Pornography is any material that is intended to cause sexual feelings for the person viewing, reading, or listening to it. It’s pretty easy to come across porn on the internet, and there’s a good chance you already have. According to this survey, between 62.1% women and 93.2% men percent of college students were exposed to online porn before they were 18. Additionally, 13% of web searches are searches for porn, and so are 20% of mobile searches in the US, and that was only in 2014!
One well-known example of porn is the content found on PornHub, (a site which we don’t recommend, read our page on Ethical Porn to learn why).
Porn can be a great tool for enhancing and/or exploring your sexuality , but it’s important to keep in mind that most porn isn’t intended to be educational or realistic.
While porn can be great for your own pleasure, as well the pleasure of you and a partner, we have to remember that societal gender roles drive porn production and consumption. Continued hurtful stereotypes, lack of representation of different genders, sexualities, and unrealistic body types remain present in much of mainstream porn, as well as sexist, abusive, and racist content. Therefore, it’s dangerous to base our real-life, intimate interactions on what we see in mainstream porn. Sex includes much longer conversations on topics such as consent, boundaries, and emotion, and your experiences in the bedroom don’t have to, and oftentimes won’t, mirror what you see on your screen.
