TEDxVienna: Is the Porn Brain our New Sex Educator?

In May 2016, I was invited to speak at TEDxVienna’s event, The Future of Intimacy.

Below is full video of my TEDxTalk, “Is the Porn Brain Our New Sex Educator?”

TEDxVienna Talk Description: What is our Porn Brain? How has it become our new sex educator and how/what is it teaching us about consent, sexual pleasure, and our sexual selves?

In a world where sex is simultaneously commodified and shamed, sex education efforts are failing young people while the porn industry is booming. According to PornHub.com’s 2015 year-in-review, we’ve blown through 1,892 petabytes of bandwidth on the site this past year, equivalent to filling the storage on all of the iPhones sold in 2015 with porn, with 63.7% of these visits launched from smartphones or tablets.

Technological advances have made porn available to us in the palms of our hands & Google a more accessible sex educator than our teachers, parents & peers. But what kind of sex educator is porn? What sexual stories do our Porn Brains tell us (men, women & young people) and how do these stories both positively & negatively impact our real-life experiences of sexual pleasure, communication, connection & intimacy?

See pictures of my time with TEDxVienna on my Instagram, @the_vspot!