Teenagers are watching more porn than their parents know, and they’re learning a lot from it — about intimacy, power, and pleasure. But are they learning the right things? One high schooler, identified by the first initial of his nickname, Q, told The New York Times that porn “gets in your head” because you’re “looking at an adult. The guys are built and dominant and have a big penis, and they last a long time.” Another high schooler said that the concern is, if you don’t do it like the guys in porn, “you fear she’s not going to like you.” Bryant Paul, an associate professor at Indiana University’s Media School and the author of studies on porn content and adolescent and adult viewing habits, told The Times that on average, boys are around 13 and girls are around 14 when they first see porn. In a 2008 study, 93 percent of male college students and 62 percent of female college students said they saw online porn before they were 18. A new class is trying to combat the lessons that porn teaches these teenagers. Created in part by Emily Rothman, an associate professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who has conducted several studies on dating violence, as well as on porn use by adolescents, the class is modeled around the idea that most adolescents do see porn. The class hopes to make kids “savvier, more critical consumers of porn” by looking at how things like gender, sexuality, aggression, consent, race, queer sex, relationships and body images are portrayed or not portrayed in porn.
Thanks for reading InsideHook. Sign up for our daily newsletter and be in the know.
