I wanted to ask you about the pandemic and how being isolated impacted young people’s game, or just their ability to flirt and socialize with each other
I think what it did is sort of speed up a process that was already happening, which is the outsourcing of a lot of sexuality to the internet, because that was their only outlet for sex, in a lot of ways. This was happening in some ways that were helpful, because, you know, I think in particular the internet has been really great for young LGBTQ+ folks to find information about themselves. And in some ways that made people more fearful of sex.
I spoke to one young woman, for example, who got Covid, and her boyfriend got Covid, and they couldn’t see each other during lockdown, and he pretty much pressured her into sending nudes, because he was saying, “If I can’t see you, I want to be able to have nudes of you.” And she felt a great deal of shame around that. It was saddening to me, because I do think that sending nudes can be a totally normal activity, but because more and more of young people’s sexuality can get pushed onto the internet today, young people are not always comfortable with what that means, and they should be.
A lot of what we’re hearing is that Gen Z and young people are learning about sex from porn and that being damaging. We’re also in the middle of a major porn crackdown in the US. Did young people feel like porn is a net negative?
They felt very much like they had learned about sex from porn and that was in part because they weren’t getting sex ed in schools. The federal government has poured more than $2 billion into abstinence-only sex education, and that kind of education can’t acknowledge that sexual desire exists, that sexual pleasure exists, and so young people go and look at porn to see what giving and receiving sexual pleasure looks like. The downside of that is a lot of porn has extremely narrow ideas about what pleasure should look like in ways that are not necessarily reflective of real people’s preferences.
A lot of young people told me that they felt like porn had normalized “rough sex” and in particular had normalized choking. If you’re under 40, you are almost twice as likely to have been choked during sex. And I talked to one young woman who was telling me, you know, when she was first having sex in high school, and all of her friends were having sex, all of them were getting choked, and she was like, “Some of us liked it, but not all of us liked it.” If you like porn, if you like being choked, go for it. I just want you to do it safely and consensually.
Let’s talk more about the state of sex ed in America. What were some of the horror stories that you heard? And is there literacy being taught around things like sending nudes?
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