‘They’re Much Too young’: The Entanglement of Porn, Pleasure and Age in Sex Education

ABSTRACT

Most debates around the place of porn in the classroom focus on abstaining from porn through sex education. Any inclusion of pleasure often entails lengthy consideration of discourses of pornification and sexualization more broadly. In this study, I aimed to elicit young people’s and teachers’ views, concerns and suggestions about the place of porn, and pleasure more broadly, in sex education. I present a thematic content analysis of small friendship group interviews with 106 young people aged 12–16, who self-identified as boys or girls, and semi-structured interviews with six teachers in New Zealand. I argue that by politicizing age, we continue to view young people as an at risk population. In doing so, we miss the nuance of young people’s engagements with porn and pleasure, which denies scope to understand the role of porn in young people’s lives. This is a missed opportunity to interrogate and understand porn as a resource through which young people construct and express their sexual subjectivities and social roles.

There are numerous reasons why it is important that young people perceive their sex education as valuable (Dawson et al., 2018). As Kippax and Stephenson (2005) pointed out, “effective sex and relationship education provides people with opportunities to socially transform their worlds” (p. 360). For it to add value, it is imperative that the content of sex education is relevant to young people – in terms of age, information and with respect to their lived experiences and social realities (Allen, 2005). The idea that young people lack the agency to determine what they need is an inadequate justification for the continuation of adult-led sex education policies and programs. Given the growing prevalence of young people’s porn use in New Zealand (Henry & Talbot, 2019), I start by exploring the relationship between young people and porn, followed by porn and addiction, then finally, porn and sex education.

Young People and Porn

The use of porn has traditionally been a source of public fascination and discomfort, especially when the consumers are teenage young people (Albury, 2014). These cultural anxieties have resulted in the rise and endurance of protectionist policies and education aimed at protecting young people from its influence (Buckingham & Chronaki, 2014). The development of technology has created porn that is cheaper and more accessible for consumers and porn has become a routine part of mainstream culture (Spišák, 2016). In New Zealand, the Office of Film and Literature Classification conducted an online survey with 2071 young people aged 14–17 years. Of those who had watched porn, 93% thought it was common for boys and 50% thought it was common for girls (Henry & Talbot, 2019). While acknowledgment of women’s porn use is growing, porn remains a gendered phenomenon in terms of perceptions and use, in New Zealand (Henry & Talbot, 2019) and elsewhere (Goldstein, 2021). Frequent reasons for watching porn include curiosity, education, pleasure and masturbation (Bale, 2011; Mulholland, 2013; Sabina et al., 2008).

Porn research has traditionally centered around “effects,” which posits that young people are negatively impacted by the porn that they consume, leading to undesirable outcomes such as violence and addiction (Tsaliki et al., 2014). Porn has increasingly been constructed as a risk to young people’s sexual, emotional and mental wellbeing, and development (Flood, 2009; McKee et al., 2010). One of the ways in which risk has been attributed to porn is through the potential for addiction.

The presence of porn addiction is highly contested in academic arenas (Taylor, 2021) whereby the terminology, cause and impacts remain debated and inconclusive (Prause et al., 2015; Taylor, 2020). Porn addiction is omitted from the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (Weir, 2014); nevertheless, clinicians report patients self-diagnosing porn addiction in order to try to understand how and how often they viewed porn (Taylor, 2020). These concerns are reflected in public policy, where, for example, in the U.S., porn addiction is recognized as a public health crisis.

