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This episode is not for the faint of heart as me and my sex-therapist guest, Jo Robertson, leave nothing to the imagination as we discuss the importance of talking to our kids about porn. We cover Jo’s TED Talk that shook me, the likelihood of early exposure to porn in the internet age, how this wires our kids’ minds about what is normal, and Jo offers lots of practical things we can do to mitigate the damage. We also talk about ethical porn, the messaging around pleasure that our kids are (and are not) getting, and what conversations we need to be having with them, even in middle school, elementary school, and before. There is a lot of laughter, partially because I have the mind of a 13-year-old boy, but also because Jo pretty much challenges me to bring up something sex-related that she hasn’t heard. And guess what? Challenge accepted! Am I victorious? You’ll have to listen to find out.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Brandy: Hey guys! It’s me, Brandy, with just a quick note before the episode starts. I had this one ready to go before the pandemic happened, and somehow, just like my last episode, this one is also quite relevant during these times. If your kids are anything like mine, they have been spending more time on their iPads and phones, so you might need this episode more than you think. Okay, back to your regularly scheduled pre-pandemic episode.
Brandy: Hello, Adult Conversation Podcast listeners. This episode is not for the faint of heart. Oh, boy. Mom, if you didn’t like the short handjob scene in my book, you won’t like this one either. Today, me and my guest, Jo Robertson, a sex therapist, leave nothing to the imagination as we talk about the importance of talking to our kids about porn. This topic was not on my radar at all until I saw Jo’s TED Talk. But her perspective shook me, and I had to know more. In this episode, we discuss the likelihood of early exposure to porn in the internet age, how this wires our kids’ minds about what is normal, and Jo offers lots of practical things we can do to mitigate the damage. We also talk about ethical porn, the messaging around pleasure that our kids are (and are not) getting, and what conversations we need to be having with them — even in elementary school and before — not just starting in middle school. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of laughter partially because I have the humor of a thirteen-year-old boy, but also because Jo pretty much challenges me to bring up something sex-related that she hasn’t heard of. And guess what? Challenge accepted! Am I victorious? You’ll have to listen to find out.
Brandy: And a quick shout out to my newest Patreon supporter, Fran Cooper. Thank you, Fran! If you’d like to join Fran and the others in supporting this podcast, you can go to http://www.patreon.com/adultconversation. Onto the show…
Brandy: Joining us on the podcast today is Jo Robertson. Welcome, Jo!
Jo: Thank you. Good to be here.
Brandy: I recently saw your TED Talk about why we need to talk about porn, and I was honestly super moved which is why I reached out to you. This part of raising a young person was not really on my radar. I knew that this was something that would come up, and it’s like, “Oh, stay away from that!” But I didn’t really realize the things that you talked about in your talk which were, “What is porn teaching our kids? How is porn educating — or really mis-educating our kids?” And that part kind of stunned me. I was really moved by the whole thing, and I just really appreciate you being here today all the way from New Zealand.
Jo: Thank you! I’m curious in that you said that it wasn’t something that you had thought about prior (in terms of parenting). I’m wondering if anybody in your community or provisional setting or school-life had ever talked about porn before. Was that the first time you’d kind of really grappled with it or had there been little moments along the way?
Brandy: I mean, obviously, I have a history with the first time that I saw it, but in terms of parenting — so I have a twelve-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter, and I just hadn’t thought about what you explain, about how different it is that young people are learning about sex today compared to what it was like learning about sex when we were younger. In a second, I want to get into what you talked about on your TED Talk regarding the difference between those things and some of the problems. That part was totally not on my radar, about what is it teaching my son (just because he’s older) specifically about pleasure and about sex? Might he see something that he doesn’t have a frame of reference for? That was something that we never had growing up to that extent. I will tell you about a story that I didn’t have a frame of reference for, but it’s nothing like today.
Brandy: With your TED Talk, I started it out, and I was in tears, stunned, laughing, and then crying. I watched it again today, and I got super emotional at the part at the end where you just speak your truth about what society is saying about women when they allow this kind of porn to exist. And for the listeners, we’ll get into this, but I’m not talking about just porn in general. I have no problem with actual porn that’s ethical and non-aggressive and all of that. It’s not like I’m a prude that’s like, “Oh, we can’t talk about or see those things.” It’s about what’s on mainstream porn today. I so related to you in that moment. We have so much to talk about, but something I ask everybody that I have to ask you too is, “What do you think the listeners need to know about you?”
Jo: Hmm. Lots of things come to mind. I was born in the Philippines, and then we moved a lot. I’m technically what some people call a “third culture kid.” Have you ever heard that before?
Brandy: No.
Jo: So that’s where you grew up somewhere in a different country. And then you move to a different country, but your parents are potentially from a different country to both of those things. You don’t have a specific culture or origin place.
Brandy: Interesting.
Jo: I grew up a bit of everywhere around the world, and my parents are New Zealanders, but I was born in the Philippines. You kind of end up in this ambiguous place.
Brandy: Yeah. Do you end up feeling not rooted and a little bit lost? Or how do you deal with that?
Jo: I think all of us as kids dealt with it slightly differently. But for me, yes. If somebody asks me where am I from, I find that confusing. Even though my parents are New Zealanders and I live here and obviously that’s my accent and all of those things, I still sometimes think, “But I don’t really know if that’s right.” It’s only as I started my own family, I think, that I felt a greater sense of place, but before that, it was confusing.
Brandy: Yeah. In addition to being somebody who gave a TED Talk, which is super interesting in itself, you work as a sex therapist. Is that right?
Jo: Yes. Yeah, that’s part of my life.
Brandy: I think on the TED Talk, you talked about some of the things that you cover, but what exactly does that mean? What is your work as a sex therapist?
Jo: Some people hear that, and they think it sounds a little bit creepy. {laughter}
Brandy: {laughter}
Jo: Traditionally, some people had the idea about sex therapists that we actually touch people, but we don’t. We basically specialize in the same way that someone specializes in trauma or abuse, personality disorders — you know, essentially, most therapists specialize in a particular field, and that’s what happens. You specialize in the subject of sexuality. What that looks like for me is that I work around the topic of pornography and betrayal for couples. And then I also do some work with couples around sexual dysfunction or relationship breakdown due to issues in their sex life. It might be that they don’t orgasm or that they don’t ever get turned on anymore. I don’t work with men by themselves. But it might be that there are struggles around arousal for him too, but they come to meet with me as a couple to talk through that.
Brandy: Okay, got it. You’re like cool with all the things. There’s probably nothing I could throw your way.
Jo: No, I like all the things.
Brandy: {laughter} Okay. Awesome, then you’re so perfect for me.
Jo: I know, we could go anywhere on this, and I would be good. {laughter}
Brandy: Okay, so I feel like the bar was just sort of set for me to find something that would just shake you to your core, which I won’t do. But there has been a little bit of a seed planted there, so I’ll be thinking in the back of my head. {laughter}
Jo: Yeah. Do it!
