The Illusion of Porn “Literacy”

Contemporary progressivism faces a pressing dilemma. It must continue the sexual revolution’s legacy of free love and sex-positivity, but it must do so in a Pornhub age, in which maximal sexual liberty has produced not an egalitarian paradise but a brutal human marketplace. For elite liberals, pornography has always been the badge of liberation that wouldn’t stay pinned on quite right. 

The latest example of this awkwardness comes from (where else?) American schools. Earlier this month, the New York Times profiled Justine Ang Fonte, a “sex positive educator,” who resigned from a swanky New York prep school after parents of high schoolers expressed dismay at a lecture on “porn literacy.” The Times’s sympathetic coverage of Fonte frames the backlash as the result of a right-wing media hitjob, but students and parents told the New York Post that the material in the class—which included a survey of popular pornography categories and an interview with a female performer—made them uncomfortable.

The Times, meanwhile, handled the question of porn classes for minors with all the grace of an elephant on ice skates. Reporter Valeriya Safronova writes of kids using porn as an inescapable reality of modern life. The best response, she concludes, is resignation plus education: “Pornography literacy classes teach students how to critically assess what they see on the screen—for example, how to recognize what is realistic and what is not, how to deconstruct implicit gender roles, and how to identify what types of behavior could be a health or safety risk.” 

It is rather surprising that anyone who knows the name Harvey Weinstein could believe that progressive gender politics can infuse pornography with virtue. When actress Salma Hayek told journalists that Weinstein forced her to perform an explicit nude scene in order to keep his funding for her film, nobody asked whether there may be systemic exploitation behind much of the gratuitous sexuality in entertainment. Why not, especially since it was the Times’s own Nicholas Kristof who blew the lid open on a massive story about sex trafficking and rape on Pornhub, the world’s biggest pornographic website?

Among many other things, the push for porn literacy classes reveals just how decadent the liberal dream has become. For decades, media moguls and sex researchers insisted that maintaining a robust market of pornographic content for willing adults was compatible with protecting children from being harmed or victimized. From plastic bags over magazines, to cordoned-off sections of the video store, to FCC-mandated time slots, the narrative was the same: Adult-only desires can and should be fulfilled. 

The Internet utterly destroyed this compromise, and the smartphone delivered the coup d’etat. Extreme forms of pornography are now viewed regularly by 12- and 13-year-olds. Teens are participants, not merely viewers. Sociologists are coy about wondering if the “sex recession” might have something to do with the triumph of online porn, but the lesson from the Japanese demographic crisis, particularly when it comes to young men, seems clear enough. Why would anyone risk rejection, awkwardness, pregnancy, or disease to have sex when limitless masturbatory fantasy is so free and easy? So much for adults only. 

Thus, one can sympathize somewhat with the logic behind porn literacy classes. Indeed, the students are watching it. Administrators are facing crises of sexting and exploitation inside their buildings. So why not, as one panelist on “The View” expressed it, let the kids learn about it “from a healthy place”?

But this is a hopeless question. Education is about discernment, yes, but it is also moral formation. No teacher or administrator interested in keeping her career would advocate a curriculum that treated racism the way porn literacy treats smut, as a substance with which to become better acquainted and a more informed consumer. Likewise, any teacher who invited a CEO of Big Tobacco to give a lecture on why his career is satisfying would be sharply rebuked. What we as a society deem harmful and unjust is taught as such. Porn literacy is a technocratic evasion to avoid either approving pornography wholesale, which most parents would find revolting, or condemning it forthrightly, which many on the cultural left would not abide. In the end, “literacy” curricula is likely to be as effective a compromise for schools as adults-only labels and online age gates are. 

There’s no good reason schools should decline to condemn pornography to their students. It is addictive, misogynistic, desensitizing, and a vehicle for human rights violations. The cost of society’s “pornification” falls most heavily on girls, who go to extreme measures to keep up with airbrushed perfection and tolerate rougher, more degrading sexual encounters in their teens. But boys suffer too; addiction warps male sexual responsiveness to real women, as many have discovered. As one user put it in a Time essay, “I’ve wasted years of my life looking for a computer or mobile phone to provide something it is not capable of providing.” All of this data is available for educators, and none of it requires an hourlong tour through the porn industry. 

Porn literacy, on the other hand, beatifies pornography, and its advocates know this. If proponents of porn literacy believed pornography to be harmful and destructive—as it is—they would teach their students to believe this. The curriculum is a worldview masquerading as critical thinking. 

Thus collapses the liberal compromise, wherein the liberty of willing adults is accommodated but the innocence of children is preserved. In the twentieth century, Americans were gifted a trojan horse of moral relativism for all, out of which stormed an army of educators, activists, and Big Tech CEOs. In not even half a generation we have gone from protecting kids from smut to protecting smut from ignorant kids. Porn literacy is an illusion, a whiff of the sexual revolution’s decomposition, and a reminder that our post-Christian schools are nonetheless places of deep spiritual formation. 

Samuel D. James serves as associate acquisitions editor at Crossway Books.

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