@smallskylight
But don’t tell me it’s more than a try on, in the same way that some men have tried forever
I really, really don't think it is like it used to be when I was young. I really don't. Everything I have read, and heard is telling me young women are having very different experiences, from people going to schools and talking to young people about sex, from feedback from Family Planning Services, to a bloody article in the Metro - a 'humorous' article where women were asked to write in with tales of men's bad manners in bed. In my day that would have been stuff like farting or sticking the football on the tele immediately post-coitus. These young women were describing stuff that was borderline sexual assault to actual sexual assault and talking about it like,' Ha Ha, what are men like, eh?' I really think its different, and the reason is the type of porn and ease of access to it.
Its like smoking. We didn't massively cut smoking by saying 'oh its bad for you. Now make your own choice, and you can choose if you go to places where non-smokers are - its on you.' We realised it was bad for people, including non-smokers and reduced access to smoking, essentially making it less socially acceptable.
These things are public health issues, not a matter of individual choice, because they effect others than those making those choices.
I don't doubt that's true, but I think there's a danger in these discussions that because people are focusing on what's bad about the present, they view the past through rose-tinted glasses or at least fail to recognise that there was a whole lot of other stuff that was bad about it too.
I grew up in the 70s and I can tell you that for teenage boys then, rape myths and acceptance of rape culture was absolutely standard and not even questioned. School on Monday would involve eager sharing of information about which girls had been "banged" on the weekend, and if some of that involved duplicitous means, who cares. I was a nerd at school and didn't lose my virginity till much later, but my first girlfriend (who was much more experienced) filled me in on some of the techniques involved in cornering girls into situations where they ended up submitting. Mostly things that these days we would simply call rape.
Rape in marriage wasn't even legally recognised until the 70s. Going back from my generation, do you think my parents' and grandparents' generations enjoyed only the purest of enthusiastically consensual and mutually satisfying sex, simply because they didn't have internet porn? Historical record and the way women-as-chattels are depicted in all aspects of culture say otherwise.
What's often overlooked is that while both social and technological changes have made unsavoury porn more widely disseminated, they've also made a lot of other things more widely disseminated too. Like equality, women's rights, open discussion about consent, overcoming shame, challenging victim-blaming, awareness and tolerance of different sexualities and proclivities, knowledge about STDs etc. Listening to my teenage son and his friends talk about stuff like this, they seem sooooo much more enlightened than we were.
The experience of girls feeling pressured to do things they don't want to do is probably not that different, in essence, from that of previous generations. Basically men want casual sex more than women, and vary in how well socialisation moderates their pursuit of it. Plus ca change.