Brandy: In your TED Talk, you brought up so many great points, but one of the main ones was this question about how we get our ideas about sex and pleasure. Will you talk a little bit about how we do that, how it was different back when we were growing up (because I’m imagining we’re around the same age), and then what it’s like now?
Jo: Yeah, I mean, there are some similarities. We did still get our ideas about sex and pleasure from media, and the media platforms have just changed slightly. But there are still some common threads there around movies and TV shows and music. Generationally, that’s quite similar as probably our generation as we read a lot of magazines. We probably read more Cosmopolitans, girlfriends’ magazines, maybe Teen Vogue, and things like that. Historically, actually, those were much more sexualized than they are now. There has been a bit of a shift in the magazine sector and the print media sector around creating more diversity, but also equality for women and not telling a story about a woman’s sexuality that solely revolves around a man. When I was a teenager, it was definitely how to give the best blow job, how to get him to stay into you, how to keep him from cheating on you. There were all of these really problematic narratives around relationships and female sexuality, and there’s been a shift if you listen to print media editors and journalists. They have really moved in terms of wanting to be more empowering to women, but the porn industry — and not even just the industry, but people at home who are creating porn for themselves and then uploading it — they’ve stayed quite strong in that narrative around a lack of equality for women, being quite demeaning and derogatory to women, and that their sexuality revolves around a man. I don’t know if that’s intensified because I wasn’t really exposed to porn as a teenager, but it’s very strong now. And we know with mass consumption of pornography, there’s no doubt that that is influencing young people in a way that they think about sex, the way that they think about gender, but also the way that they actually do have sex and have relationships. There are some similarities and some differences now.
Brandy: Yeah, one of the many things that I hadn’t really thought about was when you talked about how growing up, if you wanted to consume porn, you went to the video store behind that curtain. You had to bring the tape up to a person in your community. It was a very public thing. And then, when you went home, you had to find a TV to watch it on. Whereas today, if a kid has a phone and there aren’t settings, it’s right at their fingertips, not as one title that is being rented. You have the whole library, and just the immediacy of all of that is so different than how it was when we were younger. You mentioned about if you wanted to know about something, you would look in the dictionary and you’d get sort of an anatomical description, but these days, if you want to know what a penis looks like, or what it’s all about, and you Google that, that’s really different than the Merriam Webster’s definition.
Jo: I know. {laughter} I actually tried to find a selection of encyclopedias so that my kids would be able to look up in encyclopedias when they wanted to answer some of those questions. My goal is to leave little books and images around that they can stumble across or that they can sneakily try and find, but I’ll have planted them there intentionally.
Brandy: Oh, that’s smart. My parents had The Joy Of Sex on some bookshelf that I think they forgot, but, of course, I think you and I — in your TED Talk, you talk about how curious you were, and I was the same way. On the day that we learned about sex ed in school, they split up the boys and the girls, and they gave us each a pamphlet. On the way out, I snuck a boy pamphlet, and I was the only girl that knew the boy side. Man, that was really good! {laughter}
Jo: Totally! I was exactly the same. I loved those magazines because I wanted to know everything I possibly could. Looking back now, I can see how heavily they informed my ideas around sexual performance and gender, but I loved accumulating all the knowledge about sex that I could, which makes a lot of sense to me now, given my career choices. It’s really played out consistently through my life. I think the other thing with porn now is that historically, you either stared at an image which was in a magazine. It might have been a nude woman for example. Or you would see a video, and then you would need to probably watch that video over and over again if you wanted to continue to watch porn because you were limited by what you had rented or bought.
Brandy: Right.
Jo: But now, if you even just click on one scene, you are never just watching one scene. So even down the sidebar of the screen, you can see multiple scenes, and there are advertisements. You are never just selecting one thing. You are essentially being guided through a whole website, but you’re always looking at about six different positions or relationships or different sexual engagements at one time.
Brandy: Oh, the porn rabbit hole. Yes, it’s vast.
Jo: Yeah. Even if a young person chose to watch something that they deemed to be more equal, in terms of the female and the male role — talking about, obviously, heterosexual porn — then they are still going to see some really problematic images down the sidebar. They’ll still see advertisements that call woman names or that talk about impregnating a woman and then leaving her. They’re still going to see all that content even if they’ve chosen something that they deemed to be more equal. Does that make sense?
Brandy: Yes, absolutely. And I think, too, what really opened my eyes in your talk was about what’s popular. The top, most popular things on porn websites are so despicable. Again, I’m not a prude person, and I don’t think those things are about being prude. It’s about being respectful of human life and not being illegal. I think that that’s the difference too. It’s not only what’s available and how much of it, but then the specificity of what is being shown and what people are choosing. When we talk about, “Well, how do we get our ideas about sex and pleasure?” and you think about when we were growing up, you didn’t really see a lot of this stuff. You had this organic sort of thing that happened where you’re holding hands and then you’re kissing, but these days, like what you were saying, kids are being exposed to something so far beyond that, even before they have this frame of reference. That was the part that really struck me where I was like, “Oh, shit. This isn’t just that you don’t want your kid to watch porn.” But it’s like, “No. You don’t want your kid to completely ruin their future sex life and possible relationships because they’re seeing something and they’re making a setpoint off of something that isn’t realistic and isn’t legal and isn’t kind.”
Jo: Yeah, if you think about it like a script, essentially, they learn a script for how to have sex and they learn how to perform their gender and perform their sexuality with another person. They adopt that script from the online world, rather than, exactly like what you’re saying, evolving organically based on relationships that they’re having. It’s what we call an anchoring bias, which is where their first point of reference or their first experiences often are kind of the position by which they filter everything else through. If their first sexual experiences are online through porn, then that becomes the anchoring bias. Then they hear through sex education, parenting, caregivers, or peers, information through that lens, rather than looking at porn, probably accidentally, but they’ve already had a really good, holistic, wonderful conversation with a caregiver. And then they see the porn through the lens of the conversation that they’ve had. One of my key messages to parents and caregivers is that you really want to be the expert voice, and you want to be the anchoring bias.
Brandy: Yeah.
Jo: The choice that you have is how early you try and get in there. It might be scary and uncomfortable and terrifying and awkward, but it is better for you to be the anchoring bias, as long as you’re giving healthy messages, rather than Google.
Brandy: Right. I’m just kind of sitting here in a little bit of, like, a fugue state. I’m just sitting here thinking about when I was in, I think it was seventh grade. This friend of mine had an older brother, and she was like, “Oh, my God, I found this video in my brother’s room.” We put it in the VCR because he wasn’t home. The stuff that happened, it was, like, there were lots of blow jobs, and it was just something I didn’t even know could exist. There was lots of ejaculating all over people, which I also didn’t quite know yet. You hear about it in sex ed, but until you see it in that way – and I’m wondering, like, have I been scarred? Is this now playing out? I’m thinking when you’re talking about this anchoring point, I’m like, “Wow, that was probably a pretty significant anchoring point to me.” I’m just in my head a little bit like, “How did that actually have a long-term effect?” I remember my friend and I were laughing to the point of crying because we just couldn’t believe what we were seeing. (My husband has heard this story so many times.) Then that next time that we had sex ed in my science class, my teacher had this tin and you could write an anonymous question. After that video, I had about a billion questions. I’m, you know, feverishly writing on these notes and putting them in there. This poor man — oh, my gosh, it was this poor guy. He was like the most simple man. He didn’t own a TV. He was just a simple dude, and he pulls out my note. It’s basically like, “So what happens when a woman’s giving a man a blow job and all of that liquid gets on her face and then down her throat?” {laughter}
Jo: {laughter}
Brandy: This is how much shame I don’t have, which I think is probably a red flag. I see him looking at this, and then I see his face just, like, fall. Instead of just sitting there, I was totally fine to risk the anonymity to get the answer to my question. I was like, “Well, if the one you’re reading that you’re not sure about…” And then I just asked him, in front of the entire class, my question.
