You probably checked over your shoulder to see if anyone was looking before you started to read this.

People do not usually talk about pornography blatantly. Or they talk about it openly with wild abandon. From my experience, when you bring porn up there tends to be a lack of middle ground.

However, a Huffington Post report shows people view more porn a month than they do Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined. If we aren’t talking about porn, we most certainly are watching it.

With all that pleasure-viewing taking place in our country and probably on our campus, we must analyze the role pornography plays in forming our ideas of sex.

We must realize that the sex in pornography is not sex in real life. It is essential that these two concepts are divorced from one another.

Pornography is not sex education, but for some people it’s the only way to learn about sex.

Pornography is erotica. There is no intimacy between the individuals engaged in creating the films. Sex in real life is, well, sexual intercourse. The huge dichotomy between what constitutes sex and what constitutes pornography must be understood and taught.

“Sex isn’t necessarily copulating,” said Mary Hope, a Greensboro counsellor who has specialized in adolescent treatment for over fifteen years. “It’s more intimate and personal.”

Sex comes from an intimacy that is shared between people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that sex has to be between two people who are in love, or necessarily between two people at all. But sex should be engaged in by consenting adults who take health precautions such as wearing condoms, something that is hardly ever seen in pornography.

On one hand, sex and masturbation should not be as stigmatized as they are. There is nothing wrong with orgasming on your own or with some help. After all, it feels good.

Yet we still have to recognize that sex isn’t what pornography depicts.

“Pornography is all about a representation of power, domination, denigration and pleasing men,” said Professor of Philosophy and Interim Coordinator for Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Nancy Daukas.

If that’s what you prefer in the bedroom, that’s your business. But when videos of that type of interaction are put on the internet it becomes all of our business.

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine “90 percent or more (of) youth…have access to the internet.”

That means access to porn, thanks to the many free porn websites out there.

The adolescents who view pornography are having their views about sex and women shaped by brutality, fake orgasms, lack of protection and no emphasis on gaining consent before having sex.

“Pornography reduces the value of male and female interaction,” said first-year Brian Braswell. “It is the primary source of sexual education for young boys. That’s how they learn.”

If that’s how adolescents learn about sex, obviously something is wrong. The pornographic sex that they are seeing is a fake representation of the actual thing. That’s why it is dangerous to avoid an open dialogue about pornography and sex.

We must talk about porn to address the problems it is causing our society.

For porn lovers out there, I’m not crusading against pornography. I just believe it needs to be more reminiscent of actual sex. But, perhaps that’s the reason porn was created and is so popular: it isn’t real sex.

Sex is not about just one person pleasing the other, or one person being subjected to domination. Sex is about passion and pleasure. Two things that are hard to fake.