Warning that teen porn use confuses consent
As the chief censor tells Glenn McConnell a quarter of 12-year-olds and three-quarters of 17-year-olds have watched pornography experts call for more education to tell children what they’re watching is no different from an action movie – it’s not real – a
CLAIRE Meehan studies pornography. More specifically, she’s interested in the place porn has in the culture of young people and how it’s affecting their lives.
By ‘‘young people’’, she means very young. Not young first-home buyers, or young adults. Live-at-home, pocketmoney, mum-makes-theirsandwiches young. Young.
She talks to those who are not even teenage, interviewing 12-year-olds around the country about their porn use.
Her current target age group is youths aged 12-16.
So young, it’s illegal to supply pornography to them. Yet Meehan hasn’t struggled to find young people to interview.
Some of her interviews have revealed stories of pornography being used for healthy exploration of sexuality. In other cases, porn is treated as a joke. Edgy gifs, memes, or videos are shared between friends as a laugh.
When Meehan sat down for one interview, a young man shared a story he thought was a bit of a joke.
She had asked about anal sex and the young man said he did watch porn and it had peaked his curiosity.
‘‘He really wanted to have anal sex, but the young girl didn’t. Halfway through, he pulled it out, put it in her butt and said ‘oops sorry wrong hole’,’’ Meehan said.
He told this story to Meehan openly, in a group interview with friends of his. She said he didn’t appear to comprehend the severity of his actions; his disregard for consent, or that his actions constituted sexual assault. He thought it was sort of funny, she said.
‘‘I was the most shocked person there,’’ she recalled.
‘‘He was like, ‘yeah, I probably shouldn’t have’. But he certainly didn’t equate it to sexual assault, which it is.’’
I called Meehan after last week’s release of a podcast journalist John Daniell and I made called He’ll Be Right.
The podcast asks what it means to be a modern man in Aotearoa. It delves into issues which have long plagued many Kiwis, stemming from toxic ideas of masculinity – issues such as domestic abuse, and abuse of power.
What we hadn’t planned to talk about was porn. It’s a strange subject. Meehan said it’s either a conversation starter or killer, there’s no in-between.
But while we talked to people such as Stuff Me Too editor Alison Mau, and educators who teach gender and sexuality in schools, porn kept being highlighted as one of their biggest concerns. It popped up in conversations about mental health, too.
Mau, who investigates sexual harassment and abuse, said discussions she’d been having with younger people indicated a greater awareness about healthy relationships. The only issue, she said, was porn. It was clouding judgement, confusing people’s ideas about relationships and consent and also, she said, ruining lives.
One man Mau met appeared to be a successful good-looking dude, but porn had taken its toll.
‘‘It destroyed the neural pathways between his brain and functioning organs,’’ she said. ‘‘He went through a lot of therapy to try and rebuild those just so, he said, he could look at women as human beings.’’
Walking out of those interviews, I wondered how big of an issue porn really was these days. I kept asking people.
Everyone seemed to have a porn story. A friend admitted they felt uncomfortable about their own connection to pornography, saying they felt they were almost addicted. It seemed to be changing the way their brain worked, and they recognised that their kinks and turn-ons were fast changing, but there seemed to be nothing they could do about that.
If it didn’t affect the person I was talking to, then very likely they had a friend or friend of a friend going through similar troubles. Of course, this was all anecdotal.
The Classifications Office, headed by Chief Censor David Shanks, estimated 75 per cent of people had watched porn by age 17. For 12-year-olds, it was estimated 25 per cent had watched porn.
Shanks said there was an argument that young people had always been exposed to some degree of pornography, but he believed the content they could
find online in modern times was more harmful.
‘‘Some 35 per cent of the clips assessed contained some nonconsensual behaviour,’’ he said. He added that other supposedly consensual videos often started with a reluctant woman saying ‘‘no’’.
Shanks said research showed teenagers and children relied on pornography to teach them
about sex and relationships. ‘‘The way this material treats consent and family relationships, the relative lack of affection, disregard of safe-sex practice and so on, emphasises the simple fact that adult porn is a terrible product for young people to be drawing on to shape their views on sex. And yet they are doing exactly that.’’ A reliance on pornography for sex education could be because kids aren’t learning what they need at home or through the education system. But people like Leah Rothman, a Wairarapa-based
social worker, are trying to fill those gaps. We spoke to her for He’ll Be Right after hearing that for the past 10 years she has been visiting schools to answer questions and talk about consent.
It isn’t all bad news.
‘‘10 years ago, I’d go into a classroom and introduce the concept of consent and ask who knew what it meant. There would be radio silence in the classroom,’’ Rothman said.
‘‘Now I go into a classroom and everyone could put their hand up, or 50 per cent could put their hand up.’’
But can education keep up with misconceptions stemming from porn?
‘‘If you’ve never learned about consent, if you’ve not had these conversations about sex and boundaries and communication and respect, then there is potential to go somewhere or meet someone and do something that’s wrong and harmful to the other person and not know it,’’ she said.
Porn often presents a distorted version of sex and consent.
‘‘You don’t base your education for how to interact in the community on Bourne movies, you know it’s an action film,’’ Rothman said. ‘‘But no one’s telling our young people that these porn films are not real.’’
Meehan said it wouldn’t be feasible to block porn altogether.
She, like Mau and Rothman, pointed out that porn had always been around in one form or another. Even before the internet, young people managed to find it somehow.
But these days it’s much easier to find, and Meehan said much of what was available highlighted the worst material.
Ethical porn does exist, but it’s rarely shown on the homepage of sites such as Pornhub.
Porn isn’t all bad, according to Meehan. She’s heard from teenagers who have had positive experiences with porn. It can demystify sex, and has also helped some young people who have fears about their sexuality.
But it has also created great harm.
According to Meehan, we need to take porn and sex out from the dark to prevent a generation from being scarred.
Let’s have an open conversation about what healthy and real relationships look like.