These days, it’s not just magazine images or even social media influencing kids. It’s free online porn.
By some estimates, about 80 percent of teens have seen porn, whether they intended to or not, with kids as young as 8 first exposed to these sites. There are two schools of thought about how adults should respond: teach kids to be critical consumers, or figure out a way to get porn out of young people’s lives.
On a Thursday afternoon inside a fluorescent-lit meeting room of the Boston Public Health Commission on Massachusetts Avenue, a group of five high schools students hold their weekly after-school meeting for the commission's Porn Literacy program.
The teenagers are part of Start Strong, a nationwide peer leadership program that aims to prevent teen violence. The Porn Literacy course was born out of the Boston chapter. Kyrah*, a peer leader who has completed Porn Literacy, holds up a cover of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The model is wearing a string bikini and her thumbs are pulling down on the bottom suggestively.
“Do you think this is beautiful?” Kyrah asked.
“I think there’s an element of provocativity and promiscuity,” Jojo said “But it doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful. I think the woman is beautiful.”
Meirit, another peer leader, chimed in. “Yeah, but you can tell it’s purposeful, like it’s trying to get a reaction out of people.”
The conversation transitions to pornography and how it intersects with beauty standards.
“Do you feel like porn influences what you think is or is not beautiful?” Kyrah asked.
“I think porn is tied to a lot of body shaming when it comes to having sex,” Jojo said. “There are certain, like, bodily images that you have to aspire to, and if you don’t have a porn body, then it’s ugly.”
Start Strong's, program director, Jess Alder, says that if teens are going to watch online porn, maybe there’s a way to harness that into something positive.
“In terms of actual consumption of porn, the messages that they're receiving are really ingrained in how they're supposed to act and how they need to act. So we thought we might as well explore some of the messages that are being taught,” Alder said. “So, we don't show any porn. That's not OK. That's super illegal. But we do ask them to critically examine some of the messages that they're learning from sexually explicit media.”
That can range from gender stereotypes to violence and even the occupational hazards of working in the porn industry. Alder said it’s really a vehicle to talk about consent, healthy dating and respectful relationships.
“We realized that young people really wanted to have conversations around building healthy relationships preventing teen dating violence," Alder said. "It's just if you package it as, ‘Let's talk about healthy relationships,’ not many people want to come to the conversation. But if you say, ‘Let's talk about porn,’ everyone wants to come to the table and have that conversation.”
It just might be working. Kyrah, a graduating senior, said this course has peeled back the curtain on porn a bit.
“[The course] kind of dismissed the fantasy for me," she said. "Which is not a bad thing. For me, it’s a good thing."
She described a confusing landscape that her peers are trying to make sense of. They know porn isn’t real, but they still use it to model their behavior and expectations.
“Talking to my friends, they are bummed about when it comes to sex with their boyfriends or someone different. They definitely have a lot of confusion going on with themselves on why it’s not coming up to par with whatever they’re consuming,” Kyrah said.
The Porn Literacy program has also made her feel more confident about having candid conversations about sex and what she wants in a relationship.
Another result? In the three years the Boston Public Health Commission has been running this program, surveys have shown that teenagers who complete it watch less porn. It's caught the attention of many educators and school administrators nationwide. The program's creators, Emily Rothman, Nicole Daley and Jess Alder, now provide training seminars, which over 200 people have attended so far. Case managers, advocates and youth workers have also taken part in the seminar.
But porn literacy has its critics. Gail Dines, an anti-porn activist and president of Culture Reframed, describes internet porn as a public health crisis.
“It's a public health crisis because boys learning to link sex and violence is a public health crisis — because they play it out on the girls. And really, when you lay waste to boys, which is what the porn industry does, you then lay waste to girls. And when you lay waste to boys and girls, you lay waste to the culture,” Dines said.
She cited research that connects porn with sexual aggression and indifference towards sexual violence.
"The message is: Women are disposable. There's no connection or intimacy," Dines said. "There's no touching that is remotely about connection. If he's going to touch you, it's to pull a hard smack of face or something. This is what kids get if they go on Google or Snapchat, or however they get it. This is what they get catapulted into."
Dines travels all over the world giving talks and interviews on the effects porn has on kids. Culture Reframed provides a toolkit for parents and caretakers on how to talk to kids about porn, with a step-by-step framework for different age groups.
“I do not want to teach kids to be better consumers of pornography or more discerning consumers," Dines said. "What I want is to do to pornography what was done to cigarettes. That's what I want to do. Porn is not cool. It's not the thing to watch. We need a massive shift, a paradigm shift in the way we think about pornography, and especially for young people to say, 'Porn is not cool.'"
There is one thing Gail Dines and Jess Alder agree on: Kids need comprehensive sex education to counteract the influence of porn.
Twenty-four states currently require that public schools teach sex education. Massachusetts is not one of them.
The decision to provide sex education is left entirely up to school officials. The proposed Healthy Youth Act is not a state mandate, but would require the curriculum to be medically accurate and age-appropriate. The current bill emphasizes affirmative consent and includes gender fluidity, as well as safe sex practices and abstinence. It also includes an opt-out for parents who don’t want their children to attend.
The Senate version of the bill passed in the last two years, but it has never made it up for a House vote. It will be up again for a public hearing in June. Its lead co-sponsor, Rep. Paul Brodeur, is hopeful this will be the year it comes up for a vote. He also emphasized its urgency.
“It’s hard to be an adolescent. You’re trying to figure out a lot of different things. And you layer that on top of puberty and you get bombarded with images on the mainstream media that are a little tricky,” Brodeur said. “And if you dive a little further, you can find images that I think most people would think as non-mainstream and kids might think that’s the norm. And without the ability to put it in any context if you’re on your own, I think that’s a very, very challenging thing for a kid to navigate. They need help.”
Massachusetts is ranked lowest nationwide for teen pregnancy, but the rate of sexually transmitted diseases and infections is alarmingly high among adolescents. If this isn’t incentive enough, Brodeur hopes the issue that remains at the top of the cultural mindset, consent, will propel this House bill into a vote.
"I really do think that the consensus is there, among the rank and file, and that the time is right," Brodeur said. "We’ve seen this issue of consent blow up and we’ve seen an increase in sexually-transmitted infections. I think this bill directly addresses that."
In the meantime, organizations like the Boston Public Health Commission are at the helm of a heady topic many kids are curious about and want to understand. When Kyrah, Start Strong's peer leader, is asked if she’s concerned about her friends, she paused.
"I do for a second, but then I remind them it’s normal, because I feel like everyone will have a come-to-Jesus moment growing up," she said. "Right now, it’s a coming of age thing, like, ‘Oh, what I’m doing right now is correct.' But later on, they’ll be like, 'OK, this is the female anatomy. This is how it works, this is how it goes. This is way more complicated than what I’ve been watching before.'"
*The Boston Public Health Commission requested that WGBH News refer to the students using their first names only.
