Do you remember when I highlighted Gail Dines's proposal that schools launch porn education classes to counter the modern development of online porn having become the de facto sex education that the youth receive, @
Dr. Who (or anyone)?
Well high school porn literacy classes are now a real thing and these courses may well begin to spread to many schools across the United States!
As detailed in the linked article, extensive study has revealed that the main thing younger generations are learning about sex from growing up in a pornography-saturated cultural environment is that there are supposed to be clear gender roles involved, where the man is abusively dominant and the woman submissive to the point of enduring constant pain and suffering; that that's just how sex is, how it's supposed to be, that women enjoy being physically abused and controlled by men. That that's the main lesson the kids are getting from it doesn't shock me one bit.
To judge by the considerable success of the counter-narrative provided by the sampled porn literacy course (detailed in the article), I think that the proliferation of these classes would be a step in the right direction, but also kind of a pitifully defeatist one. For right now, we are just accepting the premise that pornography has to be in circulation and that its consumption is as inevitable as sex itself despite the fact that barely 15 years ago, just 14% of Americans consumed pornographic material routinely, and fewer before that. But maybe a better-educated generation of Americans will be able to eventually figure out otherwise. *sighs* Baby steps, I guess.