Brian Willoughby knows he’s doing a good job when parents become uncomfortable. That’s because part of his job involves telling them that their teenagers are looking at pornography — hardcore, explicit, often violent. Sometimes, the conversation is with a church group.
Willoughby is a social scientist at Brigham Young University, where he studies the pornography habits of adolescents and the impact this has on relationships. When he goes into the community to explain what the modern world is like, he speaks plainly.
“I always have to be careful to couch things by saying, ‘I’m not saying porn is good — but I am saying it’s a reality,’” he said. “You can stick your head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist, and say this is bad and pray harder, or use addiction language, but you have to have a realistic understanding of what’s happening.”
In the past, many parents have tried to ignore the watching of pornography by their children, forbid its use or wish it away. But scholars who study the adolescent use of online pornography say that the behavior is so commonplace and impossible to prevent that a more pragmatic approach is required. When it comes to pornography, they want us to talk about it.
The aim: to teach adolescents that the explicit content they encounter is unrealistic, misleading about many sexual relations and, as a result, potentially harmful. The approach does not condone the content or encourage its use, Willoughby emphasized, but acknowledges its ubiquity and unrealistic, hardcore nature. Long gone are the days of nude magazines that left much to the imagination.
“That was nudity, sexualized,” Willoughby said of the pornography of yesteryear. “A lot of parents still think that porn is Playboy.”
On average, Americans first see online pornography at age 12, according to a 2023 survey of adolescents by Common Sense Media, and 73% of those age 17 and younger have seen it, a figure consistent with other research. Of those who watch pornography, whether intentionally or by stumbling into it accidentally, more than half reported seeing violence, including rape, choking or someone in pain.
The realpolitik approach has been endorsed by recent scholarly papers that call for teaching adolescents “porn literacy,” having doctors ask young people about their pornography viewing and starting conversations between teenagers and their parents.
One paper, published in January in the Journal of Family Medicine and Community Health, called for a practice that helps “provide an objective view of adolescents’ pornography use, guidelines for screening of pornography use and ways to facilitate conversations about the use between adolescents and caregivers.”
“Can I tell you how much pushback we got on that paper?” said Emily Pluhar, a clinical psychologist and instructor at Harvard Medical School and an author of the paper. “People thought we were endorsing porn. What we were saying is ‘It’s there.’”
“This is a topic that is so uncomfortable that nobody wants to talk about it,” Pluhar added. “It’s only going to get worse.” With artificial intelligence and other technologies, the virtual-sex experience will become ever more personal and intense, she said: “We have to start talking about this.”
But what should adults say? Thus far, science has not firmly answered whether online pornography — known to researchers as sexually explicit internet material — is harmful or to whom.
“What we can say is that for some people it might cause issues in their sexuality, relationships and so on,” said Beata Bothe, a psychologist at the University of Montreal, where she studies pornography use. “But we don’t have enough scientific evidence to say it’s harmful, or not for everyone.”
In February, Bothe was an author of a paper that found that some types of pornography could affect the sexual well-being of viewers. The study, a survey of 827 young adults, found that people who watched passionate or romantic pornography reported higher sexual satisfaction in their relationships, whereas watching “power, control and rough-sex pornography was associated with lower sexual satisfaction.” (The study also noted that the passionate, romantic and multipartner material was more widely viewed than the harder-core categories.)
In 2021, a study of 630 Dutch adolescents found that adolescents who watched more pornography engaged in more advanced sexual behaviors at a younger age, such as heavy petting and oral sex. But, the researchers noted, it was unclear whether more sexually advanced adolescents were drawn to pornography or whether the pornography drove their behavior.
“Adolescents may practice what they have seen and learned, and that pornography use and sexual behaviors may reinforce each other over time,” the authors noted. Vitally, as pornography use has grown among American adolescents, young people are waiting longer on average to experiment with actual sex. In 2021, about one-third of high-school students reported having had sex, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a sharp drop from a decade earlier, when the figure was closer to 50%. Experts have suggested that rates of some adolescent activities that concern public health, including drinking and sex, could be falling because adolescents spend more time online. But experts also credit public education campaigns with curbing behaviors such as binge drinking, smoking and sexual experimentation.
For the experts who study pornography use, educating adolescents about pornography begins with an unassailable truth: Online pornography is unrealistic.
“Porn is a movie — what we see is not reality,” Beata said. “Even if people seem to like what they do, they might not really enjoy it, or it might be painful.” This might be obvious to some older adolescents, she said, but not to the younger consumers of pornography “who have no real-life sexual experience.”
Although the research is modest, she said that she and other scholars suspect that “porn use can relate to or change peoples’ sexual scripts.”
Pluhar said that, to the naive viewer, pornography could seem like a documentary. But in the real world, she noted, “women don’t climax immediately, it’s not all about the guy, there is consent, there is a relationship, it’s not only about physical connection.” She added: “These people are all thin and muscular, and that’s not how things look. Sex can be messy. It looks like pretty smooth sailing online. It’s glamorized.”
That’s to say nothing of the violent pornography, which Pluhar considers most potentially harmful to a viewer. “We’re talking about a woman being thrown down and raped,” she said. At one point, she treated a man who, when younger, was frequently exposed to violent pornography and as a result was afraid to be intimate with women, fearing that he would act out what he had seen.
Willoughby said that when he spoke to groups of parents or students, he sometimes cited the portrayal of anal sex as a clear example of how misleading pornography was.
Willoughby tells audiences that many women do not like anal sex and find it painful, and yet a great deal of pornography has normalized the activity, leading couples, particularly men, to expect it. His aim isn’t to moralize, he said, but to set realistic expectations, so that relationships can thrive and partners have a shared vision of what will happen in the bedroom.
He said he sometimes received “pushback” from parents who feared that talking about the subject would make the problem worse, perhaps by prompting pornography use. But that idea was a “common myth,” he said, not based in research and naive to the reality that young people know about and find this material.
Pornography literacy is the very least that needs to be done, he added, although it may be “a bit defeatist”: Ideally, society would find ways to discourage pornography, including adopting more effective tools to block it.
“Kids are going to be looking at porn whether you talk to them or not,” he said. “And so if they’re going to look at porn, and you want to have any influence on their life, you have to have this conversation.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
