Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, fascinating. So let's talk about the rest of the internet outside the social media, because Gen Z is the first generation that has always known a world where porn and nudes are readily available online in just a few clicks. And I'm curious, how has that impacted them?
Carter Sherman: What's really interesting about porn is when I was going into this book, I thought I would find a diverse array of beliefs about it. I thought that people on the right would be more opposed to it, that people on the left might feel a little bit more warmly towards it. I thought that everybody would watch it, which was generally true, but I instead found that in general, no matter person's political background, they tended to feel like porn was really bad for them, that it had warped their sexuality in some way. Three quarters of Americans have seen porn by the time they hit 18. The thing is that the science on porn is incredibly muddy. It's very hard to find a control group, find people who have not seen porn, so you can't really do the best science on this, and so much of the research that we do have on porn is riddled with biases and baked in beliefs about what constitutes a degrading act or what constitutes rough sex. So what I found among young people is that they had what sociologists call a, quote unquote, "deep story,” and a deep story is this belief about something that feels true, and this belief can be more powerful than the facts. And the deep story for young people is that porn was bad for them and that it had in particular normalized, quote unquote, "rough sex,” and in particular, normalized choking. If you are under 40, you are almost twice as likely to have been choked during sex than someone who is over 40, and a majority of young people have not been asked before they were choked on every occasion or on some occasions. So for me, I think that if you enjoy choking, if you enjoy rough sex, more power to you, but I want you to be doing it safely and consensually and not just treat it like this is another average act you don't have to ask consent for.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. It feels like with so much of this, it's less about the thing itself than our, or their I guess, relationship with that thing.
Carter Sherman: Oh, yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: It feels like there's a lot of shame surrounding it or sadness or it's detracting from people's lives in some way, then that's the issue, versus if they just had this relationship with porn that felt additive and totally fine, we wouldn't be talking about this.
Carter Sherman: Yeah. I think the thing that porn does do is it portrays pleasure, right? It shows what it's like to give and receive sexual pleasure, and that pleasure might not be reflective of a lot of people's real life preferences, but we have in this country a real dearth of comprehensive sex education. Since 2000, the federal government has poured more than $2 billion into abstinence only sex education, and that sex education just can't account for porn, it can't account for pleasure because it's so narrow-minded and only focuses on telling people, "Oh, if you have sex, you will get pregnant and die," in the words of Coach Carr from Mean Girls. And so young people turn to porn because they want to know what pleasure looks like, and this seems to be the only way that they can find out about it.