The Porn Conversation: The Effects of Pornography on Youth and How to Talk About It

[Dr. Dimitri Christakis]: Hello, welcome everyone, to this week’s Ask the Experts workshop. My name is Dimitri Christakis. I’m a pediatrician and epidemiologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital in the University of Washington, and a member of the advisory board for Children and Screens, and I have the honor of hosting today’s webinar on behalf of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. Thank you for joining us today for a conversation that Children and Screens believes is vital for the mental, physical, and relational health of young people and families: the porn conversation. As many of you know, Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development has a four-fold mission to advance and support interdisciplinary scientific research into the impact of digital media on child and adolescent health, development and well-being. To foster public awareness, promote policy that protects young people and increases the human capital in the field. During the pandemic, we are enacting our mission by funding research in the digital media use before, during, and after the pandemic, and hosting weekly workshops for parents, educators, clinicians, public health experts, and other stakeholders about various digital media topics. Today’s webinar about pornography may be a bit uncomfortable, but it is one that will absolutely benefit your family in the long run. Our panelists have reviewed the questions you submitted and will answer as many as they can. If you have additional questions during the workshop, please type them into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. We will answer as many questions as time permits. We are recording today’s workshop, and hope to upload a video to YouTube in the coming days. Before I introduce our moderator, I would like to take a moment to remind you that the subject matter of today’s workshop is not appropriate for anyone under 18. Please do everything you can to ensure any little ears in your home are not able to hear this conversation. We have taken care to ensure that images are not explicit. However, even if you are using headphones, it will be best if your children are able to spend the next 90 minutes in a different room. It is now my great pleasure to introduce our moderator, Dr. Gail Dines, a professor emerita of sociology who has been researching and writing about the porn industry for well over 30 years. Dr. Dines is the founding president and CEO of the non-profit Culture Reframed, which is dedicated to building resilience and resistance in children and youth to the harms of a hyper-sexualized and pornified society, and develops cutting-edge educational programs that promote healthy development, relationships, and sexuality. Gail, it’s all yours.

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Thank you very much for that introduction, and thank you for inviting me to be a participant in this. So I’m just going to share my screen. And what I’m going to do today is discuss what mainstream pornography is, because for many people, although we’re having the discussion, it’s not clear what it is. If you’re thinking of Playboy or Penthouse, or even Hustler, 10, 15, 20 years ago, forget it. The new player on the block is PornHub, which I’m going to discuss a bit later. So, let me tell you what we know about the content of mainstream porn. The actual study that most people cite, the kind of gold standards, is Ana Bridges and her team, who analyzed 304 of the most watched scenes. And what they found is that at least 90 percent contain some form of physical, sexual, and verbal aggression against women. So, I’m going to take you through what the content of mainstream pornography is. So when you go on to PornHub, which again, I will be discussing a bit later exactly what PornHub is, and why it’s so important, and the fact that it’s the most traveled porn website in the world. You will see millions of videos, literally, but all of them will basically have the sex acts in, or the vast majority, so gagging – which is where they gag her with their penis, they put the penis so far down her throat that she’s actually almost vomiting. And in some cases, she does vomit. Tears are streaming down her face, and she can’t breathe, and they continue to gag her. Now, also we need to talk about strangulation, because that’s becoming increasingly popular. And that difference between gagging and strangulation, is strangulation around the neck, and it can take up to a week for the effects of strangulation to come out, when you’re actually – all your throat begins to swell and you can die in your sleep. That is now not only popular in pornography, but is finding its way into mainstream sexual behavior. Very, very rough anal sex – in fact, in pornography, anal penetration has almost replaced vaginal penetration. But this is really rough and body-punishing. Ejaculation on the face – virtually every porn scene ends with one, two, three, four – any number of men ejaculating on her face, and especially into her eyes. ATM: ass to mouth, this is where the penis goes into her anus and then into her mouth without washing, and the joke is “The bitch has to eat her own shit.” This you hear all the time. Hair pulling, spitting in her face. So the average scene has usually all of these in, and then she ends up literally dripping in ejaculate at the end. So this is not your father’s Playboy. The age of first viewing of porn, depending on which study you look at, is between 11 and 13. And these are studies where we see 93 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls have seen porn during adolescence. 100 percent of college males and 82 percent of college females have watched porn. 64 percent of young people aged 16 to 24 actively seek out porn weekly, or more often. And these figures, by the way, have all been growing during the pandemic. Now the problem with this is it is a public health crisis, but it is a stealth public health crisis. And it’s stealth because a lot of parents, and also adults charged with bringing kids up, and these include child protection services, pediatricians, are not aware of what is going on in this new world of pornography. What we know from studies is that half as many parents thought their 14 to 18 year olds had actually seen porn as they had had. Depending on the sex act, parents underestimate what their kids saw by as much as ten times. So we know that parents are a key protective factor in the well-being of their children. However, they’re not familiar with A: the fact that their kids are looking at porn, or B: what the content is. Now, I want to explain that when I was writing my porn land, and was sort of putting myself in PornHub regularly, I kept thinking “How do these kids stand it?” And because I could barely stand it, and then I started looking at the text that actually goes with each image, and the texts are very clever. So, let’s take a popular website, Gag Me and then Fuck Me. It says, “Do you know what we say to things like romance and foreplay? We say fuck off. We take gorgeous young bitches and do what every man would really like to do: we make them gag,” etc. Well, let me say this – if you are 11 years old, what do you get from this? We take gorgeous young bitches and do what every man would really like to do – that’s not true, every man doesn’t really want to do this, but when you are 11 years old and have no repertoire of sexual history, you’ve got nothing else to really go from. You are dependent on pornography as your major form of sex education, especially given the, such poor sex education in most schools. So this carries an enormous weight: we take gorgeous young bitches and do what every man would really like to do. I want you to think how they are bringing in, weaving a net to bring in kids now. Another example, promotional copy from Anally Ripped Whores, “We at Pure Filth know exactly what you want. Chicks being ass-fucked till their sphincters are pink, puffy and totally blown out. Adult diapers just might be in store for these whores when their work is done.” By the way, everything up here, I just want to make sure you know I got for free on PornHub, and I got it in 10 seconds, which means kids can get it in five seconds. Again, look how clever it is. We at Pure Filth know exactly what you want: No, they don’t know, but again, the 11 year old boy who does not know that in fact, men, not all men want this. How is he going to engage with this in a critical manner? Especially given he’s 11 and his frontal lobes are still in early adolescent development. So what’s interesting here, is this boy who put, I don’t know, boobies or butts into Google or whatever, was thinking he might get lucky with a pair of breasts. He was thinking he might get lucky if he sees naked people or sex. He was not expecting this level of sexual violence against women, and remember he’s masturbating and aroused to this, which means he thinks he’s complicit. And judging the self-loathing, the embarrassment, the shame, and the toxic stew of arousal, these boys are being traumatized by the porn industry. By looking at sexual violence, being told they like it and also in a way of body betrayal, because their bodies are aroused to this. This is what happens when the pornography industry becomes the major form of sex education. And again, I’m not looking: I do not deal with the worst of pornography. This is mainstream porn on PornHub, the most traveled website in the world, the future. So the most traveled porn website, the future. Now this is from 2003, and this is from a very hardcore porn director, one of the things about today’s market and the porn about porn and gonzo porn, is so many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff. You see, the pornography industry basically by 2003 was running out of ideas what to do, because they do virtually everything to a woman today, short of killing her. So what’s the future? Well, thank you, Ashcroft Court, because thanks to Ashcroft versus the Free Speech Coalition in 2002 to 3, they stuck down, they struck down two provisions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996. The most important provision they stuck, that they struck down, was that you could not use girls or women who looked under 18. The Free Speech Coalition, which is the lobbying arm of the porn industry, said that was too cumbersome on their free speech. Ashcroft agreed, and overnight teen porn became one of the major sites to look for now. I just want to give you some examples. On PornHub, amateur category has 304,000 videos, teens have 262,000 in number, and rough sex has 54,000. But this doesn’t tell you what’s going on. When you go into the back end of PornHub and you look at the tags for teens, this means that PornHub has collected data on what men who put teen porn into are looking for as well. So they don’t just put teen porn in, they put also things like small tits, virgin pussies defloration, first time. When you add up all of the tags that stand for teen, it’s got 531,000 videos. It by far dwarfs all the other 83 categories on PornHub. This is the most popular. Why is this such a problem? Because we’re now finding that men who originally had no interest in children are going to porn sites, going to PornHub, other porn sites, becoming bored with adult porn, wanting something new, going into teen porn. And some research is suggesting, moving into child sexual abuse images on the dark web. And what this is showing, these research, is that men who have no prior interest in children, as sexual beings or sexual objects, are now increasingly becoming non-pedophile rapists of children. So we are putting our children at an incredible risk, because we are expanding the number of predators out there for children. So, this is just giving you a taste of: “What is mainstream pornography?” Forget Playboy, forget Penthouse, forget Hustler. This is the new world today of pornography. Anyway, what I would like to do now, is introduce our speaker, and I’m just going to go into full mode here. And I’d like to introduce next, Dr. Marc Potenza. So, Dr. Potenza is a board-certified psychiatrist with subspecialty training and certification in addiction and psychiatry. He’s a Professor of Psychiatry, Child Study, and Neurobiology at the Yale University School of Medicine, where he is Director of the Problem Gambling Clinic, the Center of Excellence in Gambling Research, and the Women and Addictive Disorders Core of Women’s Health Research at Yale, and senior scientist at the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling. Dr. Potenza is an eminent neuroscience researcher on the topic of pornography, as well as several other domains, and it is my pleasure to introduce Marc, who’s going to speak now. Thank you, Marc.

