I seem to be unable to get anything else done today because of endless ruminating on this issue and how to deal with it. Even a very productive hour-long talk about this with Seska hasn’t exorcised it enough to let me do other work (Seska, with Cheryl, is often my go-to gal when I want to fiddle with theory and approach when it comes to issues about pornography, because she’s one of the few people I know who isn’t really polarized about the issue despite personal investment and very strong personal feelings: it’s very tiresome for me that so many people in general tend to be so unable to put their personal agendas aside when it comes to discussing the matter in a more general way). So, I’m going to leave this open as a sort of running notebook today where I can bring it and toss thoughts on it as they distract me.
Yeah, one full paragraph later, I’ll actually fill you in on what the topic at hand IS.
Apparently, Strunk and White are on vacation today. I hope they’re having a lovely holiday.
The issue is pornography, the culture of pornography, and some of the effects I’ve been seeing both having on some of the generation I work with at Scarleteen, namely, the first batch of folks in the world who have grown up with it as a pervasive, all-access given from day one of their lives onward.
Back when, in the middle of writing the book, I did a big batch of surveys of teens and young adults about sexuality in general and their experiences with it. At that point, we’d had enough discussion about it at Scarleteen that I had a pretty good idea about the different places this generation stood with it, but I found that in the privacy of the surveys, a surprising number of them — guys and girls alike — were more anti-pornography than I’d have expected. Not really a giant surprise. After all, for a lot of them, even the way they were introduced to porn was some degree of having it pushed in their faces rather than having to search under beds and in the backs of closets for it more electively. In other words, for many of them, they didn’t even get the chance to have a curiousity about it: it was sated before — or without — a need to be.
But I think I’d kind of figured that, if anything, that would have resulted in an apathy, more than anything else. And for some of them, that is the case. In fact, based on what I see at Scarleteen, in other young adult venues and the few studies that address this, and what I found in those surveys, I’d say that the range of response to porn, across the board in this age group (let’s say 14 -22) now is generally apathy/blithe acceptance to disdain/opposition. I don’t tend to see a lot of users that are super-excited, fascinated with or blissed out about porn. They’re either “whatever” about it or pretty negative. Of course, that’s a pretty common range of feeling about a lot of things for teenagers, but ….well, whatever, as the kids say.
Anymore, we get a post nearly identical to this one and the other linked within it maybe once every week or two. Even given our volume, when a pretty specific repeat happens that often, I need to start paying attention and really examine it as best I can. I’d say that posts like these, over the past five years or so, have been cropping up more and more regularly, and they have a lot of common threads among them.
(And per one of the posts in there with the young woman who advises just making porn for a partner instead, yes, we get that a whole lot, too, which, as I said there, is obviously pretty disturbing. Even when you set aside the legal climate we live in which makes that SO volatile and dangerous for them, and when you set aside the fact that so many of them have a hard time envisioning their utter lack of privacy in this respect and where this stuff can go long-term, there are still some elements of this that are troubling. But that’s a topic for another day, or a little later here.)
This is sticky for me. See, I can’t just apply whatever my personal opinions about pornography in theory and practice (which, when it comes to my opinion, are two pretty different arenas) are. I had the same conundrum when it came to the part of the book that addresses porn. I have to do what I can to hear what their needs and experiences are, and put those first, and think much more broadly. Certainly, there is room for some of my personal feelings, but I have to work to not make them paramount or be too influenced by them, which is, of course, always a challenge. I’d say that the approach I took in the book, as well as in interactions like this, was slightly more porn-critical than I personally feel, because given what needs they express, and what the pervasive messages they most often get are — in short, either a puritanical approach that’s just tantamount to nudity-and-sex-are-evil, or the opposite tack, oh-relax-you-big-prude-and-kiss-that-other-girl-for-my-personal-entertainment-already — it seemed like the only appropriate road to take to really do my job in serving them.
In part, that’s because my personal opinions and experiences with this are just not that relevant.
These young folks aren’t me. (Would that they were: it’d be so much easier to apply what were my easy fixes in my teen years and just tell them all to go out to a club, jump up and down all night in big stompy boots, drop a dose or smoke a bowl, take a long hike, and have some really fun, mutually-beneficial sex in the cemetary.) Their experiences have been different than mine, their relationships and the context they engage in them in is different than mine is or ever was. Really, the older I get, the more I feel like it seems that the appraaches to porn someone like me takes — who has SO much context and information to process it in, who has such a vast array of relationship, emotional and intellectual experience, who is and always has been so outside the box of mainstreaming in so many ways, including in relationship and gender models and approaches, and also, who grew up reared so clearly to question mandates and the lot — is of limited use to the vast majority of the populace. In all truth, years back when I first started working doing sexuality advice, I think I brought way too much of my own opinion to the table, and was a lot more cavalier with women who’d ask the sort of things these young women are than I should have been, merely because I couldn’t really get that where they were and where I was were two very different places.
