The lack of inclusive and comprehensive sexual education can lead adolescents to turn to pornography for information.
Mel Ferrara, a gender and women’s studies instructor, said mainstream porn focuses on showing pleasure, cutting out the sometimes awkward, but real moments in sexual experiences, like consent and intimacy.
“When we talk about sex in general, things that are really crucial to healthy and affirming experiences of sex have to do with communicating, especially around consent, and pleasure, what people want and negotiating those things,” Ferrara said. “Unfortunately with mainstream porn, a lot of those conversations are cut out.”
Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia require public schools to teach sex education and only 20 states require that if provided, sex and or HIV education must be medically, factually or technically accurate, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Kayla Firestone, a senior linguistics major, said she received little to no sex education at Neshaminy High School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
“It really left me to my own devices,” Firestone said. “It didn’t even mention being queer as an option … If it weren’t for the fact that I had the internet, there wouldn’t be any words for my identity.”
Ninty-three percent of boys and 62 percent of girls were exposed to online pornography before the age of 18, according to an online survey of college students by Penn State Harrisburg School of Behavioral Sciences and Education.
Porn should not be used as an alternative for sexual education, because it is not a realistic portrayal of actual sexual experiences and does not teach adolescents about relationships, sexual development or sexual health, Healthline reported.
Cassidy Sanders, a senior theater major, said pornography largely caters to male viewers, even in portraying LGBTQ sexual experiences.
“It’s enormously heterosexual,” Sanders said. “Legitimate bisexual representation just isn’t there. I don’t feel like I have ever seen anything that really shows what it’s like to be a bisexual woman.”
Marvin Manalo, a senior kinesiology major, said he’s experienced fetishization of his ethnicity personally and through porn, in which Filipino men were called race-based derogatory names.
“Porn is acting,” Manalo said. “The way sex workers portray what sex should be is a total 180 degrees from reality.”
Porn perpetuates a cisgender and heteronormative culture which leads to the objectification of marginalized communities, like the hypersexualization of Black women and fetishization of Asian women, as well as the eroticization of queer and trans people of color, Ferrara added.
In Pornhub’s annual year in review, interest in transgender porn saw significant gains in 2018, becoming the fifth most searched term by those aged 45 to 64, according to the pornography website’s analytics.
Black and Latino men were more likely to use aggression compared to white men in pornography, perpetuating the stereotype that Black and Latino men are more violent. Latina and Black women were usually portrayed as “exotic seductresses”, while Asian women were portrayed as an exotic “Dragon Lady” seductress, or an infant-like “submissive doll”, according to a study that analyzed 172 pornographic videos by the department of sociology at McGill University.
There is also a perception that adult actors perform for the “male gaze,” or to provide sexual gratification for the male viewer, Ferrara said.
“It’s harmful to be stereotyping and reinforcing these cultural norms for male viewers, but also for those identities viewing it who suddenly feel certain types of pressure to reproduce those stereotypical norms in their own sex lives,” Ferrara added. “Especially those who didn’t have affirming sex education.”
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