There is no real way to prevent a kid from finding pornography, apart from raising them in a cabin in the woods in the center of a wifi dead zone. And when they inevitably find it for the first time, whether intentionally or by accident, they probably have no idea what they're looking at (other than that they will never, ever wipe it from their brains). The sex ed system in America—where it is allowed to exist—is a joke, after all, and it definitely does not cover the ins and outs (and on-top-ofs and underneaths) of pornography.
"Personally and individually, people have a lot of shame around sex and their sexual habits, the things that turn them on," Rashida Jones told Vox in a wide-sweeping interview about porn, sexuality, and her many related projects (Hot Girls Wanted, its sequel, and Turned On). "And it's not something that people feel necessarily comfortable to talk about publicly, amongst each other, or with their children, which to me is the most important piece that we're missing here."
So people, and especially kids, get all kinds of fucked up feelings about it, which they can't talk through because culture refuses to acknowledge how mainstream porn is, despite almost every single human being having seen porn at least once in their lives. For example, Jones worked with the Kinsey Institute to survey teenage girls about their first experiences with porn; half were "a little scared" by it, and a third didn't like how women were being treated. And that's not totally bad news, according to Jones.
"That gives me hope because there is this weird struggle that porn is protected by this bubble of fantasy, and there's a lot of really problematic representation in porn, racially, gender-wise, politically," she said. And if young girls (and boys) who are hopefully aging into a generation that's more open about health and sexuality think it's off, maybe it'll change, and porn won't be the only way we do sex ed. Another arguably promising sign: We're in an era when Pornhub viewing numbers are recorded like box office results for all the world to see—so a little more conversation on the subject might just be the step in the right direction that we need.
