The Porn Conversation
48% of respondents who were age 11 to 16 had seen online pornography. Of that group about 47% had intentionally sought it out leaving about half who had seen the material without seeking it, so finding it involuntary through unwanted pop-ups or being shown it or sent it by someone else.
Panelists, Justine Ang Fonte, Corey Silverberg, and Avril Clarke quickly identified the conflation between sex education and pornography as commonplace with many people looking to pornography for the sex education that they are not receiving at home or school. Fonte expresses that many people are learning from mainstream, free, online porn while living in our current sex-negative world necessitating porn literacy to be a starting ground for all modern sex education (Fonte, et al., 2022). Central to the conversation was a few key themes. One, pornography is not for kids, sex educators, sexologists, sex workers, and other laborers in the adult industry do not want people under 18 viewing porn; pornographers want people with credit cards and capital viewing porn. However, since we know that nearly half of children between 11 and 16 years old have seen porn, we must provide them with the tools for understanding that what they are encountering is a fantasy designed for an adult audience so that they are prepared when pornography or other sexualized imagery inevitably arrives on their screens. Media literacy gives a framework for mindfulness as to what we are consuming and how. Silverberg argues, “Our identities are not created out of nothing. They are created in relation to each other and in relation to the media around us,” including pornography. Two, porn is an entertainment industry, not an education industry. Porn, much like other forms of media, often reproduces harmful power dynamics based on gender, age, race, and so on that can be internalized by viewers. For example, free online porn often amplifies racist and fetishistic depictions of people of color, especially women, that can do real-world harm when that is where people are learning about intimacy. Porn literacy means addressing the racism and other violent forms of bias that are reproduced and reinforced by representations of sex and sexuality in media. Three, sex education in its current form is written for kids who do not exist. It is designed for an imaginary white, middle-class child who knows nothing about sex outside of the curriculum and has never had an inappropriate, strange, or uncomfortable interaction with sex, sexuality, or intimacy. Sex and sexuality are everywhere around us, in advertisements, on television, in music, films, art, and on social media, like TikTok.
The Porn Conversation is a non-profit project by Erika Lust and her husband Pablo Dobner “That offers free and easily accessible tools for families and educators to talk to young people about sex - beginning with the topic of porn literacy” (The Porn Conversation). Lust and Dobner founded Erika Lust Films out of concern for finding ethical porn that centers women’s pleasure, as they developed their adult film production company their concern shifted from the ethical production of porn to who is consuming pornography and what impact it is having on young people. Mainstream pornography often leaves young people, regardless of gender and sexuality, “with a misunderstanding of what sex is and what respectful relationships look like. But we can teach, we can talk, we can make children and teens aware and critical of the messages they are receiving” (The Porn Conversation). This concern for porn literacy from people involved in the adult industry has led to the creation of educational tools such as The Porn Conversation’s conversation guides, curriculum, and activity guides. These resources are accessible for free online and provide three different conversation guides for parents and three curriculum and activity guides for educators divided by age groups. The Porn Conversation provides age-appropriate guides for the eight to eleven, twelve to fifteen, and sixteen and up age groups.
Since, as I have previously mentioned, TikTok’s suggested minimum age for users is thirteen I want to call attention to elements of The Porn Conversation’s conversation guide for young people in the twelve to fifteen age range. The conversation guide is intended to be a non-professional sex education resource, or rather it is designed to facilitate conversations at home between children and their caretakers. Like pop sex ed on TikTok, this is a form of sex education that occurs outside of the classroom and away from the potential peer pressure, social stigma, and shame that may stop people from asking questions they have about pornography at school. The Porn Conversation recommends informing young people about porn and media literacy because,
When young people don’t have access to age-appropriate and evidence-informed sex education from trusted sources and adults, they are left to learn about sex through what they find online, which in many cases, is porn. Whether it’s an advertisement, a video game, a social media post, a pop-up, or porn, it’s nearly impossible to protect your child from ever seeing sexual content in their adolescence.
