The girls with internal injuries
Allison Pearson points out that porn is having some bad effects on girls.
I was having dinner with a group of women when the conversation moved onto how we could raise happy, well-balanced sons and daughters who are capable of forming meaningful relationships in an age when internet pornography is as freely available as a glass of water. Porn has changed the landscape of adolescence beyond all recognition. Like other parents of our generation, we were on a journey without maps or lights, although the instinct to protect our children from the darkness was overwhelming.
A couple of the women present said that they had forced themselves to have toe-curlingly embarrassing conversations with their teenagers on the subject. “I want my son to know that, despite what he might see on his laptop, there are things you don’t expect a girl to do on a first date, or a fifth date, or probably never,” said Jo.
A GP, let’s call her Sue, said: “I’m afraid things are much worse than people suspect.” In recent years, Sue had treated growing numbers of teenage girls with internal injuries caused by frequent anal sex; not, as Sue found out, because she wanted to, or because she enjoyed it – on the contrary – but because a boy expected her to.
And what boy expects boy gets.
There was stunned silence among the mothers around that dinner table, although I think some of us may have let out involuntary cries of dismay and disbelief.
For Sue’s surgery isn’t in some inner-city borough where kids may have been brutalised or come from cultures where such practices are commonly used as contraception. Sue works in the leafy heart of Hampshire. The girls presenting with incontinence were often under the age of consent and from loving, stable homes. Just the sort of kids who, only two generations ago, would have been enjoying riding and ballet lessons, and still looking forward to their first kiss, not being coerced into violent sex by some kid who picked up his ideas about physical intimacy from a dogging video on his mobile.
Oh that’s nothing – the other day Teen Vogue (which is aimed at teenage girls) had a piece on how to submit to anal sex.
The harm, of course, is not just physical. A study this week revealed that the number of schoolgirls at risk of emotional problems has risen sharply. Scientists for the Journal of Adolescent Health were surprised to see a 7 per cent spike in only five years among girls aged 11 to 13 reporting emotional issues. Boys remained fairly stable while girls faced “unique pressures”. Researchers said the causes could include the drive to achieve an unrealistic body shape, perpetuated by social media and an increasing sexualisation of young women.
But there’s always Ivanka to look up to and Gwyneth to sell us jade eggs.
But women in porn earn more money than men. It’s eeeempooowering.
This really is a tragic horror show, but the solution is almost certainly not in abolishing porn (which is about as likely as abolishing drug use, with the attempts resulting in about as horrible consequences). The fact is that parents have outsourced those “toe-curlingly embarrassing” conversations to schools, to time, and now to the Internet. But having a child means educating them about the realities of sex, and intimacy, and relationships; it no longer cuts it to sign a form so that the school can teach reproductive biology in the earthbound human, or to let the kids figure things out on their own, or to get them to swear-to-jesus-they’ll-save-it-till-marriage. Teaching kids about consent, respect, sexuality, and sex itself is part of raising a child, and if people are not going to demand an actual robust sexual health curriculum on the order of the physics curriculum, they’re going to have to do it themselves or let their kids figure it out on their own from sources that were not designed to provide such an education.
It’s impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, short of an apocalypse or an informational dystopia wherein ISPs or the government get to decide what constitutes pornography and who constitutes an acceptable audience. It’s also unreasonable to expect all pornography to always and only present healthy, realistic sexual interactions, just as it’s unreasonable to expect an action or sci-fi or horror movie to always and only present realistic physics.
The Internet is a powerful tool for self-directed learning, especially in the young. But that doesn’t make it a substitute for the kind of thoughtful education that such an important topic requires, at least not until the culture is saturated with the values that would let such resources emerge as spontaneously as Khan Academy or its likes have done for science and math.
Seth, I agree with you, and I talked to m son about all of this in the years just before the Internet became a thing. I didn’t find it toe-curlingly embarrassing, but maybe that’s because I’m a biologist, and I find it a natural thing to talk about.
The problem is, though, that what it requires is teaching BOYS about consent, that they are responsible for accepting a no, and that is being presented by many as emasculating, feminizing, and OMG dangerous.
It means teaching GIRLS about consent, that they have the right to say no and have that no respected, but it also means teaching them that there are more important things in life than if Boy X likes you, when the wider world is busily engaged in teaching girls that the most important thing in life is that Boy X likes you.
In short, while I agree that parents can’t outsource this information, they also can’t actually be the one who takes the full responsibility, because teenagers think their parents are uncool, and that everyone who is not their parents is a gadzillion times more likely to be cool. In short, I suspect the right answer on this is it takes a village – we have to support parents in talking to their children, but we also have to alter society so the parents are not undermined at every turn.