But alas, you live, you work, you learn, and hopfully, over time, you get better at it all.
There’s so, so much to touch on with what I’m seeing in these kinds of queries. One of the tough bits for me is that I, personally, can understand (and to a large degree, agree with) objections to pornography in practice (rather than theory) when we’re talking about aspects of the industry, about porn under capitalism, about exploitation, about some of the cultural messages a lot of it sends, about women, specifically, but also about sexuality and sexual partnership in general. I can also understand, in some respect, concerns about porn per barriers it might present and sometimes does to intimacy.
But when the objections aren’t about that, but are about insecurity, body image; about feeling porn is a threat to idealized monogamy or a sort of sexual ownership or control, while I can intellectually wrap my head around it, those sorts of concerns just don’t resonate with me at all. When adults bring that sort of the stuff to the table, it strikes me as somewhat juvenile, as…I don’t know, emotionally infantile to some degree, but even if those impressions are anything but surface (and they may well be: it even sounds patronizing to me to hear those thoughts in my head), they aren’t applicable when the people I’m serving ARE juvenile or very, very new to sexual and intimate relationships. And when we’re talking control issues, this is of special import to a generation of young women who, from everything I can see, are having a notoriously hard time expressing limits and boundaries, having them respected, or feeling they’ve any right to have them in the first place.
To step towards the more remote before I go to the more obvious, one of the things I’m seeing in situations like this is that pornography — and even masturbation and sexual fantasy, though to a lesser or less potent degree — becomes even more of a sticky wicket among young women (not esxclusively, but mostly) whose sexual fantasy IS absolute monogamy, not just in action, but in thought; not by choice, but because “that’s what love is.” As I addressed in that post, it’s just so foreign to me to think of monogamy as anything but an active choice in which we are choosing to only be with one partner, in person, in a romantic and/or sexual context, and to think of it as anything but an option, rather than an ideal or default. I don’t want to say that I don’t believe these young women who tell me that they never-ever-never think of anyone in a sexual contaxt but their partners…but I really kind of don’t. My impression, instead, is that what they’re actually doing is engaging in an extended fantasy themselves in which they have effectively fantastized a reality into being for themselves. Do you know what I mean?
Related to that, I also keep seeing, again and again, a sexual dynamic in couples like this (and they’re always hetero) in which the sex they are having is SO male-directed, so all about service, about getting off (if they do: plenty don’t, like, ever) on delivering their partner’s every immediate whim to them: in other words, sex which is really porny.
So, what I start to think is that maybe it makes quite a bit of sense that they are so personally threatened by porn — again, nearly all of them object based on how it makes them feel, on their insecurity, rather than to exploitation and the like — if, in fact, the only difference between their sex life and porn is that they don’t look like the actors in it; if they behave like them, sexually interact like them, but can’t match their appearance.
Yet again, if these things are so — and I’m inclined to believe they are a lot of the time based on what’s being discussed and reported — then I have a personal disconnect. The idea of a sex life that resembles what’s often represented in mainstream porn is either totally laughable to me or just plain sad, depending on my mood and the type of porn we’re actually talking about. The idea that the people or activity we see in porn is any sort of ideal just confounds my mind: of course, I wasn’t reared with the idea that that was an ideal, and I’m inclined to think that not ever being heterosexual or gendernormative might make a difference, too. (Especially since one of the things I had validated for me in other studies I found in researching the book was that for this generation has much stricter ideas about gender and gender roles than the one previous, believe it or not.) I don’t even think there is a disparity between me and them: I think it’s a generational difference, all around.
It’s such a huge bummer that there really isn’t much study yet on this particular generation’s issues with pornography: I really don’t like flying solo in this respect.
That said, I’m going to stop here for today, with designs on picking it up a couple more times over the next few entries.
I’d be very, very interested in discussion in the comments on this, especially from readers with kids or who work with teens or college-age students (or who ARE college-age students themselves). It’s very easy for me sometimes given the massive volume of Scarleteen users to forget that when we’re not talking about users who just hang out there that I’m often seeing users in some form of crisis, which does color things somewhat per making generalizations. Sure, I read up elsewhere, because I’m well-aware of the risks of myopia, but there’s never a danger of hearing too many perspectives.
(Just be cool and calm about it, eh? I feel silly even asking that, because overall, I’ve almost always seemed to have a readership better able to handle thsemlves in comments than most I see out and about, but no harm in tossing a reminder out there with a provocative topic.)






