A London record producer I know is used to hearing teenagers talk about sex. All his working life, he’s been surrounded by hormonal boys in recording studios, hearing them chat with fevered curiosity about how to get girls into bed, and what to do in the unlikely event of succeeding. But now, he says, the studio has gone eerily quiet.
Boys don’t talk about sex any more. They sit there in silence, staring at hardcore pornography on their phones, swapping images of astonishing sexual violence as if they were Pokémon cards.
“They’re just kids,” he says sadly. “They used to find out about sex by having it. Now they know all about sexual extremes I’d never even heard of – and think must be normal – when in real life they’ve barely got further than a clumsy fumble.”
Concern about the sexualization of childhood has been widespread in recent months, but directed at the mainstream media. A British Home Office report earlier this year called for the labelling of airbrushed adverts, banning raunchy music videos before 9pm, and a ban on the sale of men’s magazines to under-16s. We’re certainly right, experts say, to worry about sexualized images in adverts and on TV. But it’s a bit like fretting about kids eating artificial additives when they’re already smoking crack cocaine.
If your partner is over 40, his sexual development was probably inspired by the underwear pages of a clothes catalog. Even just a decade ago, most teenagers might have seen only soft porn magazines such as Playboy. Yet today’s children are just a click away from a world of scat babes (women covered in excrement), bukkake (women weeping in distress while several men ejaculate over their faces), or websites offering an entire menu of rape scenes, from incest to raped virgins.
The average child sees their first porn by the age of just 11. Between 60 and 90 per cent of under-16s have viewed hardcore online pornography, and the single largest group of internet porn consumers is reported to be children aged 12 to 17. There is nothing new, of course, about pornography. But this is the first generation to grow up seeing rape and sexual violence before even losing their virginity.
Such an unprecedented change has occurred in less than a decade, and raises disturbing questions. What is online porn doing to boys’ and girls’ sexual development? What can we do about it? And if the answer is nothing, what kind of intimate relationships will our children be capable of forming when they mature into adults?
The impact of porn on boys, according to sex therapist Dr. Thaddeus Birchard, is particularly profound. “Boys tend to create their sexual template by images — either in their mind, or on the page,” he says. “These pictures become watermarked on to the fabric of each individual’s sexual repertory. That’s how male sexual function gets set up.”
A recent Australian study found “compelling evidence” of a link between boys watching pornography and regarding sexual harassment as acceptable, while researchers in Sweden have found that only limited exposure to porn changed boys’ attitudes towards their girlfriends — they found normal sex boring, and wanted to experiment more.
Couples therapist Val Sampson suspects the new popularity of anal sex is entirely due to its prevalence in pornography. “It’s now something that teenage boys feel they have a right to do,” she says. A recent survey by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that one in three girls aged 13 to 17 had been subjected to unwanted sexual acts by their partner, and one in four to “partner violence.” It is perhaps also no coincidence that before the internet, female pubic hair was generally considered normal. Banished from almost all contemporary porn, however, it is now regarded by most young men as some sort of abomination.
And it’s not only the sexual norms of boys that are being reset. The Portman Clinic in London, which treats sexual disorders, has noticed a dramatic increase in referrals of young girls using the internet to become amateur porn stars. Striking sexual poses, these girls can appear deceptively precocious. In reality, says Sampson, they haven’t a clue what they’re doing. “If those girls could see the fat middle-aged men wanking over them, they would be appalled,” she says. “Their fantasy is that they are on the red carpet, or a movie star.”
It’s precisely their lack of knowledge that makes online porn so fascinating to many teenagers. A recent survey found that 54 per cent of boys found porn “really inspiring” in terms of sexual performance. But it’s this tendency to equate porn with some sort of sexual training manual that worries many therapists the most.
“Children are getting their information from these sites,” says sex and relationship therapist Mo Kurimbokus. “But they are adult entertainment. Porn doesn’t teach children about respecting your partner, it doesn’t give sex education — and it never claimed to.”
Above all, says Kurimbokus, it’s the extremity of hardcore internet porn that makes it so corrupting. “Once you start to expose impressionable young people to porn, they become desensitized. They start looking for something more in terms of excitement, and they can become sexually deviant.”
“Porn is even more addictive than alcohol or drugs,” agrees John Woods, a psychotherapist at the Portman Clinic. And like any addiction, the user’s tolerance threshold quickly rises. It is still too early for us to have solid empirical data on how exposure to online pornography will affect the adult relationships of today’s teenagers. Even if most of them won’t grow up to become addicts, experts’ predictions for their adult sex lives are troubling.
“Girls are in an impossible position,” says Woods. “They will never match up to the porn star images. And sex will inevitably be a disappointment to men with these exaggerated notions of what might be possible. Boys will become disillusioned, too, because they don’t all perform like sexual athletes.”
Dr. Patrick Carnes, who runs a sexual disorder treatment program in Arizona, says there is no way of knowing who will have a problem with cybersex. “In other sexual disorders it’s possible to detect patterns or common points — such as childhood sexual or emotional abuse, or a family history of addictive disorders — not so with cybersex.”
Many teenagers themselves (see case studies in the July issue) feel they are perfectly capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy, and that only those already damaged by life can be damaged by porn. It is an appealingly reassuring argument — and could they be right?
Sampson isn’t persuaded. “I think we are all influenced, no matter how stable we are, by what we see,” she says. “Every experience to some degree scars us, for good or for bad. I would suggest that choosing to watch violent pornography will be scarring you, whether you like it or not. And it will have an impact on your behavior. We’re being naïve if we think it’s the same as watching gangster movies.”
The only solution, every expert we’ve spoken to agrees, is regulation. “We still have this ideal of free speech and expression,” says Woods. “We think there’s nothing wrong with sex, and we shouldn’t go back to moral hypocrisy. But the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Regulation is the only answer. And it can’t be difficult. If the Chinese government can block political dissent, surely we can do it with sexual imagery for children.”
“One day, this unregulated era will look as shocking as smoking on airplanes looks to us now. But until there is a groundswell of opinion, until enough of us say enough is enough, nothing is going to change.”