Jo: {laughter} How did he answer?
Brandy: I think he was like, “I’m not answering that, Brandy.” And then I was like, “Well, shit.” And now thinking about it as an adult, he probably should have put me on some list. You know, where you’re like, “That kid shouldn’t know about that yet. We need to check in with the family.” That was my first experience with any of that, and, now, I’m kind of trying to piece it together in my journey. What do you make of that? Is there anything that you immediately go, “Here’s how you’re fucked up, and here’s exactly why and how.” {laughter}
Jo: {laughter} There’s a few things that that story highlights. One, is that some kids have a greater level of curiosity around their bodies and sexuality than others. I’m not one hundred percent sure why that is apart from that we’re all just interested in different things.
Brandy: Yeah.
Jo: Meeting the needs of your specific child, being intuitive about what they’re curious about, and responding to that is really important. But the other thing is that when we are silent about certain things — so him not replying essentially sends a message. Our silence communicates as well. We can give answers to questions, but the questions we don’t give answers to also tells young people what is shameful, what isn’t okay, what is taboo, what isn’t taboo, and if you’re a safe person or not. Just the fact that you’re not answering things sends the message to your young person or child that you are not the person to ask questions of.
Brandy: Right.
Jo: Silence is not a good strategy. You’re totally right that someone should have picked that up, and that’s one of the, I guess, red flags or points to notice in young people is highly sexualized language and questions that are kind of beyond their developmental stage. If your seven-year-old all of a sudden knows a lot about anatomy, you know, that uses kind of different words, they’re not saying ‘vulva,’ they say it using their language.
Brandy: Yeah. ‘Pink taco.’
Jo: Oh, yeah. exactly. {laughter}
Brandy: I’m trying to get you. I’m not getting close. {laughter}
Jo: No, that’s good. I’ve never heard that in New Zealand, but I’m with you in that I understand what that means.
Brandy: {laughter} I’m so happy to have introduced that to you. Now when you have an American client come in, you will know exactly what they’re talking about without having to ask.
Jo: The pink taco. {laughter} “Does that have that have beetroot in it? Like, what is that!?” {laughter} You do want to notice those things and ask questions. Historically, what’s interesting — because I worked in trauma and abuse with children and as a therapist for about five years – is that at that stage, which was probably, I don’t know, 10 years ago or something, if a child said something in a sexualized language or about their body or about someone else’s body, it was quite a strong indicator of abuse because they would often be such detailed things that the only way that they would know about those things is if they had really experienced them. Now, it’s not a strong indicator of abuse. It could be a strong indicator of what they have seen, rather than experienced.
Brandy: Right, right.
Jo: Definitely, it’s good for the community, whether you’re a parent, teacher, social worker, or youth worker, to be noticing those little things and asking questions and not being silent because you’re communicating that it’s taboo.
Brandy: Yes. I’m going to go back and tell Mr. Nichols that he should have just sacked up. {laughter}
Jo: Yes.
Brandy: As I’m looking back on it, there was no right answer for him. If he did that in front of the class, the amount of, you know, parent backlash — but if he pulled me aside, alone, after class, that’s also sort of problematic. What would have been the ideal thing? Would it have been to send a note home or have me talk to a counselor?
Jo: There’s so many layers to that because if you were worried about potential abuse, you would not send a note home. If you were thinking that it was a safe context, then you might send a note home. I totally understand that for him. He might not have even known the answer to that question and making one up could have been problematic.
Brandy: I wished he had gone that route.
Jo: And just made one up? {laughter}
Brandy: I mean, I would have loved to see him just grapple with what words to us. That’s the part of me that likes to be entertained, but I’ll let him off the hook.
Jo: My science teacher, he — I went to a Catholic school, so we didn’t really have sex education. I remember him talking about ‘heavy petting.’
Brandy: Oh.
Jo: He didn’t want to say ‘foreplay’ or ‘touch’ or, you know, what we would call digital stimulation. He didn’t want to do any of those things. He just wanted to call it ‘heavy petting.’
Brandy: Yeah. That was the safer version.
Jo. Yeah, and I was like, “This is weird because now it’s gone quite animal.” I felt strange about that. {laughter}
Brandy: {laughter} See, there’s almost like there’s no winning. It’s like all roads lead to somewhere that makes somebody laugh or something.
Jo: But it would’ve been better for you to have at least someone somewhere to talk about that video you had seen.
Brandy: Yes.
Jo: It would have been great if you had an opportunity to unpack that in a non-shameful way like, “This is this thing I saw.”
Brandy: Yes.
Jo: “And there were lots of blowjobs, and he was ejaculating all over her. Is that normal? Is that what’s supposed to happen?”
Brandy: I can’t imagine any adult in my junior high having the capacity to even hear any of the words that you’re saying, but maybe I misjudged them and maybe some of them could have.
Jo: Yeah, I mean, who knows? Maybe they could have, but that’s what we want to see culture change around —
Brandy: Yes.
Jo: …that there are more adults equipped to have those conversations. Ideally, someone at home because that’s a consistent relationship, but someone in their life that they can ask those questions of. Otherwise, they will just continue to get the answers online.
Brandy: Exactly. One of the other parts that really stunned me was the most popular porn that is searched and the different categories on the most popular porn sites. Will you talk to us a little bit about what those are and how screwed up they are?
Jo: Yes. {sigh} It’s never a comfortable topic for people, but one of the things that I ask particularly parents to do is to just kind of push past their own discomfort because that’s for the good of the young person. It can be uncomfortable to think about sexual abuse or sexual violence, or, you know, anything that’s demeaning, but we need to move through that discomfort because it’s not about us.
Brandy: Yeah.
