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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Anal sex for 13 year olds? Warwickshire again...

637 replies

Whatisthisfuckery · 25/09/2019 20:46

I’m offering this without comment, mainly because my jaw is still on the floor.

twitter.com/hubblevicky/status/1176758148721512448?s=21

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13
Smotheroffive · 13/10/2019 08:49

I just read that pp article link and found the one above, which says this

Jon Brown from the NSPCC told Channel 4 News that they thought it important to do this research to get an insight into young people’s views on sex.

“What we’re seeing is that there is a very regular and normal consumption of hardcore adult pornography – that the sharing of explicit sexual imagery by photos or by video clips is now extremely normal, so I think it’s important to recognise what was previous regarded as unusual, concerning, or sensationalist, now has in fact become the norm,” he said.

But then that we need to accept it is normal instead of unsuccessfully restricting access.

This can't be right??? Right?

Smotheroffive · 13/10/2019 08:54

Also both those articles were from years ago but it sounds like the start of the rot behind the Warwickshire publications. Good job they've been taken down.

Amy Munahay or something was the manager of Respect at the time promoting all this.

Its also all accessible from an app it said

BarbaraStrozzi · 13/10/2019 09:35

The sad thing is that teens are exposed to porn and do need help learning how to navigate this. But a website which (in a tragic effort to be "down wiv da kids") just says "Here's explanations of some really out-there practices" without any context, criticism, discussion, assessment of health risks - such a website is clearly not helpful.

It would be good and useful to tackle hard core porn use among teens from a media studies point of view?

Who's producing this stuff? Who's benefit are they making it for? Who gets the profits (and how big are they)? Are you in fact being played by big business here? Is everything "advertised" to us safe and healthy? Is "advertising" just what you see on telly/billboards, or do other channels such as social media, social media count too? What role does sexism play - are these healthy images of what women (and men) should be like? What's the ethics of "advertising" something addictive (smoking versus vaping, for e.g.)?

BernardBlacksWineIceLolly · 13/10/2019 09:44

in a tragic effort to be "down wiv da kids"

that's a charitable interpretation of the motivation of the people who facilitated this. it's probably true for most of them. but not all I don't think

you really need to think carefully about the motivation of people who want to educate children about sex

OhHolyJesus · 13/10/2019 10:00

Full text from article:

The 1950s cabaret act Flanders and Swann had a routine that urged, “Ma’s out, Pa’s out, let’s talk rude”, climaxing in a line of playground swearing: “Pee, po, belly, bum, drawers.”
Innocent times. Not one of those words merits an entry in an explicit self-styled “sextionary” created by a local authority to explain sexual positions and body parts to 13-year-olds and older.
Starting with the number 69 and ending with zelophilia — a condition in which a person is turned on by jealousy — the guide sets out a sexual vocabulary for the modern teenager in blush-making detail.
Posted on a website called Respect Yourself, it was commissioned by Warwickshire county council and is being read by up to 30,000 people across Britain each month. The council suspended it last week and launched a review.
Twenty terms are listed for the act of sleeping together, accounting for just one paragraph of the 47-page guide. Among the fetishes that can be named in a family newspaper are amaurophilia — it involves blindfolds — and bagpipes (something unmentionable to do with armpits).
<a class="break-all" href="http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjstg9mXqdb8sh9fCQkHOVqgiOqtN2KMY34KLaTRFVHVdOzaTrXrK4bcenqZIO2eJbXpv5A3qpDGKaFgMufV-7fTTLS7eR-tCfP3daWCHfp3OvCZUNp0l9XHnFGy2CvrxGq8YWgfoEmkX6U7U4HmXsswmYY-TrR1nR9ozVKlJO6tpaRFZERkllUpqJ3t7QyEglKiI71BqMF2fnQhh5mUVutyoxGQoZaQLoQHpBOd_F6omZy2GYDAKkc3mzd7ldokBf8WJ51QzGm2y6_5dcsI&sig=Cg0ArKJSzEbBJfSxWksx&adurl=www.thetimes.co.uk/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">

