*This blog uses gendered language and makes generalisations based on my own anecdotes and experiences.
If I asked you to reflect on your first memory of ever seeing porn, you would giggle and go red like I did when asked to do the same.
For me, it was walking into Blockbuster in Year 12, tasked with hiring an adult video for a girl’s night at a friend’s house. What started as watching a terrible VHS entitled ‘East Meets West’ for ‘shits and gigs’ quickly turned into the realisation that this porn stuff was not really for us. So, we turned it off and forgot about it until Mum got a call that the video hired under our family account had not been returned later that week.
I can still feel the red in my cheeks.
For most parents, these are the stories of porn that we are used to.
Maybe for you, it was one of the following storylines…
- a box of magazines sneakily inherited from older siblings or VHS tapes and DVDs hastily exchanged between smirking mates between school lockers.
- or it was those scandalous images painstakingly downloaded on dial-up while your mum banged on the door, demanding the phone line back.
- or finally, was it an epic failure of explaining to Dad why the family PC was suddenly full of spyware?
So, when we reflect on our own early experiences of porn, we assume that our kids’ experiences are the same. As such, it is no wonder our response to ‘modern’ porn has been slow off the mark.
These memories came flooding back to me while I was attending Day 2 of the Daniel Morcombe Foundation’s ‘Bright Futures’ workshop in Adelaide this week, where we heard from porn expert Maree Crabb. Her interviews with porn stars from the past revealed that, back then, the industry produced only a few hundred films each year. Fast forward to today, anyone with a connected device and a camera can be a porn producer. In fact, Maree reported that even if you tried to watch all the content uploaded to Pornhub in the last 12 months, it would take you 169 years to get through it all. Challenge accepted?
But it is not just the change in the volume of porn that is the issue.
The age verification to enter a porn site is almost identical to that to enter Dan Murphy’s website. When you consider three out of the fifteen most popular websites in the world belong to porn — it is no wonder porn is considered officially mainstream. When porn sites are ranked above Netflix, TikTok, and LinkedIn, you start to understand how mainstream porn really is.
And we have not even started to talk about the content.
ALL porn features acts of aggression towards females. Things like strangulation, verbal abuse, spanking, slapping, and choking feature in more than 50% of mainstream porn. Coupled with the fact that in all cases, the female ‘target’ meets this aggression with a ‘neutral or positive response.’ And the research shows it is beaming onto our kid’s devices when they are alone at home.
The message is clear: men should be violent during sex, and women should like it.
The evidence is both shocking and damning—porn is telling our girls that their safety, consent, and pleasure do not matter and setting our boys up to fail, becoming perpetrators of sexual violence.
Fuelled by poisonous propagandists like Andrew Tate and the INCEL movement, who spread toxic ideologies, it is not surprising we are seeing an increase in disturbing notions that women exist for the pleasure of men. When you consider porn is ‘educating’ our boys for 3 years on average before their first physical sexual encounter, what do we think is going to happen?
Porn is fast becoming a template for abuse, and our kids are learning from it.
How confusing, dangerous, and sad that male or female, gay or straight, there is a likelihood that a young person’s first sexual encounter will involve violence and degradation.
When teenagers refer to strangulation during sex as ‘vanilla’… we have a fundamental problem.
As a mother of young sons, I am devastated that if nothing changes, my boys will grow up to see violent depictions of sex before they have even had their first kiss. And, even if I try to encourage them not to seek it out, statistically, they have a 56% chance of seeing it by accident.
As digital safety and wellbeing educators, Evolve Education work tirelessly to help students develop critical digital literacy skills through our workshops and preventative programs like Common Sense Media’s Digital Citizenship curriculum to counteract porn’s misguided messaging around relationships and the ‘new norm.’ In addition to our work, Sexuality, and relationships education experts such as Dr. Tessa Opie from In Your Skin helps kids understand what consent and loving, intimate relationships should look like.
So, while we wait for government regulations to catch up with this space with things like age verification methods, what can we do as parents now?
Our research-informed approach to reducing the harm from exposure to pornography falls under Evolve Education’s positive parenting pillars, which provide the backbone to all our parent/carer presentations. When we talk about reducing the harm pornography can cause to your family, we approach it through the lens of these 4 positive parenting pillars;
Model
- Model consent from an early age when taking and sharing pictures.
- Model respect and gender equality in our homes, schools, and workplaces.
Participate
- Co-view and co-play; get involved in what your child loves to do online. Create a space where you are part of their online community.
Communicate
- Reassure kids that ‘there is nothing they could ever do to make you love them less.’
- Praise speaking up and seeking help.