Jo. It’s just not. It’s about our kids. Part of doing the best job we possibly can is pushing past that discomfort. In terms of how porn is produced, but also what is out there, about fifty percent is what we call ‘amateur porn.’ That’s user-generated, so that’s someone at home, potentially. We actually don’t know if they’re getting paid or not, but it’s low production quality. It could be on a phone, it could be on an iPhone being filmed, or it could be just a really cheap, nasty camera. There’s no lighting. Whether they’re just doing it themselves at home and hoping to get some money out of uploading it onto Pornhub, or there’s some really small amount of income, that I don’t know. But it’s fundamentally different from someone who goes on to a set, gets their makeup done, has an outfit, and signs a contract, hopefully. It’s a different style and a different genre. There’s that, and historically one of the key things people talked about with porn and one of the things that they saw was problematic was around body image. They were like, “Pornstars have really big boobs and they’re really skinny and perfect.” A lot of porn, actually, isn’t like that anymore. It’s amateur, it’s at home, and there’s probably more body diversity than there ever has been before in pornography. There’s amateur porn, and then there are different categories. If you go onto any mainstream site, you’ll see between twenty and fifty categories that are often promoted on the homepage. In the categories, just the titles of them are really problematic. You get ‘forced sex,’ and I think I said on the TED talk that on one website, which is the third most popular site, there are seven categories solely dedicated to sexual assault. Seven different categories that are around forced sex and some of which appear to be underage and what we call child sex abuse material traditionally known as child pornography. That’s not hidden in some deep dark web. That’s what I used to think is that you used to have to really hunt around the internet to find this content. But no, you could get out your phone now and click two things and you would be at underage child sex abuse material.
Brandy: {sighs}
Jo: Yeah, so it’s not hidden from our young people. It’s very much open to them. And yeah, the search terms now in the popular scenes are often quite violent and quite aggressive. There’s a lot of what we now call ‘sex with a family member,’ so that’s brother, sister, mother, son, daddy, daughter. That’s all the scenarios. I was doing an analysis recently on Pornhub, and in the recommended videos, sixty percent of them were family sex.
Brandy: Oh, wow.
Jo: It’s not niche or fetish, it’s mainstream. We tend to think of that stuff as being really fetish and that only some people would be exposed to that or some people would try and find it, but our young people will see that if they go on a mainstream porn site. It’s not going to be hidden from them. Therefore, it’s really normalizing or just very confusing.
Brandy: Yes.
Jo: Hopefully, you get messages from your sex education or your family around what is and isn’t okay in sex or what sexual violence is. But then on porn, you’re seeing that it’s not only present, but it seems to be arousing. It’s what we call the eroticization of inequality. Inequality, gender imbalance, power dynamics, and all of that stuff is a turn on, and that that is what people want when they have sex with you or you’re trying stuff out on them that that is what you should do. You perform to what you’ve seen.
Brandy: I think one of the stats that you gave on the talk was that forty to eighty-eight percent of porn is aggressive, and ninety-four percent of the aggression is targeted at women. You have what you’re talking about, which is women responding in the videos as it’s pleasurable. You said something like, “It’s like calling me a slut while gagging me, and me responding with ‘yes, please. I like it.’”
Jo: Yes.
Brandy: Obviously, that’s super problematic in terms of both parties watching that. That’s problematic for the aggressive counterpart, for the male counterpart, and also for the female because, like you had talked about, girls these days are watching porn to figure out the answer of how to perform. “What am I supposed to look like? What am I supposed to do?” And they’re seeing these things that are not real in terms of — what’s a better word for that? Not that it’s not real, but that it isn’t healthy and isn’t about love and safety and consent. It’s like both sides are mislearning. Then they come together, and both get two pieces of this really dysfunctional, dangerous puzzle. That, to me, is terrifying, and why I, after I watched your TED Talk, immediately showed my husband, and then had a talk with my son about it because I just was like, “I can’t let another second go by without him knowing that this thing exists! I know you’ve heard about it, let’s talk about what you’ve heard about it, but just how off it is that this should never be a set point for you.”
Jo: Yes. You know, there’s lots of things in what you’ve said that is, absolutely right and really important to highlight. One of them is that young girls or women are not the only victims of the scenario. I have three boys. That is, you know, hard work. {laughter}
Brandy: They’re kind of little, aren’t they?
Jo: Yeah, they’re really little. They’re two, four, and six.
Brandy: Oh, my goodness.
Jo: Yeah, they’re just babies, but I’m aware of what’s coming for them and wanting to prepare them well.
Brandy: Right.
Jo: But you know, they are also the victims of this cultural context. They will similarly, as a female would, learn how to do sex from this. When we hear about boys potentially pushing boundaries or being coercive or even being aggressive during sex, I hear from boys that they didn’t think that they were doing anything wrong there. They thought that that’s what she wanted. He is not feeling great about that either, and he could be equally confused, as she is, about what they’ve seen and what they’re doing.
Brandy: Exactly.
Jo: It’s such a strong model for them because it’s a stimulus in which they arouse to, so that’s kind of a better platform for learning. But it’s visual — it’s talking in sex ed, it’s just someone telling you something, but watching something in person is just so strong as an educator. So yeah, they are also the victims in that, the boys. There are lots of different pieces of research coming out around aggression, and it showed that young people were, in fact, seeing all the aggression that we knew was there. There was kind of a hope that once we knew that aggressive porn was available to them that maybe they weren’t seeing that content, and maybe they were seeing something slightly better or more tame or mild or vanilla or whatever. And now we know that, actually, they are seeing the content that’s nonconsensual, that’s assault, that’s aggressive, that’s violent, that’s demeaning to women, where pleasure is not being experienced by a woman in the scene, that is the content that they are, in fact, being exposed to.
Brandy: Yeah. You talked about, in your talk, specifically, about rainbow youth like the LGBTQ community, and about how that’s its own problematic thing that some of those stereotypes play out over there. One of the most popular gay scenes that you saw on one of the sites was “obedient slave boys used like property.” Things like this where the gay porn that’s out is reinforcing stereotypes rather than breaking down stereotypes or even homophobic discourse, you see gay males being degraded for feminine looking traits. I can see where on one hand having some of this stuff so that you can kind of see, “Well do I like that? Does that arouse me?” I guess for sexual orientation and just kind of experimenting, some of this stuff could be helpful to figure out where you belong. But then there’s this other side where it’s not helping and it’s actually harming. You have these both sides of it.
Jo: Yeah. I mean, it’s really important to acknowledge that for lots of the rainbow community, and for some rainbow youth, that porn has been really, I would say, affirming for them. For lots of people, it’s actually been a largely positive experience, and that it might be the first time they see two men holding hands or two women kissing or it’s the first time they’ve seen some of the affectionate behaviors that they don’t necessarily get to see in real life or that isn’t talked about in their sex education, or that they don’t feel safe talking to their parents about. It can be a really powerful, affirming experience. I don’t want to take away from that in terms that I really understand it, I acknowledge that, and I hear it because they are in a marginalized group. Lots of mainstream society is homophobic and afraid or just don’t even talk about it. I completely understand that position. What is so sad, though, is exactly what you’ve said. It is often the same narratives. Whilst it can be affirming, it can also be destructive at the very same time, and they really need a critical lens to look at the porn and go, “Hey, actually, what’s happening here is that they’re degrading the person who looks the most gay.”
Brandy: Right.
Jo: “They’re swearing at him and that he is having to be obedient to the master, who is the straight looking person.” It really can further embed power dynamics, and hetero-normativity and homophobia. It really can actually submit those ideas, rather than pull them down.
