To be really pissed off about how young girls are being affected by this ?

[Blistory]

Disturbing article written by a teacher

www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6294001

I don't really think I am being unreasonable to think this is a horrible way for young girls to experience their teenage years.

[Blistory]

Thanks for that, Kim. On iPhone and can't do links

[laurenamium]

It is a horrible way to live your teenage years I agree. I can relate to a lot of this from when I was a teenager (I'm 25) and I'm still dealing with the issues that its created

I'm not looking forward to DD going to school!

[ScaryFakeNails]

I would agree that some of what she says makes sense but some parts just seem total bollocks to me and I think the focus on girls as opposed to all teens is ridiculous.

[MrsTerryPratchett]

This worries me horribly. DD is only 2 and I'm already dreading it.

I have heard of friends' children sending sexts in single digit ages. So sad.

[Blistory]

I don't think it's ridiculous to focus on the harm that it does to girls given that they're the ones worst affected.

I do however think that both boys and girls need to be educated on this and taught how wrong it is.

[heyannie]

I agree ScaryFakeNails. She writes as though every single teenage girl who engages in sexual activity is coerced and forced into it rather than some of them being as genuinely curious, gung-ho and horny as their male counterparts.

And "As little as 10 years ago, experimenting with sex was considered to be something you gave a great deal of thought to. Pornography has made sex seem more casual" Of course porn and under-aged careless sex is exclusively a 21st century thing

[StaceeJaxx]

Stuff like this scares the shit out of me. I remember finding photos of DSD on the family computer in provocative poses when she was 13, it was horrible! DD1 was 9 and we're starting to look at senior schools for her. I'm pretty certain that she'll be going to a girls school mostly for reasons like that article. Although it's not going to shield her completely from this type of thing, it will help at least.

[ScaryFakeNails]

Wheres your evidence that its teenage girls that are worst affected? Theres very little focus on teen boys around this subject and I would be tempted to argue that if all girls are suffering this 'pressure' from boys then its actually the boys who are more affected because not all girls succumb to the pressure so therefore its the boys making demands who have evidently been more influences.

Also heyannie picked up on one of the quotes that particularly annoyed me. In a couple of years it will be 30 years since I started experimenting with sex and based on my experiences, that of my friendship group at the time and talking to my current friendship group as well as my mother, I think what rubbish.

I can barely understand what point is being made about the linguistics. If she's saying that a blowjob being called brain is some slight on the desire to be intelligent or the value of academia amongst young woman, all I can do is a massive eye roll.

[porridgewithalmondmilk]

I am Head of English in a large 11-18 comprehensive and can honestly say absolutely none of that rung any bells at all for me. I hope that reassures some of you about your daughters.

There are certainly problems with cyber-bullying that weren't around when I was at school but I can remember "virgin" "frigid" and "lesbian" being the ultimate insults when I was at secondary school in the 1990s. I have not heard any of those insults for years.

[heyannie]

Stacee trust me, don't get lulled into a false sense of security if she does go to an all girls school. I speak from experience!

[MrsTerryPratchett]

Very easy access to very hardcore porn is a recent thing. I wish I could remember where I saw it but there was a study about the average ages children had seen various things. Anal, bestiality etc. It was very young. I don't think my generation was looking at women eating shit and people having sex with animals. It does normalise it.

One of the reasons the focus is on girls/women is that the vast majority of harm from the violence and rape porn is obviously going to affect them, not men.

[Seenenoughtoknow]

YANBU. I have seen and heard of enough of these awful goings on from my teenage daughters who are living it. I have had to have 'the talk'. The teacher IS NOT exaggerating, and these things are really happening.

[ScaryFakeNails]

Stacee I guarantee an all girls school is not the antidote to this kind of behaviour. Having attended one for a few years, grown up near 2, have various nieces that attend and having friends that teach at them, I've always found them to have an almost higher rate of this kind of thing.

[nailak]

i dont think it has anything to do with porn, as a teenager i never watched porn it has more to do with lack of confidence and esteem in young women, them feeling they can get belonging and acceptance through performing sex acts, and the sexualisation of society in general, like muslic lyrics and videos, movies, adverts and so on

[nailak]

i dont think it has anything to do with porn, as a teenager i never watched porn it has more to do with lack of confidence and esteem in young women, them feeling they can get belonging and acceptance through performing sex acts, and the sexualisation of society in general, like muslic lyrics and videos, movies, adverts and so on

[AuscreemaAscare]

"they answered that women in porn don?t have pubic hair. When I asked them if their penises all looked like the ones on the men in porn films, there was of course a deathly silence."

I'm going to arm DD with that comeback.