The Porn Conversation, like many critical porn studies scholars, encourages an understanding that porn is one form of sexualized media that has a message and impact regardless of it being consumed intentionally or not. One of the primary concerns regarding young people’s engagement with pornography is how it can impact the formation of sexual expectations by providing a narrow script of what sex is ‘supposed’ to look like. Therefore, the central goal of increasing porn literacy is to encourage individuals to be critical of the media they consume and extrapolate their own meanings from porn as texts much like the way we are trained to view books, movies, tv, and video games. We are raised to understand that when a superhero in a movie jumps from a building, it is a combination of an actor’s athletic training, special effects, editing, and ongoing off-screen safety procedures. We are not raised to view porn performers as skilled sexual athletes who similarly may benefit from movie magic and are a part of ongoing off-screen safety protocols such as conversations about consent, negotiations of boundaries, and the professional adult industry’s PASS system. Few people know that the people involved in porn production abide by an industry-standard created by the Free Speech Coalition (www.freespeechcoalition.com) in 2011 called PASS, which monitors the testing status of participants and conducts STI and other infectious disease testing in the US and Canada. The frequent testing and safety protocols in the porn industry were a part of the reason the adult industry returned to operations faster and more efficiently than the mainstream film industry during the Covid-19 pandemic and should be viewed as a leader in public health and worker safety for other industries. Since much of what keeps adult performers safe happens behind the scenes, there is a common misconception that safety is not being practiced at all, and performers, typically women, are experiencing abusive work conditions. We do not worry that Spiderman has not consented to do stunt work, or that his life is being wrongfully put at risk by the film industry because we do not see him agree to pretend to shoot and swing from webs on screen. If we saw this it would break the illusion and disrupt the fantasy we choose to engage in when we watch the film. Porn literacy skills are necessary for “Young people to anticipate sexual outcomes that are realistic for their lives instead of the fantasy that porn creates” (The Porn Conversation).
There are attempts among pop sex educators to facilitate a porn conversation of their own on TikTok, but due to shadowbanning and content removal, some sex educators have moved to other platforms to engage in discussions about the topic of Porn. For example, peer-led sex educator @itskatiehaan has specifically mentioned her attempts to address porn on TikTok being met with overmoderation, making a podcast episode on the subject in response. Similarly, @sexedwithdb has addressed pornography on her podcast of the same name but has not successfully been able to address pornography on TikTok. User @tiddygoals has also referenced being censored by TikTok for attempting to breach the porn conversation. Unsurprisingly, the only video on the subject of porn present on @tiddygoals’ page shames people for treating porn as a tool of sex education. The 22-year-old content creator is thin, blonde, and white with a small silver septum piercing, and she speaks with a gen-z vernacular that likely draws younger users to her content as another self-described “big sis.” Her lasting TikTok about pornography reads, “Yall it is so obvious when men is copying what he sees in p/rn IRL like i promise you babes treating her [cat emoji] like ur mining for precious gems w/ a jackhammer is NOT gunna make her c*m” (Lily, 2021). The comment section is flooded with posts ranging from agreement and second-hand embarrassment to genuinely thoughtful discourse about sex education and pornography. User @asairies comments, “People don’t watch amateur? Or what they would like done to them? I think amateur would be actually educational.” Users like @jas_jamesx offer suggestions like “A more ethical ‘corn’ website for women is bellesa,” and @emmyhall who says, “ok corn is bad… but wattpad fanfiction,” which branches off into a conversation about the fan-written, online porn literature common in many fandoms. Many of the comments come from other sex-positive users discussing the benefits of having the porn conversation as a part of sex ed and about the lack of discussion of female pleasure in schools. Although the conversations among users in the comment section speak to a popular desire for more candid discussions about pornography and pleasure, these conversations continue to become more difficult to have on TikTok.
As I am writing this in March of 2022, after the flagging and/or banning of the terms p0rn, pron, and pr0n, the most common ways to signify that you are talking about porn on TikTok through chilled speech is, “Corn,” or the corn emoji. Pop sex educator, @itskatiehaan, also has one video about porn TikTok that is yet to be removed where she provides a brief sex-positive, pro-porn argument for not dismissing all pornography because of the prevalence of misogynistic, racist, or otherwise violent and harmful content (Haan, 2021). Due to repeated content removal of discussions in sex ed like ethical porn, Haan began the “Your Gay Big Sis with Katie Haan,” podcast which she describes as the place where listeners can engage “with all things we can’t talk about on TikTok” (Haan, 2021) such as porn literacy. In the comment section of Haan’s TikTok on the adult film industry @xx.emosimp asks “Over 18? Do you mean its ‘bad’ for teens to watch? Cuz why?” @paucantelles adds “what happens if you are under 18” to which users reply below “its technically illegal, if ur under 18, please don’t watch it, its not meant for u, ur a child,” “nothing changes on ur 18th birthday u don’t magically mature,” and others correctly insisting that porn is not intended for children. Further down in the thread a user comments “I’m in fifth grade and I only just started learning about sex Ed what are the basics to learn.” The comments section of pop sex educators' feeds is experienced as safe places where young people feel comfortable asking questions and older or more experienced community members can respond from their own experiences and understandings of the subject. Overwhelmingly these comment sections are sex-neutral or positive, there are comments like “ew” or “ma’am im a child” sprinkled in, but for the most part, it is a site of collective learning.
The Porn Conversation provides an opportunity to see what embracing the intersections between pornography, sex workers rights and sex education can accomplish in our current system. The impressive collaboration of sex workers with sexologists, advocates, and educators to create free comprehensive sex education that is rooted in sex workers’ nuanced understandings pornography. With sex worker organizers and educators at the center, there will be an exciting future of sex education being taken seriously as a harm reduction tool.
