ChaoticMusings

Here is a mother's account of her experiences....and some accounts by girls themselves.

On a summer’s day two years ago, my 14-year-old daughter Clio returned from a walk in our local park in tears.

She had met up with a boy the same age as her, whom she’d been FaceTiming after they’d met at a mutual friend’s birthday party a few months before.

They got on well. But when, after an hour of chatting, the boy suggested they find a quiet spot to sit down, it became clear he felt the preliminary introductions had gone on long enough.

When Clio had to repeatedly say she did not want certain parts of her body to be touched intimately, she remembers noticing how the face of this boy, previously so sweet and well-mannered, changed. ‘It was like he stopped seeing me as a person, but saw me as a thing,’ she told me. ‘When I kept saying no, he got angry. After ten minutes, I got up and left and he called me a b****. I never heard from him again, except for two messages, which were links to porn videos, so I blocked him.’

So what has changed? When I was my daughters’ age, yes there were times when I was catcalled and flashed by older men. A couple of times when I was at Durham University, I felt pressured to do things that I wish, in retrospect, I had said no to. But this generation of girls are growing up with a generation of boys whose healthy natural curiosity about sex has been turbo-charged by pornography. It means that girls rarely feel completely safe.

Of course, girls see porn too. But it is precisely this insecurity at a vulnerable time of their lives that means they are groomed to go along with the sex acts shown — and which means they feel less able to stand up to the humiliating sexual expectations some boys impose on them. Wall-to-wall images of female submission encourage boys and girls to believe that it’s not unusual for a girl to give oral sex before she’s even had her first kiss.

This week I almost wept with frustration when my older daughter, Lily, 19, showed me a blog by a group of girls at another household-name public school that had been attended by some of her friends. It read more like a collection of crime scenes than school memories.

Girls being taken advantage of while drunk, being groped at parties, discovering that their sexual encounters had been filmed without their knowledge and distributed. One girl told how boys at the school made a ‘tier list’ of girls ranked in order of looks, using a marking system to rate their body parts, like cuts of meat.

We don’t talk to our daughters about sex and relationships soon enough. And, crucially, we say even less to our sons. Yet at the same time, our children are growing up with a limitless supply of the most violent, misogynistic porn ever created. No wonder our young people are failing when it comes to healthy sexual relationships.

Georgina, 17, says:

Right now, I just don’t want to be around boys. It doesn’t matter where they are from or how educated or smart they are, rape culture is like a virus in schools — and none of them believe that what they are doing is wrong.

For teenage boys at my school, it is a ‘flex’ — a way to get their friends’ respect — to have abused, harassed or even been violent towards a girl sexually.

Boys don’t believe their bad behaviour is sexual abuse, even if they say they do understand why it’s wrong.  I have been sent ‘d*** pics’ via text and Snapchat. That’s just normal now and boys don’t care when you ask them not to. They move on to another girl. Talking to them is useless.

There is a teenage boy we all know who films himself having sex with girlfriends without telling them. He has done it with several girls and doesn’t stop, even though he has been asked by the girls not to do it. If a girl complains too much, he just dumps her and moves on to the next one.

He says he doesn’t see what he’s doing as sexual assault, even though it is wrong. We have to criminalise all this behaviour.

Abi, 15, says:

My first boyfriend was someone I had known since we went to nursery school together. He went to a weekly boarding school and when we were 13 we used to hang out together at weekends.

He started messaging me every evening on Snapchat and asked me to send pictures of myself. Reluctantly I sent him a pic of my boobs. He kept pressuring me for more photos, so I sent pictures of me naked below the waist.  But the weekend we split up, he put the pictures on social media and identified me. It was horrible. There were so many vile comments. My mum called him to tell him to take the pictures down. She then called the boy’s parents and contacted the headmaster at the school. We agreed not to go to the police if the parents and school dealt with it.

Annabel, 16, says:

It’s just normal among people my age. Boys talk about porn all the time in front of us. It makes me really uncomfortable but I feel like I have to act like it’s fine with me or they will roll their eyes and call me a feminist — which they consider an insult.

For a long time some boys I know called me Miss Banana and I had no idea why — until one of them told me it was a porn star they thought I looked like. It made me feel objectified but you just learn to laugh it off.

It’s normal for some of them to grab our bums and boobs but that’s considered a joke. Girls are pressured into sending nude photos to boys. Girls my age feel like they have to do it or the boy will stop liking them. Some of the boys share the photos around. They talk about girls like they’re a prize to be won, to be boasted about to their friends. I try to challenge them but every time I bring it up they shoot me down by saying, ‘It’s only a joke, shut up!’

At my friend’s school, there is a remote corridor that none of the girls will go down on their own because boys will shove their hands up their skirts. I’ve had so many rows with boys and in the end it’s not worth it. The toxic masculinity among young boys is so strong that even the nice ones sometimes get dragged in.

Lexi, 15, says:

I joined Snapchat when I was nearly 14, as it’s an easy way to connect with people you don’t know. I’ve got more than 200 followers and, while I don’t know all of them personally there’s always some connection through a schoolmate.

Something I didn’t expect, though, was to start getting unsolicited ‘d***’ photos from boys. I was shocked and each time I’ve blocked the sender.

Other boys have contacted me and asked, ‘Do you send?’ This means do you send naked photos of yourself, and they can be really persistent. I’ve never done it as I know what would happen – they screenshot the photo so they can keep it and show all their friends.

Beth, 18, says:

I was at a mixed boarding school that only went co-ed in the past 20 years, so it definitely seemed like a boys’ school that had a few girls in it. I think the boys felt like the girls owed them something.

There was huge pressure on the younger girls to perform sex acts and send nude pictures. You felt like you’d lose your boyfriend or get labelled frigid if you didn’t.

A picture of my boobs got leaked when I was 14. My face wasn’t in it but a boy had taken a screenshot and sent it round my whole year saying it was me.

It felt like the boys could get away with it because we were at boarding school and not really being monitored the way we would be at home.

I was too embarrassed to say anything to the school, so he faced no consequences, whereas I was told I was slutty and asking for it.

I think the culture of the so called dick pic is purely a technologically enabled and driven phenomenon, where all kids nowadays have a phone with a camera.

I have noticed on BBC articles of the past that reported on planned laws to curb access to internet porn that the most popular rated comments were those pushing their right to access porn without being tracked.

For years people have complained about violent and sexualised video games but there has been a huge lobby from the gaming industry that claims it has no affect on children and may in fact decrease their violent and other tendencies because it is a form of testosterone release.  The gaming industry also brings a lot of tax revenue to governments.

If kids have access to porn and personal porn they also have access to other materials such as images and video of things happening in war torn countries.

Studies have shown when kids go to school not only are they influenced by their teachers and what they are taught they are also strongly affected by peer culture.  So when people say they need to be educated out of certain things, they are also strongly educated into peer culture which the schools and teachers have little control over.

Maddog wrote:

---

babylonbee.com/news/330-million-americans-sue-cardi-b-for-mental-damages

---