Q: Do you think pornography encourages the baseball model?
A: I absolutely think pornography encourages the baseball model. It highlights vaginal intercourse over other kinds of sexual activity, and it often promotes the idea of the “bases” as the actors go through a series of regulated steps in their sexual activity – moving from kissing to touching to oral sex to vaginal intercourse. You can’t get more “baseball” than that!
Pornography is also problematic because it gives unrealistic models of what sexual activity is really like, reinforces very rigid and traditional gender roles, and promotes unrealistic body images (especially for women).
Honestly, I don’t think pornography can be considered a part of healthy sexuality for high school age students. Pornography is another form of media, just like TV, and TV gives us mostly unhealthy models of sexuality and sexual activity. Viewing pornography on a regular basis can fill a person’s head with many unrealistic expectations of what sexual activity may be like. Those unrealistic expectations can mess people up when they encounter real-life sexual situations. If a young person is going to view pornography (and, as I said above, I don’t think that’s necessarily healthy), please be clear that this material represents unrealistic fantasies. There is nothing about the way pornography portrays sexual activity that translates in “real” life. The clearer you are about that, the better off you’ll be.
Here’s another thing you probably never thought about. What do you think those actors and actresses do after they’re finished filming a scene? Do you ever realize those actors and actresses are real people with lives and families and interests outside of the world of pornography? What do you imagine they do when they’re not making a porn movie? Surely they don’t live at that studio and spend 24 hour a day, 7 days a week having sex on film? They need to do laundry, pay taxes, go grocery shopping, drop their kids off at school (if they have kids), make dinner, call their parents, maybe even go to church – all those normal things every person does. Pornography causes us to dehumanize the people involved in it. We don’t think of them as real people, but they are. We’re real people too, so our lives can’t be about sex 24 hours a day, 7 days a week either. When would you get your homework done?