Gen Online Needs Porn Literacy

It was March Madness, and I was at Madison Square Garden with a friend. Walking to concessions, I was stopped by a group of ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-old boys, all screaming my name and asking for a photo.

They knew me from my years as an adult film star.

I asked them, “How do you know who I am? Do you click the box that says you’re eighteen when you’re really...” Before I could finish, they shouted their ages back at me: eleven, twelve.

It was mortifying. Standing there surrounded by kids who had no business knowing who I was, the only direction I could take it was a pointed conversation about consent. “What happened in those scenes will probably never happen for you. Don’t ask a girl. And most importantly, don’t force a girl.”

That moment made something painfully clear. For a lot of gen online, pornography has become the earliest reference point for sex. And knowing that fact is very different from understanding what it means.

It’s a Performance

Most people understand that an action movie is choreographed. No one watches a car chase expecting it to look like their commute. We recognize the rehearsal, the stunt doubles, the editing.

Sex deserves that same context. Most people who watch adult content have no idea how much of what they’re seeing was engineered to look effortless.

Adult performers are professionals, like actors and stunt performers. Their work is built to entertain, not to serve as a blueprint for healthy intimacy. Many of the most-watched scenes get popular precisely because they’re extraordinary, not because they reflect what most people experience. Often, the scenes pushing the furthest boundaries pay the most, because fewer performers are willing or able to do them.

For a young viewer with no other reference point, those scenes become the unintended blueprint for what sex is supposed to look like. That gap between entertainment and reality is the whole problem.

Understanding, Not Shaming

Pornography is filmed, edited, and packaged as fantasy. It was never meant to be an education in consent, communication, emotional intimacy, or realistic expectations.

Porn literacy isn’t about shaming adult content. It’s about understanding it: recognizing what it is, what it isn’t, and why the difference matters. The same way we learn to separate a movie from real life, we can learn to separate performance from genuine intimacy.

That includes understanding the industry itself, from performer safety to consent and testing protocols. That context helps people avoid mistaking a performance for an accurate picture of everyday relationships or sexual health.

None of this is about pretending adult content doesn’t exist. It’s about giving people the tools to view it critically, with a clearer eye for the difference between fantasy and reality. That matters more than ever, because the algorithm deciding what a first-time viewer sees doesn’t care about any of that context at all.

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For more advice on helping young people build healthier relationships in a digital world, you can find gen online on Amazon.

Lisa Ann is a retired adult film star, talent agent, director, producer, and radio host, appearing in more than five hundred adult movies and producing and directing countless others in her twenty-year career. A celebrity in the adult entertainment industry, she shot to mainstream fame during the 2008 presidential election with her porn parody of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Lisa Ann retired from the adult film industry in December of 2014 to begin a new career talking fantasy sports and sports betting.