When We Rely on Porn for Sex Ed

In our Bedtime Stories segments, where we read portions of books on relationships and sexuality from Christian publishing houses, we discover that authors commonly speak against the pornography industry, describing, as this recent Relevant Magazine article, the negative impacts of pornography on the minds and sexual relationships of its attendees (and often doing so without data or statistical research).

Consumption/non-consumption of pornography is a common indicator of insider/outsider in the church, despite the growing evidence that regions with the highest consumption of pornography are traditionally conservative/Evangelical communities.

At Sexvangelicals, we hold the following values around pornography:

Pornography is about entertainment and exploring fantasy; its intended purpose (unless otherwise stated) is not educational.

Keep in mind: Fantasy is not neutral. The bodies and sexuality represented in mainstream pornography reflect the values that communities hold around what bodies and sexual expressions are most valuable.

However, due to the lack of adequate sex education in our country, many people turn to pornography as a source of education about sex and bodies. This system is at the root of problematic porn usage.

Dr. Kate Dawson, professor of psychology at the National University of Ireland in Galway, and her colleagues spoke with young Irish citizens about what they learned about sexuality in their article “Development of a Measure to Assess What Young Heterosexual Adults Say They Learn About Sex from Pornography” (This was published in February’s Archives of Sexual Behavior, (one of the premier research journals about sexuality.)

This article is of interest because Ireland, driven by Catholic ideologues, and the United States, informed by a combo of Catholic and Evangelical rhetoric, have very similar approaches to sex education. There isn’t a well funded national program around sexual health. (We would argue that abstinence-only models in the US are ultimately about sexual repression: sexual health is cloaked in a deficit-based paradigm that highlights the dangers of sexuality.)

It’s also important to note that Dawson and company only interviewed straight people; straight people, particularly those in conservative cultures, tend to practice a narrower range of sexual practices. While this is inherently not bad or good, sexual challenges often develop as a result of the same sexual script being repeated, at the expense of diversity and exploration.

Dawson discovered that, in the absence of a healthy sex education system, people may develop the following expectations about sex and bodies from pornography:

1. Women: Being a good sexual partner is about pleasing a man through manual and oral stimulation of genitals.

2. Men: Being a good sexual partner is about how you behave (typically dominantly) and how to please their female partner.

3. Men: Sexual exploration is about different types of penetrative sex.

4. Women: Tend to have more varied interests (i.e. role play, sexual fantasies) in online searches, but mainstream pornography may fail to capture these interests.

5. What naked bodies look like.

6. What genitals look like. Note: 5 and 6 are often not representative of the average population.

Dawson and colleagues summarize: “Pornography may potentially provide valuable information for young people. However, we do not know if learning from pornography contributes to an improvement in one’s sexual knowledge.”

At Sexvangelicals, we are proponents of creating a sexual health system that provides:

1. Accurate language and depictions of the diversity of all bodies and body parts.

2. Accurate language and depictions of the diversity of all genders and gender representation.

3. Accurate physiological descriptions of the systems engaged in sexuality (neurological, reproductive, endocrine, etc.)

4. Communication practices that promote consent and the discovery and sharing of values.

5. Promotion and discussion of a diversity of contraception models.

6. A body-positive approach that highlights individual and relational pleasure.

7. Pleasure is a human right.

Until we get these systems, the porn industry commonly fills the gap as a combination entertainment/education system, the latter of which it was never intended to do.

What are things (positive and negative) that you learned about your body and sexuality from the porn industry?