Utah Anti-Pornography Blog Reposts Article About Negative Effects of Pornography on Teenagers, Omits Advice about How to Help Teens Navigate Porn-Filled Modern World
It’s like advising parents that rather than teach their kids about driving safely, they should teach them nothing except that the Fast/Furious franchise is deliciously sinful.
In June, Australian Women’s Weekly published an article about how teenage girls are having sex earlier than in previous generations, as well as the reasons this might be happening, the consequences of a generation’s sexual understanding being based on pornography, and the ways in which parents can help their children become more prepared for healthy sexual relationships by having conversations. Overall, it’s an informative article that dispenses sound, if predictable, advice.
The next day, Fight the New Drug, an anti-pornography organization, posted part of the article to their blog. While they cited its source in AWW, they omitted several paragraphs that appear in the original version — one paragraph about how sex can be a positive, empowering experience for young women and eight paragraphs (more than 25% of the total) that address ways parents can help their children through adolescence by talking with them about sex — essentially, the ethos of the article.
At the end of the blog post, as at the end of each of Fight the New Drug’s posts, there is a call-to-action for readers to share the article via social media, to “help spread the facts on the harmful effects of pornography on individuals, relationships, and society.” As of the writing of this essay, six weeks after the articles were published to both sites, the original AWW article has about 64,000 shares. The article on Fight the New Drug’s blog has 782,000 shares on Facebook alone. While it’s great that the message about unrealistic sexual standards and the harmful effects of pornography is being disseminated (pun intended), I’m concerned that the exclusion of the paragraphs about what parents can do immediately, IRL, will not only deprive readers of that advice, but will also cause readers to focus on the evils of pornography and an internet crusade against it rather than on parental influence in a young person’s understanding of sex.
The Fight the New Drug blog post ends with this sentence:
Arguably, there has never been a more confusing, stressful time to be a teenager.
The original article in AWW contains this sentence:
Arguably, there has never been a more confusing, stressful time to be a teenage girl.
Interesting choice of “teenage girl” to “teenager” in the repost, but what’s more interesting is what the original article says when it continues:
We can make it easier for them. A loving, nurturing family environment and parents who are open about sex help enormously, says Jennifer Walsh, education manager at Latrobe’s Centre for Health, Sex and Society. “Many parents are bewildered and extremely concerned about this aspect of their children coping with the world, but they’re so worried about saying the right thing and getting it perfectly right, that they are saying nothing at all.”
The article goes on, as I indicated above, to encourage parents to have conversations with their teenagers (both female and male) while giving them advice on how to do so and reasons why it will help. There is advice for all parents, from those who want to encourage their children to abstain for as long as possible to parents whose children are already sexually active. The advice advocates, above all, to create an open and honest dialogue, to be understanding, and to not “freak out.” From sex therapist, Dr. Rosie King:
“You want to maintain a close relationship with your child. Try to understand the pressures around teenage girls to have sex. Understand why it’s hard to say no. I’m not trying to justify early teenage sexual activity, but if you handle the situation wrong, you can make them feel dirty, not lovable, and forever unclean because of their choices.”
How different the message of this article is from the message presented in the repost on Fight the New Drug’s blog! How much more hopeful, encouraging, healthy, and responsible it is to accept that something exists and will not go away or go unwatched because of what equates to an online petition (pornography is an enormously profitable and ancient business), but that help is available through non-internet communities — specifically, the families of the people who feel consciously (or unconsciously) victimized by it.
I’m not Australian, so I don’t know first-hand what it’s like to grow up as a female in Australia or how chill Australian parents are about talking to their kids about sex. I, like Fight the New Drug, am American, and I was raised by people who expected someone else to tell me how and why sex happens. I spent my pubescent years in a school district that taught sex ed starting in fourth grade (at which point it was the school nurse and one female teacher — who, I have to assume, was either the bravest or the least easily embarrassed — describing anatomy slides to a classroom full of nine-year-old girls), and my mother, aware of this fact, said to me when I was eleven, “So, they taught you about periods in school, right? If you get it, you know what to do?”