It's bloody depressing though. We are all shocked at how young women were treated and looked on in the seventies with the stuff about Jimmy Saville et al and it wasn't easy when I was a teenager in the eighties but I'd fucking well hate to be one now.

[Seenenoughtoknow]

I'm afraid this is only going to get worse with the gradual dumbing down of pornography in our society, 50% of which is viewed by under 18 boys. 
It then moves into adult life with them.

There are plenty of articles on the net that explain how the viewing of pornography changes how men think of women and sex - how women simply become objects to be used...it is frightening, and according to a councillor friend of mine, is an epidemic waiting to happen. He said the amount of men visiting him for porn addiction alone has increased 300% in 10 years, and is now the most common sexual problem he deals with. It leads them down paths of infidelity within marriage, and to prostitution use, which is now becoming normalised behaviour on stag do's and trips away, and is far more prevalent than any of us would want to believe.

As worrying is the fact that it destroys the young men's ability to make love to a woman without seeing her as an object for his own satisfaction, rather than a partner in love making. It basically changes the way they have sex, and it is very very difficult to reverse.

[ScaryFakeNails]

I have a teenage daughter too, and I brought up my niece through her teens (now 21), I'm not denying porn has an influence and a further reach than previously but this idea that we were all so chaste years ago is ridiculous.

There tends to be maybe a handful of particularly 'promiscuous' girls in most school years, theres then your average run of the mill having sex, the ones who 'snog and grope' (as the article put it) and the ones who don't engage at all.

Its nothing new, it was like this when I was young, this idea that blowjobs or line-ups is some horrific new concept, makes no sense to me its something I was familiar with at 14/15. I was quite promiscuous myself so maybe that meant I was more aware of certain practices than others but people were at it then. My mother talks about how her school friends used to have sex in the park and the classic of smoking and fingering behind the bike sheds.

Anal probably has more prevalence but the idea that because most teens now see 2 girls one cup, they're all shitting in each others mouths is completely off.

I'm going to go and investigate whether the various teens downstairs know who James Deen is.

[cinnamonnut]

ScaryFakeNails, I don't think anyone's saying that we were all so chaste years ago.
Of course experimentation has always happened. But the way it happens has changed - rather than being two teenagers having a fumble and a laugh, it's girls being treated as sexual objects.

[Eurostar]

I agree that young boys are badly affected by this too. Absolute confusion about how to treat women sexually, feeling that they have to deny their loving, caring side and worries about their own bodies and penis size possibly to a worse extent than girls worrying about their body shapes.

[Lovecat]

I was talking to DH about this the other day and he was saying (we're mid-40's) that when he was a teenager, porn was incredibly hard to get hold of - it was magazines (which no-one wanted to be seen going into a shop and buying) and the rare 'blue' movie - video was a new thing in the early 80's and not everyone had one. He and I both find it hard to credit that a generation who can access porn (and far more hardcore porn than the stuff he and his teenage peers saw) on their phones in a few clicks will remain unaffected by this stuff, both in terms of unrealistic expectations and deadening of the senses. As Seenenough says, it's total objectification of women - a problem for both men and women, but the repercussions affect women far more than they do men. :(

[MrsTerryPratchett]

I think there is also a very scary psychological issue. Orgasms are rewarding, one of the easiest, quickest and least dangerous 'highs' there are. If a boy is looking at rape fantasies, 'teen' stuff, violence and all the other nasty things that are the norm on the internet, he then gets a quick fix of pleasure and reward. He will associate the two. This is why porn is addictive but also why the nastier side of it is so dangerous.

[Backtobedlam]

I find all this very concerning, and I'm dreading walking the thin line of what to tell kids...not enough and they go elsewhere, too much and you're giving them 'ideas'. However, the new Internet age has many positives to counteract the negatives. The relationships section on here is full of people willing to offer support, pointing out what behaviours are/aren't acceptable, and easy access to many articles to back points up. I'm hoping the positives will go some way to balancing out the negative side of the Internet.

[Ozziegirly]

I was having a chat about this very topic with some friends recently - we all worry, whether parents of boys or girls about this.

We all said that the first few erotic things that we were exposed to around the age of 12-14 or so did really "set the scene" for our adult sex life. Luckily, for most of us it was "The Joy of Sex", Jilly Cooper books, Dirty Dancing, Wish You Were Here (the film, not the travel show..) seeing Jason Donovan with no top on and at the most raunchy end, Eurotrash and The Word.

So maybe the answer is to try to (in some way) allow children in their early teens, before they have had exposure to harcore porn, to see "lighter" erotic images and stories so that their initial sexual experiences aren't based on redtube and youporn.

Because surely if you're seeing anal sex at 12, what on earth are you going to be looking at by 18?

How you do this though, without being totally creepy, I have no idea.