The guide was criticised by the Christian Institute, whose deputy director, Simon Calvert, said: “Respect seems to be the last thing on the minds of the people responsible for this appalling material. Young people deserve to be treated with dignity, not spoken down to as if they have no self-control or moral compass. Compiling an A-to-Z that includes some of the most dangerous and degrading sexual practices imaginable and presenting them all to young people as equally valid and healthy is profoundly irresponsible.”
The guide offers practical advice while condoning promiscuity. “If you are on a girls’ holiday and make the decision to sleep with someone you’ve just met — for safety’s sake, take them back to your place, where you know your friends are only in the next room” is an example.
Monica Fogarty, chief executive of Warwickshire council, said the site, which has been live since 2010, stood by its explicit content, which had been generated by young people: “The rationale behind the language in the sextionary was that we wanted to work with the young people themselves. We promised them we would be really honest and print their questions as they came to us.
“Young people argued that knowing what the terms mean, however unsavoury, they feel safer, and would therefore not agree to being involved in anything they don’t understand or feel comfortable with.”
She said it had helped halve the teenage pregnancy rate in Warwickshire, while cases of sexually transmitted disease had reduced by a third. Even so, she said it was right to review it. “As a public body, it is responsible to do so.”
Last month her council was embroiled in another controversy when it emerged that a sex and relationships programme called All About Me was teaching children as young as six about touching or “stimulating” their own genitals. That area of the website is now under review.

Thingybob · 13/10/2019 10:02

It's good to hear that the Times have now picked up on this although I don't think they have highlighted some of the most disgusting content. I would have also liked to have seen them investigate some of those dubious characters who wrote that stuff.

HandsOffMyRights · 13/10/2019 10:07

What Monica (and I'm still waiting for her reply as to why she got Respect Yourself and All About Me, two different campaigns re the sexualisation of minors, mixed up following my very clear complaint about RY) and co also fail to mention is age of consent.

This was aimed at 13 plus. Promoting anal sex to children and telling girls to just take it, isn't just gross, it's illegal.

Smotheroffive · 13/10/2019 10:24

Its just wrong that they have erased the responsible role of the adult and claimed its right just because the children want it (if you can believe these are real questions).

Isn't it the whole point of being a responsible adult and parent to restrict harmful activities and engage age appropriately Confused

Not to just say, oh and yeah, there's all this other stuff you can get up to aswell thats positive and normal!

DC need to know a lot more about a lot of other stuff before any 'need' to know about this. I didnt know, and I still don't want to.

I'm an adult with dc and I dont want to look at it because I dont want those images in my mind, why would I.

Horrible commentary that they are only reviewing because its what they should be doing, not a hint of concern. None. At. All.

BarbaraStrozzi · 13/10/2019 12:30

I share your suspicions, Bernard. I think there are some very unsavoury adults piggy-backing on this.

However, as the mother of a child coming up to the teen years, I don't want to throw the whole discussion out.

What I personally am hoping for: keep communication open, explain to DS that he's quite likely to be shown this stuff on his mate's phones or (for all my internet filters etc.) stumble upon it himself (either by accident, or through curiosity, or simply because most teens are very interested in sex - I used to look for the sex scenes in adult library books aged about 14 or so). But that quite a lot of this stuff will be downright nasty - painful, non-consensual (which makes it rape), deeply misogynistic, pushing utterly unreasonable expectations about both bodies and what sex should be like.

And (most importantly) that he has a choice. And that that choice is exercised in a moral context. That he can choose to look at the really nasty stuff, and it will do him no end of psychological damage. Or he can choose not to look at it. And, once he's old enough, look for sexual gratification elsewhere - somewhere where the emphasis is on mutual enjoyment, consent, respect for one's partner, giving one's partner pleasure as well as receiving it.

And I fully expect these conversations to be bloody excruciatingly embarrassing for both parties.

But I'm also aware that (a) I may fail (due to excruciating embarrassment, due to the fact that teens come more or less pre-programmed to ignore their parents on the big stuff) and (b) there are parents out there whose approach is ostrich head in the sand or religiously driven "abstinence only" (which simply doesn't work).

So there is a role for schools. The thing is, you can't discuss this stuff in a moral vacuum. Adults themselves will be somewhere on a spectrum from "look, some sexual acts are abnormal fetishes and probably best avoided, and some - the violent and/or non-consensual ones are flat out wrong" all the way through to the "your kink is not my kink but that's okay" anything goes brigade.

The trouble with the Warwickshire material was not covering this stuff, but that the agenda was so clearly driven by the "anything goes" brigade. Whether because they were just a bit dim but genuinely believed that (some idea that we'd all be happier people if we embraced eating shit for sexual kicks and got in touch with our inner furry), or because they were sleazy perverts actively trying to undermine children's sexual boundaries, I don't actually know.

