Fanfiction, Porn, and Other Forms of Sex-Ed

Let’s talk about sex-ed.

Or rather, let’s talk about my own personal experience with sex-ed. (Who knows? Maybe we’ve got something in common.)

My school district didn’t offer students a genuine, in depth sex-ed course until high school health class. Here’s the funny thing–we had health classes through most of middle school too, but I only remember sex being brought up vaguely in passing, if at all. In those health classes, we mostly talked about drugs. At age 13, I knew a LOT about the dangers of LSD.

My high school’s stance on sex-ed wasn’t “Abstinence Only,” it was “Absinence Preferred.” I know what you’re thinking: what the hell does that mean? Mostly, it meant that they tried to dissuade us from having sex as much as possible, while also begrudgingly telling us what dental dams were and how to use them. 

There was a big focus on essentially trying to gross us into not having sex. We all had to make brochures about different STDs–brochures that required at least three to four close-up pictures of the assorted diseases’ effects. They also had us watch The Miracle of Life. I’ll never forget my teacher gleefully rewinding and replaying the scene of the baby crowning over and over again as my class shrieked in teenage horror.

My sex-ed class taught me to practice safe sex. That’s essentially all it taught me. Where did I actually learn about sex?

The internet.

I’ve been on the internet since I was in middle school. My first real exposure to sexual content (besides the occasional, quickly fast-forwarded movie sex scene) came when I was about 11, searching Google images for pictures of my favorite cartoon characters. I was scrolling, and suddenly, whoops! That’s sex. 

I’d argue that most people my age had similar experiences as preteens on the internet, stumbling upon content we probably shouldn’t have. Consequences of growing up online, I suppose.

During those tender, formative years on the internet, most of the sexual content I stumbled upon came in the form of fanfiction. Now, there’s a big stereotype that all fanfiction is pornographic–this isn’t remotely true. However, fanfiction that is pornographic is easy to find and hard to avoid, even when you’re a kid on the internet. 

So anyway, I wound up running into it a lot. And, for better or for worse, curiosity has always been known to get the better of me, so–well, you get the gist.

At age 13, I genuinely thought I had a wealth of sexual knowledge, all stemming from fanfiction, urban dictionary, and wikipedia. That’s hilarious, I know, but what’s even funnier is that compared to most of my friends, I actually did know a lot. 

Still, that’s not saying much. Because who was writing the content I was reading? I have no clue, honestly, but they probably weren’t sexual educators in any capacity. Nothing they wrote actually had to be accurate or realistic, because it was erotic fanfiction. Emphasis on fiction.

I’ve written about erotica before, in my article on the trainwreck of a movie that is 365 Days. I said it once and I’ll say it again: erotica is all about fantasy, about heightened, romanticized versions of sex. This is especially true of written erotica. 

There’s nothing wrong with fantasy, but I think we run into some really sticky territory when people pretend that all erotica is harmless just because it’s fictional. Lots of erotic fanfiction is fairly innocuous, but there’s also a LOT of it that is violent, unhealthy, and frankly disturbing. (Am I saying that I think content like this shouldn’t exist? That’s a conversation for another article.) 

What I know is that erotic fanfiction is incredibly accessible for young people to get their hands on. And if someone without any prior knowledge of sex or relationships only has fanfiction as a jumping off point for sexual education, they can wind up soaking in some truly dangerous ideas about boundaries and consent. 

Young people who receive most of their early sexual knowledge from pornography run into very similar problems. Just because porn involves video of two people having sex, doesn’t mean it’s anything like the actual thing. So much of porn is, to a certain degree, extreme. Going into real-life sexual encounters thinking it’s going to go down exactly like it does in porn is how we wind up with young men who think it’s cool to randomly start choking their partners without bothering to ask for consent.

The thing about porn and erotica is that it isn’t real. The purpose of both forms of media is to entertain and to titillate, not to educate. That’s not to say that you can’t learn anything from porn or erotica! I like to think you can learn something from almost anything. But using that as your main frame of reference for understanding sex and relationships? Yikes. That’s a big recipe for disaster, if I’ve ever heard one. 

Unfortunately, though, these things will continue to be young people’s main entrees into sexual education until we start actually making a solid effort to teach them about sex. The bare bones, “WEAR A CONDOM OR ELSE!!!” method of sexual education simply isn’t cutting it anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time. We need to be having discussions with young people about consent, boundaries, and the intricacies of romantic and sexual relationships. 

Not informing young people about sex doesn’t stop them from being curious about it, and it certainly doesn’t stop them from having it. If schools and parents refuse to talk to kids about sex, they’ll just go looking for answers elsewhere–and you might not like where you wind up finding them.