Brandy: In my area, where there’s been debate about what should be taught in sex ed because they just redid the curriculum and a bunch of people are having a hard time with there possibly being any homosexual inclusion in that, you bring up such a good point. If these rainbow youth aren’t learning about this stuff in a sex ed class, then Google is their educator. The disservice that we’re doing to them — I mean, I already fully support them being included and then some, but this part of it, it affects them forever if they’re not included in this. Not just to feel like they belong, but also legitimately to educate them about things so they do not have to go to Google to do it. I just think that that is so important.
Jo: Yes, and the other thing that happens with sex education, that I’m not saying I have answers to or know how to do necessarily better, but the message that quite strongly comes through from young people is that they don’t just want to hear about biology, anatomy, STI’s, and contraception. That that is not a satisfying conversation for them, and that that is not robust education. They actually want to learn about pleasure and about relationships, and they want to learn about how to do things well and how to ask if the other person’s into the same things as them. Those are the layers that are the most uncomfortable, I think, for adults, but that’s stuff that they’re really hunting out and they’re really looking for.
Brandy: Right.
Jo: If we don’t want to answer those questions, we are definitely just leaving them to their own devices to figure it out. If you don’t want to have the conversation, if you don’t want to educate them around pleasure, then you, to some extent, are saying, “Okay, porn industry, I’m allowing you to do that for me.”
Brandy: You’re giving them that power.
Jo: Absolutely. They just do. They just have questions. In New Zealand, at least, our sex education curriculum is pretty fantastic.
Brandy: Of course, because your whole country is amazing. {laughter}
Jo: {laughter} I think it tries to be.
Brandy: I think it does a good job.
Jo: We have a really great curriculum, but it’s not necessarily implemented excellently. It still relies heavily on essentially teachers to teach content that they might not feel confident or comfortable with, or that they, you know, maybe even just don’t know that much about or they’re not sure how to educate around pleasure. The curriculum can be spectacular, but that doesn’t mean implementation is equally spectacular.
Brandy: You have such a good background to answer this question, but in what ways — I know that there are probably listeners out there that think all porn is probably awful. What would you say are the benefits of porn?
Jo: Well, I think for people who come from cultures, or maybe religions, where sex is not talked about, where they genuinely don’t know what to do when they get married, for example, where there’s a complete lack of knowledge, then I know sex therapists have recommended that they watch porn. I am not a particular fan of that. Only in that I feel I know quite a lot about mainstream porn, so you would have to be really specific about where you were directing people. I know people for whom they use a more ethical platform or a feminist porn platform to learn to feel normalized in the things that are their kinks or the things that they’re interested in. I know that that does exist for people.
Brandy: Yeah, the idea of ethical porn was something that I didn’t know existed. You said that it’s porn that prioritizes female pleasure, it’s got body diversity, and it’s ethically made. It’s like buying organic strawberries. {laughter} It’s like the organic version, but it’s not even a category you said on some of the main porn sites, and it’s something that you have to go out of your way to find that you have to put in a credit card that you have to pay for.
Jo: Yeah.
Brandy: Which makes sense because people would be paid for it, and that makes sense. But it’s harder to get, and it’s not going to be that common that that’s what people and, especially, young people are seeing.
Jo: Yeah, and it’s also important to note that it hasn’t actually been assessed. There hasn’t been a content analysis on feminist or ethical porn yet.
Brandy: Hmm.
Jo: There is no fair trade stamp, you know? {laughter}
Brandy: There’s no organic label? {laughter}
Jo: No, there’s no way of really knowing, at the moment, whether they’re just saying those things, but really does it represent the same models of sexuality as mainstream porn? We don’t know. We are doing some research around that. I’m collaborating with another organization, and we hope to have some more robust answers to those questions. After that, we’re going to assess it and analyze it. We’ll look at the power dynamics, pleasure, equality, aggression, and safety. Are condoms being used, and is the lubricant present? All of those kinds of things help make it ethical or feminist, but we don’t know for sure yet if it is.
Brandy: Got it.
Jo: There are organizations who are definitely wanting to create that kind of porn, who are really passionate about it, and who also want to create what we call ‘user-generated, ethical, feminist porn.’ People at home, your average, everyday couples — some of the producers talk about ‘fanny farts’ and ‘slips’ —
Brandy: Wait, what? {laughter}
Jo: {laughter}
Brandy: I need you to explain.
Jo: I think some people call it a ‘queef.’
Brandy: Oh! {laughter} This is amazing. That reminds me, in, like, sixth grade, the word to look up in the dictionary to give yourself a giggle was ‘smegma.’ Is that a universal thing? Do you know of this?
Jo: No! What is smegma?
Brandy: {laughter} Oh, God. And now I’ve backed myself in a corner where I have to tell you what smegma is.
Jo: Yes, you do.
Brandy: Can I tell you to Google it? {laughter}
Jo: Can I do that right now? {laughter}
Brandy: {laughter} Now I feel like Mr. Nichols. I’m like, “Jo, I’m not going to answer that,” even though I brought it up.”
Jo: Smegma: A sebaceous secretion in the fold of the skin, especially under a man’s foreskin.
Brandy: There you have it. I first related to it as in between, like, in the labia. That was a thing, in your class, you would go look at the dictionary, and you’d leave it open to that page. Then someone else would come, and they’d laugh and go sit down, it’s a thing. Anyway, back to queefing. {laughing}
Jo: I’m looking at the images now. I’ve moved past just the description, and now I’m trying to find an image.
Brandy: Oh, no. Are you in a vortex? Are you in a rabbit hole? {laughter}
Jo: Yes. {laughter} This is my hole. Oh, I see. I’m looking at it now. I know what you’re talking about.
Brandy: {laughter}
Jo: Wow, there are some really gross images there.
Brandy: Did you have any question that there would be? {laughter}
Jo: No, I’m good. I’m good. I’m covered. {laughter} Some ethical porn producers want to create – they, actually, often don’t even call it porn. They want to detach themselves from the label ‘porn’ because of what mainstream porn represents, so they might call it adult cinema. They might call it erotic content. They want it to be representative of a really normal experience where there’s strange noises, giggling, and awkwardness where your tummies slap together and make a funny sound.
Brandy: Right. {laughter}
Jo: All of that stuff that lots of people experience, but that isn’t represented in mainstream porn, and therefore we feel is not normal. They want to normalize that. The question is whether it does. Again, we don’t we haven’t analyzed it or assessed it yet, so I don’t want to just send people down to a platform, which we don’t know enough about.
Brandy: Yeah.
Jo: And I have had parents say to me, “Oh, should we just send our kids to ethical porn?” And I’m like, “No, definitely not at this stage.” But also, I don’t know if it will gain enough popularity. I don’t know if people will find that content stimulating enough to pay for it and to watch as their education. I don’t know. We’re not sure if that yet.
Brandy: Right. At the end of your talk, you were very serious about how you must talk to the teenagers in your life about porn. That it was a non-negotiable. We, as parents, need to plant a seed with them that porn might not be healthy, and let them know that we are a safe person to talk to. How do we do that? I’m curious, too, you’ve got a two-year-old, four-year-old, and six-year-old. Are there things that you have already started doing that are a little bit more passive or subconscious rather than having a big conversation like I could have with my twelve-year-old? How do we do this? How do we save them from having their setpoint for sex and pleasure be totally bonkers?
