We Need to Talk About What Porn Is Teaching Our Children

 

I think we desperately need to have a conversation about pornography, especially as women, because this is no longer just a conversation about what adults choose to watch behind closed doors. Pornography has become incredibly easy to access, it is sitting on the same phones and tablets that children use for homework, entertainment and social media, and whether we want to admit it or not, many children are being exposed to sexual content long before they are emotionally or intellectually ready to understand what they are looking at. And that is what worries me.

I am certainly not saying that every person who watches pornography is going to become violent, incapable of intimacy or unable to have a healthy relationship. The research does not support such simplistic conclusions, and I think it is important to say that clearly. Studies on pornography have limitations, and researchers continue to debate exactly how much of the relationship between pornography and harmful behaviour is causal and how much reflects other factors that were already present.

But acknowledging that complexity does not mean we should pretend there is nothing to worry about.

There is a huge difference between an adult making a conscious decision to consume sexual material and a twelve-year-old boy stumbling across violent pornography on the internet when his brain is still developing and he has barely begun to understand relationships, consent, intimacy, attraction or even his own emotions.

The adolescent brain is not simply a smaller adult brain. During adolescence, the brain is undergoing significant development, including changes involving the prefrontal cortex, reward systems and neural plasticity, which is one reason young people can be particularly sensitive to rewarding and stimulating experiences. Researchers have specifically raised concerns about the interaction between adolescent brain development and sexually explicit material.

And then we have to ask ourselves a very uncomfortable question. What happens when pornography becomes one of a boy's first teachers about sex? Because pornography is not sex education.

It is entertainment designed to stimulate the viewer, and much of the material available online is exaggerated, scripted, edited and increasingly extreme. It does not teach young people how to communicate with another person, how to ask whether someone is comfortable, how to recognise hesitation, how to respect a boundary, how to deal with rejection, how to make a partner feel safe or how to understand that real intimacy involves two human beings with feelings and needs. Instead, a young person can end up learning a visual script.

Research on adolescents has found associations between pornography exposure and more permissive sexual attitudes, gender-stereotypical beliefs and sexual aggression, although researchers caution that the evidence is not strong enough to claim that pornography alone causes these outcomes.

But think about what a young boy can take away from repeated exposure to pornography in which women are presented primarily as bodies designed for male pleasure, where aggression is eroticised, where boundaries can appear irrelevant and where the woman's pleasure, discomfort or consent may be treated as part of the performance rather than something that actually matters.

If that is one of the first representations of sex he sees, where exactly is he supposed to learn the difference between fantasy and reality?

This is where I become particularly concerned for women.

Because we live in a world where women already spend an enormous amount of time thinking about safety. We think about where we park our cars, whether we should walk home alone, whether we should tell someone where we are going, whether the man behind us is simply walking in the same direction or following us, whether we should get into a car with someone, whether we should reject a man politely because we are worried about how he might react.

So when sexual culture increasingly contains imagery that normalises aggression, domination and the objectification of women, I think women are allowed to ask what effect that might have on the environment in which we are expected to date and have relationships.

A large meta-analysis examining 166 independent studies and more than 124,000 participants found that sexualised media was associated with aggression-related thoughts, attitudes and behaviours, with stronger effects for violent sexualised media than for nonviolent sexualised media. The researchers concluded that sexualised media, particularly when combined with violence, can negatively affect how women are perceived and how aggressively people treat them.

There is also more specific research involving adolescents that deserves attention. One longitudinal study followed middle and high school students over three years and found reciprocal associations between pornography use and sexual harassment perpetration, with stronger associations among male adolescents, as well as some associations between pornography use and later sexual assault perpetration. That does not mean every boy who watches pornography will become abusive, but it is certainly enough to make me think that dismissing the subject as harmless entertainment is irresponsible.

And then there is the issue of age.

I find it deeply disturbing that children can encounter pornography before they have even had a proper conversation about puberty.

We have created a situation where a child can learn about sex from an anonymous website before they have learned about consent from a trusted adult.

A systematic review and meta-analysis covering 27 studies and more than 16,000 participants found significant associations between exposure to sexual content and problematic sexual behaviours in children and adolescents, with stronger associations for violent or live sexual content. Again, association is not proof that exposure alone causes these behaviours, but the findings reinforce the need for prevention and education.

I think we need to stop assuming that children will simply know that pornography is fake.

Yes, many adolescents understand that pornography is exaggerated or unrealistic. A 2024 systematic review found that most adolescents in the studies were aware that much pornographic material was exaggerated and unrealistic. But the same review found that pornography can still function as a source of sexual information, particularly when young people do not have other sources they trust.

A teenager can know intellectually that something is unrealistic and still absorb elements of it emotionally.

We know this from so many other forms of media. You can know that a romantic comedy is fictional and still develop ideas about romance from watching hundreds of them. You can know that Instagram is curated and still compare yourself to the women you see there. You can know that reality television is edited and still absorb its ideas about relationships, beauty and conflict. So why would we assume pornography is somehow immune from influencing expectations?

