Young Americans have less often sex, and some of the relationships they have are distorted by what they see online.
“Many young people I mentioned were quite concerned about what the Internet had done in their lives,” said Carter Sherman, who covers the reproductive health of the Guardian. She interviewed more than 100 young adults for her book, The second coming: the sex and the fight of the next generation for its future.
Sherman says that many of them told him that the exposure to pornography had complicated their sex life.
“It was something that really surprised me,” said Sherman.
She says that some said that her porn had scrambled the boundaries between what could be considered a typical sex and a raw sex – like hitting and choking.
“They estimated that they were just supposed to do it, even if it was something that did not interested him personally. And in addition, they had to do so in such a way that they were often not asked for consent.”
One of the people interviewed for the book, Davante Jennings, 28, told NPR that growing up with the Internet had given him unrealistic expectations of what sex looked like.
“People ‘body is the body of people,” says Jennings, “everyone is not, you know, perfectly sculpted … Sexual experiences are a little more annoying.”
Jennings says that most of what is represented in porn will not fly in the real world. For example, preliminaries are often minimized in pornography. He learned how important it was and that different partners like different things.
“I think it was just a lot of tests and errors. As the best teacher is life.”
In recent years, several studies of organizations with a range of political trends have revealed that an increasing number of young people have no sex at all.
Debbie Herbenick is a professor at the Faculty of Public Health at the University of Indiana and seeks the impact of the Internet on young people’s relations. She says that exposure to more violent sexual images at younger ages is part of the problem.
“They receive the message that sex is harmful and rough, and therefore a game … say that this thing seems horrible to me, I don’t want to do it.”
Sherman also found this feeling among the young people she interviewed, including a woman who said she was interested in sex, but fearing that the men she meets would reflect the misogyny she would see in certain online communities.
“Frankly, it was really sad for me,” said Sherman, “because it was as if she had to close part of her life, part of the potential exploration out of fear.”
Sherman says that the Internet was useful for the romantic life of some young people: it is easier for them to find answers to the sensitive questions they do not want to ask their parents or their teachers. This also benefits those who could otherwise have trouble finding a community.
“I think that for young LGBTQs, the Internet has been revolutionary,” she said, “and making them feel accepted and wanted and as there are other people like them.”
But overall, Sherman thinks that Americans should be more critical about what they see online.
“I don’t know that we can get rid of phones or that we can reduce the use of the Internet significantly,” she said. ” I am more interested in understanding what she has done and how we can alleviate these side effects, or at least make people aware of these side effects, because we have simply accepted these social media and phones and internet in our lives without having many questions or regulations around these problems. “”
This story was published by Megan Pratz.