Ah, the good old days when people learnt about sex from dirty magazines bought over the counter during a cringeworthy exchange with someone who may know your parents.

Enter the internet, and with it instant access to just about any kind of sexual material for teenagers wanting to learn about sex. The problem people are seeing with more regularity these days is the unreal representation of sex shown in most pornography teens are exposed to. According to Stuff, this is having a detrimental effect on how boys are behaving with their sexual partners:

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…

In recent years, Sue [ a doctor] had treated growing numbers of teenage girls with internal injuries caused by frequent anal sex; not, as Sue found out, because they wanted to, or because they enjoyed it, but because a boy expected them to. “I’ll spare you the gruesome details,” said Sue, “but these girls are very young and slight and their bodies are simply not designed for that.”

The damage is not just physical, with many of the girls suffering emotional scarring in the wake of these encounters. One study, conducted in England, revealed some truly alarming stats:

…a fifth of girls had suffered violence or intimidation from teenage boyfriends, a high proportion of whom regularly viewed pornography, with one in five harbouring “extremely negative attitudes towards women”.

The end result is what Sue sees as a GP. Young girls – children, really – who abase themselves to pass for normal in a grim, pornified culture.

It seems parents considering ‘the talk’ may have far more on their plates than they bargained for. How they must long for the days of a sordid mag found stuffed under the bed.

[source:stuff]