While effects-based research remains, more recent porn studies scholarship has moved away from a focus on effects to explore the ways in which young people are using porn as a vehicle for making sense of their sexuality, their sexual desires and experiences (Attwood et al., 2018). This literature demonstrates that young people have diverse perspectives when it comes to porn, including excitement, nonchalance and resistance (Setty, 2022). Consumption of porn is intimately entwined with young people’s sense of their sexual circumstances, like pleasure, as well as offering ideas about future relationships (Attwood et al., 2018). Spšáik and Paasonen (2017) suggested that young people’s perceptions about porn are more diverse than what is reflected in public policy and debates. These perceptions ranged from the “mundane” to complex interplays between individuals’ bodies, sexuality and imagination (Attwood et al., 2018; Setty, 2022). Through engagement with porn, some young people saw it as a sort of “new normal” (Mulholland, 2013) while others were excluded (Attwood et al., 2018). Porn can also be used by young people as an educational resource for learning about different sexual acts as well as for those young people who have questions about their sexuality (McKee, 2007; Meehan, 2021).

Porn and Sex Education

Educators have long struggled to develop meaningful sex education which reflects the complexities of young people’s needs (Allen, 2001). An overly biological model has long predominated in many jurisdictions, with much sex education being driven by the aim of educating young people about the risks of sexual activity, such as unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (Lamb, 2010). It has only been in recent years that there has been recognition of the need for more holistic forms of sex education, encompassing issues such as healthy relationships, porn and sexual consent (deFur, 2016)

Porn may provide a source of information that young people use to develop and understand their norms and values around sex, sexuality and expressions, especially if they believe their sex education lacks value (M. Smith, 2013). While some researchers have found that there is no correlation between perceptions of the value of sex education and porn use (Dawson et al., 2019), others have suggested that porn may enable young people to access detailed images of genitalia or sexual activity (Kubicek et al., 2010). Allen (2007) and Carmody (2009) put forward the discussion that young porn users may seek a discourse of erotics (Fine, 1988), for example how to initiate sex or perform certain kinds of sex which may not be covered within their program of sex education.

In New Zealand, sex education is a required component of the curriculum. Sex education sits within the broader learning area of Health and Physical Education. The Ministry of Education sets out that schools need to provide a broad education through a balanced curriculum covering essential learning areas (Ministry of Education, 2015). A 2018 report (Education Review Office, 2018) released by the Education Review Office demonstrated that many schools are struggling to teach sexuality education. While The Ministry of Education in New Zealand confirmed that physical/biological/puberty aspects were “well covered” in compulsory health and PE curricula, fewer than half of secondary schools were covering porn and sexual violence. Schools were overwhelmed with competing information from 109 external sex education providers. This is compounded by individual schools’ conflicting views about the content and delivery of sex education.

It is easy to understand why schools are hesitant to engage with porn in a critical and inclusive way (Hancock & Barker, 2018) that moves beyond an abstinence-based model. In New Zealand, The Ministry of Education recommends that sex education should be meaningful for young people, engaging students in thinking and learning about sexuality as a complex and diverse area of study, rather than being framed merely in terms of risk.

Method

Participants

This study was part of a larger research project working with young people to gain insights into their digital sexual lives, expressions, and relationships. Small friendship group interviews were conducted with 106 self-selecting young people, aged 12–16 and six teachers in three participating schools in New Zealand in 2019.

Measures and Procedure

Young people were recruited from one rural co-ed − (35 participants), and two urban single sex (one male − 40 participants, one female − 31 participants) schools. Inclusion criteria involved young people aged 12–16 years old who attended one of the sample schools. In the sample schools, I gave presentations at assemblies to advertise the study to students, and they self-selected if they were interested in participating.

Small friendship group interviews of established friends in the same year group allowed many of the benefits of a focus group, but overcame some of the limitations, such as the participants not knowing or liking each other (see Allen, 2014). Group sizes ranged from three to six participants and groups are categorized, recognizing that they were not mutually exclusive, as younger teens (12–13 years), mid-teens (13–15 years) and older teens (15–16 years). It was hoped that a comfortable small group setting with established friends would be more conducive to providing deeper insights and respecting confidentiality. I provided refreshments and the groups began with a scenario based on either sexting or porn to open discussion and then focused on loose topic areas, such as “the relevance of porn for young people” rather than pre-set questions. The participants and I were the only people present at the group interviews which were held in a classroom at each school. Six individual semi-structured face-to-face interviews were undertaken with teachers from each of the three sample schools (two from each school). Teachers were recruited if they either taught or had a vested interest in sexuality education and provided pastoral care. Four of the six teachers were female and two, from the boys’ school, were male.

