So, I’m a writer and this is about sex ed. And I write a lot about online pornography and how we as parents should do EVERYTHING we can to keep our kids from seeing it and becoming addicted to it. But I’ve just read an article about the subject in the New York Times Magazine that has left my fingers frozen as they hover above my keyboard. I want to write about this, to tell you about this, to urge you to protect your kids from this.
But this information has knocked the wind out of me. These kids’ stories are so…raw, so matter-of-fact, they way they talk about porn, that I am, temporarily, speechless. SO let me take a deep breath.
Here we go.
“There’s nowhere else to learn about sex,” the suburban boy told me. “And porn stars know what they are doing.”
This is a quote from the article that has me so riled, by Maggie Jones, entitled “What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn.” It’s a long but excellent read, and I hope that you do read the whole thing, but I also hope you’ll allow me to passionately extol the parts of it that stuck with me and weigh so heavily on my Mama heart.
In preparation for writing her article, Jones interviewed a couple dozen teens who are enrolled in a local “Porn Literacy” class. YES, there’s a CLASS for that. Officially called The Truth About Pornography: A Pornography-Literacy Curriculum for High School Students Designed to Reduce Sexual and Dating Violence, the class is offered as part of Start Strong, a peer-leadership program for students in Boston’s South End. It’s is funded by the city’s public health agency and aims not to keep kids from viewing porn but “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.”
The fact that such a class EXISTS tells me we’ve given up as a society, on the notion of trying to stop kids from viewing porn. We’ve said “they’re going to do it anyway” and we’ve let them…do it anyway, to a degree that is hard to imagine. And, to be honest, we don’t HAVE to imagine, because now there is data to tell us the facts.
Jones’ article features statistics from a survey 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. The professors surveyed 614 teenagers about their porn consumption and found these fun facts [GRAPHIC DETAILS WARNING]:
“…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”).”
“Almost one-third of both sexes saw B.D.S.M. (bondage, domination, sadism, masochism).”
“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.”
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.
Like I said, very, very fun facts. I hope you’re picking up on my sarcasm there, because the word I MEAN to use is “horrifying.” These facts are horrifying.
And these are OUR kids.
Listen, moms and dads. Lean in and hear me: the people who designed this class have decided damage control is their best bet. (It’s not that I don’t applaud them for teaching kids that porn is not real; I am just so sad that they have to.) You and I as parents cannot afford to do that.