[Dr. Marc Potenza]: Thank you, Gail. Thank you for the kind introduction, and I will share my screen once I have the ability to do so. I think the prior presentation will need to stop screen sharing, Gail. Wonderful, so I will bring up my talk, which is on what the science has been telling us with respect to Internet pornography use. And like I do with all of my presentations, I have a listing of disclosures with respect to relationships with pharmaceutical gambling, gaming, and legal entities. And as Professor Dines mentioned, development is a time when there are many changes. These are changes that occur from a behavioral perspective, as individuals are transitioning from a childhood where there’s more parental oversight, to independence in adulthood. And there are behavioral changes that are linked to biological changes, and some of these are within general realms, and some are more specific to sex and related behaviors. So there’s been for the past 15 plus years, people have been investigating some of the brain-based changes, where there are significant changes going from childhood through early adulthood, and concurrent with those is increased engagement in risk behaviors. Some of this is with respect to potentially addictive behaviors, like with substance use, but today’s world is very different than the world that I grew up in, for example, with respect to the Internet and the content that one can easily access on the Internet. And there are a wide range of behaviors in which one can engage, on a variety of different apps and other areas on the Internet. One of these that was mentioned in the prior talk, is PornHub, and PornHub as of several years ago was receiving over 80 billion views, as was mentioned in the prior talk. During COVID19, during the early part of COVID19, the traffic on PornHub increased by over 10 percent. And at the time several years ago, MindGeek, which is the parent company of PornHub and several other websites, was among the top three bandwidth consuming companies in the world, with the other two being Google and Netflix. So this is widely engaged in activity, with respect to viewing pornography, and sometimes youth can stumble onto pornography at early ages. So this  Huffington Post Article talked about how a girl searching for My Little Pony stumbled across Internet pornography, and then the discussion that the mother had with her daughter about what she had witnessed. But the availability, the accessibility, the affordability, the perceived anonymity of Internet pornography is thought to underlie its widespread growth in consumption, and this also pertains to children. So data from a pornography website provider indicates that the proportion of 7 to 10 year olds over the past five years, as compared to the prior five years, is viewing pornography is increasing. And we heard that in the prior presentation, that the, that during the period of 11 to 13 years is a prime age for many individuals to begin viewing pornography. A study out of Poland found that 80 percent of university students reported viewing pornography, with a median age of onset of pornography viewing being 14 years of age. And earlier onset of pornography viewing was associated with multiple factors, including needing more stimulation and more sexual stimuli to reach orgasm, a decrease in sexual satisfaction, a poor quality of romantic relationships, neglects of responsibility, and what was termed “problematic pornography use” where pornography viewing is perceived to interfere in major areas of life functioning, with the highest odds of these relationships being seen in individuals who started viewing pornography at less than 12 years of age. Adolescent pornography use has been linked to a number of poor health measures, including poor body image that – over time, youth in Hong Kong from eighth grade students, had increased pornography viewing with particular groups of youth, those with lower levels of youth development and poor family functioning, showing greater increases in pornography viewing. And amongst youth, depressive features and increased sexual interests were linked to increases in problematic pornography use over time, in a separate study. Other online sexual activities weren’t mentioned, so amongst Swedish high school students, those with online sexual contact leading to online sexual abuse were more likely to have a number of factors  linked, including poorer mental health or self-esteem, and poor parental relationships. Amongst adolescent boys with high levels of instrumental attitudes towards sex – and instrumental attitudes are those where sex is perceived for enjoyment or excitement rather than intimacy based — pornography use predicted willingness to non-consensually forward sexts from a stranger, and this sharing of sex with individuals can have some substantial negative consequences. There’s a documentary that was generated a few years ago based on real life events, in which two teens were sexually assaulted by boys they considered friends. They were humiliated online and harassed by their communities, and I think while this is two incidents, it is something that I think is more widespread, and is, I would recommend watching. Then one also has to think about the impact that pornography use may have on partnered sex. And amongst U.S. urban youth, about half have been asked to watch pornography with a partner and had been asked, a substantial proportion had been asked to do something a partner saw in pornography, and given what we heard in the prior presentation, this can have negative impacts on both boys and girls, and on sexual expectations and arousal templates throughout development. In a separate study, adolescent dating victimization was linked to frequent pornography use, viewing in the company of others and being asked to perform acts first seen in pornography, as well as pornography use during or following cannabis use. And then qualitative data, so, interview of 23 low-income minority youth suggested that viewing of extreme pornography in schools was common, as well as on phones, and that a substantial number reported copying pornography in their own relationships. Again substantiating some of the concerns that were raised in the prior conference presentation, so females may be particularly at risk. Among 16 year old girls, the 30 percent reported using pornography and about 40 percent of those have tried to copy sexual acts seen in pornography. Girls who have viewed pornography are more likely to be sexual, sexually active, have peer relationship problems, and substance use concerns. And some of this may extend into adulthood where among the U.S. probability sample of adolescents to adults, about one quarter of the females, the adult females, reported having scary sexual situations. And some of this may relate back to what we heard in the prior presentation on choking during sex that is popular within pornography, but it also can extend into the rough sex that was also mentioned in the prior presentation, where in the settings of some deaths of young women, Grace Millane, Natalie Connelly, there is a group of women who banded together entitled “We Can’t Consent To This,” and helped change a law and in the the course of this, rough sex defense that has been now made, not been be able to be used, they identified that at least 60 British women had been killed in episodes relating to so-called consensual sexual violence since 1972. But about 30 of those had died within the past five years, suggesting that the frequency has been increasing  recently. And it’s not just females who may be at risk, young boys may also be at risk. So this is a story from about a week ago, within the last week, of a 19 year old Connecticut man allegedly  killing a 14 year old boy using Snapchat to lure him away. And they’re investigating this as a potential sex crime. There may also be other effects upon males: so-called pornography-induced erectile dysfunction is something that is being reported by young males and being seen by physicians. And there have been a coverage of this not only in TIME magazine, but also This Is Life With Lisa Ling interviewed Alexander Rhodes who founded NoFap, which is one of the Internet websites for young males who, for men or for individuals, who are trying to cease pornography viewing. And with respect to the, the types of Internet behaviors, a recent study out of South Korea found that using the Internet mainly for searching for pornography, as compared to other information, have the highest odds of being associated with problematic Internet use. How has the medical community been considering Internet use and pornography? Several, some of the more controversial areas have been related to Internet addiction and sex addiction. There’s been debate in the literature regarding the extent to which sexual behaviors, including pornography use, may be considered as a disorder. Most recently, compulsive sexual behavior disorder has been introduced into one of the main nomenclature systems for conditions: the ICD. And this version of the ICD, the 11th revision, at the earliest, will come into effect in countries in 2022. And in this setting there is still debate about how best to define and classify compulsive sexual behaviors and problematic pornography use, although we have argued that an addiction model seems to be well supported. And so in conclusion, many children and adolescents view pornography. Adolescence represents a critical period of neural development for establishing adult behaviors and protecting youth from harmful exposures, including to pornography. And promoting healthy sexual behaviors and healthy behaviors in general is important. And we need to gather more data, and translate those data in from the current environment into improved prevention treatment and policy efforts. I’d like to thank a large number of individuals and funding agencies, and thank you for having me here and thank you for your attention.