Data were recorded and transcribed by a professional transcriber and I verified the transcripts. Drawing on Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis framework, data were coded and analyzed using a latent approach, which allowed me to move away from the explicit and obvious content of the data, to identify initial organizing codes. Common themes were then identified, reviewed, further defined and situated within the scholarly literature. For the purposes of this article, the findings are organized as follows: 1) motivations for watching porn 2) sex education at the “right time,” and 3) navigating porn in school. Excerpts below are taken from young people, who are referred to by a pseudonym throughout the article. The teachers are referred to as “teacher, school A (girls” school), B (mixed school) or C (boys’ school).’ Quotes that are displayed together form part of a conversation as it happened. Ethical approval was obtained from the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee on 4^th May 2016; reference: 017039.

Results

In this section I present findings from the thematic analysis of qualitative data from small group interviews with young people and semi-structured interviews with teachers in New Zealand, eliciting their perceptions on both porn use and porn coverage in sex education. The young participants were mostly consuming mainstream free online content from sites such as YouPorn and PornHub. While the discussions center around this particular genre of porn, porn is an umbrella term which encompasses the above but also includes a diverse range of genres such as alt, kink, feminist, queer, ethical and exploitative porn. McKee et al. (2020) convened a Delphi panel of 38 leading porn researchers from a wide range of disciplines. They found that there was no agreement on a single definition of porn. Basically, porn is notoriously difficult to define. With this in mind, the aim of this study was to elicit young people’s and teacher’s views, concerns and suggestions about the place of porn, and pleasure more broadly, in sex education. I chose to use the term porn rather than pornography or sexually explicit material, as this is how the participants referred to it.

Motivations for Watching Porn

All of the young people that participated in the small friendship group interviews had heard of porn. Reasons for watching porn were similar throughout the groups. These included pleasure and masturbation, curiosity, boredom, accessibility and informal sex education. In the first conversation below, the participants in group S – a mixed sex group of mid-teens (school B), discussed the links with pleasure and masturbation. Porn was described as an accessible alternative to sex – if a partner wasn’t “up for it” or inability to have sex due to age. There were differing perceptions of age for first watching porn – Sean thought nine, whereas Sarah thought fourteen or fifteen. This was evident in many of the group discussions, with girls consistently reporting slighter older age ranges, usually between 13 and 16. Another difference was the perception of whether porn was negative. Sarah outlined her concerns around condom use and young people watching it and then having unprotected sex. Sean felt that porn wasn’t necessarily “that bad” so long as the viewer was an appropriate age. This was also a common theme across the groups.

Claire: Why do you think people watch porn?

Sarah: Self-pleasure.

Susan: Yeah, to wank and stuff like that.

Sean: Sometimes if they’re in like a down time.

Scott: Or, feel like really, really bored, or like trying to look for something to do, or something like that.

Susan: … Yeah, and I feel that sometimes people watch porn because they don’t know how to have sex, so they’ll watch it and it will teach them how to; like they feel more comfortable watching videos instead of talking to someone about it.

Sarah: I feel like teens do it, because they don’t have like as much accessibility to do it. Whereas as older people you can go and have sex yourself. But, if it’s like younger people it’s not something you could possibly do like freely; ‘cause at a younger age it kind of feels wrong if you were to go and do it, but like again, adults can freely do it.

Sean: Or if someone isn’t up for it, you can still do it yourself

Claire: When do you think people start watching porn?

Sean: I know people that have started watching porn when they were like nine.

Sarah: I was thinking fourteen or fifteen. I just think overall porn is a negative thing.

Claire: Negative because of the age people are watching it or the content?

Sarah: Both, because people not putting condoms on, like doing porn videos and younger people watching that, the younger people would be influenced by not putting protection on. And, then it would create like a problem because if they have sex and they get pregnant.

