Sexploitation

Helping Kids Develop Healthy Sexuality in a Porn-Driven World

Cindy Pierce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351860819
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

As surprising as it may be to parents, young people today are immersed in porn culture everywhere they look. Through Internet porn, gaming, social media, marketing, and advertising, kids today have a much broader view of social and sexual possibilities, which makes it difficult for them to establish appropriate expectations or to feel adequate in their own sexuality.  Even more important, no one is talking to kids directly about the problem. Parents tend to convince themselves that their children are immune to cultural influences, wait until it comes up, or hope schools and pediatricians will address the issues. Educators and doctors may be able to start the conversation but it is fundamentally a parent's job to provide information about sex and relationships early and often to help young people find their way through their social and sexual lives. Delaying the necessary but awkward conversations with their kids leaves them vulnerable. The media, marketers, and porn and gaming industries are eager to step in anywhere parents choose to hold back. Sexploitation exposes the truth to parents, kids, educators, and the medical profession about the seen and unseen influences affecting children, inspiring parents to take the role as the primary sexuality educator. With more information, parents will gain conviction to discuss and develop values, expectations, boundaries, and rules with their kids. Kids who enter their teens with accurate information and truths stand a better chance of developing an "inner compass" when it comes to sex and relationships, which sets them up for a healthy adulthood.  In her comic and straightforward style, Pierce brings together the latest research with anecdotal stories shared with her by high school and college students in the thick of it. Above all else, her goal is to get people to develop more comfort around those difficult conversations so that kids gain more confidence and courage about drawing boundaries based on their own values not those put upon them.

CHAPTER 1

Inner Compass

Children need to develop their capacity to engage in life. That’s how they develop resilience and self-motivation.

—Catherine Steiner-Adair, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

Making healthy decisions requires listening to your heart, feeling what is in your gut, knowing your own mind, and following your instincts—when you do this, you are following your own inner compass, keyed in to a guiding interior force that indicates the right direction for you. Awareness, perspective, forethought, and reflection are more accessible when you are tapped into your inner compass, which helps you make healthy choices and handle consequences.

Unfortunately, the number and type of influences young people are managing in the digital age make it more challenging for them to listen to their inner compass. Many young people have a hard time making the distinction between what they value and what they think they should value, based on what they see online and in social media. As a society, we have reached a point where we need to actively teach kids and remind adults of the value of slowing down, being alone, and paying attention to one another and the world around us. Tapping into one’s inner compass requires focus.

“Being present” and “staying in the moment” were once considered swirly, hippie concepts but now are standard advice from medical doctors, therapists, counselors, and life coaches. The fact that such a large number of people suffer from physical and emotional health problems indicates that we are more unmoored than ever. People who feel out of balance in their lives have made meditation and yoga mainstream practices and fueled a booming self-help industry. Being caught up in the treadmill of life has led people to seek peace and harmony, search for a stronger sense of purpose, and take a step back to live in the moment. Teens are facing their own overwhelming versions of the treadmill. The many influences contributing to stress and pressure on kids as they enter their teens and grow to adulthood call for more direct guidance from the adults—parents, teachers, coaches, and others must step in and show them how to set priorities and maintain balance in their lives.

“It took me a while to discover my own heart, but the pain of being disconnected from it was overwhelming and had obvious consequences. Fortunately, I learned to meditate with excellent guidance.”

—William Okin, Thacher School math teacher and practicing Buddhist

Parents struggle to reconcile the disparity between their own childhood social experience and their kids’ experience, particularly with regard to screen time. Tuning in to one’s inner compass was a much easier task before smartphones and social media. Life, choices, and relationships seemed simpler, because our access to our friends and to the wider network of acquaintances and friends’ friends was more restricted, and we were less aware of what was going on in the lives of people who didn’t go to our school or live in our neighborhoods. Our parents may have complained about how much TV we watched, even though we had a relatively limited number of channels and options, but Internet access and social media complicate the lives of kids today in ways that are making it difficult for us to know how to respond.

Finding My Own Inner Compass

As the youngest of seven children in a device-free age, I had the opportunity to observe a lot of the choices my siblings made and the consequences of those choices, both positive and negative. Initially, my parents attempted to shield the youngest of us from discipline situations and the relationship issues of the older kids, but it was impossible to contain the volume and emotional intensity of my siblings’ interactions with our parents. Listening from the next room meant we only got part of the story, which was worse than the whole truth in some cases.

