For Goodness Sex (26 page)

Ideally, we want teens to be able to self-regulate and make healthy decisions about privacy. Kids don’t learn how to do that unless we give them a chance to try. Mistakes will be made. That’s part of growing up. Our job is to try to minimize those mistakes (and the long-term impact of them) for our kids. That’s the great thing about high school. You can screw up, but it doesn’t ruin the rest of your life. Your kids won’t be perfect. But instead of feeling helpless and fearing the worst, stay informed, stay calm, and keep the lines of communication open.

Talking about healthy sexuality and technology with young people, believe it or not, also means talking to them about Internet pornography. Accessing pornography today is much different than it was “back in the day.” My students simultaneously howl with laughter and cringe when I tell them that in precomputer days getting porn required a face-to-face interaction. You actually had to walk up to the counter in the video store and say to the person standing there that, yes,
this
is the video you wanted to rent, or you had to hand the magazine to the person at the cash register. It was anything but anonymous. Today many young people will access pornography, often unintentionally, simply because it’s so easily available on the Web—so it’s important that what they see is given some context. Research shows that, on average, kids see their first example of Internet porn, whether intentionally or accidentally, around age eleven. For many teens and preteens, porn offers their first view of what sexual activity looks like. Unfortunately, it offers some very unhealthy messages. One is that sex is the entirety of life. Every interaction is just a prelude to sexual activity, and every relationship leads to and is centered on sex. Another unhealthy message is that the rest of our lives—the nonsexual moments—have no connection to the sexual ones. I always ask students: “What do you imagine the people in those porn scenes are doing twenty minutes after the camera stops? Are they grocery shopping? Are they checking their cell phones? Are they
still
having sex?”

My students usually don’t have an answer to the question; no one’s ever asked them that before. They’re led to believe that porn stars exist in a sex bubble, that they always live in that warehouse or bedroom or on that pool deck. They don’t think about the fact that there’s more to life than sex because porn depicts only our sexual selves. It’s really easy to forget about all of the complexities of being human in the lives of the people you’re watching. It’s harder for people to watch porn when they think about the actors as real people who have parents, families, laundry, or homework to do.

The most important point I try to make with my students is that porn is
performance
. The people in the film are well aware that they’re not performing for each other but for their audience. It’s not actually a secret window into a real world. It’s a completely constructed world, as fake as any movie they see on the big screen or any “reality” show they see on the small screen. Our kids grow up in a media-saturated world and can actually be quite savvy consumers, but they don’t make the connection that pornography is just another medium that is highly scripted and produced. When your kids watch a box-office blockbuster that appears to be one seamless progression of events, they know that it’s actually the result of many different cuts strung together. The same is true in porn. Those people aren’t having uninterrupted sex for hours. They’re starting and stopping, resetting cameras, having their make-up fixed, dealing with technical glitches, and the like. While we watch our favorite action hero jump through an explosion and come out unscathed, we’re aware on some level that it’s an illusion. This is what we need kids to realize about pornography.

We can try to debunk the world depicted in pornography by asking some pretty basic questions or making some pretty basic statements. There’s an under-two-minute video on YouTube that I think does this especially well. It’s called “Porn Sex vs. Real Sex: The Differences Explained with Food.” Not only does the video break the ice by talking about porn without using explicit images, but it’s also actually pretty eye-opening for kids when they hear, for example, that 80 percent of men (and 65 percent of women) don’t shave their pubic hair. Or that vulvas in porn films all look the same but real vulvas vary greatly in size, color, and appearance.

Because porn is just another kind of medium, I maintain that if you can talk with your kids about a TV show, music video, movie, or YouTube video, you can talk to them about porn. You don’t even have to have seen the specific porn your kids might be viewing.

“Would you want someone to watch you have sex?” I ask my students one day.

“Eww, creepy,” says a girl in sweats and a ponytail. A boy next to her shrugs.

“If we don’t like the idea of someone looking at us while we’re having sex,” I’ll challenge them, “then why do we like to watch other people? How would you feel if you suddenly knew someone was watching you?”

Thanks to sites like PornHub, where anyone can upload an amateur porn video, kids are seeing what they think is “just two people doing it in front of a camera.” No, no, no, I’ll tell them. There’s a different kind of performance aspect to “amateur” films that most people don’t think about. When you film yourself having sex, you do it because you want someone else to see it. Your sweetheart is already right there; she or he doesn’t need the video recap. Once you realize this, you have to ask, “How does the presence of a camera change a sexual interaction between two people?” Isn’t it likely that the people are going to do things and say things they don’t normally, even things that might not be true, because it’s part of their performance? Is the moaning in porn scenes real? It’s as real as the moaning in disaster movies after a plane crashes. Are the actors really turned on by each other or are they just acting as though they are?

Often kids look to porn to help them figure out what sex is like, but it’s such a skewed picture they get online. Our role, as always, is to provide context. Porn is not like real-life sex, and the earlier that kids learn that, the healthier the relationships they’ll be able to carry on. While trying hard to convey the message that porn isn’t real, we also have to be clear that the messages porn sends about women, about sex, about violence—and especially about the interaction of all those—are very real and can be very damaging. So much of heterosexual pornography is concerned with dominating and degrading women. Women are used as objects, not treated as people. Our kids aren’t just internalizing messages about what sex is like when they watch porn uncritically, they’re also internalizing very skewed messages about what it means to be a man or a woman, about the place of violence in sexual activity, and about how dehumanizing sex can be. None of those messages are healthy ones, so we
have
to be able to counter them.

