Is porn education?
Whether it's conscious or subconscious
Before the internet people would have to buy their porn in person, which I like to describe as the best form of moderation. Then, since the internet began porn became more accessible, but there were still limitations to this because most households would usually only have one computer, that had to be attached to the WIFI roster, so not exactly the privacy you want for watching pornography. Then you have my generation where due to the rise of laptops and smartphones, our experience with pornography as education became dramatically different to the generations prior.
There are lots of layers to this topic. Firstly, we need to consider the fact that the majority of us do not receive a proper sex education. Some people will receive some form of sex education from their parents, but not everyone does. Then you have the schools…
My sex education consisted of a birthing video (which I like to describe as birth control), and we didn’t even learn how to put a condom on. For others, sex education is usually just the biological labeling of diagrams, with little context around sex, pleasure, LGBTQ+ and more. And there certainly is no porn literacy.
Therefore, there is some basic information given, without the proper picture/context. You then couple this with the sexual comment/scenes that you hear on TV, with general pubescent hormones/curiosity and then young people start to go looking for some answers. But, due to digitalisation, and the privatization of digitalisation with personal laptops and phones, it is far too easy to come across pornography. Indeed, according to the American Psychology association the average age that comes across porn nowadays is 13.37 years old.
For myself, I first came across pornography at the age of 11, and I am very open about the fact that most of what I learnt about sex came from Pornhub, and I can firmly say that I am probably not the only person with this experience. At the time I didn’t really think that there was anything wrong with my learning off porn, because no one had spoken to me about it. It wasn’t until I was older that I started to see how big of an issue this was. There were definitely things that I saw in pornography that I just assumed were part of ‘normal sex’, and in hindsight I think that if my education wasn’t porn that I wouldn’t have put myself in 80% of situations. In addition, I saw the same things for men. You could instantly tell that a lot of them had also learnt off pornography, and would then choke, or slap you without first asking.
We can’t deny the fact that pornography has turned into sex education due to inadequate education at home/at school coupled with increased digitalisation. You will have some older generations not understand the magnitude of this problem, because they try to relate it too much to their experiences with pornography which were not at the same digitalisation scale or effect. Then you have the other side. As someone that works in the porn industry, trying to fix this issue, I have had a lot of conversations with other adult companies, charities and performers on this matter. The line of argument that most performers will take is that pornography is education, not entertainment and so the porn industry cannot be blamed for this. This is true, the porn industry has been made the fall guy for this problem. But it’s not as straightforward as that because the only reason porn is being used like that is because of parents and schools failing at adequate sex education. Likewise, it is true that porn was not intended to be education, but entertainment. However, this argument is flawed. As companies, you might launch a product with an intended purpose. But, if you start to see your product being used for another purpose, then you should adjust your product to meet that demand. The same should go for the porn industry. It is clear what the product has started being used for, and claiming that wasn’t the intended purpose is not a good enough argument.
Overall, we cannot deny that porn has become education, and we cannot pretend that porn doesn't exist or that it will go away. The best solution is safety, education and literacy. Pornography is not bad, porn could be a useful form of sex education. But, there needs to be a move by not just the porn companies, but also by the performers to improve porn literacy, and increase consent awareness. This cannot just be fixed with a niche, paid for subscription site because this is not where young people will be going. There needs to be a move in the tube site companies to improve consent, literacy, less controversial plotlines and educational context. Likewise, we need schools and parents to acknowledge the fact that with digitalisation porn has become education, and to teach better sex education as well as porn literacy. As a society we should be trying to solve this issue with more urgency, so that we can help the next generation. This in turn would improve consent, and reduce sexual violence, leading to an overall better and healthier society.