But sex ed without reference to morality is never going to end well. Because sex is never a morally neutral activity (unlike, say, eating a nutritious meal). It always has an ethical dimension. That needn't be "wait until you're married then do it for procreation in a set of church-approved positions", but it has to, as a bare minimum, include consent, a willingness to aim for mutual pleasure, and a respect and liking for your partner as a fellow human being.

truthisarevolutionaryact · 13/10/2019 13:48

Excellent post BarbaraStrozzi. It's such a complex area and you highlight the dilemmas for parents so clearly.
The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that the police should be taking a close look at the hard drives of people who write this stuff for children as it is evident they are very lacking in some significant boundaries.

7Days · 14/10/2019 10:44

Thanks for articulating that so well BarbaraStrozzi
Morals and ethics are part of sex, what we are seeing is a March to deny that, to strip it down to a mere physical act. If its merely physical only hysterical prudes would say no to any random encounter. You see it all the time in pro prostitution discussions - oh, they are well paid for just 30 mins of her time. Emotions and psychology are part of sex - it's even acknowledged in kink that it's about psychological states - but yet in another sense the psychological and emotional aspects are totally denied.
Of course, it's a reaction against excessive repression of earlier eras. But mad swings in any direction dont suit most people. Most people are, for want of a better word, ordinary. Until they get porn sick.

No wonder teens have to label themselves as demi sexual hetero romantics, when they just mean they want to sleep with people if the opposite sex who they both fancy and like. IE most people. No disrespect to GLB people here, I'm just talking about the most common 'orientation' given a grandiose name to - what? Validate themselves in the eyes of this cohort? Validate normal human emotions and sexuality? Claim the right to be affected emotionally by sex?. Weird its come to this.

TheProdigalKittensReturn · 14/10/2019 10:48

I honestly think the demi sexual stuff is the only way kids can find to say no to anything sexual without being bullied into it by their peers. "I just don't want to" doesn't seem to be a good enough reason any more.

BarbaraStrozzi · 14/10/2019 11:06

That's absolutely what the demi sexual label is about.

When you see what, twenty years ago, was the absolutely big standard, statistically most common attitude to sex in the population at large (men as well as women, going off my male friends' attitude) suddenly needing a label so it can be defended as a "legitimate lifestyle choice", you need to be asking "What's changed between now and then? What are the social pressures people feel they have to defend themselves against in order to wave this label around as a defence?"

I think it also explains the curious phenomenon of the "asexual" who likes sex (in the right circumstances). I think this is also a defence mechanism - again the label becomes the only way you're allowed to engage in what used to be the fairly normal behaviour of giving yourself a period to regroup and reassess what you want in between sexual relationships.

HepzibahGreen · 14/10/2019 11:11

Barbara re Internet filters, just fyi you can get adult content blocked by your wifi provider so at least they are not accessing porn at home. Much more effective than messing with individual devices. I do this (and I tested it by trying to Google a lot of terms from Warwickshires pro porn for kids content and it wouldn't let me because it was inappropriate. . ) but I'm amazed by the number of parents that don't have this. I'm also really angered by parents lax attitude to Internet safety actually because if they were all on top of this then my dc wouldn't get shown/told about porn by other kids.
Anyway, I agree completely about talking to teens about what is behind porn on terms of who benefits etc. I have always done this- discussed the fact that it's a big business,that porn actors are often emotionally damaged and that you can't ever know that porn is consensual.

I also say that porn doesn't represent what sex is like for most people.
I still just can't really believe a council is producing garbage like this tbh. I don't need to know about all these fetishes and I'm an adult with a fairly colourful past! . Anyone who can defend this needs their background looking into in depth, for sure.

fruitinaheapisnotabirthdaycake · 14/10/2019 11:19

Disgusting. Glad I don't live in Warwickshire. The teen pregnancy rate must be astronomical when they encourage kiddies to have sex

BarbaraStrozzi · 14/10/2019 11:25

Yes, I do have porn blocked at router level at home. I actually work in a pretty techy area, so know my way around this stuff, which is precisely why I don't think tech fixes are the answer. For eg with my internet provider's router level block on, it weeds out anything dodgy searching via Google - but doesn't filter out dodgy searches via duck duck go. This isn't even as "complex" as using a VPN - this is as simple as changing search engine (of course these days installing a VPN is as easy as falling off a log).

Tech fixes only really stop the "accidental Google" incidents (and not even all of them). They don't stop deliberate attempts to access porn.