Sean: Porn isn’t that bad. Just watch porn at an appropriate age.

In the conversation below with younger teens (school A), there were parallel responses with regards to porn, pleasure and masturbation. Reasons included “having a bad day” and, like group S, the inaccessibility of sex. The groups reported that porn could be used as a source of information about sexual acts and potentially to “prepare” oneself for having sex. Anna also voiced some concerns about young people watching porn for information and the potential for “high expectations” from an unreliable source.

Claire: Why do you think people watch porn?

Abby: I think it’s to masturbate.

Anna: For pleasure.

Ariana: Some people watch porn and masturbate to it, just because they’ve had a bad day and it just makes them feel better.

Abby: If it’s like what helps you get off, the yeah do it. Have fun.

Anna: Yeah, but sometimes also, when they do masturbate to PornHub, it’s because they’ve been talking to a girl and they’ve been doing stuff together or talking sexually, or whatever, and then she doesn’t want to do anything, so then he goes to …

Abby: But also to see what it looks like. I think you can learn a lot from it. Especially when you’re young and you don’t know.

Ariana: Yeah. ‘Cause I think with girls it’s like they might like to watch it ‘cause they’re curious, not sort of like they want to do it realistically but they’re just like I know like sex ed, they teach themselves something. It could be like an education for them.

Abby: I guess it prepares you more but it also creates some unrealistic expectations, but in my opinion it’s better to have it because it’s sort of self-education for the future. It’s better being exposed to that slowly over time at your own pace; than one night you’re like, “what do I do?; what is this?; what’s going on?.” You know?

Anna: I think also when they’re young and they don’t know much about sexual intercourse and then porn is the first thing they see, that sets such a high expectation, that’s where they learn a lot from and often it’s not all good information.

It is clear from the descriptions in the groups above that porn was perceived as very easily accessible, whereas having sex was not. Porn is created to increase and assist masturbation, as the groups pointed out, but it also creates an anonymous space for watchers to explore their sexuality and expressions, which may not be readily available through traditional school-based sex education (Newman, 1997). Research has consistently shown that porn provides a resource for people to obtain information about sex (C. Smith et al., 2015) which may have a positive impact on young people’s sexual knowledge about sexual intercourse as well as sexual identities (Dawson et al., 2018).

Sex Education at the ‘Right Time’

Sex education in New Zealand sits within the broader learning area of Health and Physical Education, and schools cover it in different ways and classes, for example, through drama, physical education, health class or English. In each school an abstinence-based model was adopted, telling students not to engage with sex, highlighting risks and dangers. Each school touched on porn in the latter stages of students’ schooling, around 15–16 years old. Until this stage, the predominant focus of each sexuality education curricula was on the physical and biological aspects of sex education, such as puberty, periods for girls, and condom use and STIs.

A common thread that arose through the interviews with teachers was that it was important that students didn’t get this information “too early” (Teacher 1, school B). The various reasons teachers gave for this concern was that information about porn might encourage young people to watch porn, for example, “I don’t want to be telling them about it so they’ll all go and do it” (Teacher 1, school A), anxiety about parents not wanting their children to be exposed to comprehensive sexuality education, “I don’t want them [parents] to think that we’re condoning it” (Teacher 1, school A). “We have an example to set for our students” (teacher 1, School B) and concern about students’ maturity to understand the information. “I just don’t think they’re ready for it. When they’re older, they should know, but is it really necessary at 13” (Teacher 2, school A).

Claire: Are you worried about covering porn?

Teacher 2, school B: Yes. We’ve seen the risks of boys watching too much porn or having early exposure. It sets them up with unrealistic expectations.

Teacher 1, school B: Not to mention that they can so easily become addicted to it

Teacher 2, school B: And then there’s the link with violence. We teach them that they need to be very careful. So they don’t become addicted but also about how women are treated in porn

Teacher 1, school B: They need to know that sex isn’t like that

Claire: what’s it like being in a classroom, teaching young people about porn?