Neither cell phones nor computers nor pocket calculators are evil; they’re tools. They don’t cause the ruination of children any more than a hammer does. Sure, if you don’t know how to use a hammer, you can end up hurting yourself or someone else. In skilled hands, though, a hammer can be used to create everything from a solid structure in which to live to a beautiful piece of art. What makes the difference is knowledge, training, and, yes, experience. The same is true for any technological device. By forbidding my brother and me from using his pocket calculator, my father made it more likely that if we did come upon one, as was inevitable, we’d be ill equipped to use it well. Like everything else we’ve talked about in this book, the keys to success for your children’s use of technology are clear communication, setting and reinforcing limits when appropriate, and most important, aiming for the good outcome rather than planning for the disastrous one.

Question Box

Q: Do you think pornography encourages the baseball model?

A:
I absolutely think pornography encourages the baseball model. It highlights vaginal intercourse over other kinds of sexual activity, and it often promotes the idea of the “bases” as the actors go through a series of regulated steps in their sexual activity—moving from kissing to touching to oral sex to vaginal intercourse. You can’t get more “baseball” than that!

Pornography is also problematic because it gives unrealistic models of what sexual activity is like, reinforces very rigid and traditional gender roles, and promotes unrealistic body images (especially for women).

Honestly, I don’t think pornography can be considered a part of healthy sexuality for high-school-age students. Pornography is another form of entertainment media, just like nonpornographic TV, which gives us mostly unhealthy models of sexuality and sexual activity. Viewing pornography on a regular basis can fill a person’s head with many unrealistic expectations of what sexual activity may be like. Those unrealistic expectations can mess people up when they encounter real-life sexual situations. If young people are going to view pornography (and as I said above, I don’t think that’s necessarily healthy), please be clear that this material represents
unrealistic fantasies
. There is nothing about the way pornography portrays sexual activity that translates into real life. The clearer you are about that, the better off you’ll be.

Q: Is it normal that I’m not into pornography but I do masturbate? I am a male.

A:
It’s absolutely normal! The idea that every guy will be into viewing pornography is a stereotype. The same goes for the stereotype that all girls aren’t into viewing porn. Some guys and girls like to watch it, others don’t. Some people use pornography while masturbating, others don’t. The important thing is that you do whatever feels most natural and right for you.

Q: Why is watching pornography such a turn-on?

A:
I notice two things in your question that I want to address before I answer it. First, not all people get turned on by watching pornography. For some people, in fact, it’s the exact opposite—a huge turn-off. Other people really get turned on by watching pornography, and still others can take it or leave it. There’s no “right” reaction. The important thing is to know what your own response is and why.

Second, the phrase “watching pornography” is like the phrase “watching TV.” It encompasses such a huge range of things that it’s hard to think about as a whole. Just as there are different kinds of TV shows, of which some you’ll like and others you won’t, there are all different kinds of pornography. One kind might turn a person on while another doesn’t.

Now, for those people who
are
turned on by watching pornography, why is that? Again, there’s no one right answer. Getting turned on can be a totally natural reaction to seeing something sexual, and it might be as simple as that. People who are visual learners (those who take in and process information more easily by seeing it than by hearing it) will likely be more turned on by viewing pornography than someone whose brain responds more to sounds or to physical movement. Some people create fantasies while watching pornography, which can be very stimulating, especially imagining that a sexual act they are seeing is being performed on them or by them. Fantasy is a normal way for our brains to try out ideas and doesn’t necessarily have any connection to what we might actually do if given the opportunity in real life. Some people get turned on by doing something they think is “dirty,” and if their value system says pornography is dirty, it might be the thrill of being “bad” that’s the turn-on. When people masturbate while watching pornography, they might associate watching the video with the physically stimulating sensations they are giving themselves; once the association is made, seeing the porn triggers the feelings.

Being turned on is a natural human response and can happen for a million different reasons. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being turned on. As I said above, the more important question to think about is why and how it’s happening, and whether that fits your values as an acceptable way to experience this very natural reaction.

Q: Why are guys so obsessed with boobs?

A:
The simple answer is because they’ve been taught to be obsessed with breasts. Not every culture sees women’s breasts as a focus for sexual pleasure or attraction. What tends to make breasts the object of sexual desire is not seeing them regularly in a society. In societies where women routinely go topless, breasts are seen as just another body part. Some will find them sexually stimulating, others will not. In the United States, however, women’s breasts are not routinely visible. That can make them become an object of desire. It’s clear that in this country we make a strong connection between women’s breasts and sex. Once a culture makes this connection, then women’s breasts become more and more sexualized and take on greater importance. Guys are told they
must 
be interested in women’s breasts—that such an interest is part of being a man. This is unfair both to men and to women. It creates all this drama around a body part that in other situations might just be allowed to be one part among many others—as men’s breasts are this country.

Epilogue

T
he changes I see in my students as they move through a year of my Sexuality and Society class are amazing. In September, they’re giggly, nervous, a bit defensive, and generally pretty confused about sexuality. By the time they leave the class, they’re confident, open, and more secure in themselves, and they know their values. I’m not a miracle worker, and I don’t know some great secret that their parents don’t know. I simply talk to them.

I want to wrap up, not with more of my words—you’ve had enough of them—but with some of their words. Near the end of the year, I give out blank index cards to the kids and ask them to write down some words of wisdom they learned in our class that they want to pass on to the ninth-graders in our school. I tell them this is their chance to be the “sexperts,” to give the younger members of our community the benefit of
their
wisdom. They take this task very seriously; they really
do
care about the younger kids, and the legacy they’re leaving for them. I have to admit to getting a little weepy when I read through the index cards. Here’s what they had to say: