Sex Porn and Teenagers 8pm Monday 4/10 BBC Radio 4

[LadyBiscuit]

That's in 5 mins :)

From the BBC website:

" "Shag bands" are thin coloured rubber bracelets, indicating how far the wearer will go sexually if the band is broken.

Purple for a kiss or yellow for a hug may seem comparatively harmless but some of the other colours such as black for full intercourse or blue for oral sex ring alarm bells.

A Wakefield MP recently campaigned to stop shops selling them after complaints from parents including a mother who innocently bought some for her 6-year old's party bag. Elsewhere schools have banned "shag bands" after finding pupils wearing them.

Part of playground culture, they're often worn innocently or in a show of bravado but there is a darker side where early sexual exploration strays into the easily accessible world of internet porn. Where children once passed notes, they now use their mobile phones to share explicit images and there's peer pressure through social networking sites.

Presenter Miranda Sawyer, herself a mother, investigates whether society and parents are aware of just what their children are getting up to and asks how concerned should we be about the sexualisation of children in media, advertising and fashion such as sale of padded bras for pre-pubescent girls or sexual references on T shirts for primary-aged kids.

Even though teenage pregnancy rates are falling, Britain still has the highest rate in Western Europe. As many as 1 in 4 teenagers have underage sex with anecdotal evidence of sexual experimentation including anal sex to avoid pregnancy. However sex education is improving in schools and access to contraception and STI screening has never been better.

But there are concerns that unlike the 'dirty mags' of their parent's day, teenagers now access porn which can be addictive, desensitising and threatening to healthy relationships in the future."

Scary but essential listening I think

[Saltatrix]

some

[sunny2010]

Sakura - No my mum and dad just have only had sex with each other and say all the things you all say such as things were different in my day etc. When I mean dress me I mean my mum used to say you arent buying that its slutty, nice girls dont wear stuff like that, boys like it when you leave a bit to the imagination etc. As if people only dress for boys lol. Again just different generations.

I wanted lots of sex because I think when you hit 13 due to puberty its all you can think about personally. Its why at that age you start masturbating everyday and discovering who you are sexually. That is the reason and it is a hormonal thing. Some people fight it but some people dont see it as a big deal.

[Sakura]

I agree with you sunny, that not doing it casually might also be social conditioning. But the point here is that porn culture is definitely social conditioning. Two wrongs don'T make a right IYSWIM

[Sakura]

I didn't "fight" the urge for sex. I was lucky enough to have boyfriends who didn't think it was a big deal, and we found a million other things to do apart from intercourse. I was worried about pregnancy, of course. Pregnancy for a teenager is a disaster, in most cases

[LadyBiscuit]

The thing is that even if you have decent firewalls at home, you have no controls over what your children see at other people's houses, on phones, what's emailed/posted on bebo/myspace/facebook.

My colleague found his 11 year old had been downloading hardcore porn on his phone (only when the bill arrived) and when he challenged his son, he said 'well all the other boys are doing it'. It's sleepwalking into a porn-defined world.

Early access to porn which frames children's attitudes to sex means that sexual excitement becomes entirely divorced from attraction which is based on really knowing someone and I think is likely to lead to an inability to form proper sexual relationships founded on trust and mutual respect.

[Saltatrix]

That's why I think it should be an opt out system rather than opt in. It will make it less likely for friends parents to have access to porn online because they would have to actively request for access.

Also phone internet tends to have protection in place already where you have to call up and request access to 18+ etc.

[sunny2010]

I just think it all depends on how you view sex even now I dont think being in a couple means you have to be monogamous and dont see anything wrong with people in alternative setups like swingers, polyamourous etc. I also dont see anything wrong with having as many sexual partners as you like or having sex young.

I suppose we will all never agree as I dont see anything wrong with porn. I have worked on cams/lines myself and enjoyed it. I know strippers and an acquintance I used to go out clubbing with at 16 now works in America as a porn star through her own choice. Its not something I see as a big deal but again I realise why are all coming from completely different viewpoints so wont ever agree.

I never worried about pregnancy when I was young as I always used condoms and the pill together. I dont see the difference between having sex like that young or having sex casually when your older. There is no way I would of kept a child with anyone I had casual sex with even when I was older, like a lot of people wouldnt, that doesnt mean I was going to abstain from sex.

[Sakura]

But the condoms aren't 100% foolproof and the pill has some nasty side effects like thrombosis and you had to get it from the doctor (!!) and there was no way I was going to do that, when I could have an orgasm with my BF without any of those things.

[Malificence]

If young people mature thinking that porn sex is anything remotely like real sex then there will be a whole generation with absolutely crap sex lives.

I find it quite ironic that Sunny feels that she hasn't been affected by early sex and porn use, when it's obvious that her ideas/beliefs about sexual relationships are rather extreme.

[CheeseandGherkins]

I've never heard of these before and I'm 31, never happened in my school. Average working class place in East London, like some others have said, kiss chase was about as far as it went and that was late primary. Secondary was all girls, catholic school.

[Sakura]

I get the feeling that people who talk about strip-clubs, polyamorous, are the same ones who sneer at loving sex or monogamy.

It's as though PORN is the NORM and loving sex is a fetish, thesedays

[claig]

good point. I think that is in fact the intention behind these things. Shag bands are just another step along the path to normalising porn and denormalising loving sexual relationships.

[AnyFucker]

sakura..some people on these boards would have us think so

I don't think that is the case in RL, I still think there is stigma attached to people who live in unconventional relationships

[Sakura]

hmm.. there shouldn't be a stigma if people want to live differently, but at the same time it's funny how "sex" thesedays = male sexual expression i.e porn. It's becoming more and moreso.
Agree with Malificence, young girls and womens' sex lives must be V unsatisfying

[AnyFucker]

I didn't say there should be, but there is, certainly within the circles i move in

[vezzie]

Opt-in v. Opt-out - good idea. The person who suggested it meant specifically the internet. What if you could apply it to society as a whole.

Maybe 13 year olds are all crazy for sex (they aren't - surely all kids develop at different rates) but that doesn't mean they have to have porn. That is a completely different thing. Rolling around with a contemporary who is at a similar stage of development to you is completely different from being exposed to a huge commercial adult juggernaut of pornography. It's sex abuse in an analogous way as if the 13 year old were rolling about with a 30 year old.

Discovering sex (in the broadest sense, including snogging etc) is potentially one of the loveliest experiences in life. You can spend ages on it and every single moment can be precious and personal and special (even if you aren't going to marry your partner). I am very sad to think of all this being coopted by porny sensibilities, not because I don't think young people should have sex, but because I think they should completely love it.

[Sakura]

NO, I know you didn't think there should be.

But I then they're just as bad as some of the people on MN who stigmatize "Mundanes".

Both are reacting to social conditioning.

[Sakura]

Agree Vezzie. Kids lose.

[Malificence]

Vezzie - (great name btw ) - that's a brilliant post.

Discovering sex as a teenager is (and should always be) a wonderful, safe and loving experience - it's being taken away from young people by the corruption of good sex by porn.

DH and me still talk about our early experiences as 16 year olds, some 28 years later.

If young people think that porn-style sex is good sex then I feel very sorry for them.
It's like putting a teenager behind the wheel of a car when they haven't learned to drive.

[Sakura]

sorry, just want to clarify my post to AF (because I'M confused about what I meant myself)

I think that in a our culture, everybody is socially conditioned, one way or another, to some extent.
Porn exacerbates that. IT's not about female sexuality.
IN an ideal world, nobody's sexual preferences would be stigmatized.
But when people's preferences appear to mirror porn, we can only assume that they've been influenced by it

[claig]

What is the objective behind the social conditioning to accept porn? Why are shag bands no big deal to some people?

It is the brutalisation of human beings, it is the desensitising of human beings and the objectification of human beings (mainly women, but in some cases also men). It is the removal of the standards of decency that have created a fair, stable society with respect for each other. It is exposure to desensitising and dehumanising porn that eventually leads to soldiers raping prisoners and forcing prisoners to perform sex acts on camera. We saw this a few years back, and female soldiers took part in the filming. They had been so conditioned, so brutalised, so desensitised that they passed the pictures around openly and thought it was funny. How had they descended to such a level of barbarity? They had been conditioned.

We see exactly the same thing with young people being endlessly conditioned by violent movies and video games, which also desensitise them, and lead to them thinking that videoing attacks on people is funny. They think it is so funny that they even call it "happy slapping".

[GetOrfMoiLand]

I agree Claig - crap like shag bands are the thin end of the wedge.

You have that when you are a child, porn on mibile phones when you are a teen, flash your tits for the lads in a night out, High Street Honeys and stripper fashion for when you are a bit older.

It has seeped in a pernicious way into the mainstream. I worry for my dd - I just hope that by talking about my feelings about porn, strip clubs etc that she is able to understand how frightful some of it all is. However it is all very easy for me, in my 30s, to stand up for what I believe in, less easy for her at the age of 14.

[Lancelottie]

I listened to some of this with my (deeply embarrassed) teenage son yesterday.

His take on it was, 'What if you DON'T want to go on about, y'know, IT all the time, and you don't want to do, errm, it yet either? Even the SRE lessons all go on about being normal to want to, and ask you things about, umm, how you feel doing it, and what happens when girls, err, mumble mumble, blush, and then you feel a real weirdo for NOT doing it...'