Teacher 1, school B: We do it at assembly with the year group

Teacher 2, school B: There are usually some giggles but we have to make sure that they take it seriously. We show them the research that shows how dangerous it can be

Claire: Are you worried about covering porn?

Teacher 1, school C: I think that it’s something that needs covered [sic]. Especially as so many of them will have access to it

Teacher 2, school C: We have an excellent woman [name] who comes into assembly to talk to the students about it. We bring her in to do a session every year. She shows them the issues with pornography and the research about it

Claire: What are your key concerns with students watching porn?

Teacher 2, school C: Well, we know that it’s out there and they are watching it. There have been worries about boys watching too much, getting addicted but also about their expectations and how they view sex and treat partners

Teacher 1, school: We use [female educator] as she is able to reach the boys on a level which shows them the damage pornography can do to relationships

From the conversations with teachers from schools B (mixed sex) and C (boys), we can see the focus on risk which feeds into an abstinence-based approach. In both schools, porn was covered in assembly with whole year groups. This entailed a large-scale lecture-style lesson, with little or no opportunities for the students to ask questions or discuss what was being taught. In school C, they engaged a well-known educator to give a presentation on the risks and dangers associated with porn use. Each of the three schools modeled their information around risk of harm – porn was risky and young people were at risk, which reflects previous research in this area (Scarcelli, 2015). This approach resonated with traditional effects-based scholarship which argues that young people are negatively impacted by the porn that they consume, and this leads to undesirable outcomes such as addiction and violence (Tsaliki et al., 2014). In a similar vein to this body of literature, porn was depicted as a risk to students’ sexual, emotional and mental wellbeing, and development (Flood, 2009; McKee et al., 2010). None of the schools included pleasure in their coverage of porn. This was due to it being considered “inappropriate,” students being “too young” or being seen to “encourage them to watch it” (Teacher 2, school B).

When discussing the inclusion of porn at school with mid-teenaged young people from school A, their views contrasted with that of the teachers. In the excerpt from the girls’ group below, there are calls for porn to be included in the curriculum earlier than it is currently. The participants in this group felt that if it were covered earlier, conversations around porn use would be normalized and young people wouldn’t have to rely on porn as a source of information about sex.

Laura: I think it should be talked about a bit earlier because like I haven’t had any of these talks with any of my teachers, or like health class, or like puberty class or anything like that, we never really talked about this topic, and it’s definitely something that needs to be talked about; especially for like expectations and that kind of thing.

Lisa: Mm. ‘Cause it would be amazing if we just talked openly about all these issues and then there would be no issue about ‘cause it would just be like talking about what you’re having for lunch or something. It would be so much easier.

Laura: And they might not need to have the need to go to porn to find stuff out when they can just talk about it.

In the following excerpt with older teen boys from school C, Harry detailed how he felt that schools address porn in the wrong way. He called for a pragmatic approach which accepts that porn is ubiquitous, easily accessible, and widely used by young people. Henry critiqued the abstinence-based approach which underpins their education and asked why they don’t include the reasons why people use it, such as pleasure. Harry and Henry both agreed that a balanced approach would be more effective in educating their peers about porn.

Harry: I think they address it the wrong way to be honest; they address it as this bad thing. Everyone’s still going to do it, it’s part of our society. It shouldn’t be a bad thing. It’s a personal thing; you do it when you want to do it … Everyone’s going to do it, and in my opinion they address it the wrong way. They address it as though you should never do it. I reckon they should address it as this is in our society now, it’s not a problem because everyone does it. … I think they should address it as it’s here, it’s not a problem; we teach kids about it so they don’t get addicted; they take it in and learn from it. Teach us about it not just say, “Here’s a problem don’t do it.” That’s not going to stop anyone obviously.

