A book about teenage sexuality is causing a bit of a stir here in Australia. The Sex Lives of Australian Teenagers by Joan Sauers has prompted the usual hysterical rants from conservative politicians.
The author conducted a random survey of 300 teen boys and girls, asking questions about masturbation, oral sex, contraception and porn.
The best summary of the book appears in this article at the Bulletin.
A few interesting statistics, to paraphrase the article:
* 53.5% of girls 12 and under have seen porn, and by the age of 16, this rises to 97%
* 70% of boys have seen porn by the age of 12 and 100% by the age of 15
* By the age of 16, 51% of girls and 65% of boys who responded had engaged in oral sex
* 42% of girls have had sexual encounters with other girls
* 92% of girls and 88% of boys saying religion or parental authority had little or no influence on their sexual behaviour
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A couple of other interesting snippets:
* One 16-year-old boy from Victoria said he masturbates “in front of the computer watching porn. The normal way”.
* One girl described being “ashamed” when her porn-watching boyfriend complained she was “too hairy”.
* One 18-year-old boy expressed discontent with school sex education, which focuses mainly on reproduction and contraception: “They should warn you in school how bad you feel after a one-night stand!”
So… what are my reactions to all of this? Well, for a start, it’s worth questioning the validity of the statistics, which Jack Marx has done well here (“Testimony-based science is vexed at the best of times, human beings so prone to bullshit – both the agenda-driven variety and the seemingly pointless – as we all know they are. The risk is amplified when the theme is sex, a topic upon which everyone can be relied to either lie through embarrassment or embellish through boast.”).
On the issue of teenagers having sex… well, duh. That’s what they do. That’s the whole point of their lives at that stage. I think we need to stop being hysterical about the idea that teens are doing it and start feeling sad about the fact that they’re probably doing it all wrong. Schools still don’t talk about where the clitoris is, or how to give a girl an orgasm. And they definitely don’t talk about navigating the murky moral dilemmas of deciding who to do it with, and why.
I guess the issue will always be skewed by the double standard. Teen boys are sperm bombs, and expected to be such. Teen girls may well be orgasmic dynamos, but society doesn’t want them to think that in case they get pregnant. So girls are supposed to be virginal. The dynamic of too many teen sexual relationships is one of male as predator, female as prey. The survey reports that incidences of boys “slipping it in” against the girl’s wishes are more common than they should be. I have to feel sad that so many girls experience sex in such a powerless way.
But can teen sex be anything other than a cluster fuck? At that point in your life, peer pressure is insane, you have no real idea of who you are and a lot of things seem like a good idea at the time. It’s always been like that. I guess the whole teen sex dilemma is one of those things that everybody experiences, and it makes us who we are. You may regret it, but you learned. Hopefully you learned.
When it comes to the idea of 16 year olds masturbating in front of the computer “the normal way”, it makes me feel old. I’ve been making online smut for seven years. That’s long enough for an entire generation to grow up with internet porn. That means that sneaking a look at dog-eared copies of Penthouse to get your kicks is completely, like, prehistoric, dude. Excuse me while I adjust my walking frame.
My concern is not that teens look at porn, but that so much porn is so very bad. I mean, what kind of strange idea of sex would you get if you were inexperienced and thought that facials, ass-to-mouth or snowballing were what everybody did in bed?
And in the absense of any detailed sex education (especially in the US, where abstinence programs are taking hold), I’d say a lot of teens are using porn as sex education, which is a worry. If teenagers were sneaking a look at Tony Comstock’s films, I’d be cheering because at least there’d be a bit of balance in there. But too much porn – especially the reality stuff I can’t stand – is based on negative emotion and race-to-the-bottom tastelessness, and I hate to think that teens (or anyone, actually) are thinking that it’s real.
Perhaps we need to start trusting that teenagers are cynical consumers. That they understand that the porn they’re seeing is so very, very strange and unrealistic. And that when the time comes to start fumbling around in bed, they’re not expecting Brazilians, vaginal orgasms and six different positions.
I hope.
I guess I have a reason to continue making positive erotic material. So that when that 97% of 16 year old girls turn 18 (and I can legally show them porn), there’s something decent out there to enjoy.
Hmm. Have I descended into my own hysterical rant? Ah well. Blogger’s privilege.