Jo: Yes, and that is really hard. I’m not assuming that everyone’s going to find that easy or comfortable, or that there’s going to be a quick fix there since it’s much more nuanced. But one thing that we’re always aiming for is something called ‘porn literacy’ or ‘wider media literacy.’ We know that if young people can see an image and critique it, that the image itself is not going to have as much of an impact on them.
Brandy: Hmm.
Jo: If we can teach them what is problematic about pornography, then, if they stumble across it or they get shown it by a friend (and the chances are that they probably will), if they can critique it, then it won’t set them up in the same way that for a young person, who has no other reference points, it will. Porn literacy is essentially being able to identify the unhealthy or problematic messages, and those are around those four key things that we talked about in terms of problematic messaging. One is around gender being gender equality or inequality, the power dynamics, the male being in a controlling position, the female being in a submissive position. Or, in gay male pornography, the gay person is the one who is submissive. If they can identify that, they are much more likely to critique it, and it doesn’t have as much of an influence. The next thing is risky sexual behaviors being group sex, no condom being present, no lubricant present, for example, in anal sex. Those are risky sexual practices. If they can see, “Hey, it doesn’t look like anyone put a condom on there,” then that’s them, obviously, showing critical thinking. Then identifying aggression. “No, it’s actually not okay to call a woman a bitch, or it’s not okay to choke her during sex. It doesn’t look like she’s having a good time there.” Being able to identify aggressive behaviors, and at the moment, that’s what our young people are lacking is the ability to fully identify and critique the aggressive behaviors because it looks erotic and arousing to them.
Brandy: Right.
Jo: And then the other one is the other sexual behaviors, in particular, around pleasure. “Did she climax as well as him? How do we know that? Did he ejaculate on her face? Do we think that’s going to be nice?”
Brandy: Right. Yeah. {laughter} You’re triggering me back to back to, like, seventh grade.
Jo: Yeah, you were there. {laughter} What kind of stimulation happened for either of them? In a lot of porn, it’s just the male being stimulated. She gets no attention. It’s rare, really, for a woman to receive oral sex or digital stimulation with fingers before sex and to really look like she’s being fully aroused prior to having intercourse. We know that most women need at least twenty to thirty minutes of foreplay before having intercourse for it to be really, really enjoyable. If young people can know those things about sex, and then if and when they stumble across it, that they can see, “Oh, no. She doesn’t look like she’s really having a good time there.” Then they’re less likely to use it as the sex education tool.
Brandy: Right, and you also talked about the three different components of the heart, head, and hand in your talk, which I thought was really great. Will you detail that for us?
Jo: Yes. If your young person or your child has seen porn, and you’ve either found out or they’ve told you, that’s what I call disclosure or discovery. They’ve disclosed it or you’ve discovered it, and then the first thing to do is to ask them how they’re feeling. That’s kind of reaching out to the heart first. It’s quite easy to jump into, “Oh, this is what’s wrong with porn, this is what happens to you, it’s going to make you have bad sex, or it makes you think that it’s okay to be violent.” It’s easy to jump straight to that point or to even jump straight to strategies like, “Oh, you’re not allowed to have a phone anymore, or I’m going to put a filter on your device,” and go straight to kind of consequences. But first, what we need to do is really build the connection between the adult and the child. “Thank you for telling me,” or, “I totally understand you probably came across this by accident.” I know lots of young people feel pressure from friends. I really want this to be a safe place to talk. I really care about you and asking them how they felt. There’s kind of two elements to that, one is, “How did your body feel?” If they felt aroused, they might say it felt kind of good, and normalizing that for them. “It’s okay. It’s totally okay if your body felt good watching that. Actually, that’s a sign that your body is working, and that it’s really healthy.” Normalizing arousal is really, really important. Then it’s kind of like, “How did your body feel,” but then, at the same time, “How did your emotions feel?” That can often be, “I felt a bit yucky or maybe uncomfortable, or I felt confused.
It can even go to, “I felt traumatized.”
Brandy: Right.
Jo: They might not use that language, but that might be what’s coming up for them. It’s important for us to talk about that we can experience both things at the same time. We can, actually, be aroused and traumatized at the same time and normalizing that for them.
Brandy: That’s such a good point.
Jo: If you touch something hot, you get burnt. That’s a physiological response. When we see nudity or sex, we have a physiological response, which is arousal. There’s no shame in that. There’s never any shame in arousal. It’s your body working. It’s actually just healthy and it’s having a normal response. I don’t believe we should, especially, shame a young person for being aroused by content, but being able to identify for them that, “Hey, that’s totally normal, but here are some of the problems with it.” You address their heart, how they’re feeling, what was going on for them. Second thing, here’s what can be unhealthy about porn. And that’s where you’re hitting those four points: gender, risky behavior, aggression, and sexuality. So, G.R.A.S.S. {laughter}
Brandy: Yeah. {laughter}
Jo: The other one is mental health. That’s what I call ‘G.R.A.M.S.’ You’re hitting your four points, your G.R.A.S.S. points, but I throw an ‘M’ for G.R.A.M.S., which is your mental health, so, “It can make you think about porn more than you usually would. It can make you feel like you want to keep going back to it.” That’s what people typically call addiction, but I would never use that language for a teenager because it’s way too strong. They’re going to take that label with them into adulthood, and I don’t really want that for them, in really formative years. Then ‘hands’ is really talking about strategies. You’ve got heart, you’ve got head, and then you’ve got hands. What are we actually going to do from here? Asking for their ideas in that is really important. They’re your ally. You’re not just going to tell them what you’re going to do. “What do you think that we should do as a family to protect ourselves or to make sure that we don’t see this kind of stuff? What do you think we could do, as parents, to help you know more about sex? What do you want to know from us? We’re going to get this book and this book and this book, and you can read them anytime you want. We’re going to use a filter, or we’re going to have the whole family to leave their phones in the lounge at night.” You kind of develop a family culture, rather than just making it about the young person themselves because then further shaming them. “How do we all do this technology-life a little bit differently because it can impactful of us?”
Brandy: And then the father is like, “Umm, but not me.” {laughter} “I need my phone.”
Jo: And that is going to be the challenge for parents. I already feel that. My five-year-old, he’s now six, he started asking for a phone. I thought, “Crap.” I was like, “Why does he think that the phone is so important?” Probably because he sees me use it all the time. He sees it as an extension of my being. The challenge for me, then, is how do I show him that my phone is not that important, and that is hard and challenging. I’m on that journey too. The tool for parents is what I call ‘C Four’ or ‘The Four C’s’ around the porn conversation. If you’re having a conversation with your young person and they disclose that they’ve seen porn, there’s kind of four key things you want to know from them.
Brandy: Okay.