There is also the problem of body image and sexual self-worth.

Girls are growing up surrounded by highly edited images of what women are supposedly meant to look like, and boys are growing up surrounded by images of what women are supposedly meant to do. That combination can create an incredibly unhealthy environment in which women feel pressure not only to look a certain way but also to perform sexuality according to expectations they never chose for themselves.

And then we wonder why so many young women feel anxious about their bodies, their sexual performance and whether they are "good enough" for a partner.

Pornography can also create unrealistic expectations about frequency, physical appearance, sexual stamina, bodies, sexual availability and what supposedly constitutes a satisfying sexual encounter. Research into young people's psychosexual well-being continues to examine associations between pornography use and sexual self-concept, sexual desire, sexual functioning and compulsive use, which tells us that the conversation is much bigger than simply asking whether someone watches porn or not.

Another issue that concerns me is escalation.

When something becomes familiar, people can seek increasingly novel or stimulating material, particularly when consumption becomes habitual or compulsive. That does not mean that everyone who watches pornography develops an addiction, because the terminology and diagnosis around problematic pornography use remain subjects of scientific debate, but problematic use is absolutely something researchers study, particularly among adolescents and young adults.

And what happens to intimacy when a person's brain becomes accustomed to sexual stimulation that is instantly available, endlessly varied and completely controlled by the viewer?

Real intimacy is not like that. A real woman is not a video that can be paused, skipped or replaced. A real man is not a performer who exists to fulfil a fantasy. Real sex involves communication, awkwardness, vulnerability, laughter, insecurity, attraction, boundaries, consent and two people responding to one another in real time.

That is actually what makes it beautiful.

Perhaps one of my biggest concerns is that pornography can make sex look like a performance instead of a relationship between two people.

I do not want girls growing up believing that they have to tolerate things that make them uncomfortable because "boys like it." I do not want boys growing up believing that a woman saying no is part of some sexual game. I do not want young people believing that pain, humiliation, aggression or degradation are automatically normal components of sex simply because they have seen them presented that way online. And I certainly do not want children learning any of this from a website before they have learned what respect looks like.

We have spent decades telling women how to protect themselves from men while doing far too little to teach boys what it means to respect women.

We tell girls not to walk alone at night, not to drink too much, not to get into strangers' cars, not to dress "too provocatively," not to send intimate photographs, not to trust men too quickly and not to put themselves in dangerous situations. And yes, teaching personal safety matters.

But where is the equally passionate conversation about teaching boys that women's bodies do not belong to them? Where are the conversations about rejection, emotional regulation, empathy, consent, boundaries and the fact that sexual access is never something another person owes you? Where are the conversations about the difference between fantasy and reality?

Because I think we have placed far too much responsibility on girls to avoid being harmed while allowing boys to grow up in an online environment that can expose them to increasingly extreme sexual material without giving them the emotional tools to process what they are seeing.

That does not mean boys are inherently dangerous. It means boys need guidance. They deserve adults who are willing to talk to them honestly about sex instead of leaving the internet to do the job. And girls deserve that too.

The answer cannot simply be "porn is bad, don't watch it," because children are curious, the internet is enormous and prohibition without education rarely solves the underlying problem. What children need is age-appropriate sexuality education that teaches them what pornography is, why it is not an accurate representation of sex, what consent actually means, how bodies and relationships really work and what healthy intimacy looks like. Researchers studying pornography exposure among adolescents have specifically pointed toward evidence-based sex education and media literacy as important parts of prevention.

Most importantly, I think adults need to stop being embarrassed by conversations that children desperately need us to have. If we cannot talk to our children about sex, the internet will. If we cannot explain consent, pornography will provide its own version of it. If we cannot teach boys what healthy attraction looks like, algorithms will happily teach them what gets clicks.

And if we do not teach girls that they never have to perform something sexual simply because a boy has seen it online, they may grow up believing that being desirable means being endlessly available. That is not the kind of sexual culture I want for the next generation of women. I want girls to grow up knowing that their bodies belong to them. I want boys to grow up understanding that attraction does not give them entitlement.

I want young people to understand that sex is not supposed to be a performance for an invisible audience, and that real intimacy is not about recreating something you watched on a screen. It is about trust. It is about communication. It is about wanting each other while still respecting each other's humanity.

And perhaps most importantly, it is about understanding that another person's boundaries do not make sex less exciting or less passionate. They are part of what makes genuine intimacy possible in the first place.

Pornography is not going to disappear, and I am not naïve enough to think we can simply remove every sexual image from the internet. But we can stop pretending that children encountering pornography is harmless, and we can stop treating the sexual education of the next generation as something that will somehow take care of itself.

Because it won't.

And as women, I think we have every right to care deeply about what boys are being taught about our bodies, what girls are being taught about their own bodies, and what kind of sexual culture we are creating for everyone who comes after us.

Thankful for your presence, Neja