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My son dies a little inside when I start talking about sex. But teens need to know pornography isn’t reality

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If you have the internet, your teen will more than likely be exposed to adult content. Picture posed

If you have the internet, your teen will more than likely be exposed to adult content. Picture posed

If you have the internet, your teen will more than likely be exposed to adult content. Picture posed

If you have the internet, your teen will more than likely be exposed to adult content. Picture posed

July 27 2022 02:30 AM

It is a rare occasion that I yearn for my school days. Perhaps after an especially tough night, I will recoil in horror at the hideous walnut that greets me in the bathroom mirror, and idly think, ‘Oh, to be young again’. Generally I think, ‘Well thank god that’s over.’

However, reading the headlines last week did give me a moment’s pause and make me ponder my endless forward trajectory, because apparently they are going to be teaching pornography in schools. A bold progressive move, I thought to myself, as I wondered if they were going to start with the classical works of Jon Holmes before moving on to the modern-day Emily Dickinson of OnlyFans. Then I read the rest of the story and realised that actually they are not planning on teaching the kids pornography, they are considering teaching them about pornography, which is an entirely different thing.

It might make any parent’s gut squirm to think that the topic could be mentioned in a classroom setting, but we might as well grasp the nettle because pornography is just about everywhere now.

Back when I was my eldest son’s age — 14 — there was plenty of pornography. It wasn’t ubiquitous and you had to seek it out — stumbling across tattered magazines on waste ground, a classmate stealing his dad’s VHS stash — but it was there. Now, it is everywhere. If you have the internet, you have a tidal wave of adult material just over the horizon, and it doesn’t take much for it to come flooding in. You can set all the restrictions you want on the WiFi but if your child has a laptop, tablet, computer, or smartphone (there is every chance they have every one of those) then you probably need to accept that they will be exposed — willingly or unwillingly — to material that is of an adult nature at some point in their early teenage years. And if you have managed to live in analogue isolation and your kid has absolutely zero internet access, chances are one of their friends does. So, there is a grim sense of inevitability about this, and just like all other potential harms, forewarned is forearmed.

I talk to my son about pornography. Not all the time, that would be weird, but when matters of that nature crop up in conversation for whatever reason, I usually take the opportunity to drive it home to him that pornography is not reality, and that much of it is downright misogynistic and violent. I can see he dies inside when I start on my lectures about sex and sexuality, but it’s not something I can ignore. I know when I was his age I was completely clueless about virtually everything in life, but especially sex.

My meanderings, painful and uncomfortable as they are for my son to hear, will only do so much. All his peers need to hear a consistent message about pornography and the best way for that to happen is in the classroom. Not every parent is going to have the same outlook as me, so every child will have a different experience of these chats in the home, and so a considered, nuanced discussion that everyone is involved in is the best way.

When I was in school, there was almost no discussion around sex and sexuality. We learned the cold hard facts of biology, and that was deemed sufficient. A few bad illustrations of the inner workings of the human reproductive organs was as close as we got to any consideration of erotica, so a lot more Gray’s Anatomy than 50 Shades of Grey.

I’m sure there are many people of my generation who think that this clinical approach never did us any harm (I have four kids so obviously I worked out the finer points eventually, or perhaps you could say I have four kids so I clearly had no idea what I was doing) but it certainly didn’t help us either. My peers and I may not have gone to pornography seeking instruction, but you can’t ignore how it can shape reality in a young mind when all around them is a sexless vacuum.

In comparison to the progressive school system we now have, the 1990s of my youth look like the Dark Ages, which might be why I would never go back, although I’m sure the poor teacher who has to face down a classroom full of feral teenagers in a frank sex chat yearns for those simpler times.

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