It’s Family ‘Sex Scenes’ Night

In her Los Angeles mom circle, Joanna Schroeder is known as the unshockable one. A parenting writer and media critic, Schroeder is writing a book about raising teenage boys, so, perhaps unsurprisingly, her friends often ask her for parenting advice. Recently, one called with a sensitive question: “How do I explain to my 13-year-old son how sex actually happens?” The mother had managed to steer her son away from porn, but he was still in the dark about some basics — not condom use or consent, but choreography. “Spark. Romance. He’s interested in how people go from, like, kissing to actually putting a penis in a vagina,” she explained.

“There’s so much sexy content out there,” Schroeder told her friend. “What if we just found some clips? And we could say, ‘Hey, if you’re curious, you know, you could watch this.’”

The pair compiled a NSFW playlist anchored by the carriage scene from Bridgerton in which Penelope Featherington and Colin Bridgerton finally begin to consummate their long-smoldering love; the scene includes enthusiastic ongoing consent, the implication of digital penetration, lustful kissing, female orgasm, caring “cleanup,” and loads of eye contact. Plus, Schroeder says, “It’s a hot scene that, like, went viral on TikTok.”

Schroeder says the whole time they were looking up smut on behalf of a 13-year-old boy, she and her mom friend were asking each other, “Is this weird? Are we being weird?” But, it turns out, their idea wasn’t even original. Sex educators I spoke with say parents today need to provide counterprogramming for their kids because the mainstream porn that teens stumble on, in addition to being full of racist stereotypes and short on body diversity, is now dominated by violent BDSM. And teenagers are mimicking what they see.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the choking is the worst part. Debby Herbenick, who teaches sexuality at the college level and leads national surveys of sexual behavior, says that in her study of college students at a large midwestern university, two-thirds of women had had their airway restricted by a sex partner and 40 percent of those women experienced it before the age of 17. When a music video or a reality dating show references spanking or calling someone a slut or a whore during sex, “to a 12- or 14-year-old, it’s not edgy. It’s just how you have sex,” says Herbenick. “We have to make it really explicit for them that choking and slapping and smothering and knife play and rape play are actually not vanilla. You could hurt somebody or scare them.”

Even series known for positive portrayals of sex don’t always get the details right — and can provide their own teachable moments. Puberty educator and mom of four Vanessa Kroll Bennett, co-author of the book This Is So Awkward, wants her kids not only to see depictions of nonviolent, loving sex, but also to fully grasp sexual pleasure. Watching alongside them is a way to make sure they understand what they’re seeing. She used Bridgerton as a teaching tool with her 13-year-old daughter, pausing the show during season one, episode six, when Daphne Bridgerton loses her virginity. “With a single thrust, she seemingly orgasms. I looked at my daughter and asked her, ‘What didn’t he find?’” recalls Bennett. The girl responded, “Her clitoris!,” which is how you know this was not their first conversation on the topic.

Taking a cue from Bennett and Schroeder, my husband and I started watching Bridgerton — for the sake of the children, of course. Our eighth-grader mocked us mercilessly and refused to stay in the room while it was on, but they did, I think, overhear us talking about how we liked that Lady Bridgerton encourages her children to find passionate love matches.

Christopher Pepper, a sexual-health educator in the Bay Area and Schroeder’s co-author, told me about watching Never Have I Ever with his son. In the final episode of season three, the main character, Devi, loses her virginity to her friend and academic rival — a scene Pepper hopes made an impression. “There’s a lot of negotiation involved in the scene instead of two people getting swept up in the moment,” he says. His son’s reaction? “At first, he was like, ‘I can’t believe they did that!’” recalls Pepper. But later, he says, “It helped him think about why people might want to have sex and that it’s a serious decision.”

That said, not everyone I interviewed suggested watching these scenes with your kids. Heather Corinna, founder of the sex-education site Scarleteen, tells me cis boys “generally don’t want to get a boner with their parents.” Corinna says making recommendations is preferable to hosting a family watch party.

