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In order to achieve a change among teens' sexual behavior, an important step is to improve our knowledge about their opinions concerning relationships, love and sexuality. A questionnaire including topics on relationships, love and sexuality was distributed to a target population of 4,000 Filipino students from third year high school to third year college. Participants were obtained through multi-stage sampling of clusters of universities and schools. This paper concentrates on teens aged 13 to 18. Students reported that they obtained information about love and sexuality mainly from friends. However, they valued parents' opinion more than friends'. They revealed few conversations with their parents on these topics. A majority of them would like to have more information, mainly about emotion-related topics. Almost half of respondents were not aware that condoms are not 100% effective in preventing STIs or pregnancies. More girls, compared to boys, were sensitive and opposed to several types of sexism. After adjusting for sex, age and institution, the belief of 100% condom effectiveness and the approval of pornography and sexism were associated with being sexually experienced. There is room for further encouraging parents to talk more with their children about sexuality, specially aspects related to feelings and emotions in order to help them make better sexual choices. Indeed, teens wish to better communicate with their parents on these issues. Condoms are regarded as safer than what they really are by almost half of the participants of this study, and such incorrect knowledge seems to be associated with sexual initiation.
Having a partner with ED isn’t the primary problem most young women face with porn, and only a fraction of women report feeling addicted, yet they are not immune to the effects of growing up in a culture rife with this content. Teen girls increasingly report that guys are expecting them to behave like porn starlets, encumbered by neither body hair nor sexual needs of their own.
In his late teens, when he got a girlfriend, things did not go well. “I really hurt her [emotionally],” says Rhodes. “I thought it was normal to fantasize about porn while having sex with another person.” If he stopped thinking about porn to focus on the girl, his body lost interest, he says. He quit porn a couple of times before finally swearing off it for good in late 2013. His two sites have about 200,000 members, and he says they get about a million unique users a month.
Since the teenagers guzzling all that porn are digesting it in a brain that is still developing, it’s possible they are particularly susceptible. Philip Zimbardo, emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University (and the guy who did the famous Stanford prison experiment), notes that porn often goes hand in hand with video games and is similarly finely tuned to be as habit-forming as possible.
Noah Church devotes about 20 hours a week to trying to help others eliminate porn from their lives, or at least to cut out the habit known as PMO (porn, masturbation, orgasm). He has written a free book about it, Wack, runs addictedtointernetporn.com and counsels people via Skype for a $100 fee. Rhodes, meanwhile, tries to help guys get their mojo back by arranging “challenges,” during which young people try to abstain from PMO for a certain span of time. There are different levels of abstinence: the most extreme (known, ironically, as “hard mode”) is keeping away from any sexual activity, and the least extreme is having all the sexual encounters that present themselves, including those that occur alone, but without visual aids. Deem’s site offers similar strategies, along with a lot of community support and educational materials. A group of young men from Utah have started an organization called Fight the New Drug, which has a free recovery program for teens called Fortify.
The one thing that these young men are not suggesting is an end to porn, even if that were possible. “I don’t think that pornography should be legislated or banned or restricted,” says Rhodes. In any case, legislating porn has always been fraught, and today that’s not just because of the First Amendment but also because of technology. One challenge facing the British proposal to force porn sites to verify the age of their consumers is figuring out how to make that work without invading adult privacy and despite the ease with which most teenagers can subvert online filters. (Reports showed that 1.4 million unique visitors to adult sites in Britain were under the age of 18 in May 2015, after Internet providers’ opt-in filters were in place.) Although one U.S.-based site, Pornhub, has pledged to adhere to the new British rules, the industry is dubious about the health claims. “My No. 1 gripe with the porn industry is that they have been generally unaccepting of the whole porn-addiction recovery movement,” says Rhodes. “They really trivialize it.” (Pornhub declined to answer any questions about legislation or health concerns for this story.)
“As an industry we have seen a lot of moral panics,” says Mike Stabile, communications director for the Free Speech Coalition, the adult-entertainment industry’s trade association. “There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of reputable science. Should something emerge it might spur discussions.” The industry is not in favor of the British approach that makes Internet users opt in to adult content rather than opting out, says Stabile: “Those filters can block access to LGBTQ groups and sex-education sites.” But that’s exactly the model that state senator Todd Weiler is hoping will be used in Utah. “We’ve changed how we’ve approached tobacco, not by banning it but by putting reasonable restrictions in place,” says Weiler. He’d like places like McDonald’s and Starbucks–and even libraries–to filter their wi-fi so that they would be porn-free.
Providing a counternarrative for teens about the porn they’ll inevitably encounter, despite whatever filters are put in place, is a key goal of the young activists. “Thirteen- and 14-year-olds have access to unrestricted and endlessly novel Internet porn way before they discover that it could potentially have harmful side effects,” says Rhodes. Deem points out that he stayed away from cocaine because he was taught it would harm him. He’d like to see porn treated the same way, with schools teaching about the possible side effects of pornography during sex ed. “I would tell my son, I’ll be straight up with you, all superstimulating things, like Internet porn, junk food and drugs, can be fun and pleasurable, temporarily,” says Deem. “However, they also have the potential to desensitize you to normal, natural things and ultimately rob you of the one thing you thought they would give you, the ability to experience pleasure.”
By college, a third of women and 90% of men have viewed porn, which some experts say has become a main source of sex ed for millions of American teens. “A lot of girls watch porn to learn how to have sex,” Bernstein said. “What they see there influences the way things should go, and how they think things should look.”
“The origins of sex ed. in this country are concern over teen pregnancy, STDs, and HIV. That’s why we’re stuck in a lot of places in this biology-based model,” said Nicole Cushman, an expert on sex education pedagogy and an associate in the department of population and family health at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “There is growing awareness that needs to be situated in young peoples’ lives. Students aren’t making those decisions [on physical relationships] just on biological reasons.”
With increased screen time and less adult supervision, experts also warn that secondary and even elementary students are encountering more inappropriate information and conversations around sex. National estimates find that among teenagers, more than 4 in 5 boys and 3 in 5 girls have seen at least some pornography online. On average, they were exposed for the first time before age 14—with that exposure rising during the pandemic.