Jo: Key questions — The first is around consumption. How much porn have they seen and how regularly? There’s a really big difference between someone who saw porn once last week to someone who’s been watching it every day for a year. Actually, rates of consumption, we want to know that from a young person because I’ve had parents who are just having a flip out because they know that the kid saw something at school. I’m like, “It’s probably okay. As long as you unpack the messaging, they’re probably going to be fine.” Consumption – ask how often. That’s important to know the impact. The next is the context. Always ask a young person where they first saw porn. How did they come across it? Were they experiencing any pressure? One of the key points we want to get out of it is: did an adult show them?
Brandy: Hmm.
Jo: This is a form of sexual abuse and/or grooming. We really want to know there’s safety there in their peer group friendships but also in their adult relationships. You’ve got consumption then context then content, and this is the part that parents often find quite hard is asking the question like, “What did you see?” That would be back — think about your story with seeing the multiple blowjobs.
Brandy: Right.
Jo: That would be the adult in your life asking you the question like, “What did you see?
Was it someone kissing another person? Was there more than two people? Was there five people? Were they having anal sex or oral sex? Who was doing what?” That can be the most confronting thing for parents, and they tend to have quite a shocked response if it’s something more than what they were expecting. But why it’s important to know that is because, then, we know what the likely impacts are. If they saw lesbian sex — let’s imagine lesbian porn, where it’s two women probably kissing, touching each other, and playing. It’s often quite kind of fun and baby-like because it’s made for men, not for lesbians. It’s often, like, a bit more tame. They’re not hitting each other around, for example.
Brandy: Right.
Jo: We want to know the content that they’re seeing so that we can understand the impacts on them. That fourth one is just, “Are they experiencing any consequences? Are they feeling traumatized? Are they feeling unsafe at school? Are they worried about relationships in the future? Are they starting to look at Dad differently? How are they feeling internally?” Those are the four key elements that you want to get out of that conversation and then unpack, obviously, the messaging after that.
Brandy: That’s so helpful. And what you said on the talk is that these conversations are not one and done – it’s checking in every few weeks or months, or however is needed, which reminded me of the conversation I had, after I saw your talk, with my son because I asked him, I said, “Have you heard of this?” And then I let him tell me what he had heard. I said, “Have you seen any of this?” And he said, “No, but there’s a kid in one of my classes who will show us his phone and he’ll scroll to Pornhub. He’ll show us that he’s been on that or that he has history there and whatnot.” I realized that I need to check back in with my son and just say, “Hey, I’m wondering about that kid in your class.” I told my son ways to not see that and to stick up for himself and all of that, but you never know what happens. I liked your idea of, “It’s not like you have the big talk and then you walk away.” It’s an ongoing thing.
Jo: Definitely. That’s where I think with our kids, we’ve started young in talking about media, internet, bodies, anatomy, and relationships, and we don’t say anything that we believe to be inappropriate or too early. Everything kind of feels really organic. We don’t really have intense like, “I’m going to sit down and have an intense conversation with you.” I have a lot of brief, quick kind of chats in the car or talking whilst I’m making the bed. My son, who’s six now, has had his first crush on a girl.
Brandy: Aww.
Jo: I know, which is really cute. It’s easy to go like, “Oh, gosh. What do I say about that?” Then I thought, “I think it’d be good if he knows that I’m a safe person to talk to about crushes on girls or boys, if that’s the way it lands.”
Brandy: You’re the safest person. You need to not only tell him you are a safe person, but you are literally the safest person in the world.
Jo: I’d hope so. I could tell he was deeply embarrassed that I’d found this love note in his bag. He was feeling so embarrassed, which I thought was really fascinating from a five-year-old. There was something there he felt he should be ashamed about.
Brandy: Gosh, right. So young.
Jo: We had never talked about relationships like that. He always had lots of little kind of girlfriends, but it was really interesting to me that he kind of innately experienced that. But, anyway, I just thought, “Okay, how am I going to talk about this with him? He can’t handle a face to face conversation. He was feeling it too deeply.” I could tell because he couldn’t even look at me. I went in, and I just made his bed. I was just like, “Oh, just tell me about the note. Tell me about who it was for. Tell me about what you like about them. Tell me about what happened when you gave the note. Do you want to write another note? You could just tell us if you need help with that.” Just kind of normalizing the note writing process.
Brandy: Yeah.
Jo: We are it for him. We are on his team. We want him to do well in this area of his life, and we will totally champion him through relationships. Yeah. It’s all those little details that you start really early. We are very open about bodies — very, very open. He’s asked me all about periods and tampons and pregnancy, and we’ve managed to have enough conversation about sex that he doesn’t know a penis goes into a vagina, but he knows how Dad gives Mama seed, and then it gets planted in her tummy. We have a whole story around it. That’s enough for him to feel satisfied, but not so much, and if he told his friend, that another parent would freak out.
Brandy: Yeah, exactly.
Jo: I do believe, as parents as well, we have to support each other as parents. I will tell my friends, “Hey, just letting you know, I talked about this with my son today.” Or I’ve told his preschool, “Hey, just letting you know, we talked about body parts this morning, what he can’t touch on other people, and what people can’t touch on him.” And just kind of forewarning the adults in his life, so that they are prepared, if that comes out in other kids because he’s shared.
Brandy: Yeah, that’s a great idea.
Jo: If your young person sees porn, and you’ve had that conversation with them or you’ve discovered it on the phone, or whatever — I mean, I know it’s really hard, but I really encourage you to tell their friend’s parents because the chances of those children having seen porn are much higher. That’s really hard because parents often feel some level of shame. They’re like, “I don’t want other people to know that my kid watched porn or saw it.” But, actually, you’re doing a great service to them if you prepare them for what’s happening in the friend circle.
Brandy: Yeah, I was thinking about that kid in my son’s class and thinking, “Gosh, if only a parent was looking in on the search history…” And who knows if they are or if they aren’t, but I feel like I want to tell all parents, “Parents, check your kids phones!” Whatever you’ve set up with them — like with my son, he has a phone, but he knows that we can check anything at any time that we want to. We trust him hugely, but he knows that that’s part of the deal until he reaches a certain age where that privacy seems that we’ve reached that point. I don’t know when it will feel like that, but it just kind of blows my mind sometimes that there are parents out there that don’t check their middle schooler’s phones.
Jo: Yes.
Brandy: I personally, think that that’s an important thing. Almost one of the deal breakers with giving your kid a phone is that, “You cannot have this unless you give me the passwords.” I know that they know ways around things. We have some friends who
lock their parents out and all these things happen, or whatever, but I just think that they should know that. There’s always going to be the kid with Pornhub whose parents aren’t checking his phone, and you wonder, “Why is that?”
Jo: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the best things we can do is keep talking to other parents, send them this podcast, send them the TED talk, and just distribute the message because if your child’s wider community is on the same page, then they are much safer. Just informing as many people as you can around some of the vulnerabilities online means that we’re kind of doing some herd vaccination. {laughter}
Brandy: Yeah, exactly.
