Porn literacy 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.
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.
