Porn and a parental naïveté gap is fucking up a lot of teens.

“Our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic. But nobody brings us up to behave well in bed.”

Why do we ignore one of the most powerful forces embedded in every teenager – sexual curiosity?

It’s a curse. It’s a naïveté gap, an ignorant void, which today is being filled by pornography. On one website alone (there are hundreds), Pornhub, there are over 80 million visitors everyday, and too many of those viewers are teenagers.

This excellent article in the New York Times Magazine references a study that stated, “Parents underestimated what their kids saw by as much as 10 times.”

This is frightening

If you want to understand better what your kids think about porn, read the article and then do more than stick your head in the sand. In fact, stick your nose in as many books and as much reading material as you can get your hands on. And your teenager’s nose too. They are desperate to know, desperate to understand and need to discuss sex, not just try it.

Stop ignoring their sexual curiosity, embrace it and feed it. The NYT article is a good starting point – enlightening. Here are a few excerpts:

Easy-to-access online porn fills the vacuum, making porn the de facto sex educator for American youth.

These [porn] images confound many teenagers about the kinds of sex they want or think they should have.

Relatively few sex-ed classes in middle and high school delve in detail into anatomy (female, especially), intimacy, healthy relationships, sexual diversity. Even more rare are discussions of female desire and pleasure.

For A., it wasn’t enough to know that porn was fake sex. She wanted to understand how real sex worked.

We have given our children technology, so we need to teach them how to handle it. But she takes it a step further by suggesting that parents of middle and high-schoolers talk to their teenagers about “healthy porn,” which she says includes showing female desire and pleasure and being made under fair working conditions.

One effective way to get young men to take fewer lessons from porn: ‘Tell them if you want to be a lazy, selfish lover, look at porn.’

Watching porn also heightened Q.’s performance anxiety. “You are looking at an adult,” he told me. “The guys are built and dominant and have a big penis, and they last a long time.” And if you don’t do it like the guys in porn, Drew added, “you fear she’s not going to like you.”

Engaging teen sexual curiosity is critical

Information and knowledge can make us smarter and more supportive of our teenagers, which is very needed. And unless we adults have more than our own sexual experience to base our support on, we are whistling in the dark, which is not a very enlightened place for our teens.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t teach him a lot if you don’t know enough.

As adults, we should watch some of the porn our teens are seeing and then have an adult conversation with them. As is being done in a Boston neighborhood in a class titled: The Truth About Pornography: A Pornography-Literacy Curriculum for High School Students Designed to Reduce Sexual and Dating Violence (see link to New York Times article below).

Sorting myth from reality and making the best decisions

After some discussion on understanding porn films, it is important to move to a more effective medium to motivate teens to open up to a fuller discussion. We owe it to them.

Read, read, read

Books, essays and articles about sex are the gateway to a deeper, intellectual understanding, which is the bedrock of our bedroom behavior, the foundation of our capacity to be true lovers rather than just average sex partners.

There are many books on pornography and, at the very least, every parent should be reasonably informed if they have any hope of guiding their teens through the jungle of sexual acts and a clear emotional basis for developing their own perspective and make their own choices.

Pertaining to pornography, two books that can be good sources of information and should be in every family that has teens are:  The Pornography Industry by Shira Tarrant and A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us about Sexual Relationships by Dr. Ogi Ogas and Dr. Sai Gaddam (available at Love & Sexcess Bookstore, 25% and 20% respectfully).

Best practices

Get your teenagers to read about sex in the context of romantic stories, erotic sex and loving relationships and you will have the cornerstone for an open, honest and ongoing conversation about all things sexual, romantic and loving.

Make reading erotic romance one of your family’s best practices. Check out Book Reviews to find something to your liking and visit the wide selection at the Love & Sexcess Bookstore.

Read New York Times article >>

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