When browsing chatroulette at which guys do you stop skipping?
How about during your sexual encounter?
As someone who has written books on pornography, rape culture and consent, and who has recently taught a class on consent, how can you support someone who is struggling to understand their own sexuality and consent? That's the real issue here, isn't it? It's not that women don't see pornography; the data clearly shows that they do. The real issue is that for men and women, young and old, online and off, exposure to pornography has real, long-term effects. For young girls, it fuels unrealistic expectations about their sexuality. For young men, it fuels a sense of entitlement and failure. And for both genders, it can cause mental health problems like pornography use disorder. Young women's use of pornography has tripled since its introduction. Indeed, the media hype surrounding pornography has tripled with the internet. Young women are much more likely than girls to use the internet to seek and find sexual content, and pornography use has tripled with the internet. And young men are much more likely than men to report that they are still using pornography after they're 18 years old. So these changes in girls and men's sexual behavior are happening at exactly the moment when our society and our institutions are trying to convince girls and men that they should be learning about sex and consent. This is very challenging, true. And it needs to be done in a way that doesn't tell girls and men that they're doing them a favor by using the internet to find sexual content and that they're heros when in fact most of them are villains. Because most of these young people are doing so out of a sense of entitlement, because they think that by using the internet to find and engage in sexual behavior that they have some kind of innate right to know what that information means. In fact, most of them don't. A minority of them actually, actually, know very little about consent. And that's the point.
And finally, as someone who has been working with young people on porn, I can tell you that young people are finding that the interaction between them and the people that they see is never perfectly one-sided but often quite one-sided. Young people don't always see the whole interaction but they certainly know there is a problem. What I have learned is that one of the most effective ways that we as an industry can attempt to address this is to give our young people a range of experiences and add these to the mix of realistic chances of injury and harm, is to give them options. Should they always see this as a one-way street? Or should they be able to call the police and say, I'm uncomfortable with this situation, but I'm going to find a place where I can be sure I'm not going to see someone who I really don't want to see me, and that's going to have to be with someone else?
That's not to say that every interaction that happens
