Foreplay is supposed to hurt, yeah?
Guess what: porn has a bad effect on teenage boys’ ideas about sex.
High school rapists are so influenced by pornography and so lacking in sex education, they think their victims’ tears are “part of foreplay,” says Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism campaign.
Bates shared this shocking finding at the Edinburgh Book Festival, as she warned of an epidemic of sexual assault in British schoolyards — where a rape a day occurs during term time. In the three years to 2015, 600 rapes in U.K. schools were reported to police, according to the Times of London.
Due to schools’ lack of sufficient policies for dealing with the problem, victims of assault are then being returned to classrooms with their attackers. The ongoing absence of mandated sex and relationship lessons — which Bates thinks should begin before students reach their older teen years — also means there are no correctives for the “misogynistic and dehumanizing” nature of pornography that can be easily accessed online. And with schools using guidance formulated 20 years ago, “for all these people experiencing online porn and sexting there is absolutely no advice at all,” Bates said.
“I went to a school recently where they had a rape case involving a 14-year-old boy and a teacher had said to him, ‘Why didn’t you stop when she was crying?’ and he looked straight back at her, quite bewildered, and said, ‘Because it is normal for girls to cry during sex,’” Bates recalled.
Well, it’s normal for girls to cry if you stab them or pinch them hard or yank their hair out, too, but is that a reason to keep doing it? I’m having a hard time understanding the thinking here. If she’s crying she’s not happy; that’s not “during sex” it’s “while I’m hurting her.” If she’s crying, how about stop whatever you’re doing and ask her why? How about treat her like a person not an orgasm-dispenser?
What is the matter with people? (Porn, is clearly one answer, but there’s still the problem of thinking “that other person who isn’t me is crying, good-oh, I’ll keep doing more of the same.”)
“I go into schools and talk to children around that age all the time who think that crying is part of foreplay because they have seen so much online porn that normalises violence and treats women in a way that is incredibly misogynistic and dehumanising.”
I guess it’s just hopelessly naïve to think sex should be erotic rather than dehumanizing.
An increasing number of sex therapists and GP’s have been popping up in our media saying they are concerned at the increasing number of patients (both sexes) they are treating for problems that the sheet back to modern porn.
The problems noted include:
– Erectile dysfunction in men unless they engage in rough sex, gagging blow jobs, anal sex or sex positions and acts generally only seen in hardcore porn. They’ve simply become desensitised to what most people consider ‘normal’ sex. Problem is, eventually their partners get sick of it.
– Women unable to engage in even normal or gentle sex because they can’t generate lube and their vaginal muscles spasm tight shut when sex begins. This is apparently a natural reaction of the body to repeated painful sex.
– An increase in genital warts and herpes in both sexes. Apparently a contributor to this is the lack of pubic hair.
– Severe scarring on the pubis mons as a result of repeated shaving using poor technique/hygiene.
– Dysfunctional relationships caused by conflict around sex expectations.
All in all I’m not surprised. Back when I was a teen what seemed like racy and out there edgy porn (which was hard even for a bunch of over sexed teenagers to get hold of) looks positively benign, loving and consensual compared to what is commonly available now for anyone who wants to dip a toe into the torrent. I certainly don’t consider what I’ve seen to be healthy or desirable and certainly not something to model any idea of normal sexual behaviour on.
Teaching kids about respect, autonomy, relationships, consent and some pretty frank discussions about sex before they become overwhelmed with hormones strikes me as a damn good idea. I know from observing friends in action that this can be accomplished with a minimum of fuss, bother and embarrassment all round; and without sexualising the children.
God, what a catalogue of horrors.
I probably shouldn’t describe what happens to a woman’s anus and rectum when subjected to frequent rough anal sex either…
Current porn represents a culture utterly alien to my generation. The driving force isn’t desire, or even objectification. It is resentment. We have a generation of boys (or more accurately, boiz) who have NO ongoing relationship to women. It is as if they had no mothers, no sisters, no teachers, no relatives…their entire outlook and attitude are grown in a medium of commercial exploitation.
All the way back to the pink and blue apartheid in the cradle.
I dunno, it’s not just this generation… Finding young adult men modelling proper relationships towards women was rare when I was a boy and that just left peers and film/TV…
I remember thinking that fighting over a woman was perfectly acceptable because I’d seen it in movies… and my peers were recommending far worse things.
Yeah, when I encounter SWIFs, I’m always dumbfounded by the fact that they so readily dismiss the notion that people (individually) and society (collectively) are influenced by the media they consume. This is a damned staple of every social justice movement in existence–and yet, somehow, we’re supposed to believe that porn (a genre meant to be consumed at precisely the moment you’re establishing some of the strongest emotional connections in your brain) will have no effect whatsoever.
As for the cultural impact of porn–ask any female comic book fan about ‘pornface’. Apparently, a large number of pencilers in the big comic-book houses (DC, Marvel and Image) make use of shortcuts to be able to crank out work quickly, and one of the biggest is tracing–you put the sheet over a picture of a real woman’s face, and then draw the lines in, then send it on to be inked and colored.
Well, starting in the nineties and oughts, a lot of women comic-book readers noticed that there was a particular set of expressions that seemed to be very, very common on female characters. The guys were basically tracing over the pictures of women in porn, most often ones suggesting oral sex. As a result, the women were consistently shown with their mouths in the classic “O” position–which, of course, is rarely actually used when merely speaking. (Greg Land, in particular, did this so often that it practically became a meme.)
[…] a comment by Freemage on Foreplay is supposed to hurt, […]