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Thank you, Marc, that was really interesting and you showed us a lot of research. So I have a question: if you pull the research all together, and you think of what’s going on with young men, especially – let’s sit with males at the moment – having such access to hardcore, mainstream porn, you know. There are certain developmental stages that kids have to go through in order to become healthy functioning adults, so I would ask you to take all this research that you’ve just presented, and how do you think it undermines the social, emotional, and cognitive development of boys for becoming healthy, connected adults with a capacity for intimacy? You know, I was asking you to bring it all together, because these boys are going to grow into adults. They’re going to be fathers, they’re going to be partners. What does this say for what’s going to happen to the next generation?

[Dr. Marc Potenza]: I think this is an important consideration. I think that pornography may undermine the abilities or tendencies of both males and females to develop intimate  relationships. So, the, it promotes more of an instrumental, kind of voyeuristic, type of view towards sex and sexuality that includes a “priming,” if you will. Or a, you know, during this critical period of development, it’s impacting arousal templates and expectations in a way that is very different from prior generations.

[Dr. Gail Dines]: And I think so, I would ask also about, you know, intimacy is such a core capacity to build relationships into adulthood. You know, what does that mean if their sort of, their capacity for intimacy is being eroded? 

[Dr. Marc Potenza]: Yeah, and I would say perhaps even beyond intimacy, empathy is also another a factor to be considered that is an important part of intimacy. And there are data to suggest that pornography viewing amongst adults is a major factor within high divorce rates within our our country, and probably elsewhere around the world. And if youth do not develop the capacity for secure, intimate, mindful relationships, that can undermine longer healthy relationships. And it’s why my wife and I, for example, have published on a mindful model of sexual health to promote healthy sexual behaviors, rather than to rely on external stimuli that may be guiding people down a poor path. And sex is never just about sex, it’s about so many other things as well, so yeah.

[Dr. Gail Dines]: So thank you very much, Marc, for a wonderful presentation. So it is now my pleasure to introduce Jo Robertson. Jo is from Auckland, New Zealand, and she’s a qualified sex therapist who recently completed her Masters of Science in Medicine with a focus on international consumption rates and the impact of porn on adolescents. Jo has a private therapeutic practice specializing in problematic sexual behaviors, sexual dysfunction, and relationship breakdown due to betrayal. She is one of the co-founders of The Light Project, a charity equipping young people, families, and wider communities to possibly navigate the new porn landscape. So welcome, Jo, it’s a pleasure to have you. 

