Tips for talking with young people about porn
PORN SHOULDN’T BE A SEX MANUAL: HERE’S WHY
26.08.25
We live in a world where access to pornography is easier, faster, and more unregulated than ever. With just a few taps, young people are exposed to a flood of explicit content that shapes how they think sex should look and feel, often before they’ve even begun formal sex education.
At Everyone’s Invited and Sex in Space, this issue comes up time and time again in our work. Everyone’s Invited is a charity working to expose and eradicate rape culture with empathy, compassion and understanding. Everyone’s Invited seeks to spark a conversation about rape culture by providing a safe space on its website where survivors can share their testimonies. Through its Education Programme it reaches students in public and private schools to deliver preventative healthy relationships education. Sex in Space is a not-for-profit sex education project started in New Zealand, and now has roots in the UK. They are cultural activists, looking to open spaces to help reduce stigma, and create content to fill important education gaps - they believe that sexual knowledge is power and makes for healthier futures, and their goal is to make that knowledge accessible to all.
From classrooms to conversations with parents, both our organisations have seen how porn becomes a default reference point for sex, relationships, and even identity.
The problem isn’t just that porn is accessible. It’s the type of content they’re exposed to - often violent, degrading, and rooted in misogyny. It promotes a version of sex that centres male pleasure and sidelines consent and healthy communication, presenting a very narrow and unrealistic image of intimacy.
When porn becomes a stand-in for education, it distorts the basics, like mutual respect, consent, and pleasure, replacing them with scripts that celebrate dominance, force, and objectification. This early exposure is changing the way young people understand intimacy. It’s reinforcing harmful gender roles, encouraging aggression, and creating expectations that have very real impacts in real-life relationships. Porn is fundamentally shaping what young people believe they are supposed to do in sex.
Why does that matter?
The real-world consequences of this are playing out in classrooms, workplaces, and communities across the world. One testimony from the Everyone’s Invited safe space describes a girl being asked to have a threesome by two boys when she was 6. Such testimonies are a stark illustration of how early exposure to porn is influencing behaviour before children have the maturity or context to critically process what they’re seeing.
Harmful messaging about dominance and violence are influencing how young people approach relationships. We're hearing more and more about situations where young people are mimicking what they've seen in porn without understanding boundaries, communication, or care. The Children’s Crime Commissioner found that not only are children as young as nine years old watching pornography, but in one particular case a 12 year old girl was strangled during her first kiss because her boyfriend had seen choking performed in porn and thought it was normal.
Problematic messaging is translating into problematic practices. Non-consensual sex and sexual violence, mostly aimed at women, shape sexual expectations and actions in relationships, as does the exclusive focus on male pleasure. Pornography is therefore setting expectations that are not just unrealistic, they’re unsafe.
What exactly is different about sex in real life?
The sex you see depicted in porn is often very different from the kind of sex you might see in real life. An example of this is the fact that there aren’t a lot of safe sex practices shown in porn videos - one study found that only 3% of videos that showed penetrative sex also showed condom use. This can communicate some pretty harmful ideas to viewers about what kinds of things are desirable, or not desirable during sex. It also doesn’t give young people an understanding of how to incorporate safe sex practices into their sexual experiences - things like how to ask someone if they have a condom, or how they can include the act of putting one on in an arousing or sexy way.
Sex without consent is also a huge theme in porn. One piece of research found that only one in three teens had seen porn that included someone asking for consent before engaging in sexual activity. That means that two thirds of teens haven’t witnessed this playing out on screen – and this can communicate some pretty problematic messages about what counts as consent, and when consent is even needed. In the same study, more than half of respondents had seen porn that seemed to show rape, choking or someone in pain. It’s likely this isn’t the message you want your kids to be receiving about what sex should be like.
What can we do?
Tackling this issue means more than just regulating online content, it means changing the conversation entirely. We need to be starting these conversations much earlier. Before young people turn to porn for answers, we need to be having real, age-appropriate conversations about sex, consent and relationships. These learnings must be woven into how we talk about bodies, emotions, and connection from the very beginning.
