Pornography. With digital technology bringing access to pornography into our homes and our trouser pockets, we have come to accept it as part of life. It’s everywhere, including the places it’s not. The aesthetics of the porn industry are found in fashion shoots, in advertising, in literary novels, in teenage fanboy films. We’ve even got a Playboy President in the White House.
When I first became active in the feminist movement over a decade ago, the campaign to get rid of pornography and the commercial sex industry was real and pressing. We brandished our copies of Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs and demanded that women’s bodies and sexualities stopped being sold as aids to men’s orgasms. Almost every young woman I met—and a few older ones too—was motivated by a desire to end what we snappily called the “commercial sexual exploitation of women.”
Since then, things have changed. The porn industry is now so ingrained in our lives that the belief we could end it all together has been replaced by attempts to manage its impact.
Enter porn literacy lessons, a new initiative in the USA. The programme aims to give young people the opportunity to question what they have seen in pornography and how they relate what happens in porn to their own relationships. It includes discussions of how the industry operates, the lack of realism in much pornography and even “non-sexist pickup lines.”
Studies have shown that boys first watch porn at the age of 11, with girls encountering it not much later. As a result, the availability of mainstream pornography is shaping young people’s attitudes towards sex and bodies.
This means, for example, that young people are growing up with the belief that women are hairless and need to be big breasted, while men require large penises that last a long time, as well as the requisite buff chest. Even if they know logically that these things are not true, they are as hard as any other beauty standards to shrug off. Some studies also show that young people struggle to separate what’s real and what’s fake in porn.
More, the content of mainstream porn normalises sexual aggression towards women: a 2010 study found that in the best-selling porn videos of 2004 and 2005, 88 per cent of scenes depicted physical or verbal aggression. Similarly, porn allows boys to believe that girls unanimously enjoy sex acts which they may not actually wish to partake in or enjoy.
"Girls reported they felt coerced into having anal sex"
Chief among these acts is anal sex. In 2014, a study of 130 teenagers aged 16-18 found they believed porn was the motivating reason for why young men wanted anal sex, an act teenagers are engaging in more than ever before. Girls reported they felt coerced into having anal sex, and both blamed themselves, and felt blamed by their partner, if they found it painful.
This is deeply depressing. Sex should be something that both partners want to take part in, enjoy and gain pleasure from. It’s troubling that girls feel sex is something that should be done to them, and that they should feel bad for not enjoying.
In such a climate, porn literacy lessons sound like a good idea.
After all, if most young people are being exposed to porn, they need places to discuss whether the images they watch are realistic, and if they feel comfortable copying those acts with a partner. They need to talk about how pornography has given them specific ideas about what men and women want, and challenge whether those stereotypes are true.
The lessons could also be a place to discuss how young people feel about some of the more aggressive and degrading acts that are normalised in porn, and think about body image issues.
And yet, the idea of porn literacy classes set off an alarm bell in my head. It’s an alarm bell clearly labelled WOMEN. (It’s had a lot of use recently.)
Porn literacy lessons may provide a space to question male aggression, coercion and body image. But they are still positioned in a place where the ubiquity of porn, which largely caters to male sexuality and portrays aggression as a routine part of sex, is seen as inevitable.
As a result, it feels like porn literacy risks supporting young women who are being asked to accommodate their male peers’ sexual demands, rather than promoting or even—imagine!—prioritising women’s sexual autonomy, agency and desires; things rarely represented in most popular pornography.
And this matters.
It matters because sex is still seen by some as something that is done to women—that men want to have sex and women put up with it happening.
This is a trope propped up by cultural representations ranging from pornography to gross-out teen sex movies to high literature. It’s the narrative supported by the experiences of young women who think they just have to put up with no orgasms and finding anal sex painful, because boys want it.
Isn’t it time then, that instead of helping women work around pornography and teaching men that not all women are going to howl with pleasure over a facial wash, we take a truly radical step and talk positively and actively about women’s sexuality? That instead of taking exposure to porn as the starting point for talking about sex, we instead talk about sexuality, pleasure, relationships and mutuality much earlier?
There’s a sense that porn literacy is managing depressing expectations. We risk continuing to lose out on a conversation about the joys and potential of sex, particularly from a woman’s perspective.
Wouldn’t it be truly radical if, instead of accepting the primacy of porn and therefore the primacy of men’s desire, we gave women and men positive models of mutual consent, pleasure and fun? If instead of treating male-centric porn as something men will always have and women just have to learn to deal with, we talked about how some women might watch porn too, while some women choose not to?
If we didn’t teach teenagers how to interpret what happens in porn, but taught them from a young age to imagine a different version of sex and sexual expression?
Let’s start talking about how women have a right to our own sexual desires, to our own sexual preferences; a right to say yes to what we do want and no to what we don’t.
Do that, and we won’t need porn literacy. We’ll achieve sexual literacy. And that would be truly radical.