From speaking to women my age (and not my age), I’ve gathered that my mom’s method of making sure I was prepared for womanhood was not atypical. It relied perhaps a bit more heavily on scholarship than other moms’ methods, but as a linguistic equivalent of not making eye contact, it was fairly normal. We never discussed sex; she never asked me if I was sexually active, even after I had had a serious boyfriend for more than a year. The rule at my house was that if I had a boy over for any reason, he and I had to stay within sight of at least one of my parents. If for some reason we were compelled to be out of their sight (eg playing ping-pong in the basement), we had to be within earshot, and we could not be behind a closed door: it was the forced-abstinence-only method of sexual education that assumes that if kids can’t have sex in their own beds in your house while you’re at home, they can’t have sex at all. LOL.
So I learned about sex from my friends and classmates. It was the early aughts, cell phone cameras existed on only the sleekest and most expensive flip phones, and my boyfriend was a really nice guy who didn’t pressure me into doing anything (besides accompany him to the symphony every single Friday night for an entire concert season). I happened to never encounter anything more pornographic than Lady Chatterly’s Lover until I was a junior in high school. I never had to suffer the anxiety of a pregnancy scare or the ignominy of an ex sharing nude photos with dozens of my peers. I didn’t have to talk to my mom about sex because I didn’t have a bad experience; however, it would have been nice to know that she was open to a dialogue if I had ever needed to discuss something.
If, as this article indicates, adolescents and teens are engaging in sexual activity earlier, more often, and less safely because they are being educated primarily by pornography, keeping them away from pornography will not change the statistics because parents can’t keep their kids away from anything. Teaching them that pornography is unrealistic is great. Encouraging them not to engage in pornographic activities themselves (at least until they’re 18) is also great. An anti-pornography campaign that focuses only on taking away the pornography and eschews the necessity of the teaching and encouragement is just as dangerous — for both young people and their parents — as an abstinence-only sex ed curriculum.
Incidentally, Fight the New Drug is not just an American organization, but an American organization based in Salt Lake City. One of the paragraphs omitted in the repost discusses teen pregnancy statistics in countries with different levels of sexual liberation (emphasis mine):
In Holland, where there is open, positive discussion of sexuality, there are 12 pregnancies (including abortions) per 1000 women under 19. In Australia, there are 44. In the US, where many preach abstinence, there are 85.
In Utah, boasts a news report that aired this past June (a week before the original AWW article), teen pregnancy rates have “plummeted” from 27% of young women ages 15–17 in 1992 to 9% in 2000, and the rates are even lower (about 2%) today.* That would be great news for the teens (and their parents) in Utah, except that the same story reports that STD rates are quadruple what they were in 2012.
“Bad choices are to blame for Utah’s sexually transmitted diseases diagnosed four times as much as three years ago,” says author Nadia Crow, quoting zero experts.
I’m no True Detective, but I’m guessing that the reason that the number of pregnancies is falling while the number of STDs skyrockets is that kids — somehow, some way, against all odds — figured out how to have sexual experiences without getting pregnant. Maybe, despite that fact that “the advocacy or encouragement of the use of contraceptive methods or devices [may not be taught in Utah public schools],” they figured out coitus interruptus, or oral sex, or anal sex (although the banning of “the advocacy of homosexuality” in Utah public schools suggests against this — LOL again), but they still don’t use condoms, not only because they aren’t taught to by adults who have expressed concern for their well-being and safety, but probably also because they are afraid that if one of those concerned adults finds out they’re buying condoms (and therefore doing something that requires condoms), they will be met not with understanding, but with a “freak out.”
I’m not trying to vilify Utah residents, although their sexual education policy is The Actual Worst. I’m sure people in Utah mean well and are, like many American parents, simply trying to literally and metaphorically avoid making eye contact with their offspring when it comes to recognizing that teens are curious about sex and will stop at nothing to sate that curiosity. Their pregnancy/STD statistics and abstinence-only sex ed curriculum offer a handy analog for the effects of pornography and for what might happen if, rather than speak with young people about this thing they are almost definitely going to encounter in some form or another, parents portray pornography (and all sex) as illicit at best and shameful at worst.
The quickest way to convince teenagers to do something is to tell them it’s dangerous or taboo. The best way to help teenagers be safe and healthy is to be supportive of their choices and forgiving when they fuck up (pun intended).
*The Utah statistics only consider young women ages 15–17 (potentially because a lot of young women ages 18–19 are married and therefore allowed to bear children without besmirching the state’s statistics), so the fact that their pregnancy rate is so much lower than the national average is affected by the exclusion of young women ages 13–14 and 18–19.