Jo: We’re just like trying to prepare as many families and kids as possible. We really want to create culture change, and we can’t do that by staying silent in our own homes. We can only create mass culture change by continuously talking to each other about what’s happening in our own families, what we’ve heard online, what we want to do, and differently. Spread that message far and wide. I am so passionate about the — we call it primary school, but it’s like age five to ten. What school is that for you?
Brandy: Oh, yes, it’s called elementary school here.
Jo: Elementary. I’m really passionate about parents in that particular age group being really prepared because that’s when we’re preventative. So often, parents only engage in the porn conversation once they’ve got a teenager and, whilst that’s good, the likelihood that they’ve already been exposed to porn is quite high. But we can be really preventative there and delay their exposure even later if we put measures in place when the young. I’m really encouraging elementary schools, like what you have, to run parent nights and get all the parents on board in terms of getting an educator and talking about pornography and other vulnerabilities online. Everybody’s kind of like, “Hey, let’s do something about this. Don’t just wait until adolescence.”
Brandy: For the elementary school age, is that really like filters and limiting their probability of being shown that in addition to what you’re talking about, which is showing yourself as a safe person in case they need to talk about that? Is that in line with what you would you recommend, or are there any other little things?
Jo: Yeah, so definitely delay. Delay is really important. That is the filtering software. We know that the earlier a young person is exposed to porn, also, the more vulnerable they are to the impact. If we can delay an eight-year-old seeing porn until they’re fourteen, that’s fantastic.
Brandy: Got it.
Jo: Delay — you are the safe person always holding the relationship and the connection really strongly. But also talking about media in starting the media literacy early.
Brandy: Yes.
Jo: If your kids are watching a show, talk about what’s problematic about that show, and why we don’t think it’s a good idea to watch that. I have these conversations with my sons, actually, quite a lot. They’re like, “Why can’t I watch Pokemon or something?”
Brandy: Right.
Jo: I’ll say, “Because of this, this, and this” And I say things like, “All of us, Mom and Dad as well, we’re learning all the time. What we’re learning from these shows is x, y, z.” Then they can go, “Oh, yeah. We do learn from TV or songs or movies or whatever.” Just kind of slowly embedding those ideas and I’ve now started talking to my son, the six-year- old about how not everyone on the internet is safe and how not all of the internet is good. I’ll say like, “You can’t just be on YouTube.” We don’t use YouTube. We don’t use YouTube Kids at all, ever.
Brandy: Yes.
Jo: He’ll ask, “Why?” “Because not all of the internet is good, and there are people on here who actually try and hurt children or want to teach them things that we don’t think are good for you.” Slowly, you’re drip feeding these ideas out.
Brandy: Yeah, for them to be a little bit skeptical or critical of what they’re seeing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jo: Yeah, exactly. Even
with advertising, fortunately, with Netflix, you don’t get any ads, which I
really love. But if they do sometimes see an ad on TV, I’m very quick to be
like, “See, what they’re doing there is they’re trying to sell you that thing.”
Brandy: Yes, we have that conversation all the time.
Jo: Because otherwise they don’t know. You’re starting conversations around bodies and privacy, and it’s a drip feed kind of a process. I’ll say things like, “If anyone ever shows you a picture, a photo, a book, a TV show, a game that has anyone with naked people in it, then that’s not for children, but you can absolutely tell me about it.” I have kind of introduced that idea of nudity and image and that that does exist, but I’ve not labeled it as pornography.
Brandy: Those are all such helpful things, and I know you’re exactly right about all of it comes together to set a foundation. Even the stuff about consent, which early age gives you so many opportunities for that about touching and pushing and hitting and kissing when somebody doesn’t want it. When it’s all that sort of innocent stuff, but it’s a great time to talk about consent. We’ve been huge on that in my house.
Jo: Definitely. We talk about that everybody is in a bubble. And everybody has their own little bubble, and we need to ask each other if we want to go into their bubble.
Brandy: Yeah, and just to think how that affects their sexual encounters later in life, like, to have that foundation, which is so different than a lot of the conversation that was happening when we were being raised, but just to think that you could have a kid that just so understood consent when they got to high school. I mean, not that they’re not going to mess up. It’s not that it’s just all of a sudden, you tell them and it’s perfect. But just even being brought up with that and being taught that people should respect their bubble, but then they should respect other people’s bubble, I feel like is already miles ahead of where we came from when we grew up.
Jo: Yes, I agree.
Brandy: In closing, will you explain to us what the Light Project is that you work with?
Jo: Yes. The Light Project is basically a group of different health professionals. We’ve all come from a slightly different discipline. I come from a therapeutic background, but the others come from different backgrounds. We pull that knowledge to do research. We look at all the literature around porn. Then we do surveys on what we call ‘youth stakeholders,’ so people who are engaging with porn on a regular basis. Then we do training in the health sector and the education sector amongst parent and community groups (the police, for example). We go out, and we talk about pornography. We talk about what the new landscape is — that’s what we call it, so the new online landscape. And then we talk about the impacts and then some strategies for culture change but also conversations. So that’s kind of our way.
Brandy: Wow.
Jo: There are lots of good books on our website, and people can go there and look at the books. We talk about a few different filtering services, parent’s conversation starters, and things like that.
Brandy: And what is your website? How would people get to you?
Jo: http://www.thelightproject.co.nz.
Brandy: Jo, thank you so much for doing the work that you do. Like I said, when your video came across my feed, it just stopped me, and then my whole day became about it. It became posting about it, having my husband listen to it, talking to my son, and then, immediately — what happens is when I see something that moves me so much — I’m like, “Podcast guest! Is there any chance that this person would even consider doing this?” I cannot tell you how excited I was when you said ‘yes’ to it, and this interview has been more than I had dreamed of. The fact that I could teach you ‘pink taco,’ I feel like just really… {laughter}
Jo: And, smegma. {laughter}
Brandy: That’s right. Let’s not forget. {laughter}
Brandy: That was a lot of really helpful, but really dense, information. But one of the major, underlying themes is us getting past our own stuff and discomfort so we can communicate with our kids about hard topics that really do affect their lives and future relationships. It reminds me of the “Screens Are Not Evil” episode I did with Jordan where he talks about having critical dialogue with your kids about what they’re seeing on their screens and the games that they’re playing. If we teach our kids how to thoughtfully critique things, it gives them the power to do that for the other problematic things they see that we don’t even know about. I think that is maybe the biggest takeaway for me here.
Brandy: I’ll link to Jo’s amazing TED Talk on the podcast website. Did you know that I have a website with transcripts of every single episode with links and guest info for those moments when you can’t listen to something but can read? I do! This exists! It’s http://www.adultconversationpodcast.com.
Brandy: Also, it’s definitely easier said than done to just get past our own stuff here so we can talk to our kids about it. I know many people have a history of abuse and trauma, and it’s hard to heal from that and show up to a conversation that is potentially triggering for ourselves. I really want to honor that. And I think Jo makes a great case for trying to do our best here. As always, thanks for listening.
** As always, thank you to Scott Weigel and his band, Seahorse Moon, for providing me with that jaunty intro and outro music. You guy are awesome. Check ’em out on iTunes.