This is why I think the first line of defence is talking to children. And making sure that you start as young as possible with reinforcing empathy for others, messages about "it's only a game if everyone's smiling".

Hopefully I'm doing something right though - reading a YA book aimed at boys last night (techno thriller type thing) and DS bridled at the description of one of the heroes teachers as "an attractive young woman in her twenties" - he thought the author was being a creepy bloke! (On its own that probably comes as a bit of an "overthinking" type of comment, but this author has form for this kind of thing, and it makes DS very uncomfortable).

HepzibahGreen · 14/10/2019 11:39

my internet provider's router level block on, it weeds out anything dodgy searching via Google - but doesn't filter out dodgy searches via duck duck go.
Fuck me I did not know that! Yy to talking to kids but parents also have to at least try to block dodgy stuff. Where my dc go to high school there is a lot of "oh I have talked to them about it so I know they wont" which, knowing teens as I do, is bollocks.
I will bear in mind the other search engines thing though. Mine don't seem to realise there's anything other than Google yet-we are not a very techy family-but I will keep an eye.

HepzibahGreen · 14/10/2019 11:44

Dont you have to pay for a VPN ( wrt it bring easy to install)?
Also, why would an Internet provider only filter Google searches? Is it not possible to filter all browser searches?
(Sorry to derail thread, but it's really important to share this information from a child protection standpoint imo.)

Smotheroffive · 14/10/2019 11:45

How ironic and so revealing that internet safety settings there to protect children, wontt allow you to go to that site

It works

Everyone use is.

I agree with pp that it angers me also the number of parents who dont use protections available for their dc.

BarbaraStrozzi · 14/10/2019 11:55

Hepzibah - as an experiment (with private browsing on, so your children don't stumble on the search history later) use duck duck go, pick a fairly vanilla sexual term so hopefully you don't stumble on anything too gross, and switch safe search off on the image search facility. The bad news is you will immediately get a page of extremely graphic images. The good news is that your router's block should at least prevent you clicking through to any of the sites themselves. But it is quite eye opening as to how easily things can be circumvented.

There's quite a variety of free-to-downloaf VPNs out there too. Many teens will have them on their phones (not necessarily because they're porn addicts - often simply to evade their school's net nanny so they can continue to Instagram/play fortnite while at school).

Smotheroffive · 14/10/2019 12:02

That is so true

How are phone settings so open to dc that they can just download anything, including something to break school rules?

It IS common, and has been for years for dc to download vpns.

Tbh phones present a huge risk to dc. End of.

But whos going to manage that properly, have the extensive knowledge to, and actually.follow through with not letting them have phones under an age mature enough to responsibly.manage the risks.

GColdtimer · 14/10/2019 12:27

Hi, just an update from SSA here. We have written to WCC asking a whole load of questions following the removal of the website. You can see our update here: www.change.org/p/warwickshire-county-council-stop-warwickshire-cc-normalising-the-use-of-pornography-by-children-s/u/25189570

Also, we were disappointed the Times didn't come to SSAUK or Click Off for comment as we would have highlighted some of the more concerning aspects of this site. The Times missed a trick.

HepzibahGreen · 14/10/2019 12:30

Thanks Barbara I will experiment. I mainly access Internet at home through my laptop which has a password. Dc mainly access via phones, or You Tube on the TV. Phones don't have mobile data but I know they can tether off other kids. Luckily school is phone free (while actually in school).
It's really hard to get my head around all this stuff, I am forcing myself to learn it because I'm not a techy. Given the choice I would head back to 1996 and get rid of all if it!

OhHolyJesus · 14/10/2019 12:31

Thanks GColdtimer a good reminder to sign and share. Watching eagerly for their response.

andyoldlabour · 14/10/2019 13:16

This reminds me a little bit of the limited stuff I have researched about PIE. Whilst I am not suggesting this is in any way the same thing, it does hint at a gradual erosion of moral standards, to a point where things we thought were totally unacceptable, are now regarded by some as normal.
NCCL - National Council For Civil Liberties

"In May 1978, according to Magpie, NCCL motions were passed supporting PIE's rights and the annual meeting went on to condemn 'attacks' against paedophiles and their supporters, saying "this AGM condemns the physical and other attacks on those who have discussed or attempted to discuss paedophilia, and reaffirms the NCCL's condemnation of harassment and unlawful attacks on such persons."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedophile_Information_Exchange