A year ago I walked into my kitchen to find half a dozen teenagers there, each one engrossed with their own private screen in silence. I realised it had been months since I'd seen a teenager without a computer or smartphone in their hand. I decided there and then to make a film on the subject, the beginning of a year-long journey that took me from the fibre-optic cables in the sewers of London to spending endless, unedifying hours in bedrooms of teenage boys as they watched porn.
Nearly every girl I met talked of the social pressure: the demand to be constantly in touch; the problems of "unfriending"; being in the gaze of people they have barely met; the anxieties about their image; and the horror of looking in while being left out – for them much more pressing than what one girl dubbed "the parental obsession with groomers and porn".
What surprised me was the anger of many teenagers who, in turn, felt abandoned by parents whose own eyes were fixed on electronic devices.
(...)
As teenagers increasingly learn about sex from pornography, their sexual norms change. I sat with a group of boys who, when asked about where they imagined ejaculating, took more than 20 minutes and considerable prompting to come up with a word that indicated vagina. "In the face", "over the tits", "up the arse" and "blow job" came to their minds immediately – they were all 15. One young woman had only ever been "in love" online, but had worked as an escort from the age of 17. She was one of many who confided that, though they could perform a whole series of sexual acts confidently, they felt inhibited about making themselves vulnerable emotionally. "Porn is great and it's free but it ruins love for us all," said one 15-year-old boy ruefully. Full story...
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Nearly every girl I met talked of the social pressure: the demand to be constantly in touch; the problems of "unfriending"; being in the gaze of people they have barely met; the anxieties about their image; and the horror of looking in while being left out – for them much more pressing than what one girl dubbed "the parental obsession with groomers and porn".
What surprised me was the anger of many teenagers who, in turn, felt abandoned by parents whose own eyes were fixed on electronic devices.
(...)
As teenagers increasingly learn about sex from pornography, their sexual norms change. I sat with a group of boys who, when asked about where they imagined ejaculating, took more than 20 minutes and considerable prompting to come up with a word that indicated vagina. "In the face", "over the tits", "up the arse" and "blow job" came to their minds immediately – they were all 15. One young woman had only ever been "in love" online, but had worked as an escort from the age of 17. She was one of many who confided that, though they could perform a whole series of sexual acts confidently, they felt inhibited about making themselves vulnerable emotionally. "Porn is great and it's free but it ruins love for us all," said one 15-year-old boy ruefully. Full story...
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