Seth: I don’t think anyone is calling for an actual porn ban, here, either. I would love to see a vast increase in the policing of the porn industry–if we take at face value the claim that sex work is work like any other (I don’t, but that’s another argument), then at the very least there is no viable argument for NOT ensuring and demanding the sort of workplace protections that have been a staple of progressive politics for more than a century at this point.
Just don’t read the comments under that article. It’s a swamp.
I was lucky growing up – my mother was a youth and community worker and was very open and comfortable talking to me about sex. That’s not to say she didn’t pass on a few hangups that I had to shed as an adult but I think she did a pretty good job overall.
But leaving it up to the parents is a lottery. There are a million reasons why parents aren’t the ideal choice for talking about sex and relationships with kids. But it’s an area so fraught with religious sensibilities, differing moral and ethical beliefs and political positions on how to construct a good, useful and non-judgmental curriculum, in a country that does not impose top-down curriculum control (unlike my home country) it’s hard to know where to start.
Iknklast, exactly; this problem is a specific example of a more general phenomenon of non-home-schooling, wherein the kids are in charge of their own societies and essentially govern themselves in non-academic realms for most of their waking hours. This is to some extent inevitable, and often innocuous—the transmission of children’s songs from year to year without much (if any) adult involvement is an example of children’s culture—but such self-organisation in such a specialised environment also results in specialised behaviours that don’t necessarily make for good examples outside of the environment (think the bullies who derive social capital from putting other kids down but wind up stuck in dead-end jobs where they only know how to keep bullying people).
This is a very difficult problem, and my perspectives both on the general and specific case are coloured by my own childhood experiences, my own self-directed education (sexual and otherwise) online, and my continuing intermittent consumption of pornography. But I do think letting kids all figure it out by themselves, and not offering any reasonable alternative to pornography as a method of learning about sex and sexuality, is at least a significant causal factor in the kinds of trauma depicted in the posted article.
Freemage, agreed, and I don’t want to come across as defending the pornography industry’s standards (which I think deserve more, not less, scrutiny than the standards in, say, a poultry processing plant or a mine, especially since all three are rife with employee abuse and all three provide products that millions of people comfortably and unthinkingly use every day); I simply think it’s a mistake to blame pornography for being the default sexual-education resource, when it’s our collective responsibility to provide actual resources for kids.
Claire, as a product of an apathetic religious household myself, I agree that ‘leaving it up to the parents’ is fraught with peril (at least until the parents come from a generation with ubiquitous and robust sexual education themselves). But, as you say, the US’s system of education is a feudal hodgepodge that is itself influenced by religious maniacs and parents’ rights activists, and so it’s difficult to know where to start.
Our societies seem absolutely determined to redefine the very notion of consent, don’t they? I guess in previous ages consent wasn’t a thing. Now that it’s a thing, almost everyone seems to want it not to be a thing any more.
*looks down the list of people here*
Yeah, I suspect we’ve all been told off every so often by the internet for saying things like consent might not be possible when there are fucking great wadges of pressure. That has somehow become the controversial position.
The solution is *never* abolishing porn or prostitution, is it? Never. We don’t have to talk about it because it’ll never happen. We can’t make any progress on that front, because the only options are an unworkable government ban (lots of sad boners), or a free for all with no restrictions at all.
Rinse, repeat. Do it again.
One starting point is parents. I am teaching my sons explicitly that non-consensual anything is off limits. And I am not afraid to be as explicit as possible.
On another note, there do seem to be an awful lot of parents not empowering their daughters. Surprise time is way over. Girls need to have confidence to send their partners walking if it’s not where they want to be.
And to be able to recognize when it’s not where they want to be. I stuck around in a bad situation with my ex for sometime because I was young and naive, and had been taught that girls are for wifing and mothering (I didn’t believe it intellectually, but….). It can be hard to determine that somewhere else is better if you have never been told there is a somewhere else.
Josh, sorry, I probably should have used ‘prohibition’ instead of ‘abolition’. To be clear, a society in which sexual entertainment (both via art and in-person) is guaranteed to be perfectly consensual and not taken in lieu of robust sexual education is a good society, and likely a much better one than the one we have. I’m 100% in favour of the cultural elimination of pornography and prostitution as we know them, and the transformation of our culture into one in which sex and sexuality are about as controversial to discuss and educate ourselves about as writing or mathematics (and just as essential to teach well to children).