Henry: If you teach them the limits then it would be fine, but in my opinion the schools they just see it as this bad thing. They don’t take the initiative. If you’re telling kids not to do it; they want to do it more. It’s as simple as that. You say to a kid, “Don’t smoke weed.” They’ll be like “I’m going to do it anyway.” You teach them why not. What about why they do?

Claire: And why do they?

Henry: Because they do. Escapism, all sorts of reasons. To masturbate to. Because they like it. Pleasure.

Harry: It should be about how to limit yourself; what’s too far. You know what I mean? You don’t kind of limit yourself so you start thinking it’s reality, like you start thinking some guy picks up some chick on the street randomly, and they instantly. You know? You’ve just got to sort of put realistic expectations into them. I reckon it should be taught like that, and not taught it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, because no-one’s going to listen to it. People want reasoning especially in this day and age; they want a reason and they want facts with it. They don’t want to hear, “Don’t do it.” We want to know why not to do it.

Navigating Porn in School

Regardless of how and when porn was covered in sex education, porn played a role in the young participants’ lives: “it’s become like the biggest topic” (Sean). Students spoke about the accessibility of porn and how normal it was in their culture. Even for those who did not actively engage with porn, it was hard to avoid knowing about it or having some sort of discussions about it: “I don’t watch it but obviously I know about it” (Emily).

Sean: I don’t think it’s a matter of whether they should be allowed. It’s more of a matter of, can you really stop them from accessing it? Because it’s so easily accessible. Not just easily accessible, nowadays it’s really easy to hide it. Especially when most teachers probably aren’t as tech savvy as some of their students, so their kids can easily get away with it without their teachers knowing. It would be more like, the teachers wouldn’t have a clue. So, I don’t think you can stop them from accessing it. It’s just not possible in this point in time, because of how easily accessible technology is, and how it all works.

Susan: It’s quite normalized in our young culture. Pretty much everybody views it as a very normal thing, and it’s unfortunately quite an easy topic for people to kind of relate over and stuff.

Scott: I guess the school just needs to understand what we’re going through.

There was a clear juxtaposition in the attitudes of teachers and students regarding pleasure and risk. In dichotomizing pleasure and risk, pleasure was often dismissed by teachers and the sole focus was on risk.

Claire: Tell me about the porn stuff you get in school?

Patrick: Last year we had to have a talk about how porn affects relationships …

Paul: Oh yeah that one.

Patrick: … she came across more negative …

Paul: More anti-porn.

Patrick: … She tried to come with a neutral aspect but it didn’t come across that way.

Phil: If you come with an anti-porn mind-set; it’s going to be in the middle even if you like it or not.

Patrick: She did warn us a lot about the social and relational implications about watching porn, and relationships; how porn can desensitize you. That kind of stuff, but I think what she really missed out on is probably why we fall to porn for support; for pleasure.

It is not uncommon for young participants to critique their sex education for the lack of information on pleasure. Allen (2011) referred to this as sexuality education which is de-eroticized and disembodied. Teachers’ values which underpinned the amount, type and tone of their sex education and its coverage of porn, tended to position young people as “children,” who were ideally non-sexual: “as they’re much too young” (Teacher 2, school B). This approach, which reflects dominant discourses around sexualization (Buckingham et al., 2009), pornification (Mulholland, 2013) and wider panics (Mulholland, 2015), essentially denies young people the right to information about pleasurable aspects of sexual exploration. This stance does not meet the needs of young people, rather it mirrors the concerns of adults (Allen, 2011).

One of the unintended consequences of this protection from risk framework was that young people experienced barriers to accessing help or support should they need it. For the boys in the group below, they were concerned that if they needed help or information on a porn-related worry, such as addiction, they would be reluctant to seek support from their school.

Harry: I would not go to the school counselors; I don’t feel confident.

Claire: Why wouldn’t you feel confident?

Harry: Because we’re told porn’s really bad don’t watch it; it’s misogynistic, penis erectile dysfunction. And all that stuff.

