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[This talk contains mature content]
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Six years ago,
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I discovered something that scientists
have been wanting to know for years.
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How do you capture the attention
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of a roomful of extremely
bored teenagers?
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It turns out all you have to do
is mention the word pornography.
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(Laughter)
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Let me tell you how I first learned this.
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In 2012, I was sitting in a crowded room
full of high school students
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who were attending
an after-school program in Boston.
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And my job, as guest speaker for the day,
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was to inspire them to think
about how exciting it would be
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to have a career in public health.
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The problem was,
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as I looked at their faces,
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I could see that their eyes
were glazing over
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and they were just tuning out.
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It didn't even matter that I wore
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what I thought was
my cool outfit that day.
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I was just losing my audience.
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So, then one of the adults
who worked for the program said,
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"Aren't you doing some research
about pornography?
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Maybe tell them about that."
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All of a sudden, that room
full of high school students exploded
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into laughter, high fives,
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I think there were some
loud hooting noises.
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And all anyone had done
was say that one word - pornography.
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That moment would prove to be
an important turning point
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for me and my professional mission
of finding solutions
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to end dating and sexual violence.
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At that point, I'd been working
for more than a decade
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on this seemingly intractable problem
of dating violence.
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Data from the US Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention
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demonstrate that one in five
high school-attending youth
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experience physical and/or sexual abuse
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by a dating partner each year in the US.
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That makes dating violence more prevalent
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than being bullied on school property,
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seriously considering suicide,
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or even vaping,
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in that same population.
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But solutions were proving elusive.
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And I was working with a research team
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that was hunting for novel
answers to the question,
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what's causing dating abuse
and how do we stop it?
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One of he research studies
that we were working on at the time
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happened to include a few questions
about pornography.
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And something unexpected
was emerging from our findings.
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Eleven percent of the teen
girls in our sample
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reported that they had been
forced or threatened
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to do sexual things that
the perpetrator saw in pornography.
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That got me curious.
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Was pornography to blame
for any percentage of dating violence?
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Or was it more like a coincidence
that the pornography users
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also happen to be more unlikely
to be in unhealthy relationship?
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I investigated by reading
everything that I could,
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from the peer-reviewed literature,
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and by conducting my own research.
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I wanted to know
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what kinds of sexually explicit media
youth were watching,
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and how often and why,
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and see if I could piece together
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if it was part of the reason that
for so many of them
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dating relationships
were apparently unhealthy.
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As I read, I tried to keep an open mind,
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even though there were plenty
of members of the public
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who'd already made up
their mind about the issue.
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Why would I keep an open mind
about pornography?
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Well, I'm a trained social scientist,
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so it's my job to be objective.
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But I'm also what people
call sex positive.
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That means that
I fully support people's right
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to enjoy whatever kind of sex life
and sexuality they find fulfilling,
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no matter what it involves,
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as long as it includes
the enthusiastic consent
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of all parties involved.
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That said, I personally wasn't inclined
towards watching pornography.
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I'd seen some, didn't really
do anything for me.
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And as a mom of two
soon to be teenage children,
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I had my own concerns
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about what seeing pornography
could do to them.
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I noticed that
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while there were a lot of people
who were denouncing pornography,
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there were also people who were
staunch defenders of it
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for a variety of reasons.
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So in my scholarly exploration,
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I genuinely tried to understand,
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was pornography bad for you
or was it good for you?
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Was it misogynist or was it empowering?
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And there was not one singular answer
that emerged clearly.
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There was one longitudinal study
that had me really worried,
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that showed that teenagers
who saw pornography
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were subsequently more likely
to perpetrate sexual violence.
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But the design of the study
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didn't allow for definitive
causal conclusions.
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And there were other studies
that did not find
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that adolescent pornography use
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was associated with certain
negative outcomes.
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Even though there were other studies
that did find that.
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But as I spoke to other experts,
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I felt tremendous pressure
to pick a side about pornography.
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Join one team or the other.
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I was even told that
it was weak-minded of me
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not to be able to pick out the one
correct answer about pornography.
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And it was complicated,
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because there is an industry
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that is capitalizing
off of audience's fascination
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with seeing women, in particular,
not just having sex,
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but being chocked, gagged, slapped,
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spit upon, ejaculated upon,
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called degrading names
over and over during sex,
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and not always clearly with their consent.
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Most people would agree
that we have a serious problem
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with misogyny, sexual violence
and rape in this country,
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and pornography probably
isn't helping with any of that.
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And a critically important
problem to me was that
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for more than a century,
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the anti-pornography position
had been used as a pretext
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for discriminating
against gays and lesbians
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or people who have kinks or have fetishes.
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So I could see why, on the one hand,
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we might be very worried about
the messages that pornography is sending,
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and on the other hand,
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why we might be really worried
about going overboard indicting it.
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For the next two years,
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I looked into every scary,
horrifying claim that I could find
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about the average age
at which people first see pornography,
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or what it does to their brains
or their sexuality.
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Here's what I have to report back.
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The free, online mainstream pornography,
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that's the kind that teenagers
are most likely to see,
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is a completely terrible form
of sex education.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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But that's not what it was intended for.
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And it probably is not instantly
poisoning their minds
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or turning them into compulsive users,
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the way that some ideologues
would have you believe.
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It's a rare person who doesn't see
some pornography in their youth.
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By the time they're 18 years old,
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93 percent of first year college males
and 62 percent of females
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have seen pornography at least once.