But blaming the ubiquity (and iniquity) of pornography for the poor sexual education of children is a bit like blaming Tony Hawk for kids getting their ankles broken on skateboards. It isn’t Tony Hawk’s responsibility to make sure a kid knows how to skateboard. (If anything, Tony Hawk is even more culpable, because we as a society already aggressively pursue the producers and purveyors of child pornography, but Tony Hawk has made millions of dollars off of selling dangerous thrills directly to children.)
As for your comments about “sad boners” and a “free for all”, I can only reiterate that the government already aggressively has and enforces laws against child pornography, which includes knowingly showing pornography to children. If you can think of a way to keep the Internet from showing any pornography to any child without that technology being used to a) label you a child, or b) label something you enjoy ‘pornography’ (or its equivalent), with no potential for scope creep or even well-intentioned future abuse, I’d be very interested in looking into it. Oh, and it has to be adolescent-proof, so that clever kids can’t just circumvent the safeguards and see what they like anyway. Double oh, there has to be room for consenting adults to express themselves artistically and sexually even if that expression makes the people holding the lever uncomfortable.
These issues are not easy, and solving them is not as easy as saying ‘Eventually ban pornography and prostitution!’ Firstly because that’s been tried and tried and tried some more, and has worked a grand total of zero times, and lastly it’s because no matter how well you design your tools, there’s always going to be a way around them if people don’t value the spirit behind them. And there are far too many people in government and in the private sector who would *love* to be able to decide for you what you can and cannot read and which images you can and cannot see, much less what you can and cannot produce or transform to express yourself with.
So, by all means, work to build a world in which pornography and prostitution wither on the vine, replaced by healthy and vibrant sexual expression free of exploitation. I’m betting the way to do that is by conversations such as the ones we have here, rather than by handing power to people who don’t value sexual expression.
Injurious anal sex isn’t just about ‘anal sex.’ Millions of people have anal sex that won’t involve pain or injury. The trouble with porn ‘culture’ is that EVERY possible sexual act is twisted into a venue for male spite, resentment, and hatred.
And the disturbing tone of porn doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The whole dating-industrial complex hinges on coercion or commerce in every possible contact. From rom-coms to online porn clips, actual communication and intimacy between real people is utterly absent.
It’s not possible to have this conversation, Seth, when you characterize my position (or anyone else’s that is similar) to: “They just think you can ban things and that will take care of it. They don’t know or understand that we already have child porn laws.”
In other words, you have to pretend that you think I, or your interlocutor, is at least as intelligent as you. At least as aware, as you are, of the complexities. Having read and thought as widely and deeply as you have about these issues.
This isn’t a high bar, but you haven’t met it.
Seth, I find it a bit disturbing to compare pornography with skateboarding. Yes, skateboarding is risky, but it is a risk to you, not to an entire group of people who are not you. Pornography does include male pornography, yes, and I can’t say much about it, because I’ve never watched it. But I have seen bits and pieces of pornography aimed at males, because it seems men who want to watch pornography at a place you are not able to leave do not seem to bother with invoking consent from the room – oh, wait, the times it happened to me, they invoked the consent of the MEN in the room, and assumed that meant the women were fine with it, or would STFU if they weren’t because they were, well, women.
Pornography seems often to be designed to humiliate the woman as much as possible during the sex act (I’m sure you will tell me there is pornography that does not do this; fine, I’ve never seen it). It portrays women as sex toys for men to play with and often in demeaning, painful, and in some cases, dangerous ways. So the young men who view pornography are not getting the message that they can go out by themselves and have some dangerous fun on a skateboard; they are getting the message that they can go out and expect some young woman to cater to their fantasies.
In short, analogy fail.
Josh, I did assume that. So far you haven’t given any evidence to justify it, however, only sarcasm and then a personal attack. Sarcasm and personal attacks are fine, even rebarbative, but they don’t actually constitute a positive defence of a point (unless done much more skillfully than you have or I could).
Iknklast, I agree that the analogy is weak in general, for the reasons you cite and more, and I truly am sorry that you have been the victim of such boorish and sadistic men. But I made the analogy in reference to the OP’s overarching point about porn’s harm to children when consumed in lieu of actual sex ed, and in that more limited context I think it holds up.
For all of pornography’s ills, of which I acknowledge there are many, it isn’t pornography’s job to teach realistic and healthy sexual interaction, any more than it is the action genre’s job to teach physics, or the horror genre’s job to teach metaphysics. Pornography explores fantasies, and fantasies are not an instruction manual. Those fantasies deserve criticism on their own merits, they deserve exploration as to their causes (and, indeed, their effects), but they don’t deserve to be blamed for a more general societal failing. And, more importantly, holding them to such account won’t actually solve the problems of which their abuse is an expression.
