal, even some interesting new ideas. But the sex information they’ll get from porn will be, if possible, even more useless and misleading than the sex information they’re getting from their schools.
This entry was posted on Thursday, 18 October 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Thursday, 18 October 2007 at 2:25 pm latexninja wrote:
I am
deffinitely in that group. A big part of the problem was that since
my parents were uncomfortable about it, I think I picked up that same
feeling and would not discuss it with them. We kind of left it. I
remember when I was younger being confused about exactly how many
holes there were in a woman’s pelvis.
Our culture has a pathological problem with sex, and a lot of this
stems from our own puritanical roots and could even be extended to
coming from catholicism. Many of the catholic faith feel that sex is
intrinsically sinful(it’s not, and I can make a damn good bible
argument against the point, too), and sex purely for pleasure is not
permissible. It’s insanity that our culture is still so negative over
sex, yet (with the exception of a small number) there is not a single
human being on this planet who is not the result of sex.
I had to fend for myself, and hunt down what I could and learn what I
could. I’m still a virgin, and I’m still learning, even at the age of
26. Once or twice they would find out about my research, and react
very negatively. The whole thing ended up being very traumatic and to
this day we don’t discuss it.
on Thursday, 18 October 2007 at 11:19 pm Jono wrote:
I remember one of the very first sex talks I had with my dad (never had any with my mom) was right after he let me and my brother know that he could easily see the kinds of websites we were visiting. It was a brutally short conversation, the central point of which was “Just know that what you see on the internet isn’t what it’s really like.”
This left me only slightly more confused/unaware/uninformed than I was prior, but it was good advice nonetheless.
on Friday, 19 October 2007 at 6:07 am Steve Caldwell wrote:
Greta,
Another option here for getting complete, accurate, and age-appropriate information to teens would be finding a nearby Unitarian Universalist or United Church of Christ congregation that is offering the Our Whole Lives program for grades 7-9 or grades 10-12.
The 7-9 program (when offered in religious settings) has a slide presentation that visually depicts lovemaking for male-male, female-female, and male-female couples that is realistic. The 10-12 program provides similar information but also includes cultural/historical context information as well through a video.
More information can be found online here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Whole_Lives
http://www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/ourwhole/
Thanks.
on Friday, 19 October 2007 at 8:22 am Robert Madewell wrote:
My father is an evangelical minister. He was so embarrassed about anything sexual that he never had “that talk” with me or my brothers. We had to “learn from the playground.” His religion had him hating sexuality so much that he would get angry with us for asking anything. I was even spanked for asking what a tampon was after seeing the commercial on TV (I was 8 years old). He even ignored the fact that I was being sexually abused by a teenager from our church. Later in life, he seemed to have no idea why I was emotionally disturbed or why I was suffering from years of depression. Of course my father is a product of his time. I have been to many churches in my area and I have never heard a pastor tell parents to talk to their kids about sex. My fathers church was no exception. So the problems my father had with sex was because he too had bad (or no) sex education.
on Sunday, 21 October 2007 at 10:43 pm sam wrote:
Everything I ever needed to know about sex I learned from Cosmo and magazines like it…and I’m a het male.
The learning curve isn’t all that difficult, but it IS hard to figure out where you’re actually going to find useful info.
on Tuesday, 23 October 2007 at 8:58 pm Foxbat wrote:
On the one hand, I agree - no one should ever have to learn the mechanics of sex from porn. Your points are good that porn is highly unrepresentative of real sex.
But on the other hand:
Everything I learned about the mechanics of sex, I learned from porn. Usenet was my sex education. When all my buddies were wondering how many holes there were, I knew. I used to look at pictures because I had no idea about things like the angle of the vagina, or the location of the clitoris. While porn was able to answer these types of basic questions, I was able to correct for many of the inherent non-representative qualities of porn by watching lots of it, and porn of different styles. People forget that there’s a huge variation in porn between the big block-buster equivalents made on hundred thousand dollar budgets and the webcam-in-the-parents-basement movies. So some porn is actually fairly representative.
The other major benefit of learning about sex from porn is that it broaden my horizons far more than any conversation with parents could have. By 8th grade I knew about bondage and bestiality and bisexuality - things which would never have come up in conversation no matter how open-minded the parent. Perhaps an 8th grader is incapable of understanding those things, but it has done no lasting damage. Today I’m very open minded, and I think it comes from understanding early on that there is no such thing as “normal” and that everyone has some weird fetishes.
Perhaps this exploration of variety was a function of how I got my porn, because Usenet is hierarchical by category or topic, but I would have eventually reached the same result even using the web and file sharing. For me, porn was not only a sexual stimulant, but also an intellectual quest for answers - and not only to questions of mechanics, but to greater questions about the definition of sex and the range of human interests.
So in summary, I agree that sex ed through porn can be damaging, but I disagree that it is necessarily damaging. If your kid has enough intellectual curiosity and is intelligent enough to see the biases which make porn unrepresentative of reality, then it can be a fantastic education.
