Deconstructing a De Facto Miseducation

What Teenagers are Learning from Online Porn by Maggie Jones
The New York Times, February 7, 2018

‍

In this timely and much-needed article, Maggie Jones of the New York Times describes the pervasive de facto education that young people receive from free, ubiquitous online pornography. Because so few parents speak with their offspring about their sexual relationships except in terms of the dangers – primarily disease and unwanted pregnancy – their children are learning more and more about what sex should feel and look like from easily-accessible porn, most of which normalizes and glorifies male dominance and female masochism. School health curricula most often omit any mention of pornography, as well. Jones describes the many ways that the sexual knowledge gleaned on porn sites is damaging to young people, giving them a sense of inadequacy or performance anxiety and pushing them engage in behaviors that they don’t necessarily want or enjoy. She cites a number of research studies and then describes one particular bold initiative to deal directly with this emerging public health crisis. "Porn Literacy" is a course that is being piloted in secondary schools by academics at Boston University’s School of Public Health. The course intends to give students tools to be critical readers of the porn that they view and to understand the economic underpinnings of this industry. Early results seem promising; as groups of young people discuss porn openly with skilled teachers, they easily identify commercial manipulation and become resistant viewers. Just as schools have taken on media literacy as a vital part of their education, health departments in secondary school settings should be galvanized to action to rethink their own sex education curricula.