[Jo Robertson]: Thank you Gail, yes, it’s 4 A.M. where I am in New Zealand, so if I get a bit foggy you’ll know exactly why. And forgive me, I’m actually losing my voice. I talk to parents a lot about porn, and there are two pretty common reactions: fear and guilt. I understand both, I’m a parent of three boys, so this subject is really personal to me, and I am also scared about what they might see and how it could influence them. If you’re feeling bad because your kids are 16, 17, 18 and you’re now realizing they may have seen some of this content. It can feel like the horse has bolted, but a conversation that happens late is better than a conversation that never happens at all. No one knew this was how technology or the porn industry would evolve, so it’s not your fault that you didn’t know. And it’s okay, you still have a really big influence on your kids, so take a deep breath. Let’s get into some practical tips and strategies on how to navigate this conversation. There are really two types of talks: one bringing up the subject of porn, and the other is when you know they’ve already seen it. So preemptive and reactive. Hopefully you get some good tips for both of these types. I’ve just got four slides, which I’ll flick in and out of, and I’ll share the first one now. There we go. So first up, learn. You’re doing that here today, which is amazing, but try to keep up to date with the latest platforms, so content that your kids might be engaging with. So jump on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, check it out for yourself. There’s lots of educational sites about porn that will help you feel connected to new research and how to communicate that. It will decrease your anxiety, which might already be quite high, if you know what you’re going to say. Time and place. So as a general rule, I say to bring up the conversation of porn around 10. However, if your child shows signs of being interested in relationships, spends lots of time on devices, or has a lot of curiosity about bodies, then you may want to start that earlier. Choose a time when you’re not going to be looking directly at each other: the car is often a good option, so you’re not kind of what we call “eyeballing” each other, and you both know there’s going to be an end point. Give it a good 15 minutes, but it’s going to be good for them to know that at some point there’s an exit strategy: when the car stops. Good rapport: so choose the person in their life who they have the best connection to, it could be auntie, uncle, Grandma, Mum, Dad, whoever. There’s usually someone that the young person likes the most, so get that person to spark the conversation. A young person is much more likely to take advice from someone they like. Be unshockable, so no matter what they say, no matter what they’ve seen or however many times they’ve seen it, stay calm. If you have a really huge response, they probably ain’t coming back for another chat, so it’s what I say: take the heat out of it, and try and stay chill. Here’s a way to describe porn, and some conversation starters to bring it up. So what is porn? This is a description that we use for children or tweens, usually with teenagers or older teens you can be much more explicit, but this is a good one. So porn is photos, videos, or cartoons, of one or more people without clothes on, touching themselves or another person. So here what we’ve done is, we haven’t, we haven’t talked about specific sex acts, but what we’ve made is, you know, one person. So sometimes porn is just one person masturbating, sometimes it’s videos, sometimes it’s videos of lots of people, and sometimes it’s cartoons. And it can be hard for young people, children really, to know that what they’ve seen is porn if it’s a cartoon. So that’s why we recommend bringing that up. Some conversation starters: “Have you seen something online that made you feel uncomfortable?” You can have a wider technology or social media kind of conversation there, so bring up movies that they might have seen on Netflix. “Have you ever heard the word porn, have your friends started talking about it?” Usually talking about friends first is really easy, just a starting point, it kind of “others” the conversation so it’s not about them straight up. You’re not saying “Have you seen porn?” which is quite intense. You could say, “I’ve heard that young people use porn to learn about sex, what do you think about that?” And so you’re really sparking an open conversation rather than assuming they’ve seen lots of porn, and kind of jumping straight in there. All right, I’m going to stop sharing now. Okay so, the next set of tips I call heart, head and hands. A heart: if you find out that your young person has seen porn, don’t jump straight into advice or tell them what’s wrong with it. What they actually need first is for you to ask them how they felt about it: were they okay? It’s great if you can acknowledge that seeing porn can make us feel lots of different things, that even if they were concerned, confused, or uncomfortable, that their body was probably still getting turned on, and that’s okay. Normalize that for them, because being turned on by aggression can be really confusing for a kid. Next address their head: so just have two things in the back of your head that you want to communicate about what’s problematic with porn, not seven things because that’s turned into a lecture, and they’ve started to switch off. So just two, because you’re going to have more conversations in the future, it’s not just one. So it might be about gender, that porn teaches us that boys are more important than girls, or about aggression, that porn tells us that it’s okay to hurt people or that it can change what we expect from sex. Just pick two and it might depend on their age. Next hands: so this is where you talk about ideas for change. You could talk about filters, you could talk about how you manage technology as a whole family, how to know if a site is safe or what to do when they next see porn. We’ve got this little strategy we call ACT, A-C-T. So it’s Avert your eyes, Call it what it is: that’s porn, close it down, and then Tell an adult. Don’t create a big consequence for them if you find out they’ve seen porn again, like you’re going to remove their door or you’re going to take away their device for a month, because what they’ll learn there is that if they’re honest with you, that it ends in punishment. So the next five things, and I’ll screen share again, that you want to figure out in a conversation with your young person when you know that they’ve seen porn so I’ll share that. The first thing that can be helpful to know is what their consumption is like. How often have they seen porn? Because there’s a really big difference between “I saw porn once last year”, two, “I’ve seen it every week for two years.” So you could ask questions like “How often?”, and “Do you remember when the last time was?” It will indicate how likely the impacts are going to be on them. The next is circumstances: what was the unique situation that they were in? “Were you by yourself when you saw it, was another adult there? Where were you? Friend’s house? School?” So this will indicate a potential sexual harm situation, because if it’s an adult showing your young person porn, then that’s a kind of sexual abuse and you need to intervene straight away. If they were in a friend’s house, then you want to be bringing it up with that family. If they were at school, then you want to make sure that the school knows that it’s easy to access, and maybe they don’t have good enough filtering service content. So this can be really confronting for both parents, caregivers, and young people to bring up, but it’s really important to ask some of these questions. So you could ask, “How many people were in the scene? Do you remember what ethnicity or race they were? Did it look like someone wasn’t enjoying it?” So we know that interracial porn, for example, is much more likely to include an aggression. So if an Asian or a Latino man is present, fifty percent of the time, it’s going to include some kind of non-consensual behavior. And if it’s a black man with a white woman, it’s four times more likely to be sexually aggressive. So that’s incredibly problematic and that’s not the messaging we want for our young people. So asking about what was happening in the scene is going to help you know, how likely it was that it was aggressive. The last one is concerns. So check in with them about if they’ve got any worries, if they’ve got questions, but also if they’re experiencing any impacts. “Do you have questions about what you saw, what do you think about sex now, are you struggling to not watch porn?” Which could indicate some kind of compulsive behavior or preoccupation. So actually get a sense of if they’re having any real life impacts. Again, really hard to have these conversations, and you’re incredibly brave if you do. I’m going to stop sharing that now, and I’m going to go back to context, which is that next word you saw. So this is something that you need to do for each young person in your life. What is the context of this person, what are the unique characteristics that they bring to the table? Are they bullied? In which case they might just be trying to fit in. So you’re having a conversation about social pressure, not just porn. Do you suspect or have they said that they are gay, lesbian, or trans? In which case they might be looking for validation from porn, or hoping for sex education, in which case you’re talking about diversity, you’re talking about shame, you’re talking about sexual health questions. Consider their unique needs and respond to them with empathy. The last thing I’ll say is that a lot of parents say to me that their kids don’t want to talk about this stuff, or that their kids will just tell them to shut up, and that’s okay. Actually, one of the latest pieces of research showed that 71 percent of 14 to 17 year olds wanted more restrictions to accessing porn. They’ve already put their hand up and said “Hey guys, um, we need some help over here.” They might not say anything to you in return if you bring it up, but the fact that you’ve even brought it up says that you are trying to understand their world, and that you’re safe, you’re offering breadcrumbs of information or support. And trust me that they are taking them in, even if it looks like they’re not. And give yourself a full 48 hours after this workshop to bring up porn with your young people, just let this session sink in for a while before you go in hot. Okay so those were some rapid-fire tips, and I hope some of it was helpful to you. I’m going to give it back to you, Gail. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Thanks very much, Jo, for that very interesting presentation. There’s actually a really interesting question here, which I mean, could be a presentation in itself. And somebody asked how should we talk with young teen daughters about the influence of porn on the dating behavior of their male peers, which is exactly how the majority of girls might end up getting into contact with pornography is via the males they’re dating, if they’re heterosexual, 

[Jo Robertson]: Yeah, or they’re also really likely to watch it with friends. And often that’s because they want to know what’s expected of them, they want to know how they’re supposed to participate in a sexual relationship. So you’re having a pretty similar conversation because young girls as well, need to know what other people are seeing. So you’re talking about some of the problematic behaviors because if they know that that’s what’s there, then in a real life situation they might know why it’s coming up. So if someone’s saying “I want to have anal sex,” or somebody just starts having anal sex with them without even asking for consent, which is pretty common, then they can hopefully identify maybe where that’s come from. But even if they can’t identify it, you can have really good robust conversations about consent with them. About how to say no, that you use your body language, that you use tone of voice, not just your words. So we recommend talking about porn with everyone, because even if they’re not going to view it themselves, they’ll probably be in a relationship with someone who does. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: So, when you talk about consent, I think that’s really important because you know, studies show that hookup sex has replaced dating amongst younger people, and the basis of hookup sex is not talking about what you’re going to do, it’s just kind of being in a room, and often unfolds, and there’s alcohol involved, etc. So how do you bring in consent when the majority of our teens and older teens are having hookup sex rather than sex based on a relationship? 

