Talking sex…

“Watching porn is a good way to learn new tricks and stuff. Its educational.” (16 year old girl from London)

DH and I are running a Romance Academy course for our church youth group, and the youth group of another church from south London. Not all of the young people are Christians, and the course is not about telling the young people what to think. The aim of Romance Academy is a holistic sex and relationship education for young people, helping them to develop self-esteem, confidence, and to equip them to make positive, healthy choices about sex and relationships. We are about half way through the course and at our most recent course we talked about ‘Just Sex?’ – looking at how our culture separates sexual intercourse from the other elements of both relationships and us as people. We used images from magazines, lyrics from pop songs, and our (oh yes!) personal experiences of sex to engage the young people in talking about how they feel about sex.

On a positive note, most of the young people did not feel that they were being pressured into having sex, although they felt that both youth culture and culture in general was “sex obsessed”. At the same time, they were completely unfazed by the graphic pictures from magazines (that weren’t even porn magazines) that we were looking at. Of course there were hardly any pictures of men. Scrap that. There were no pictures of men posed as the women were. The only pictures that there were of men with their clothes off were from sports or body building magazines. (Which none of the young people identified as ‘sexy’. Clearly sexiness is not just about being naked, its about which positions are adopted/ facial expressions etc.)

The girls who I was talking to were largely uncritical of the highly sexualised images that we discussed from mainstream media. Only a couple of girls pointed out that the images would have been doctored, and none of them expressed concern about why women’s bodies were being exploited for financial gain by advertisers. “It’s just her job” reflected one young person.

When discussing pornography, the overwhelming majority of young people thought that porn was a good way to learn about sex. This was by far the most disturbing finding that I took away from the session. I am no expert, but I know enough about pornography to know that if our young people are turning to porn to learn about about sex, that is not good news. Then I read this article about teenagers and violent porn and the news got worse. My post is not about porn, that is for another time, this is about where and how young people learn and talk about sex and relationships.

A friend of mine recently worked out that children and young people spend 16% of their year in school. (Even if they sleep 10 hours a day that still leaves 40% of the year with their parents, families, wider communities.) Parents are not going to be the first port of call for a frank discussion about sex, but young people do need adults and people older than them talking about healthy relationships and when sex might be a good idea or not. As a woman and a feminist I also feel passionately that we need to be talking to girls about how they feel about how women are portrayed in the media, in our culture, in pornography. Pornography is damaging to both men and women, but as women in porn are overwhelming acted-upon victims, subject to the (frequently violent) demands of men, the portrayal of women in porn has far-reaching effects that can damage multiple parts of a young woman’s humanity.  As a Christian, I want churches to start talking about sex openly and honestly, without the usual guilt-inducing rhetoric. I am privileged to be able to talk to a group of teenagers about sex in the context of a Romance Academy course, but a few hours over a few months just doesn’t come close to the depth of relationship that young people need to be able to feel safe enough to start talking about these things that greatly and significantly shape their lives now, and will continue into adulthood.