Our parents made an executive decision to invite us to the table of negotiation around the personal issues of our older siblings. It was a feast of learning about friendship, relationships, marriage, drug and alcohol use, academic challenges, and the importance of abiding by laws and following family rules. My parents made it clear to all of us that when we did something wrong, we had to pay the consequences in order to learn and grow. They viewed failures and setbacks as hidden gifts. In some cases, they pointed out explicitly all the lessons and positive aspects of difficult situations, but after seven kids, I can understand their need to move the process along. I remember one of my brothers sobbing after a difficult breakup with his longtime, live-in girlfriend. My parents processed with him for a while, but long before my brother was ready, they were exclaiming what a blessing it was that the relationship was over and how it was time to move on. Even at fifteen, I could tell he needed more time to cry.

By being present for these emotional conversations, I learned early on that finding one’s way through life was an ongoing experience of setbacks, challenges, and adaptation. Witnessing the outcomes of my older siblings’ decisions contributed to my own development of forethought, measure of risk, personal values, and strong inner compass.

The Void

With so many people spending so much time online and engaged in social media—with the relentless reminders, posts, and messages showing what could, should, or would be—we all have a broader view of other people’s lives. It is not surprising that young people today experience deeper feelings of emptiness—of an internal void—than previous generations did. Knowledge of the specific details of other people’s possessions and lifestyles can set an expectation and standard for anyone who spends a lot of time online or using social media. Intensive awareness of the many things that can be purchased, worn, seen, or done makes keeping up a constant scramble and can distance us from our own desires and thoughts. With so much stimulation readily available on phones, tablets, and computers, we are spending less time with our own thoughts and more time filling the void with technological input of one kind or another.

Boredom was once something people endured, and spent energy and creativity to move through. Now, people reach for a device at the first sign of restlessness and in the first moment of free time. Many college professors remark on what happens at the end of class now; instead of a murmur of conversation filling the room, silence remains, as students immediately zone in on their phones. When I ask college students what it would feel like to walk to their next class or back to the dorm without looking at their phone, “lonely” is a common response. A number of students readily admit that they have pretended to be reading texts while walking alone because they feel awkward otherwise.

When this tendency to focus on smartphones is brought up with young people, many are surprisingly willing to consider self-regulating their technology use. While young people rarely try to justify online communication as a healthy alternative to interacting face to face, they admit that the efficiency of communicating through devices is hard to resist or avoid. Catherine Steiner-Adair, author of The Big Disconnect, says, “With the infusion of computers, cell phones, and online activities at younger ages, elementary school also now has become the training ground for people relating to each other through tech. At a developmental time when children need to be learning how to effectively interact directly, the tech-mediated environment is not an adequate substitute for the human one.”¹

Screen Time, Texting, and Social Media

While social media connect people, spread inspiring stories, raise awareness about issues, and deepen genuine friendships, they can also breed envy and superficial connections. Social media will continue to evolve new forms of connection and sharing, and the social media platforms and apps in use today will ultimately go the way of MySpace, becoming irrelevant. Everything is hot until it is not. Facebook, Twitter, Yik Yak, Snapchat, and Instagram are used in varying degrees by different age groups and fluctuate in their popularity. Trends in use will continue to shift, and some of these popular sites will be substituted by new platforms, but most young people today, regardless of socioeconomic background, are using one, some, or all of these social media each day.

Thirty years ago, kids felt pretty special if a handful of people considered them to be mildly interesting and called them on the phone occasionally. Imagine the pressure to be wildly interesting on a daily basis in multiple public forums that kids face today. Poring over other people’s photos and posts can lead to feelings of inadequacy, jealousy, and resentment. A solid number of young people spend hours cultivating their image through posts and photos. Social media give people the opportunity to put their best face forward—and in some cases it’s a completely false image. Many young people report that viewing their friends’ feeds, with flattering photos and posts about their exciting lives and the fabulous places they visit, makes them feel boring, uninteresting, and pathetic sitting in their dorm room or family room in their sweatpants. People of all ages feel left out when they see posts about parties, events, or gatherings to which they were not invited. It is easy to get caught up in viewing for hours, reinforcing the warped perception that everyone else is having amazing and interesting lives.

“Two-Facebook” may be a more appropriate name for the ways some people use social media, however, and middle-aged people are just as likely as young people to present highly curated profiles, posting all the wonderful things going on in their lives, the successes of their children, and the kind deeds of their amazing spouses. If the “friends” actually are friends or acquaintances in real life, it doesn’t take long to get a clear sense of who is authentic in their presentation. Within days of reading glowing posts, we read in the paper about the outstanding kid getting busted by the police or hear people griping about their spouses with a vengeance. Humans are complicated, with multiple dimensions, and have the capacity to be excellent people with flaws. Social media, however, isn’t the venue in which our multidimensional selves, including our misgivings and foibles, are portrayed.