Other series and movies that sex educators suggested for teens: the “How to Have an Orgasm” episode of the animated series Big Mouth, in which the female “hormone monster” shows Jessi, one of the girls, how to masturbate with a vibrating toothbrush, leading to her first orgasm; Ted Lasso, season one, episode two, in which a woman masturbates to a video of her boyfriend crying, then explains she was turned on by his vulnerability; and the 2008 movie Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. In the film’s most pivotal scene, a teenage Kat Dennings beckons Michael Cera, a pitch-perfect incarnation of teen-boy awkwardness, toward a brown leather couch, and as the camera pans up, you hear them whispering, kissing, and fumbling with buttons, followed by a realistic-sounding female climax.

Mainstream series and films don’t show everything, of course. And in cases when teenagers are already watching violent porn, some educators and parents are convinced they need more explicit substitutes to kick out or counteract the other messages they’re picking up.

Karen Rayne, a sex educator in Texas with two decades of experience, says that at least five times during her career, boys’ parents have reached out to say they had caught their sons with distasteful porn. They then asked her, Is there any porn that is more appropriate for teenagers? Perhaps featuring teenage performers?

“When I point out to them what they’re asking for, they’re usually horrified,” Rayne says. “It’s been a real bitch to be like, ‘No, you can’t show your son child pornography.’” Pepper adds a warning: “Any adult showing sexually explicit materials to young people has some legal liability.” He reminds parents of this when similar requests come his way, underscoring that age-appropriate mainstream TV and movies are the way to go.

But some sex educators think differently. A few told me about Make Love Not Porn, a pornography video-sharing platform where every video, post and comment is prescreened and revenue is shared 50-50 with creators. “It’s ethical, wonderful, consent-driven, and really varied,” says Andrea Lee, a sexual-health educator in Canada who works with people with developmental disabilities. “Everything has been vetted and is not going to be extremely upsetting.” She has recommended the site to high-school teachers she works with and to teens and their parents.

The site’s founder, Cindy Gallop, started Make Love Not Porn with public education in mind. The 60-something British entrepreneur says that while sleeping with younger men, which she generally prefers, she kept encountering unpleasant behaviors that were clearly derived from hardcore porn. These included ejaculating on the face, very little attention to the clitoris, spitting on the vulva, and using words like bitch and whore. She set out to present an alternative view of sex as it ideally unfolds in real relationships — intimate, loving, fumbling, and even silly, with plenty of pubic hair, cunnilingus, dad bods, body noises, and authentic female orgasms.

Although the site, like all porn, is legally restricted to people 18 and over, Gallop showed me messages from parents over the years who wanted to buy gift subscriptions for their teenagers as an alternative to what they were already watching. I spoke to one of them, a Muslim single mom of two boys who were 12 and 16 when she contacted Make Love Not Porn. “I’m quite pragmatic,” she said. “I thought, It’s inevitable they will come across it. And while, for religious reasons, I didn’t want them exposed to pornography, surely if they’re going to, it would be better for them to have a healthy exposure to real sex.” For these occasions, Make Love Not Porn has curated a “soft onboarding list” of videos that are particularly sweet, loving, and romantic. But the woman’s sons turned her down. “One of the boys was like, ‘This is really weird. I don’t want to be speaking to my mother about this,’” she told me.

Gallop has plans to launch Make Love Not Porn Academy, a separate site intended entirely for those under 18, which will aggregate vetted sex-education resources — videos, articles, books — from sources like Amaze.org, Scarleteen, and Bish, a U.K. site. All the content will be PG-13, for now.

Her ultimate goal is to cleanse the world’s search results. “I have a friend whose 8-year-old son wanted to learn about sex in a child-appropriate way, so he sweetly, innocently googled ‘sex for children,’” she says. “You can imagine what came back. He was utterly traumatized.”

But until that cleansing happens, parents will have make do with Bridgerton. Schroeder’s mom friend ultimately sent her son a link to the carriage scene with the message “I don’t watch this show, but a friend who I trust says that it’s a really good representation of courtship and romance and the mechanics.” Later, she and her son had the following conversation:

“Oh, did you watch that? What did you think?”
“It’s good! Interesting.”
“You have any questions?”
“No.”
“Okay!”

The mom told me she felt proud of this brief but significant chat. She didn’t want to prod her son to overshare, but the conversation still had an impact: “He just knows I genuinely am here and open,” she says.