What a nightmare girls must live in.

“Most people aren’t able to do this job for more than two years.” It was a strange comment for an introductory training session, but it wasn’t an average first day of a new job. I was 27, living in Herne Hill and learning how to be an online sex and relationships advisor for young people on a salary of around £24,000 a year. “There’s no shame in quitting,” my trainer reassured me. “This type of work really takes its toll on a person.”

Because there’s so much of it? Because of all the research? Because too sedentary?

I realised there was one issue coming up over and over that shouldn’t be considered normal, but extremely concerning.

Is it normal to have sex you don’t want to have?

My boyfriend is pressurising me to have anal sex.

Sex with my boyfriend really hurts but he doesn’t seem to mind.

I woke up to find my boyfriend having sex with me.

I said no but he had sex with me anyway.

Almost every shift, it would happen again. A young girl writing in, describing what was quite clearly a rape, but not fully understanding that’s what had happened to her — almost always with a boy she was in a relationship with.

Every day, young girls would describe being pressured, coerced, manipulated, and downright forced to have painful sex, degrading sex, violent sex, and sex like their boyfriends had seen in porn. This charity wasn’t a rape crisis charity, but it was becoming one. I wasn’t a rape crisis worker, but I was becoming one. Quite quickly, I started to dread my shifts. After I’d clocked out, I didn’t feel fulfilled for my altruistic contribution to the world, but a deep rage at what was happening to young girls.

And what young boys are becoming.

How sick is it that a whole generation (and maybe all future generations until climate change shuts everything down) has been taught that good sex for men=torture of the woman, and that good sex for men is the only relevant issue? Good sex for women? Pff. No torture of women? HEY that would ruin men’s fun!

The impact of pornography appeared to infiltrate every shift. It happened in overt ways, like girls worried about the safety of being choked, or being expected to have anal sex, and then there were boys writing in, getting increasingly addicted to porn, unable to be turned on by a ‘real’ girl, and worried about their penis size or how long they can last. But there was a worrying covert impact too. A mass miseducation about what sexual consent really meant, sold to a generation raised on free, explicit, violent porn where up to 90% of the content shows physical aggression or violence, and women were the targets of this violence 97% of the time. Women in porn are almost always depicted as responding to this violence with pleasure or neutrality, meaning a generation of teens are internalising assumptions and expectations about the ‘sex’ expectation of young girls.

Torture isn’t sexy, pain isn’t sexy, sadism isn’t sexy, violence isn’t sexy.