Can porn change the world? At least, that is, can porn influence people to adopt safer sex practices, specifically condom use? And perhaps more to the point, should it? An article on the Washington Post-affiliated site The Lily posed those questions over the weekend, and came up with a rather definitive answer.
“It isn’t the porn industry’s job to be teaching our kids about sex education. Instead of pointing a judgmental finger at porn for its influence on our sex lives, we should instead be more critical about the abysmal state of sex education in this country,” wrote Lily contributor Maria Del Russo. “Folks should be learning safe sex in schools or from their parents—not from porn performers.”
But in 2016, a study at Columbia University, and bearing the rather weighty title, “Viewing of Internet-Based Sexually Explicit Media as a Risk Factor for Condomless Anal Sex among Men Who Have Sex with Men in Four U.S. Cities,” suggested that porn apparently can have a positive influence on the safe-sex habits of its consumers.
The study showed that among men who viewed porn—or as the study called them, SEM (“Sexually Explicit Media")—that depicted men wearing condoms during anal intercourse with other men, there was a slightly higher incidence of condom-use in their actual, sexual practices. However, the study sample was quite low, involving just 265 gay men. Another problem: "Two-thirds (67%) of the sample was recruited through Facebook."
In Del Russo’s view, the study says less about porn and more about “the state of sex education today.”
According to data compiled by The Guttmacher Institute, only 24 states plus Washington, D.C. mandate sex education for teens, and only 22 of them include HIV education in that mandate. Another 12 states require HIV education, but not general sex ed.
Should porn step in to fill the sex education void, given that viewing porn appears to have at leasts some effect on how people behave in their personal sex lives? As Del Russo points out, “there are issues when you try to conflate porn with sex education.”
The first issue is the seemingly obvious fact that porn is not education—it’s entertainment. “It only has responsibility to entertain consenting, educated adults who are interested in that kind of entertainment,” Liara Roux, an indie porn director and activist told Del Russo.
The government, not the porn industry itself, should be implementing “comprehensive sex ed that will allow people to healthily consume entertainment media,” Roux said.
The second issue raised in Del Russo’s piece is that sex education is primarily directed at teens—and porn is designed for grownups. That doesn’t mean that plenty of underage viewers don't watch porn, but according to Dr. Laurie Betito of the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center, minors are not the intended audience.
“It’s amazing how little education there is out there, and how often people turn to pornography to get any kind of education,” Betito said—adding, however, that porn creates fantasies, and the job of sex education is to give young people a context and worldview that will allow them to interpret those fantasies in a constructive and healthy way.
“You don’t look to the Fast and Furious movies to teach proper driving techniques,” Betito said. “So it’s a little strange to ask the porn industry, which promotes fantasy, to be responsible for teaching healthy sex practices.”
Photo by Anka Grzywacz/Wikimedia Commons