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And though people like to say
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that the internet has made
pornography ubiquitous,
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or basically guarantees
that any young child
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who's handed a smart phone
is definitely going to see pornography,
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data don't really support that.
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A nationally representative study
found that in the year 2000
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16 percent of 10 to 13-year-old youth
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reported that they'd seen
pornography in the past year.
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And by 2010, that figure had increased.
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But only to 30 percent.
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So it wasn't everybody.
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Our problems with adolescents
and sexual violence perpetration
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is not only because of pornography.
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In fact, a recent study
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found that adolescents are more likely
to see sexualized images
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in other kinds of media
besides pornography.
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Think about all those
sexualized video games,
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or TV shows or music videos.
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And it could be exposure
to a steady stream of violent media
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that instead of or in addition to
the sexualized images
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is causing our problems.
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By focusing on the potential harms
of pornography alone,
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we may be distracting ourselves
from bigger issues.
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Or missing root causes
of dating and sexual violence,
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which are the true public health crises.
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That said, even my own research
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demonstrates that adolescents
are turning to pornography
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for education and information about sex.
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And that's because they can't find
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reliable and factual
information elsewhere.
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Less than 50 percent of the states
in the United States
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require that sex education
be taught in schools,
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including how to prevent coerced sex.
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And less than half of those states
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require that the information presented
be medically accurate.
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So in that Boston after-school program,
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those kids really wanted
to talk about sex,
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and they really wanted to talk
about pornography.
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And they wanted to talk about those things
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a whole lot more than they wanted
to talk about dating or sexual violence.
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So we realized,
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we could cover all of the same topics
that we might normally talk about
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under the guise of healthy
relationships education,
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like, what's a definition
of sexual consent?
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Or, how do you know
if you're hurting somebody during sex?
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Or what are healthy boundaries to have
when you're flirting?
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All of these same things we could discuss
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by using pornography
as the jumping-off point
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for our conversation.
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It's sort of like when adults
give kids a desert like brownies,
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but they secretly baked a zucchini
or something healthy inside of it.
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(Laughter)
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We could talk to the kids
about the healthy stuff,
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the stuff that's good for you,
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but hide it inside a conversation
that was about something
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that they thought
they wanted to be talking about.
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We also discovered something
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that we didn't necessarily
set out to find,
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which is that there's a fantastic way
to have a conversation with teenagers
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about pornography.
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And that is,
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keep the conversation true to science.
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Admit what we know and what we don't know
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about the impact of pornography.
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Talk about where there are mixed results
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or where there are weaknesses
in the studies that have been conducted.
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Incite the adolescents to become
critical consumers
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of the research literature on pornography,
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as well as the pornography itself.
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That really fits
with adolescent development.
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Adolescents like to question things
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and they like to be invited
to think for themselves.
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And we realized by starting to experiment,
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teaching some classes in consent,
respect and pornography,
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that trying to scare adolescents
into a particular point of view
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or jam a one-sided argument
down their throat about pornography
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not only probably does not work,
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but really doesn't model
the kind of respectful,
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consensual behavior
that we want them to learn.
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So our approach, what we call
pornography literacy,
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is about presenting the truth
about pornography
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to the best of our knowledge,
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given that there is
an ever-changing evidence base.
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When people hear that we teach
a nine-session, 18-hour class
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in pornography literacy to teenagers,
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I think that they either think
that we're sitting kids down
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and trying to show them
how to watch pornography,
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which is not what we do,
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or that we're part of
an anti-pornography activist group
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that's trying to convince them
that if they ever saw pornography,
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it would be the number one
worst thing for their health ever.
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And that's not it, either.
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Our secret ingredient
is that we're non-judgmental.
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We don't think that youth
should be watching pornography.
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But, above all, we want them
to become critical thinkers
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if and when they do see it.
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And we've learned,
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from the number of requests
for our curriculum and our training,
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from across the US and beyond,
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that there are a lot of parents
and a lot of teachers
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who really do want to be having
these more nuanced
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and realistic conversations
with teenagers about pornography.
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We've had requests from Utah to Vermont,
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to Alabama, to Hawaii.
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So in that after-school program,
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what I saw, is that from the minute
we mentioned the word pornography,
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those kids were ready to jump in
to a back-and-forth
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about what they did
and didn't want to see in pornography,
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and what they did
and didn't want to do during sex.
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And what was degrading to women
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or unfair to men or racist, all of it.
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And they made some
really sophisticated points.
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Exactly the kinds of things that
we would want them to be talking about
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as violence prevention activists.
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And as teachers, we might leave
the class one day and think,
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"It is really sad that there's
that one boy in our class
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who thinks that all women
have orgasms from anal sex."
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And we might leave class
the next week and think,
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"I'm really glad that there's
that one kid in our class who's gay,
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who said that seeing his sexuality
represented in pornography
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saved his life."
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Or, "There's that one girl in our class
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who said that she's feeling
a lot better about her body,
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because she saw someone shaped like her
as the object of desire
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in some tame pornography."
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So this is where I find myself
as a violence prevention activist.
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I find myself talking about
and researching pornography.
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And though it would be easier
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if things in life were all
one way or the other,
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what I've found in my conversations
with teenagers about pornography
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is that they remain engaged
in these conversations
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because we allow them to grapple
with the complexities.
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And because we're honest
about the science.
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These adolescents may not be adults yet,
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but they are living in an adult world.
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And they're ready for adult conversations.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)