Henry: I think we’ve all agreed already that our teachers have a fairly common anti-porn stance; like, they’d probably be one of the last people who’d you go to, even though for most things they’d be your first port of call when it comes to a support network. Because they tend to have that quite anti-porn stance; so certainly not them.

Henry: Well with your friends; I mean, they do it as well. So it’s a lot more comfortable to talk about it with friends.

Harry: Yep, and also some of your friends they might be experiencing the same problem, but then they’re just, you know, too ashamed to say it, or whatever.

Henry: It would still be really hard going to your friends. Obviously, it depends on how close you are to your friends, and if you were to go to your friends, “I’ve got a porn addiction help me guys.” It’s a bit awkward.

Discussion

Enthusiasm and Uncertainty

The young people in this study were aware of porn, which is in keeping with contemporary research which suggests that young people perceive porn as ubiquitous (Setty, 2022). Even if the participants weren’t engaging with porn directly, they knew of its existence and were aware that some of their peers, especially boys, were users of porn. The young people discussed porn with different levels of keenness and unsureness, citing both perceived positives and negatives of engaging with porn. The boys who participated in this research were more likely to talk about porn positively and to report watching it compared to girls (Martellozzo et al., 2016; Tsaliki, 2011).

Porn was considered to be easily accessible and this ease facilitated different purposes, for example, as a form of escapism, when someone was having a bad day or when sex was inaccessible due to age or a partner not wanting to have sex. Young men’s porn use also provided a form of homosociality which allowed them to connect with each other (Johansson & Hammarén, 2007) – which was another indirectly pleasurable aspect of porn. Thus, watching and discussing porn was seen as being an integral element of being a teenage boy. Consistent with porn studies with adults, young people are likely to find porn enjoyable (Kahveci et al., 2020) as well as using it as a tool for making meaning of their sexuality, desires, and experiences (Attwood et al., 2018). In this way porn provided insights into sexual acts and allowed them to explore and develop their sexual identities.

Another key reason reported for young people to use porn was to explore their sexual desires, expressions and sexuality. This finding is resonant with Litsou et al. (2021) who, in their mixed methods systematic review of research on porn use for sexual learning, reported that young people do appear to learn about sex from porn. They found that porn was the first source of information for “what goes where” (Arrington-Sanders et al., 2015), “what to do” (Rosengard et al., 2012), “how it works” (Kubicek et al., 2010), and “how to masturbate and ejaculate” (Arrington-Sanders et al., 2015).

Porn and Sex Education

Some have suggested that porn is a form of normal sexual discovery for young people (Attwood et al., 2018; Tsaliki, 2011) while others advised that it is detrimental to young people’s wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of their partners (Flood, 2009). For example, boys’ use of porn has habitually been problematized (Flood, 2009). These contradictions were evident in both teachers’ and some students’ responses in the discussions. In terms of providing information about porn at school, there was a clear disparity in students’ and teachers’ views. Age appeared to be the lynchpin in this incongruence – teachers were reluctant to provide information about porn as they felt students were too young, whereas the participants voiced desires and requests for earlier, more pragmatic coverage of porn in school. Teachers’ reluctance to cover porn in a balanced way is reflective of these wider long-standing social debates and panics around the sexualization of young people, bolstered by findings from effects-based research in the past few decades. Under this framing, it is understandable why teachers are constricted in how they address porn in school. This was most evident with regards to pleasure.

Teachers were hesitant to include pleasure when they covered information on porn. As teachers, they felt it was inappropriate and might be seen as condoning young people’s use of porn. The narrow focus of sex education has been critiqued for many years (Parker et al., 2009). Deemed reductive, sex education has primarily been about reducing risk while simultaneously disavowing conversations about pleasure and desire (Fine & McClelland, 2006). It has been argued that the omission of pleasure generally has seriously compromised the development of healthy sexuality for both young men and women (Bay-Cheng, 2003; Fine & McClelland, 2006). Covering pleasure in relation to porn was considered inappropriate by teachers due to the students’ age. By infantilising young people as “at risk,” we lose sight of the sociocultural contexts necessary to understand the ways young people are already deeply enmeshed in the power relations of schools and societies. In this study, the young participants felt the information they received in sexuality education was unrelatable and lacked meaning to their lives and experiences. The anti-porn focus was unproductive as students reported zoning out or facing barriers to access support if they were concerned about their use of porn.