—
Fox
on Wednesday, 24 October 2007 at 5:44 am Fredrik wrote:
The picture is not that black and white (speaking as an outsider, I am Swedish). It is mostly American porn that is obsessed with big genitalia, they come in all sizes and forms in other countries’ porn (though there is a trend of americanization here). Also, the net reeks of amateur porn, which is usually unedited and reveals more realism.
Also, I assume that also American kids talk to each other, and that they are aware that porn is not reality, like they know action movies are not.
The more important issues in sex education, I think, are to understand conception and protection, of which porn says nothing.
That said, I am not disputing your main point.
on Wednesday, 24 October 2007 at 7:10 am To follow up on “You’re doing it wrong”… wrote:
[…] And I didn’t know whether to vomit, throw things, or cry. […]
on Thursday, 25 October 2007 at 5:13 pm Caitlain wrote:
Excellent post. One reason why the state of sex education is so abysmal here in the US is the interference of religion (and moronic politicians) in the process. Unlike what occurs in the Scandanavian countries, where the sex education is, generally speaking, top notch (with the attendant low rates of disease transmission, unplanned pregnancy and abortions), we allow the religious nutjobs to dip their meddling hands into the process of determining what sex education looks like in this country and how sex in general is viewed. This naive treatment of sex has led to a great many problems with sex in this country ranging from the incredibly high rates of disease and pregnancy among teens to higher incidences of rapes. Since we can’t treat the subject with anything resembling reality, we force the entire subject itself into the dark spaces and shouldn’t be surprised when that turns around and bites us on the ass, both from a societal perspective as well as the individual one.
on Tuesday, 30 October 2007 at 7:34 am Bunsen wrote:
Greta,
While I agree with everything you say (Yes, Yes, YES!) I think you skipped a couple of very significant point about hardcore porn as sexual education.
Point One: A vast majority of women don’t like getting covered in sperm every time they have sex. Women like being respected, and a little objectified sometimes, but not too much (come to think of it, so do men.)
Point Two: Sex can be perfectly fulfilling with just one partner. There is no need to bring in another 3 to 5 coeds - but you can if you want, and your partner is okay with it.
Point Three: It’s important that your partner be okay with it. Porn dehumanizes sexuality and sex itself - it doesn’t care about love, fidelity, or respect for partners.
AND POINT FOUR: Safe sex. Safe sex. Please. Random people on set together, just going at it, no condoms, no pills, no nothing. Just a housemaid and a plumber/pizza delivery guy who don’t discuss sexual histories, going at it with reckless abandon. I think it bears repeating again. Safe sex.
And in support of something you said earlier on, I got screwed by the size issue, because I unfortunately AM at the far, far end of the bell curve, and expected everybody I was ever with to be ecstatic about it. When the horror appeared on first-time lovers’ faces, I absolutely could not understand why.
Great article.
on Wednesday, 6 February 2008 at 5:31 pm PBT wrote:
As a virgin male it is incredibly reassuring to know that men arn’t supposed to have a solid hard on at the drop of a hat.
on Tuesday, 30 December 2008 at 4:47 am The internet, the censor, the blogger and his Twitter hostage | Sue Bailey wrote:
[…] It won’t work because the internet doesn’t work like that, because parents who were really, truly bothered would supervise their children’s surfing, and because curious adolescents want to look at porn - and wouldn’t you rather they did it in the comfort of their own homes than by having to shoplift from newsagents like my generation did? […]
on Monday, 16 March 2009 at 3:04 pm Good Vibrations Magazine » Blog » gonzo porn, realtity shows, and extreme sports wrote:
[…] To add another layer of complexity, it’s also pretty clear that some people copy what they see in porn without much thought about desire, consent, or safety. For example, I hear from lots of people who try anal sex without lube because that’s what they see in porn. What they don’t know is that the lube is there- it’s applied before they turn the cameras on. The fact is, porn sex is to real life sex what a car chase in an action movie is to real life driving. Fortunately, we see lots of examples of safe(r) driving techniques, so it’s pretty easy to remember that action movies aren’t trying to demonstrate driving skills. But most people never watch other people having sex, so it’s a lot harder to remember that porn isn’t trying to show you how to have sex. [Here’s a great blog by the fabulous Greta Christina on this.] […]
on Wednesday, 14 October 2009 at 11:28 am [Greta Christina] On the Ubiquity of Shaving | Blowfish Blog wrote:
[…] And I have issues with what I strongly suspect is the source of this trend: namely, mainstream commercial porn. I hate the idea of porn being the trendsetter, the sexual yardstick by which our sexual activity is measured. The sex in mainstream commercial porn is highly exaggerated; it’s choreographed primarily to look good on camera, not to feel good for the participants; it focuses largely on male pleasure at the expense of female pleasure; and it’s standardized to an almost ritualistic degree that would be laughable if it weren’t so sad. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Porn is not sex education. It scares and saddens me to think of an entire generation of sexually active adults getting their ideas about what is and isn’t normal/ acceptable/ desirable in sex from porn. […]