What porn has taught Gen Z about sex (and what it got wrong)

According to a Common Sense Media national survey, the average age at which a child first encounters pornography is 12. Not 16, not 18... 12. And in the absence of meaningful sex education in most schools, what they see often becomes their primary reference point for what sex is supposed to look like, feel like, and mean. That's worth sitting with for a moment.

This isn't a morality piece about whether porn is good or bad. It's more complicated than that. Instead, this is an honest look at the gap between the sex younger generations have been shown and the sex that's actually worth having.

Porn as accidental sex ed

According to a 2015 study, 60% of school and university students watch porn to learn about sex. And as Vice reported, Australian researchers have called porn “our most prominent sex educator”. The problem isn't that young people are curious; it always has been, and always will be. The problem is that in the absence of comprehensive sex education, people use porn to learn about sex: What sex looks like, who gets to have it, and what it means to be "sexy". And porn, whatever else it is, is a performance industry built on fantasy, not instruction. The result is a generation that often came to real sex already carrying a script. And that script has some significant plot holes.

What the script gets wrong

Mainstream porn has a tendency to present a very specific version of sex, one where desire is instant, bodies are uniform, and women's pleasure is largely incidental to the narrative. In a UK study of young people, only 39% of girls believed the porn they'd seen was "realistic," compared to 53% of boys. And the majority of respondents, 87% of boys and 77% of girls, said watching porn didn't help them understand consent.

That gap between what's shown and what's real has consequences. In one survey of Gen Z, 49% of all respondents, and 60% of daily viewers, said porn had shaped their expectations of sex. Some of those expectations were about performance. Some were about bodies. And some were about what sex is even supposed to feel like. One woman surveyed said, “I still play up to trying to act like a pornstar.” Another said it made her “expect rougher sex”.

For women in particular, this plays out in a specific and uncomfortable way. Journalist Carter Sherman, whose reporting at The Guardian led to her book on Gen Z and sex, found something striking in her interviews: Young people across the political spectrum felt that porn had warped them sexually and normalised “rough sex” in such a way that they felt their sex lives had been transformed forever. If you are under 40, you are statistically almost twice as likely to have been choked during sex than someone over 40. A significant number of people say they were not asked first.

The double standard built into the script

There's a gendered dimension to all of this that rarely gets discussed plainly. Women are expected to perform like porn stars during sex, while men face no equivalent standard. This is what happens when an entire generation absorbs a version of sex where women exist to satisfy and men exist to be satisfied. This is what happens when an entire generation absorbs a version of sex where women exist to satisfy and men exist to be satisfied.

Promoting pleasure is rarely a component of sexual health education. Instead, teens often supplement their sexual miseducation with porn, which fills the knowledge gaps with sometimes impractical, and at times violent, sexual expectations. When porn becomes the default sex educator, critical lessons about boundaries and the right to say no simply never arrive.

The “more porn, less sex” paradox

Here’s the strange twist in the story: Gen Z is having sex later and less than past generations, with a significant and growing share of young adults never having had sex at all – a number that has roughly doubled over the past decade.

The generation with the most access to sexual content in human history is, in fact, having less of it than any generation before them.

Part of this is COVID-19. Part of it is economic stress and the anxiety of the current political moment. But part of it, researchers and young people themselves suggest, is that porn has raised the stakes of real-life sex to a point where it feels daunting. The performance expectations are high, the body standards are impossible, and the emotional texture of real intimacy, the awkwardness, the humour, the tenderness, all the things that make real sex actually good, is largely absent from the genre.

So what do we do with this?

The answer isn't to pretend porn doesn't exist or to moralize about it. Sex educators increasingly agree that comprehensive sex education needs to go further in teaching young people about consent, pleasure, and respectful relationships, precisely because the alternative is leaving a vacuum that porn will fill.

But here's the thing that stays with you once you start pulling on this unravelling thread. Most of us didn't realise we'd been taught anything. The lessons arrived before we had the language or the experience to interrogate them (again, age 12!). And some of those lessons, about whose pleasure matters, about what a body should look like, about what you're supposed to want and how loudly you're supposed to want it, took hold in a way that real relationships have had to work against ever since.