I avoided porn as a teen. But I frequented a women’s bookstore that had a big poster, on the wall, with an erotic line drawing of two women lying together.
I guarantee you that if my peers had taught me that I had to run any porn by my parents first, I would’ve taken this literally and thought that I had to show them the poster. (And what? See if they approved? Ask them if it was okay that I thought it was hot?)
And I can tell you, my dad, who sexually abused me, would have reacted the same way he did when I foolishly asked if he and my mom still had sex.
He would’ve been WAY too eager to overshare about sexual stuff with me. He probably would’ve started gushing about how sexy he, too, thought the poster was, and then tried to talk to me some more about what my turn-ons were or something. UGGHHGHHGH
That would fuck anybody up. But if it’s coming from someone who sexually abused you, it’s literally traumatizing.
And that’s a pretty mild example. If I’d actually been into porn, being shamed into sharing it with my abuser, to get it vetted and approved?!, might have literally killed me.
This idea is completely against everything that psychology knows about developing a healthy relationship with sexuality. The absolute LAST thing a teen should be doing is bringing their parents into their exploration of sex.
Go to them with questions if they’re safe to ask.
But telling them that what they should be asking is, “please can you watch this porn and tell me if I can get off to it”… that’s covert sexual abuse from a distance.
I had been gonna say that not only is it against everything we know about healthy sexual boundaries between parents and teens, but also, it’s YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF ANTIS PUTTING SEXUAL ABUSE SURVIVORS IN HARM’S WAY WHILE CLAIMING THEY’RE PROTECTING PEOPLE…..
But that’s redundant. Because even for teens who haven’t been sexually abused, this is downright abusive. Telling them they shouldn’t have sexual boundaries with authority figures is a BAD IDEA.
This clearly comes from the anti idea that their sense of “ewwwwww this is gross and bad” isn’t just being creeped out, it’s some kind of… goddamn psychic power that lets them know what is and isn’t healthy for all other people. And that they need to patrol all communities, using their superpower to protect everyone.
It never occurs to them that there might be information they’re missing. Because all the information out there contradicts their gut sense that something is gross, and their belief that that means something bigger than “I think that’s gross.”
So they end up demanding that teens not even develop, or respect, their own sense of what to talk to a trusted adult about, around sex, or what feels safe or unsafe to them, or whether they even have a trusted adult… they’re just like, “don’t have your own boundaries. Have the boundaries we tell you you can have, around sex.”
Yeah that’s DEFINITELY not abusive. And teaching them that that’s how to live DEFINITELY isn’t teaching them to get into abusive adult relationships. AWESOME.