Why Can’t Johnny Read Porn? "Porn literacy" aims to make sure that schools are exposing kids to the broadest range of sexualized matter.

The Left uses several mechanisms to sexualize children. Public libraries, public schools, and book retailers must feature gender-bending books for ever-younger children, all with the aim of mainstreaming the fringes. Pride Month in June, 2022 featured drag shows aplenty, where young children danced with men dressed as sexualized women or put dollar bills in the pasties of strippers. Activists and academics are hard at work redefining pedophiles as “Minor Attracted Persons” in order to reduce the stigma associated with the desire to have sex with children.

Much work must be done before these practices become tolerated. Academics invent and defend new practices in seemingly obscure journals. More academics take notice. Then those practices are translated into pedagogy in education schools. After this, it is just a matter of time until they make their way into the classroom or into a library or bandshell in a city near you.

James Lindsay tells how drag went from the fringes to the mainstream, using an academic study by Harper Keenan and the venerable “Lil Mis Hot Mess” called “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood” (published in Curriculum Inquiry). Introducing drag into schools and library story times, argue Keenan and Hot Mess, will “unsettle binary gender expectations among children.” The suddenly ubiquitous Drag Queen Story Hour creates “space for young children and families to immerse themselves in LGBT-themed stories” and “a pathway into the imaginative, messy, and rule-breaking aspects of drag for children without necessarily watering down queer cultures.”

Among the next mechanisms to be normalized is porn literacy. Planned Parenthood and its government partners are already promoting porn literacy to school trainers and public health officials, as we have shown in a recent report. It is late in the game already, though few people even know what porn literacy is.

As with drag, academic articles show what is at stake for porn literacy. Kath Albury’s 2014 “Porn and Sex Education, Porn as Sex Education,” published in Porn Studies, is among the most widely cited porn literacy articles. When Lindsay read “Drag Pedagogy,” it had only four citations; Albury’s classic has already been cited 116 times.