What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn

The New York Times looked into porn and how watching it translates into behavior in teenagers — how it influences their views about sex, gender, and power dynamics. Whether parents want to accept it or not, their teenage kids watch porn, researchers say, and sometimes it’s their only source of sex education. So wouldn’t it be better to teach them some porn literacy?

That’s exactly what some high school programs in the US are doing. They’re gathering teenagers around in a classroom to debate about how stuff like consent, aggression, pleasure, and relationships are portrayed in porn. The program aims at making the high schoolers “savvier, more critical consumers of porn”. In lacking of a set of tools to grasp what they’re watching, lots of kids get extremely confused as to how they’re supposed to behave in bed.

From that confusion a range of issues may emerge — from simply really bad sex to revenge porn to unhealthy relationships. As Erika Lust, a feminist porn producer put it, “We have given our children technology, so we need to teach them how to handle it.”