I’m going to be really blunt.
It IS the fault of PORNOGRAPHY that young girls’ bodies are being destroyed. This is what PORNOGRAPHY teaches males to do. It teaches MALES to dominate and hurt females. That IS THE SOLE message of pornography.
There are REAL women and girls in porn having their bodies wrecked by men. If you’re a man that can’t admit this about porn, then you’re a LIAR or have limited faculties.
We have to engage in a massive cultural shift in our thinking and how we treat women and girls. Males have to stop consuming porn. This means WE as a culture need to NAME THE PROBLEM and rectify it.
We should have proper internet filters and there should be LAWS against producing this male sexual violence against women. A child under the age of 18 should NEVER be allowed to access a porn site.
We need to crack down on the porn industry as well as make laws against harming women and girls.
We need to adopt the Nordic Model regarding prostitution as well.
There are things we can do but as I’ve seen in this comment section, there’s always someone who takes up all the space by saying such obviously silly things like ‘ WE CAN’T BAN PORN!!!WHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAA!
I spent quite a bit of time talking to my kids about sex – and no, I didn’t find it “toe-curlingly embarassing” either. I started when they were very small with basic information (babies grow in their Mummies tummies after she and daddy have a special cuddle etc) and returned to the subject regularly, increasing the detail and the complexity as I went. We were talking about internet porn by the time my son was 11 or 12. I described it as a bit like a James Bond film and a bit like professional sports.
It’s like Bond, in that not all of it is real, and the parts that are real are carefully filmed to be as exciting as possible while missing out anything that will disturb the audience. So Bond can have a fight but we don’t see much of the blood, snot or loose teeth which happen in a real fight. Bond can get shot in the shoulder and get up and carry on as though nothing has happened. In real life being shot in the shoulder is incapacitating.
It’s like professional sports because, yes, people are really doing those things but that doesn’t mean the average person in the street can do it. There are people out there who compete at a level that actually damages their body – runners get malabsorption syndromes, footballers end up ruining their knees, boxers end up with brain damage. Look at it that way, and while it might be fun to watch but you wouldn’t really want to do it. It’s hard work and not nearly as much fun as it looks on the screen.
Later on we discussed supernormal stimuli, and how it affects our response to things like porn.
I do think that the aim of eradicating porn is a pipe dream – at least if we define porn purely as the representation of sexual activity. It’s existed throughout history, and is one of the first uses of every communications technology we develop. I think porn is here to stay. Having said that, I do think we should be working for much greater control and oversight of the porn industry. Sex isn’t quite like any other job and the level of supervision and regulation of jobs that involve it should be correspondingly more rigorous. I feel similarly about prostitution. If selling sex was all nice white college graduates making a free choice to become a prostitute to fund their Doctorates, the I’d have no complaints about it. I’d still be pushing for rigorous oversight though. But, of all the women selling sex, nice, white, independent college graduates are a vanishingly small proportion of that population and I’m more concerned with the rights and lives of women who aren’t making that clear an informed free choice.
How very progressive of you, steamshovelmama.
My younger son wants to be a professional athlete. I would never equate that to porn.
I’ll be teaching my boys that porn is mostly videos of women being insulted, hurt and violated by men who find harming women arousing, and that if they enjoy watching women being hurt and degraded they are not welcome to live in my house.
And I’ll be teaching them that women don’t exist for men to have sex with whenever they feel like it and that men being able to buy sexual access to women is cruel and wrong. And if they want to find out how bad it is they can read the essays written by formerly prostituted women in the book I have on the shelf and see what it is like for the actual human beings who are rented out as sex toys in this way.
People love going on about options and free will and making choices, but 13yo girls don’t wake up one day and think ‘I’d like to experience painful anal sex with a boy who thinks women are just objects to stick his dick in’, society teaches her that this is something she should do and that male pleasure trumps female pain. We can’t challenge that aspect of society by defending porn and prostitution as normal and healthy when they are both a symptom and a cause of the way women and girls are regarded by males these days.
If women were respected in our society then the sort of porn that leads to boys treating girls like this from such a young age would not exist, and the commodification of women and girls in prostitution would be seen for the damage it does and the suffering it causes, not with the rosy spin of ’empowerment’ and ‘agency’ and ‘consenting adults’.
And yet, given the reason for the analogy I had (“don’t expect to be able to do what you see porn actors do”), it’s very apt. Top professional atheletes regularly push their bodies well beyond what is physically safe, sane or desirable, and they suffer for it. many suffer injuries that will dog them for the rest of their lives. Some, boxers for example, will die because of their sport.