Just as importantly, we need to embed media literacy into how we teach. Young people are growing up in a world where their online and offline lives are completely intertwined. If porn is going to be part of their reality, we need to equip them to make sense of it - to ask questions, recognise performance for what it is, and challenge the narrow, often harmful ideas it promotes.
This isn’t about being alarmist, it’s about being realistic. If we don’t give young people the tools to make sense of what they’re seeing, we leave a dangerous silence for porn to fill.
And of course, it’s not just young people who are affected by this - adults are navigating it too.
How can adults navigate these topics?
Adults are having to navigate increasingly difficult conversations with young people - and they’ve often not been given the tools that they might need to feel prepared for this.
““I had a child in year 3 who said to his friend ‘I want to have sex with your mother and then kill her’. His justification was that if he fancied the mum he then would have to kill her so that no one would find out. ”
Comments like these are never going to be easy to hear, and it can be really hard to know how to respond in the moment. Vanessa Hamilton, a sexuality educator from Australia, has a really great framework for how to respond to tricky questions or comments that can be useful in situations like these. It’s called ‘PINK’ - and it stands for Pause, Inhale, Next to, Kindness.
It might look something like this:
Pause: take a moment to pause and collect yourself.
Inhale: take a deep breath - this stops you from reacting and allows you a bit of time to collect your thoughts before you respond.
Next to: be near the young person, perhaps get on their level, and give them your full attention.
Kindness: think of a kind word you can say to them (and to yourselves). It doesn’t have to be long, or complicated, it can be something as simple as “I’m really glad you shared that with me, because that means I can help you with it.”
Techniques like this are really useful because it can buy you a bit of time before you respond when a young person says or asks something that you might not be prepared for, or that feels a bit confronting. Research shows that it’s key for young people that they don’t feel shamed or judged when having conversations like these, and using a framework like PINK can help you respond in a way that will help make your kids feel safe to keep sharing with you in the future.
What are some tips for talking with young people about the problem with using porn as a manual for sex?
1. Break it down into lots of smaller conversations – rather than one big talk. Use pop culture moments, scenes from reality TV, song lyrics you hear on the radio - it’s about using the things your children are engaging with as jumping off points to get these conversations started.
The team at Everyone’s Invited met a dad after a session at a school who told us he lets his children watch Love Island on the condition that afterwards they talk about it and have a conversation about some of the things they’ve seen. Using those moments as conversation starters and education tools can be really helpful.
2. Make the most of useful analogies that are easy to get. For example, young people don’t learn to drive by watching ‘The Fast and Furious’ - just as you wouldn’t learn how to have sex from watching porn. Similarly, the way that some of the characters drive in ‘The Fast and Furious’ series isn’t how you would expect to see people actually driving on the road - there’s special effects, stunt drivers and a lot of planning that goes into creating the kind of performance you see in the film. The same goes for porn - it’s a carefully planned and curated performance, and not a good representation of what sex in real life is like. Analogies like these can be really helpful to help young people understand that porn is not something that should be used as a guide to sex.
3. Ask open ended questions to help young people think critically about what they might see online. You might want to consider questions like,
“Whose pleasure is the focus in porn?”
“How do you think bodies might be altered to look a certain way in porn?”
“What safe sex practices do you think might be missing from porn?”
“What do you think about how pornography portrays men and women?”
The Line also has some great conversation starters if you're looking for more jumping off points.
These are just a few tips to help you get started. There are loads of great resources online to help you build up your skills and feel more confident broaching this conversation with your kids. The most important thing is that you’re stepping in to help educate your kids before porn does. Help them develop the toolkit they need to navigate the content they’ll see online, so that they can approach sex, consent and relationships with sex positive healthy values, rather than the ideas porn will try to make seem normal.
Written by Everyone’s Invited and Sex in Space.
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