[Jo Robertson]: Yeah, I mean, you could talk about some of the problems with hookup sex, so that’s a starting point. You could say this is what might happen, and this is where it can go wrong, but also we’re constantly talking about consent. So just because someone is receiving your sex acts doesn’t mean that they actually want them. So teaching all young people to ask questions ,and it’s probably going to be awkward for them to be like “Do you consent to this?” So we need to pull it back and put it in language that’s okay for them. So teaching them to say things like “Is this okay? Are you up for this? Is this good for you?” are gonna be more likely words that they’ll use. And then again you’re communicating to both boys and girls, no matter what sexuality or gender diversity they are, that saying yes or no is really important, actually using words and use your body when you say no. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: I read a really interesting study recently, peer-reviewed, said the best form of sex education that prevents violence or some form of abuse of girls is if you teach girls about sexual pleasure, because then they realize they have a right to pleasure, and that makes it easier to say no rather than just going along with it if you put pleasure at the center of sex education for girls, which we don’t do. 

[Jo Robertson]: Yeah, well, in my experience as a sex therapist working with couples, is that actually men really want their partners to experience sexual pleasure. So I think talking about, I mean, like I’m going to talk about female pleasure with my boys, I want them to know how a woman might feel better and how to do that. But the other thing is that what we’ve seen amongst young girls is that their bar for sex is really low, but as long as it’s not painful that they think it’s good sex. So communicate to them what is great sex: so it’s consent, it’s communication, it’s condoms or contraception, it’s what we call comfort, which is pleasure. And so there’s lots of things that make for a really, really great relationship. The other one is actually connection, so having some kind of safe relationship where you have sex. And say those things as they’re teenagers even if you don’t think they’re going to be having sex or you don’t want them to, because whenever they choose to whether it’s when they’re young or whether it’s when they’re older, you want them to have those messages in the back of their head. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Thank you very much. Okay, I’m sure we’ll pick up on this theme as we continue. So now I’m going to share my screen again. Okay, and I’m now going to be talking about the porn industry because to understand why porn looks the way it does, we need to understand it as an industry. So domestic – the domestication of the Internet, and that was around 2000, made porn more affordable, accessible, and anonymous, as Marc said, and these are the three major drivers of demand to porn. What we know from statistics, is that porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined. Now if you’re talking about pornography, everyone should have MindGeek seared into their brain. MindGeek is the Amazon of pornography, it controls the vast majority of the pornography distributed in the world. And it controls also 10 of the 15 most lucrative porn sites in the world. MindGeek likes to fly under the radar, which is why wherever I go, I talk about it, because I want it above the radar, in above ground. If you go on the MindGeek website, you will not see the word porn anywhere. They define themselves as experts in search engine optimizing, or as IT experts. In fact, MindGeek changed the entire business model of the porn industry in 2007, 8, with the launch of PornHub. Why it went from paid porn sites to free porn sites. Now, PornHub does have a premium section where you have to pay, but the vast majority of scenes on PornHub is free. That means, that – think: who goes to free porn? Those who don’t have a credit card, so I would argue that turning porn into being mainly excessively free, is actually a way really to attract kids. Now some PornHub statistics which I find staggering: 42 billion visits last year, up from 33 billion. The daily average is 100 million visitors, 962 purchase per searches per second uploaded, 4.79 million new videos, and created over 1 million hours of new content. If you live to be 200, you will never get through what’s on PornHub. Now forget all the new content that’s being added. Now I want to talk a little about PornHub traffic during the pandemic. March saw an increase from 120 million visitors a day to 130 million. The reason for this is there was more men at home all day, and PornHub made its premium content free. It did in March as soon as was the first lockdown, I think it was in Italy, and what we saw is – when premium became free in Italy, visits increased 57 percent. In France 38, and in Spain, 61. We also know, during this period of time, and we’d have to do more research to see what the connections and correlations are, is that the number of domestic violence cases also went through the roof during COVID. Now, I want to also talk about cross-platforming marketing to kids, because this is how pornography specifically now, gets in the hands of kids. So if parents ever thought they had control over their kids, all of that went during when cell phones were introduced and they say the average kid today has a cell phone by middle school. We suggest at Culture Reframed, that you put as many filters on as you can. But remember that’s not the magic bullet because you can be, have, tons of filters on your kids phone, it doesn’t mean their best friend has filters on their phone. Some stats on Instagram because this is now critical, where kids are going for pornography: 800 million total active users, 40 billion photos uploaded today. How can you possibly monitor that amount of content? 68 percent of Instagram users are female. Now stats on Snapchat: 210 million active daily users, 3.5 billion snaps a day. Again, what is the key? Snap, it’s a selfie. Now I want to talk as well about how kids get to the porn on Instagram, on Snapchat, and how they text each other. So what they do to hide from parents is they use emojis. So the lollipop stands in for oral sex, this obviously stands in for anal, and so behind these, on their Instagram and Snapchat accounts is where the porn is. Anything with teardrops means ejaculation porn. So you need to start looking to see what your kid has on their accounts and to look for these emojis. Now I’ll give you an example how it works: this is Sunny Leone who’s one of the few porn stars – we often say the word porn star, there’s only a handful, most are porn performers – she actually has managed to get some stardom. She has 11.7 million followers on Instagram. I went on her account on Instagram, within 10 seconds or less, I was on PornHub watching her porn movies. So the cross-platforming is taking kids from Instagram to PornHub, but the worst offender is Snapchat. And what Snapchat has done is set up – well, it’s not Snapchat actually has done this, it’s the porn industry –  has set up premium accounts for porn performers which is around 15, 16 dollars a day, which is where all the porn is. How did I find this out? By asking kids “Where’d you get your porn from?” And actually, and another person I’d like to thank, is Lori Getz who also did this research, is saying to kids, you know, “Where’d you get your porn from?” And they told us about Snapchat Premium, so Instagram, Snapchat, and other apps are gateways to porn industry sites by normalizing porn. That’s what we argue at Culture Reframed, we are building programs for parents where we are trying to solve the public health crisis of the digital age. If you go on culturereframed.org, you will see programs for parents of tweens, programs for parents of teens, built by a multidisciplinary team of experts that help you, parents, or anyone tasked with taking care of kids. We have a full program you can go for five minutes, five hours, five days. It’s free, both programs are free, and they give you ideas about the emotional, social, cognitive development of kids. How it’s being undermined by pornography, and how to have many porn conversations with your kid. So I will just stop sharing, and now it is my pleasure to introduce both a colleague and a friend: Dr. Carolyn West. So Dr. West is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Washington, where she teaches courses on sex crimes and sexual violence. Dr. West has written extensively on racism and sexualized media, and in 2008 she produced the documentary “Let Me Tell Y’all Bout Black Chicks: Images of Black Women in Pornography.” So, it is a pleasure to introduce Carolyn. 

