Why Porn Is Terrible As Sexual Education
If there was ever anything positive to say about porn, it’s that it never pretended to be anything other than entertainment. That is, until Pornhub, the world’s most used supplier of pornography, started a sex-ed series (Benjamin, 2020). We’re not here to criticize the initiative toward sexual education, but we are certainly going to summarize some of the research that shows us that promoting pornography as healthy sex-ed can be a downright reckless mentality toward young people and their struggle to develop an understanding of the world.
Here are 3 of the worrying effects that porn can cause.
1. Porn can teach adolescents to be sexually violent
The link between watching porn and engaging in violent sex is not entirely clear, but a recent study (Rostad et al., 2019) shows that grade 10 students who had been exposed to violent pornography showed significantly higher rates of teen dating violence. Specifically, boys reported perpetration and victimization through teen dating violence at a rate of 2-3 times more if they had been exposed to violent pornography, while girls’ rates were 1.5 times higher. It’s easy to write off this finding as an extreme sample, had it not been for the next point:
2. Abuse is normalized in pornography
Another study (Bridges et al., 2010) analyzed the content of 304 popular pornographic videos in order to investigate the presence of derogatory and aggressive imagery. The study clearly found that the material frequently portrayed high levels of both verbal and physical aggression in 88.2% of the videos. Some of the more frequently depicted acts were gagging and slapping the people involved on film. In another 48.7% of the scenes, verbal aggression was primarily observed through derogatory name-calling. Overall, the perpetrators of aggression were predominantly male, and the victims were female in almost all cases. Perhaps most alarmingly, the victims of this abuse were shown to imitate pleasure as a response to the violence depicted. Note that the first episode of Pornhub’s “sex-ed program” advocates the importance of communication, and states that “Everyone deserves to have their boundaries respected”.
3. Porn could cause unrealistic expectations
A study by Goldsmith et al. (2017) investigates the well-known but understudied phenomenon that porn causes trouble with self-esteem and body image. Porn often paints a specific picture of how people should look and act in order to be attractive, and it’s been suspected that viewing more pornography could have a negative effect on important relationship dynamics.
The study had over 300 men and 650 women complete an online assessment of how much porn they watched, their experience of performance- and body related issues in sexual activity, their self-esteem related to their genitalia, and their sexual expectations of their partner.
Note: p <.05*, p<.01**, p<.001***, gender coded as 0=men, 1=women.
The study found that more time spent viewing pornography was associated with body-related cognitive distractions in the sense that the imagery in pornography caused a negative self-image among men regarding their own bodies as a whole. Further, they saw that men who viewed pornography had higher levels of cognitive issues related to their sexual performance than their counterparts who did not watch porn. An effect observed in relation to visual pornography was that men tend to have higher self-regard of their genitalia when they use more pornography, which was thought to be a result of the men imagining themselves participating in the scene as the male performers they were watching. It was also found that those who consumed more pornography had higher expectations of both their partner’s sexual performance and their appearance. Note that many of the concerns expressed by participants in this study were stated to be related to other factors than pornography use.
In Conclusion
Not all porn depicts violence, and not all adolescents who view violent pornography will carry violence into their adult sex lives, but internet porn in its current state is unable to provide sexual education with hopes of encouraging a healthy mentality towards sex. As mentioned above, it’s been demonstrated that viewing violent pornography can lead young people to nourish an unhealthy idea of what sex is supposed to be like. Unfortunately, violence and abuse is much too commonly depicted in porn as something that is normal, and as something that is supposed to be enjoyable for the victim. As usual, the references used in this article are not sufficient to clearly state that porn directly causes the negative effects mentioned above. However, given that fragile social and neurological development that characterizes adolescence, it can be argued that strongly advocating for pornography as a suitable form of sexual education is simply irresponsible.
References
Benjamin, P. (2020). Pornhub has launched its first ever sex education series. Dazed. https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/50928/1/pornhub-has-launched-its-first-ever-sex-education-series
Bridges, A. J., Wosnitzer, R., Scharrer, E., Sun, C., & Liberman, R. (2010). Aggression and Sexual Behavior in Best-Selling Pornography Videos: A Content Analysis Update. Violence Against Women, 16(10), 1065–1085. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801210382866
Goldsmith, K., Dunkley, C. R., Dang, S. S., & Gorzalka, B. B. (2017). Pornography consumption and its association with sexual concerns and expectations among young men and women. Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 26(2), 151–162. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhs.262-a2
Rostad, W. L., Gittins-Stone, D., Huntington, C., Rizzo, C. J., Pearlman, D., & Orchowski, L. (2019). The Association Between Exposure to Violent Pornography and Teen Dating Violence in Grade 10 High School Students. Archives of sexual behavior, 48(7), 2137–2147. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-019-1435-4
