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Does Watching Porn As a Teen Ruin Sex Forever?
It’s time for a much-needed reality check
When Emmett Hulser-Morris was 11, he and his friends dared each other to type “porn” into the Google search bar. As soon as titillating images appeared, they deleted the window. “We got freaked out,” says Hulser-Morris, now 17.
Today Hulser-Morris says he watches pornography once or twice a week. The high school senior from Takoma Park, Maryland, is no outlier. About half of children in the United States between the ages of 10 and 17 have seen porn, either intentionally or by accidentally stumbling across it online, and a quarter of those kids ages 12 to 18 seek it out, according to national surveys.
Rather than scold or punish him, Hulser-Morris’ mother, Temple Morris, a psychotherapist in Bethesda, Maryland, takes a different approach. She talks to him openly about the unrealistic messages that porn conveys. “I don’t love that he’s watching porn,” says Morris. “I think porn is bad for women; I’m a feminist. But my goal is not to keep him from it, but to make sure it doesn’t adversely affect him and the girls he gets involved with.”
Morris has talked about sex with her son and his siblings since they were tweens. The conversations often take place around the kitchen table or during family movie nights when she’s known to pause a film and explain that the sex scene unspooling on the screen doesn’t accurately depict what sex between regular people looks like. “That’s not how sex is,” she says. “It’s more awkward, it’s more uncertain, it’s more clumsy.”
To help her better articulate those messages to three children, and to her clients, who include survivors of sexual violence, Morris signed up for porn literacy training — a curriculum developed in part by Emily Rothman, a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who studies the public health impact of sexually explicit media. The program is meant to provide a framework for analyzing and interpreting pornography.
The porn literacy curriculum does not condemn porn, nor does it extoll its virtues. Instead, it delves into the history of obscenity, explains various types of intimacy, and digs into what healthy flirting looks like. “It may sound like it’s not directly about porn, but we use…