Implications for Sex Education

The combination of providing information too late and omitting pleasure because students were too young ultimately denied young people the right to healthy sexual exploration and development. Teachers showed a clear preference that students abstain from engaging with porn. Yet, young people’s requests for more information position them as legitimately sexual subjects, who have a right to experience and express their sexuality positively (Allen, 2011).

Porn studies scholarship has increasingly focused on how, not if, pleasure should be included in sexuality education (Allen, 2012). The first step to incorporating pleasure is acknowledging young people as sexual beings with wants, needs and desires (Allen, 2001, 2005). By ignoring pleasure, it has been argued that the needs of young people are not being fully met (Francis, 2012). It would seem that the fundamentals of meaningful sexuality education are to ground it in the lived experiences and social realities of young people, so that it is relatable and productive.

There are clear implications for sex education when topics that students deem important, such as porn, are dismissed because adults perceive them as being too young to be afforded information and opportunities for discussion and questioning. As has been shown in this study and others’ outlined above, when young people don’t receive the information they need or they find it unrelatable, they may seek it elsewhere (Litsou et al., 2021). While this may not increase their risk of harm, it does increase the chances of them consulting information which may not be accurate or reliable. As both teachers and students have pointed out, seeking out sexual information through porn may lead to misinformation or unrealistic expectations without the prospect of engaging in rigorous discussions about what they’ve found.

Research demonstrates that young people want meaningful sex education that is interactive and stimulating, less risk-focused and more relevant to their lives (Allen, 2005). Young people value being able to ask questions in a safe space created by non-judgmental educators to go beyond superficial factual information (Formby & Wolstenholme, 2012). In this case, students critiqued the assembly model, preferring a safe space in which they would be heard. From this research, it was clear that there is a need for porn to be covered in schools. Contemporary research (Dawson et al., 2019) has analyzed the place of porn literacy, which aims to increase young people’s knowledge and awareness about the portrayal of sex and sexuality in porn, in schools. While the premise shows potential in addressing some of these participants’ concerns around a de-eroticized model of sex education, research has found that for some parents, teachers and young people in New Zealand, porn literacy education was less appropriate than a model of sex education which was based on ethical sexual citizenship (Healy-Cullen et al., 2023). For the young people in this study, there were calls for earlier sex education, which was more nuanced and balanced than the current approach.

Conclusion

Public anxiety over the risk of sexualization to childhood innocence has spanned centuries (Buckingham & Chronaki, 2014). More recently, this has been compounded with the emergence and accessibility of online porn, alongside the glut of effects-based research highlighting the dangers of porn exposure to young people (Flood, 2009). Nevertheless, young people report the normalization of porn consumption for many reasons, including pleasure, boredom and informal sex education. For the young people in this study, porn was a part of their lives, whether or not they personally engaged with it. The main reasons given for using porn were pleasure and masturbation, the ease of accessing it and as an informal means of sex education. By politicizing age, teachers viewed young people as an at-risk population, which prevented scope for knowledge sharing as well as young people’s questions, expressions, and agency. In doing so, the nuance of young people’s engagements with porn and pleasure is easily overlooked. This reduces the scope to understand the role of porn in young people’s lives, when porn is so easily accessible and we know that young people are engaging with it, some very early. This is a missed opportunity to interrogate and understand porn as a cultural resource (Setty, 2022) through which young people construct and express their sexual subjectivities and social roles. In this case, participants felt that teachers lacked insight into their (digital) sexual lives. Youth-centered programs focused on ethical sexual citizenship should better value young people’s experiences and knowledge, which may enable more investment from students, leading to more significant outcomes.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.