In the end, the porn industry is concerned with profits, not our kids

pic: Scythers via Getty Images

A French pornography performer has taken to Twitter to slam parents for failing to teach their children about sex. After receiving messages of a sexual nature from boys as young as twelve, Nikita Belluci wrote,

“I’m getting sick of educating your kids. There is a complete lack of teaching and prevention, and it’s not our job to educate your kids.”

“Reflect on what your kids are doing in private, and the consequences of that.”

Belluci’s sentiments have been echoed by a series of industry representatives, including Sexpo special guest Ron Jeremy, in a recent video by ABC.

When asked if the porn industry had a responsibility to depict healthy sexual relationships, Jeremy, who has been barred from the Adult Video News awardsafter multiple rape allegations, disagreed.

“I like what you’re saying, but what would you do? It’s not my call to tell a filmmaker ‘you can’t do this, you can’t do this, none of this’...you know, like, who are we to do that?” Jeremy concluded with a message to parents, “Watch your goddamn kids.”

Jeremy got one thing right - mainstream pornography is not where one might find healthy or positive approaches to sexuality. Rather, porn is a “distortion of respect-based sexuality” and a poor educational tool, one that routinely fails to depict consent, safe sexual practices or mutually pleasurable sexual experiences.

As Meghan Donevan put it in ‘Freedom Fallacy: The Limits of Liberal Feminism’, pornography

“portrays sex as an encounter predicated on submission and domination…in a fantasy world where women are always ready for sex, enjoy all types of sexual activity, including aggressive and degrading acts.”

Despite this, pornography has become the primary means of sexual education for young people, with porn serving as the introduction to intimacy for many children, and parents reporting feeling powerless to stop it.

While parents certainly have a responsibility to be engaged and to monitor their children’s internet access, it’s hardly a fair fight. Parents are going up against a massive almost $100 billion industry, one that has successfully embedded its product into mainstream culture. Media, advertising and popular culture have become increasingly pornified, Playboy is a global empire and porn performers are household names. Billboards for sex industry venues including strip clubs and brothels are positioned outside schools and government owned public buses are emblazoned with ads for live-streamed sex shows. Parents need to be vigilant, yes, but it’s impossible for parents alone to counter the dominant messages of a porn culture.

The porn industry also aggressively markets its product to children in a number of ways. These include studying children’s common keystroke errors in order to direct them to porn sites, and making pornography based on children’s favourite cartoon characters. The industry has also opposed measures like age verification on pornographic websites that could limit children’s exposure - and impinge on their profits.

According to the porn industry, when children and young people are harmed by their product- and they are- this is merely due to parental neglect, and not the dehumanising and abusive content they consistently churn out. Based on this logic, it is parents, not pornographers, who are responsible for pornography’s harmful impacts on kids.

In deflecting responsibility for harm to parents, the porn industry can continue unimpeded, releasing content like “punished teen”, “extreme teen humiliation” and “crying teen gangbang”, all categories found on Pornhub, the largest porn site on the Internet. The only problem with pornography premised on the humiliation, cruelty and abuse of women for men’s pleasure, then, is that children are accessing material intended for adults.

Performer Belluci rightly condemned the inappropriate behaviour from boys as young as twelve who approached her for nude photos and sexual favours. But where do twelve-year-olds learn to relate to women in this way? Where do they learn that they are entitled to women’s bodies, and that women exist for their sexual use and enjoyment? What industry grooms and shapes young people’s sexual expectations, attitudes and behaviours in this way?

This very disrespect of women is sanctioned in pornography. In porn, it is considered appropriate for men to view women in terms of male sexual gratification- that’s the point. But the porn industry can’t have it both ways. The sexually harassing and abusive treatment of women that is endemic to mainstream pornography can’t be unacceptable in the ‘real world’ and simultaneously endorsed when it takes place on a porn set. The abuse and degradation of women is either a barrier to women’s rights and humanity, or it isn’t.

In the end, the porn industry is concerned with profits, not our kids.

“The pornographers did a kind of stealth attack on our culture, hijacking our sexuality and then selling it back to us, often in forms that look very little like sex but a lot like cruelty. The only solution to this is a movement that is fierce in its critique of sexual exploitation and steadfast in its determination to fight for what is rightfully ours.”

-Dr Gail Dines.

Culture Reframed, founded by Gail Dines, has come up with a program to help parents talk about porn with their tween-age children. The Culture Reframed Parents Program currently offers three free online courses that are short and self-paced, equipping parents with the knowledge and tools to support and guide their children.

From the ‘Parents of Tweens’ course content:

“Research indicates that just over 40% of young people view pornography on their phones, with just over 50% streaming or downloading it on computers. Many parents feel overwhelmed by this and want to know, ‘What can I do to help my child?’”

“The Culture Reframed Parents Program is designed to help you have age-appropriate, nuanced, and compassionate conversations with your child. It will give you the skills to establish in your young person a grounded understanding of sexuality based on boundaries, respect and trust.”

The program includes 12 Step-By-Step Modules, scripted conversations, specialist videos along with a range of recommended resources. Areas covered in the course include information on how to teach boundaries, consent and privacy, managing technology, how to lead discussions skilfully and what to actually say.

You can follow Culture Reframed on Facebook to stay up to date on their great work in this space.

Editor’s note: This article includes references to graphic sexual content that may be inappropriate for some readers.

Today teenagers are viewing far more pornography than their parents realize. And the porn they’re watching is much more “hardcore” than moms and dads could possibly imagine.

