Kids today are taking more sexual cues from Internet porn, GQ reports. Parents are frightened because their teenagers are gang-banging and ejaculating on each others’ faces. GQ is disappointed because its aged readership can’t get in on the fun. Personally, I’m pretty freaked out that “Travis and Cody, typical 21-year-old college students in Florida,” find female pubic hair “disgusting.” But more than pornography’s peculiar sexual obsessions—-group sex, mandatory facials, and “porn-star trim” vaginas—-I’m worried about what mainstream Internet porn almost never features: scenes of consent.
Recently, the problem of consent arose in two porn-inspired real-life incidents. In one, a teenage girl claims she was coerced into having drunken videotaped group sex with four men in her dorm. In another, a teenage girl apparently consented to drunken videotaped group sex with four men in her dorm, then instantly regretted it. Scenarios where four men have sex with one woman carry obvious challenges for establishing consent. Each sex partner must establish consent with every other partner. Each sex partner must be able to listen to every other partner to establish that each new sex act is OK. And each sex partner must realize that a group power dynamic can be a seriously coercive sexual environment for everyone involved, and discuss the act accordingly.
I don’t blame porn for these incidents, but I do think that if enthusiastic, informed, and sober consent were featured in pornography to the extent that gang-bangs are, it might help teenagers clear up consent issues before sex begins—-not in the press, through the student judicial process, or in the courtroom.
But how do we make consent porn-ready? Let’s start at the beginning: Punny consent porn titles! Here are mine:
ID Check XVIII: Girls Your Own Age
The Mile High Club: Consent From Above
Consenting Adults II: Double Checking
Doggy Style: Consensual Seduction
Safe Word III: When “No” Doesn’t Have to Mean “No”
Totally and Completely Legal
Night of Refusal: No Anal Sex This Time, But Maybe Next Week
Sex, Extended Consultation Over Each Party’s Feelings, and Videotape
Backseat Bangin’: The Honda Accord
Suggestions?