[Dr. Carolyn West]: Thank you so much for having me, and I’m going to ask you – I’m going to share my screen, and hopefully this will work for us – and I’m going to ask you to have a conversation briefly with me. Not only about talking about pornography is difficult, and then talking about racism is difficult, and then talking about pornography and racism is exceedingly difficult. So I try to, I want to give you some examples of what we’re finding, and what I’m finding in my research. And we can start to have a conversation about that as well, because I think that’s the conversation that we’re also not having with our children. I think it’s an interesting time right now because our culture is kind of grappling with racism, and images of racism, in the media. I mean just within the last month or so, companies have grappled with Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s Cream of Wheat, all these images that we maybe have spent decades having breakfast with, these logos. And, and talking about maybe there’s a problem with how Americans are depicted in the culture, and maybe we need to change these images that have been around for hundreds of years, literally. mainstream Hollywood is grappling with these images in classic movies, such as Gone With the Wind, and even some of children’s programming – of the Song of the South — featuring animated cartoons on this plantation after the Civil War. Were people thinking “Well, maybe these, we need to be starting to deconstruct these images.” But what’s really ironic and interesting to me, is that in pornography we see some of the most graphic, racist images, but nobody seems to really want to be having those conversations about dealing with the images in porn. So I’m going to give you a couple of examples about why I care about this topic so deeply, and why I spent the last couple years actually producing a documentary on it. And what I found in my own research is that porn is filled with some of the worst racial stereotypes that you would find anywhere else in media. And ironically, porn gets a pass, and that they can produce this content because nobody seems to really want to push back and say, “This is really problematic.” So some of the most degrading terms that you will hear used to refer to African Americans are throughout pornography, without any filters at all. And so here are just some of those terms right here on your screen, and these are even the tamer images. There are far worse discussions about descriptions of African-Americans and all people of color actually throughout the porn industry, in how the performers are described and how the sex acts are discussed as well. So that really prompted the research for me, and also that black women are oftentimes –  here’s another way it differs, how racism sort of shows itself in pornography – black women are more likely to be reduced to prostitutes and sex workers, more so than any other ethnic group. There’s one porn series, “Black Street Hookers,” and they have more than 100 versions of this same video, and you don’t make more than 100 versions because 106 versions sold well. So they just kept making the same, the same film over and over with different performers. So one way how porn gets disseminated and racism gets disseminated in pornography, black women are reduced prostitutes and sex workers more than any other ethnic group. I’m consistently also finding in pornography that exploitation, particularly of young girls and women, is normalized so it’s really common to see titles such as “Pimp My Black Teen,” or “Exploited Black Teens.” The porn industry doesn’t even pretend that they’re not exploiting, they come right out and say “This is what we’re doing,” and they encourage people to see this as normalized and is appropriate. And that’s of concern for me, having worked as an expert witness in domestic violence and sexual assault cases. In cases of human trafficking is that many consumers of porn who then victimize young people are actually – they also watch a lot of pornography, and pornography gives them a template that this is a population that this is acceptable to exploit in this way. So that concerns me deeply. Also another example of what you’ll see in pornography around racism is that every aspect of black women’s and black girls bodies are degraded in some ways. Their hair texture, body types, their skin color. And so that is hugely problematic when kids of color are consuming this pornography because you’re getting messages about how they should feel about their bodies, and how other people perceive their bodies, which can potentially be very pertinent. So here’s briefly what the research says about this, and here’s why I think we should care about this move deeply. Jo sort of mentioned this, and other people and Marc as well, if there’s a there, tends to be and in – Gail as well – but there tends to be a great deal of violence within pornography, that’s worse when you add race on top of that. Black women are even more likely to be targets of aggression compared to white women, and black men are more often portrayed as perpetrators of aggression against women, and they’re less likely to be shown as being intimate with their, their partners. So the message is, you know, black sexuality somehow is even more inherently violent than pornography featuring – and sexuality – featuring other racial groups. So that’s a hugely – and to speaking, you know, about what Marc talked about – we’re seeing the same with kids of color. This study looked at Black kids and Latinx kids who were between the ages of 16 and 18, and what they found is that kids were watching mainstream pornography. As Gail said, that pornography is potentially violent, but these these kids are also watching extreme pornography involving various forms of humiliation, incest themes, there is pornography involving bestiality, which is easily accessible with no filters at all. So they’re not only watching just people being sexual, they’re watching extreme forms of pornography. They’re watching it for entertainment, sexual stimulation. You’re also watching it for instructional purposes, which indicates to me, having been a sex educator for more than 30 years, they’re seeking to get basic human, basic information about sexuality that maybe they’re not getting someplace else. And porn is becoming a place where you’re getting your sex education. Even more disturbing, I think for parents and all of us who do this work, is if they’re copying the behavior they’re seeing in porn during their own sexual encounters, and they’re being pressured to make porn or imitate porn in these really unhealthy dating relationships. So we’re seeing that being connected to dating environments. These kids were also noting that they were watching this not only on their home computers and tablets, but they were also watching these and getting access to this in school for their peers. So that’s something that we have to – schools and parents need to be aware of as well. And they felt, like the kids felt like their parents were not accepting of them watching porn but their parents just didn’t have the skill set to talk to them about this. So it really looks like kids who really want to have these conversations with their parents, but parents are just not equipped or maybe not even aware that their children are consuming this material. And finally, we know that this can potentially have negative health consequences for young, young girls as well. This study actually looked at about 500 Black teenage girls, and they found almost a third of them, 29%, have been exposed to x-rated movies at some point in their young lives. And that was associated – we couldn’t say that pornography caused these problems because it’s very complex – but we, what the study did find was the girls who were exposed to pornography had negative attitudes about condoms, they were more likely to have multiple sex partners, more frequent intercourse, less contraceptive use, a desire to become pregnant. They were testing positive for chlamydia and other sexually transmitted infections, and they were more likely to be exposed to dating violence. So a whole host and whole range of physical health problems, sexual health problems, and given that black girls are disproportionately likely to have these problems, we have to start asking what is in terms of what we can do as we’re grappling with racism throughout the culture. Part of it is – I  love this book “How To Be An Antiracist,” in order to do them, do any kind of racism throughout the culture, not only in the foreign industry, you’ve got to consistently identify and describe it, and then we can work to do semantics. So our first, our first discussion is to also just be identifying that this is, in fact, a problem. And in terms of what we can do as parents, we have to start having a conversation early and frequently. So race and racism is just embedded in our society, it affects all of our everyday lives, how we interact with each other. And if we start not only bringing up sexuality, but also topics around racism, and making that a normal conversation that we’re having, then it feels more comfortable. So that’s gonna be hugely important. And I’ll just leave you with this one, one quote as I thought about this presentation, from James Baldwin, author and playwright. He said, you know, “These are all of our children we shall profit from, or pay for, whatever they become.” And so, as we have this conversation, it’s important to just understand that race – racism is – it’s got to be part of that discussion as well. And we can’t say, “Well, I don’t really interact with children of color,” or “This is something that’s not going to impact my child.” If it impacts all children, it impacts all of our children in ways that we have to be mindful. So I’ll go ahead and stop here. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Thank you, Carolyn. That was as usual, wonderful.