Texting

Texting is the way most young people communicate with a large number of friends and contacts. They pass information and interact with great frequency and at high speed. But texts, even when emojis and capital letters are used, fail to convey nuance, limiting texting as a reliable form of communication. People of all ages claim they avoid calling friends on the phone because the conversation would be “awkward.” Reading social cues has become increasingly challenging for people who communicate on screens most of the time. Many people agree on the inappropriateness of texting to arrange a “hookup” with a stranger or to break up with someone, but these behaviors continue. In general, we have come to accept, as a society, that we will use these impersonal means to talk about personal issues and feelings.

Relationships of all kinds require people to read social cues by engaging with, listening to, and observing others, because we all communicate subtly through voice tone, eye contact, body language, and facial expressions. Beginning at a young age and continuing into adulthood, people need to practice reading these cues, and learning to negotiate disagreements and personal boundaries. Development of interpersonal skills begins in earnest when kids are three or four years old, when they attend preschool or have playdates and other social experiences. These environments give kids the opportunity to disagree, cooperate, negotiate, communicate, and resolve conflict. When computers became part of preschool classrooms, kids had less time interacting and working through conflict because they spent more time sitting in front of screens. There is a movement to remove computers from nursery schools because educators and psychologist are noticing changes in children’s behavior and in their emotional well-being as a result of less time spent practicing their social skills.

“After dinner, it was work time for all. When everyone was done with homework, one watched a movie with earbuds, one watched a show, and my husband goofed around on the computer. I suggested we all watch something together, but the kids wanted to do what they were doing—solo. It makes me sad.”

—Parent of two teenagers

According to a 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study of kids ages eight to eighteen, kids spent an average of eight sedentary hours per day consuming media through a screen.² As technology has advanced over the past five years, this average is almost certainly increasing. Many experts agree that so much time devoted to screens is affecting children’s physical health and attention span. Psychologist and author Dr. Aric Sigman claims that increased screen time is impacting kids on neurological, social, and physical levels, but that there is relatively little concern about these changes: “Perhaps because screen time is not a dangerous substance or a visibly risky activity, it has eluded the scrutiny that other health issues attract.”³ But some parents and schools are concerned, and are working to address the issue. Jenny Brundin of Colorado Public Radio reported on a Waldorf school in Denver that encouraged families to participate in a media fast for two weeks, and to follow the fast with a media diet. Brundin connects Waldorf founder Rudolf Steiner’s idea that children think by creating mental pictures with her own observations of kids living in the digital age: “If those pictures are supplied ready-made—there’s less opportunity to build the ‘imaginative muscle.’ It’s based on this simple belief: technology is a tool. Introduced too early, it becomes a crutch, an addictive one at that.”⁴

Graffiti in the Digital Age

I have noticed that there has been a drastic reduction in graffiti since texting, social media, and chat rooms have become part of daily life. Before the digital age, you could not drive your car by a bridge, walk around town, or use a public bathroom without being inundated with graffiti. Some graffiti authors signed their first names or initials, but typically their work was unsigned. A good amount of graffiti was boldly crude. Graffiti artists seemed to gain a sense of power from drawing or writing in places where many people would see their words, yet they didn’t have to take responsibility. The common thread between writing graffiti, posting comments on social media, and engaging in online chats is anonymity, or at least a distance from the receiver of the message. People find a lot more courage to speak their minds in texts, in chat rooms, and on social media than they do when they are engaged in face-to-face conversations. There is emotional safety in writing from afar, because the reader can’t respond immediately. When the writer presses “send,” he just moves on.

Social skills are weakened and social courage is diminished when people depend on texts, posts, and e-mails to communicate. The sender does not have to take full responsibility for the reaction of the recipient because she does not witness it. If the recipient is hurt by a message or takes issue with it, she can respond with a text, also avoiding responsibility for how the message lands. In many cases, the recipient may feel hurt and want to think about her response; she may plan to tell the sender how she felt the next time they run into each other. But, even if the two see each other later that same day, the number of texts to and from other friends in the intervening time may make the upsetting text seem so long ago that it is truly awkward to confront the person. Everyone has moved on, because interactions are fast paced and topics shift quickly. Strong connections with other people and honest conversations about emotions may become casualties of the short attention spans that are the product of fast-moving ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Inner Compass
• Chapter 2 Unplugging
• Chapter 3 Porn Culture
• Chapter 4 Sexuality Education for Younger Kids
• Chapter 5 Sexuality Education for Older Kids and Teenagers
• Chapter 6 Worthy Girls
• Chapter 7 Empowering Girls
• Chapter 8 Worthy Boys
• Chapter 9 Setting Boys Free
• Chapter 10 A Hookup Culture Fueled by Alcohol
• Chapter 11 Moving Beyond Hookups: Finding Communication and Pleasure
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author