You see, I think we might be having a clash of definitions here. I’m calling porn all media involving sexual activity, regardless of “moral worth”. I’ve watched porn both alone and with partners, and I don’t see the appalling harm that some people claim to. At least not in the easily accessible free-to-view stuff you find on porn hub etc. Having talked to partners and male friends about what they want out of porn, for the most part it’s purely visuals of fairly vanilla sex. And most of those guys (who are mostly fairly lefty liberal types) actually agree withe the fact there are problems with porn production, and with the business model that produces porn in six minute chunks specifically designed for one guy to get off alone. Does the kind of porn you describe exist? Of course it does. But, in my experience, it isn’t the overall porn experience.
This comment also excludes the large quantities of lesbian and male gay porn that is out there (I’ve heard from gay friends that their porn is more imaginative and interesting than straight porn, but I have very little experience of it personally – it seems to fall into the, “Isn’t heterosexuality tasteless,” strand of gay conversation!)
One of the issues I think is very problematic – the one you refer to with the 13 year old girls being bullied into anal sex etc – exists for two reasons. The first is that we are not teaching boys what porn is, how to contextualise it etc, and we are not teaching boys about consent and respect. My children’s generation – they are 20 and 22 now – has been the first to grow up with almost unlimited internet access. I think a lot of parents haven’t stepped up to the mark when it comes to recognising what their children will see (and it is will – if you restrict their internet access at home they will see it on a friend’s smartphone, or in a home where there is no surfing restrictions). In that way it’s very little different from the days when some kid raided his Dad’s porn stash and passed the mags round his group of friends). The only way to stop it is a wholesale ban on pornography across all platforms. And, as I said, porn has existed since the stone age and is one of the first uses of any new communication platform. Eradicating it is about as likely as eradicating drug abuse – and we know that no attempt at prohibition, anywhere in the world, at any time in history, has ever been successful. Better to accept it – drug use, pornography – regulate it, tax it, control it.
The second issue is that we aren’t building our girls up enough so that they have the self-confidence to tell a boy to sling his hook. This is a long standing problem that existed before porn, but this generation’s response to porn is throwing a highlight on a situation that I, personally, consider far more important. And, no, I don’t think the availability of sexual images of women’s bodies is the whole story. I actually think porn images are less culpable than the shit we see in advertising, in regular TV shows, on the covers of women’s magazines. Porn images exist to get you off. You switch them on then switch them off when you’ve achieved their sole purpose. The others are far more pervasive and climb inside our personal and collective (metaphorical) unconsciousness. They affect our self image and and our confidence.
You call me progressive, but I’m really not. I’m a realist. My son almost certainly has (probably does) watch porn. I never believed I’d be able to stop him so I’ve done my best to give him the tools to deconstruct what is happening and why he likes it (supernormal stimuli, remember? Humans are just as susceptible to those as any other animal, and that is what a lot of porn is.) Good luck with the blanket ban on your sons. I hope it works, but given the nature of teens to be contrarian, and their natural sexual curiosity, I suspect you have/will have just driven it underground – and that means there’s no way your sons can approach you about anything they’ve seen or experienced. But that’s your choice as a parent.
I’ve done my best to give my daughter a firm foundation of self-respect. The results? Well, my son, despite almost certainly having watched porn was actually horrified when he read one of those stories where a drunken young girl was raped at a party by a bunch of football players (dreadful that there’s been so many that I can’t remember which one…). Despite the porn influence his first response was a shocked, “There’s got to be something wrong with them.” (The boys). He was incapable of imagining a scenario in which an ordinary boy, his age, could behave like that. Now, this is anecdata, but it does suggest the pernicious influence of porn is not a straightforward cause-and-effect one. As for my daughter? I imagine she’s seen porn. She’s also seen a lot of slasher horror movies that I find nauseating (and that were, at one point, blamed for all manner of social ills). Neither seem to have done her any harm. She’s a feminist – third wave and a little too “personal choice” for my taste, but that’s her age and her generation, I think. She’s a tough little cookie and any guy trying to bully her into unwanted anal sex is in for a bit of a shock…
tl;dr I don’t buy that the porn that is readily available is as shocking and horrendous as some people claim, I don’t think getting rid of porn is possible, though strict regulation is certainly desirable, I know a lot of nice guys (not Nice Guys…) and gals who watch porn and it doesn’t seem to have turned them into raging sex beasts, or even turned them into guys who believe they have an entitlement to women’s bodies.