These were the main messages of “What Teenagers are Learning From Online Porn,” a recent New York Times story by Maggie Jones. It quickly became one of the most read and shared articles.

While this may be a surprise to many American parents who perhaps imagine porn as merely a naked centerfold, it wasn’t to scholars like me who immerse ourselves in the world of mainstream porn. We know how widespread violent, degrading and misogynisticpornography has become, as well as the implications for the emotional, physical and mental health of young people.

In an effort to better understand the problem from a “front-line” perspective, feminist activist Samantha Wechsler and I have been traveling the world talking to parents about the issue. The question we’re asked most often is: “What can we do about it?”

‘Hardcore’ porn is everywhere

Surveys and our own experiences show that parents are deeply concerned about the easy access their kids now have to porn via mobile devices.

The statistics paint a dismal picture. A recent U.K. study found that 65 percent of 15- to 16-year-olds had viewed pornography, the vast majority of whom reported seeing it by age 14. This is especially problematic given the findings of another study that found a correlation between early exposure to pornography and an expressed desire to exert power over women.

Yet for all this concern, they know surprisingly little about what mainstream porn looks like, how much their kids are accessing and how it affects them. The Times article, however, cited a 2016 surveythat suggested most parents are totally unaware of their kids’ porn experiences. Jones called this the “parental naivete gap.”

This matches our own experiences. In the presentations we do at high schools, we ask parents to describe what they think of when they hear the word “porn.” They invariably describe a naked young woman with a coy smile, the kind of image many remember from Playboy centerfolds.

They are shocked when they learn that the images from today’s busiest free porn sites, like Pornhub, depict acts such as women being gagged with a penis or multiple men penetrating every orifice of a woman and then ejaculating on her face. When we tell parents this, the change in the atmosphere of the room is palpable. There is often a collective gasp.

It bears repeating that these are the most visited porn sites – which get more visitors every month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. Pornhub alone received 21.2 billion visits in 2015. We are not talking about images on the fringe.

Ana Bridges, a psychologist at the University of Arkansas, and her team found that 88 percent of scenes from 50 of the top-rented porn movies contained physical aggression against the female performers – such as spanking, slapping and gagging – while 48 percent included verbal abuse – like calling women names such as “bitch” or “slut.”

Bad for your health

More than 40 years of research from different disciplines has demonstrated that viewing pornography – regardless of age – is associated with harmful outcomes. And studies show that the younger the age of exposure, the more significant the impact in terms of shaping boys’ sexual templates, behaviors and attitudes.

A 2011 study of U.S. college men found that 83 percent reported seeing mainstream pornography in the past 12 months and that those who did were more likely to say they would commit rape or sexual assault (if they knew they wouldn’t be caught) than men who said they had not seen porn.

Another study of young teens found that early porn exposure was correlated with perpetration of sexual harassment two years later.

One of the most cited analyses of 22 studies concluded that pornography consumption is associated with an increased likelihood of committing acts of verbal or physical sexual aggression. And a study of college-aged women found that young women whose male partners used porn experienced lower self-esteem, diminished relationship quality and lower sexual satisfaction.

It begins with parents

Fearing for their children’s well-being, parents at our presentations, whether in Los Angeles, Oslo or Warsaw, want to run home in a panic to have the “porn talk” with their kids.

But in reality, they often have no idea what to say, how to say it, or how to deal with a kid who would rather be anywhere else in the world than sitting across from their parents talking about porn. At the same time, public health research shows that parents are the first line of prevention in dealing with any major social problem that affects their kids.

So what can be done?

Most current efforts focus on teens themselves and educating them about sex and the perils of porn. Although it is crucial to have high-quality programs for teens who have already been exposed, the fact is that this is cleaning up after the fact rather than preventing the mess in the first place.

So a team of academics, public health experts, educators, pediatricians and developmental psychologists – including us – spent two years pooling research to create a program to help parents become that vitalfirst line of defense.

That’s why the nonprofit we set up – Culture Reframed – initially focused on parents of tweens, addressing a key question: How do we prevent kids from being exposed to images of sexual abuse and degradation at that critical stage when they are forming their sexual identities?

What took shape was a 12-module program that introduces parents sequentially to the developmental changes – emotional, cognitive and physical – that tweens undergo and the hypersexualized pop culture that shapes those changes and is the wallpaper of tween lives.

For example, boys learn from music videos, violent video games, mainstream media and porn that “real men” are aggressive and lack empathy, that sex equals conquest, and that to avoid being bullied, they have to wear the mask of masculinity. Girls, on the other hand, learn that they have to look “hot” to be visible, be as passive as a cartoon princess and internalize the male gaze, leading them to self-objectify at an early age.

Navigating the porn minefield

Helping parents grasp the degree to which hypersexualized images shape their tweens encourages them to understand, rather than judge, why their girl wants to look like one of the Kardashians, or why their boy, hazed into hypermasculinity, is at risk of losing his capacity for empathy and connection. This helps parents approach their kids with compassion rather than with frustration and anger that can undermine the parent-child relationship.

Navigating all the minefields of living in today’s toxic porn culture – from sexting and poor self esteem to porn and peer pressure – is very tricky terrain, and parents need all the help they can get.

But ultimately, the Culture Reframed project is about so much more than providing parents with newfound confidence and skills. It’s about taking power back from the porn industry, which is out to hijack the sexuality and humanity of kids in the name of profit, and giving it back to parents.

Samantha Wechsler, interim executive director of Culture Reframed, co-authored this article.

Full article at The Conversation here.