[Dr. Carolyn West]: I stopped sharing.

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Okay, so, I have a couple of questions, and there’s also a question here. So first of all, as you and I have discussed for many years, I mean, what’s so astounding is – and maybe you can speak a little bit – this is, that the racist tropes that we found in porn were straight out of slavery. It’s like nothing had changed from the days of slavery, and I think a lot of people don’t get that. This porn didn’t invent these, they’re harnessing what has been around in the culture for so long, but astoundingly, you know. Slavery was made illegal, but yet, the ideology that legitimized it – you can find it right there in pornography.

[Dr. Carolyn West]: Right. And so, the images are not new, just, it’s just that pornography capitalizes and monetizes these images. And so part of it is that we got to learn more about art history in this country, and how those tropes sort of pop up. So having discussions around race, broadly. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Yeah, and someone’s got a question here, which I think is really important: How do I speak to my black son about what he might see, and how he should treat women, especially black women? 

[Dr. Carolyn West]: Oh, that is so important. I  produced a couple of – if you go to my website, drcarolynwest.com, I do have some information there about my, my research around racism. I think part of it is just having deep conversations around that, because it’s really a reflection of how you feel about yourself. And the whole culture tells particularly young African-American men that they have no value in so many ways, and then they turn and they act that out against young women in their communities. So some of it, so much of it is about making sure that they have a good sense, that they value and respect themselves. So that, that also is reflected in the relationships they have. And also telling them and talking to them about history, and where these images come from, and the whole culture is sort of set up to help them devalue themselves. So some of that really comes from us as parents, to just make sure that they have really incredibly strong role models, and they’re seeing that – your son is seeing that you’re treating women, and the most vulnerable people in the community, how they really should be treated: with respect. 

[Dr Gail Dines]: Thank you, thank you so much.

[Jo Robertson]:  I’ll just jump in there, Gail. What we’ve seen here anecdotally, is that talking about racism and porn can be more effective in terms of helping them not engage. It can be much more effective than talking about something like erectile dysfunction, for example, so we often want to like freak, freak them out, scare them and say “Oh, you might get erectile dysfunction.” But actually, they don’t think that’s going to happen to them, they think it might happen to other people. But when you talk about racism, they often really buy into that, because they care about it, and they don’t want to see those messages perpetuated. So, it’s a really good conversation in terms of young people not wanting to engage in content that’s like that. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Okay, so let me throw this out, and I think this might be a Jo question, but anyone feel free to jump in. So people are asking questions about family values around sex, including abstinence and what do parents – what should parents convey to their children around the family values, and their own position?

[Jo?]:  I mean, I think it’s fairly similar, because essentially what we’re saying to any young person is that when they choose to have sex, which again, might be when they’re 17 or it might be when they’re married, that the way they have sex is really important. Not specifically the acts, but the connection, the communication, the consent. All of those principles still apply to a marriage relationship, and I see this as a sex therapist as well, that we need to teach adults about pleasure like we talked about earlier, Gail. And so I think it’s pretty similar, it’s just that you’re adding this later on, around “Hey, this is what our family thinks, this is what we –” I call families teams, so it’s helpful to say like, for example, Robertson. Like, you know, in Team Robertson, this is what we’re about, this is what we do. And so “Whenever you choose to do this thing, we would love it if blah blah blah,” but they’re always going to make their own choices. So we know that we can’t control our kids, and so having the conversation around “Hey, when you choose to have sex then xyz.” 

[Dr. Carolyn West]: Yeah, I would say too, that you know, the research shows though, if you talk to your children about sex, you’re more likely to abstain longer than if you don’t have that conversation. So you can certainly say, here are values and this is what we would like for you, and why. But also making sure that they have the information to make choices that will keep them healthy. 

[Jo Robertson]: Yeah if you talk about pleasure, then they’re more likely to wait for a pleasurable encounter, not a fast bad one.

[Dr. Carolyn West]: Yeah, exactly, and so having conversations still about birth control and STIs, and all of that as well, so you’re arming them with the information. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Yeah, thank you, so there’s a question here. Is there such a thing as healthy pornography use, are there any positive benefits to kids watching porn, or to adolescents? And they mention Cindy Gallop. So does anyone mind if I take this first? Okay, so I would argue that there is no such thing as healthy pornography. There might be a healthy erotica, absolutely, where you’ve got equality, consent, love. But I would argue that pornography by its very nature is built on the degradation and debasement of women, and I can’t imagine anything positive coming out of anyone watching that. I’d also like to just bring up another question. Another issue is that, you know, we are fast turning into a generation of voyeurs, where watching and sort of breaking boundaries is considered normalized, because, you know, what right do we have to look at a woman – or a man –  but let’s stick to a woman at the moment. Her most vulnerable, as she’s unclothed, when we don’t even know her name, her wants, her desires and wishes. We know nothing about this woman, yet we have a certain voyeuristic privilege of looking at her when we don’t know her. And we, by the way, or often those who look, will stay clothed, and I think it’s a big political decision who gets to be clothed and who gets to be unclothed. And I’d just like to say one thing about Cindy Gallop. I’ve actually also debated Cindy Gallop many times, and again, she does no fact-checking on the women in her videos. It’s called “Make Love Not Porn,” but we don’t know if those women are being beaten into submission, we don’t know if they’re trafficked women. They, she, only takes – um, that they say this is consensual, she doesn’t do any sort of due diligence on those images. So we don’t know how they ended up on her website for everyone to look at, and interestingly, she’s not doing very well financially because she can’t get any venture capital, because nobody wants to give to anyone who’s not good making hardcore porn. So that’s an interesting sign as well about the industry. So we have another question here about filters, and what should we do about filters on different devices? Who would like to take that one?

[Jo Robertson]: I could jump in. So filters are important in terms of delay. So they are effective at delaying exposure, so I thoroughly recommend getting filters. And what’s important to know though, is that they leave your house, just like what Gail said, and so there’s no guarantee that you’re – that their best friend has a filter, or that their school’s filter is good enough. If your school uses devices like iPads. At my kids’ school, they have iPads in the classroom. Sometime, go and check them yourself. I searched for porn on my, on the school iPad, and I found porn, and the school felt that they had a robust filter and it wasn’t robust enough. So there’s no guarantee there, and the other thing is that if you aren’t getting a report, then you actually don’t know if it’s working, so putting a filter on is not quite enough. Choose a filtering service that might actually give you a report, each month, for example, because then you’ll know if it’s blocking anything. Otherwise you’re just hoping. So having something, and then also choose something that can be updated. So sometimes, if you embed a filter directly onto your device rather than an app it can’t be updated over the next few years. So sometimes an app type function is better because they, you know, when you – what’s it called, when you do an update on your phone, any app will update as well. So those are just some random tips.

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Okay, thank you. I have a question, I think, for Marc here. How long does it take for children to develop an addiction to porn? 

