Teens, Social Media and the Future of Sex
Cassidy isn’t fast enough — not to wipe the look off her face, a combination of confusion disgust and awe and not fast enough to swing her arm over her head before her brother grabs her cell phone from her hands before it goes dark, before the passcode is required to open her text message window again. She’s jumping and grunting and lunging into his body, but even though he is younger, Jake is taller, broader. He holds her phone over their heads, reads, then yells out, “Ewww!”
“Shut up!” she growls, but again, she isn’t fast enough.
“What is it?” their mother wants to know.
“Someone sent Cass a porno message!” Jake laughs and spins from his sister’s grip. And that’s it. She hates him for the rest of his life. Again.
It’s after dinner and Cassidy’s parents have demanded her phone and her password. They’re grilling her on the nature of her relationship to the boy who sent the message (none at all, but they don’t believe her), and want to know who these people are who keep sending pictures while they stare. What is this app, Snapchat, they demand to know? Don’t these children have parents? They want to know a lot of things she’d rather die than have to explain to them. They just don’t get it. Doesn’t anyone have a right to privacy anymore?
Cassidy is 14. She’s had a cellphone since she was 9 and a smartphone since she was 11. At school, the rules are that everyone must turn off their phones and put them away during class or risk having them taken away, but no one does. Everyone texts in class, and plenty of them watch porn in class, too.
As a freshman, Cassidy knows a lot of kids who’ve already had sex, although she hasn’t yet, but she doesn’t know anyone personally who hasn’t received a “sext”—a sexually explicit text message—or a nude imagine from a guy or girl their own age. She even has a friend who had been sexting a guy she met on Facebook, someone she believed to be her own age, but who turned out to be a 48-year-old man. Her friend had sent him pictures of her breasts before she knew.
Cassidy’s parents want to know just how in the world this boy knew about the very explicit things he had written in his messages. Cassidy just looks at them like they’re crazy. Jake takes over again, “Wow, Mom and Dad, it’s just sex. Like, everyone knows about it. Just cuz you guys aren’t talking about it doesn’t mean we don’t know about it.” And he saunters out of the room.
A Matter of Accessibility
When Cassidy’s parents were growing up, pornography was something one encountered only when a kid had stumbled upon Dad’s stash of magazines underneath the mattress. Or maybe a VHS tape had been discovered behind a tool box in the basement, where no one else would think to look. These were items a father was generally ashamed to possess, and likely didn’t want his family to know about. Maybe the magazines and movies were passed among boys in the neighborhood, who reviewed them in secret and then found new places to stash them, but it wasn’t usually until a boy was 18 that he was able to acquire a secret stash of his own. Pornographic sex wasn’t really informing the way young people communicated, and it was rarely shaping the way they expected to have sex. Porn was considered men’s territory, but now, more and more women and girls are consuming pornography too.
It’s an understatement to say things are different since the advent of the Internet. While the FCC has been gradually loosening its restrictions on the degree of violence and sexually explicit content permitted in mass media, it’s safe to say the U.S. is still seen as sexually repressed by many inside and outside the country. This runs at odds with the nature and degree of accessibility of porn here. The average age children are exposed to pornography is now 11. Perhaps a side effect of sexual repression is sexual obsession.
Whether accidental or intentional, children and teens are running into sexually explicit content on laptops, smartphones, tablets, gaming systems and lots of other devices. It’s virtually impossible to avoid at least some pornographic content if you are online—even in environments viewed as “safe” by parents, such as children’s websites. Pornographic content is being placed there by those who want to turn children into consumers.
The Effects
While the controversy over pornography’s existence may endure until the end of the Internet, virtually no one questions whether the inundation of such graphic images is harmful for kids. Before a child has reached the age of consent, is he or she able to understand what he or she is seeing and put it into context? And there are deeper, less rhetorical questions. What effect is this increasingly-accessible genre having on the hearts and minds of young people, and on their expectations of self and other? What impact will a culture of kids hooked on porn have on the future of sex and relationships?
Donna Freitas, a former professor of religion at Hofstra and Boston Universities, and author of books including The End of Sex (2013), recently told Nancy Jo Sales in her Vanity Fair piece, “Friends Without Benefits” that “social media is fostering a very unthinking and unfeeling culture. We’re raising our kids to be performers.” It can be argued that this is also the foundation of mainstream porn: unthinking, unfeeling (in an emotional sense) and performance.
When pornography or any other sexual impulse becomes addictive, it is understood by experts to be rooted in disordered intimacy. What is porn saturation teaching our kids if not that sex is perfunctory, mechanical and thrilling, but rarely connected or intimate? The answer isn’t likely to be found in the censorship of pornographic content (in the age of the Internet, this would be an impossible task), but in better education around sex and the nature of sexual relationships. Young women and young men are both harmed when media teaches them to expect too much, or too little, from the relationships in their lives, or too much or too little from themselves. Teens having sex isn’t anything new; but the format and accessibility of images is. It’s right to wonder where it will lead us and, if the answer’s “nowhere good,” what we can do.