[Dr. Marc Potenza]: So that’s a big question, complicated question, because there’s still debate about whether pornography use is an addiction or not, and how best to define the, the types of problems that people experience with pornography use. That being said, the time of adolescence and young adulthood is a period when many problems that fall into the addiction realm develop, and can develop quickly. So I think people should be mindful of child and adolescent behaviors, and trying to  be aware of what they’re doing, and how best to prepare youth to navigate through a complicated digital environment including, with respect to pornography, but not limited to. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Okay, thank you. And Carolyn, a question I have for you around racism is that, you know, we’re talking a lot because of Black Lives Matter now, about how racism is in the air and it’s systemic. And a lot of it, as you showed, comes through the media. I mean what would you suggest in not just about pornography, but teaching critical media literacy to kids to understand and unpack the racist images which surround them, and which kind of lay the groundwork for them moving into porn with racism. So how would you go around critical media literacy in general, not just for porn?

[Dr. Carolyn West]: Oh, gosh. That, I mean, that’s a really good question. I am a big fan of talking about history: where these images came from, why they were created, who benefits from these images. And to also helping kids: maybe create their own images that more, speak to their reality. I mean, we have so much technology at our fingertips now, so helping kids create “What would videos look like, or what would media look like that feels particularly empowering to you, that really reflects your reality?” So I think part of it is just looking at these images, and sitting down with our children and saying “What do you see here, why do you think this matters, what does this mean  for you, what do you think you’re imitating when you act out these particular images? And what are the advantages and disadvantages of doing that?” So I like, when I work with students, when I work with young people in my own family, addressing that head online. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Yeah, and I love the idea of producing your own images, because studies have found in media literacy foot classes that when kids get to actually handle a camera and make their own thing, that they change. And I want to give a great little short story – so I was working with somebody who was going around the schools, and he was getting kids to make like, just like, 45 second to a minute video. And it was taking a long time to make, you know, when you’re producing it, and a lot of the boys wanted to make violent videos, you know with people like, shooting in it. And he said fine, but remember within those 45-second videos, you’ve got to include funerals because people will die, and so you need to show the consequences. And they all said no, we’re not making them then. So you see, just to give them an idea of the consequences of violence when they’re actually making those videos was great. Okay, so one is, my 17 year old son says he’s never seen pornography, but I’m not sure I believe him. Whether he has or not, how can I start a healthy conversation about it with him, especially if he’s denying it. Well, I’ll start with this: I would say that it would be very unusual for a 17 year old, given the statistics and the research that we know, not to have seen pornography, especially a boy. And one of the ways to really start a useful conversation and ways that I started – we started with our son was – first of all, with boys what we found is, don’t sit across the table. In the car or bike riding, where you’re looking straight ahead. And for my example, my son used to like to bake, so I would always make sure I was in the opposite end of the kitchen when we started these conversations so that we didn’t look face to face. And one conversation I had with him when he was around 10 or 11, we’re talking about pornography. I said to him, you know, we don’t know what your sexuality is going to look like, we don’t know if you’re going to be gay, straight, but whatever you’re going to be, but you know what, it’s going to be wonderful because it’s going to be part of who you are and it’s going to speak to the wonderful person you’re going to be. But if you look at pornography, you know they’re going to take it away from you before you’ve even laid claim to it. So I really want you to be the author of your own sexuality, don’t allow the pornographers to manipulate it, because that’s a big thing to give away. And when he was in his twenties and we were talking about porn, he said, well, Mom, you pretty much ruined that one for me. Which is of course, exactly my goal was to ruin pornography for him, so that he would have a healthy robust sex life which he was the author of, rather than the creeps who live and produce pornography. And so let me look at some other questions, I’m going to look here – here’s a question, how to handle teenage boys watching transsexual porn. 

[Jo Robertson]: Okay, well, I did a little bit of assessment on trans porn over the summer, which would have been your winter, and what we found was that it was just as aggressive as mainstream heterosexual porn, and sometimes more so. So often there is a dominant and submissive relationship, so there is someone in control and there is someone who is receiving the sex acts, so you’re sending the same kinds of messages like, “What does this say about gender, does it say that one gender is more important than the other? What does this say about risky sex?” There is not often condom use. “What does it say about aggression, that it’s okay to hurt people? What does this perpetuate in you?” It might actually make you feel shame about your sexuality, or it might make you feel shame about the fact that you’re watching it, and we know that shame is, then also in a cycle, leads to pornography use. So that is why the calm conversation is so important – not the punishment, the consequence, the coming down hard, because you don’t want them to feel shame which will lead them to wanting a comfortable or like, a comfort experience which sometimes can be porn. So you’re saying the same kinds of things as you are with heterosexual porn.

[Dr. Gail Dines]: And we actually on Culture Reframed, we have a Compose Yourself model, which is exactly how to compose, and we give a list of things to do before you actually start the conversation, so you yourself are mindful and present and not reactive. Yeah, so that’s great, so to sum up, everyone –  ten seconds, a final thought. So keep it brief, because we’re running out of time, so what’s your final 10 second sum up that you would like to leave the audience with? 

[Dr. Carolyn West]: Mine would be, as having been a sex educator for many years, try to ask the question behind the question. If you’re looking at porn, often they’re trying to find an answer to another question – “Is my body normal, is my sexuality? You know, what does that look like for me?” So try to answer, maybe, there’s a question behind that they’re really looking for, they’re looking for it in porn, which is not going to work very well, and try to address that. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Thank you. Jo?

[Jo Robertson]: Oh, so what you’re really going for here is something called porn literacy, which is that when or if they see porn, they can identify the problematic messages. So we know that one of the highest indicators of impact is perceived realism, so if they believe that what they’re watching is real, then they’re more likely to be impacted by it. So help them identify: what are the problematic messages? And then it’s actually going to have less of an impact on them long term. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: Thank you, Marc?

[Dr. Marc Potenza:] Well, I think it’s important to keep dialogue open between youth and whoever they’re dialoguing with – parents, other family members, teachers. And within this context, to try to understand where youth are at, both from an individual context and from a developmental context, and to try to meet them and to help guide them through what is a very challenging environment, with, that is changing rapidly. 

[Dr. Gail Dines]: And I would end by saying I think we’re in a crisis situation with how much kids access porn, and it’s time for adults to adult up here, and not leave parents and kids alone to navigate what is basically a new world that we’ve never lived through before. So thank you very much, everyone, and I’m going to pass this now over to Dimitri. 

[Dr. Dimitri Christakis]: Thank you, thank you all. Thanks for being here, and I really want to acknowledge all of the very insightful questions that you asked, and the vulnerability you endured for listening. I want to thank Gail, Carolyn, Marc, and Jo for sharing your expertise with us all today, and for not shying away from this very difficult but important conversation. Please share the YouTube video you receive of today’s workshop with your fellow parents, teachers, clinicians, researchers, and friends. I know some of you in the chat asked about it being available so that you can share it with other members of your family, it will be available as soon as possible. Children and Screens’ discussions about digital media use and children’s well-being will continue throughout the summer with Weekly Wednesday Workshops. Next week on Wednesday, August 12th, the world’s leading sleep experts will discuss how to encourage a healthy sleep/screen balance in your homes. On Wednesday, August 19th, we will discuss misinformation, and help everyone in attendance develop the skills they need to become media savvy households. When you leave the workshop, you will see a link to a short survey. Please click on that – click on that link and let us know what you thought of today’s workshop. Thanks again, and everyone be safe, well, and sane. Bye-bye, thank you.