MTR Eureka Street essay

When the moaning stops: How p*rn is damaging young people

In July last year, Eureka Street editors asked me to join selected Australian thinkers and commentators – to contribute a long-form essay on a major social issue. I chose to write on the malign impact of pornography on a generation of young people, drawing from alarming stories girls were sharing with me in schools across the country, and from the global literature. The 6000 words are a lament, yes, but go beyond that, pointing to some hopeful signs and a better path forward for our young people. While originally subscriber access only, Eureka has kindly agreed to allow me to reprint the essay in full and make it available to a wider readership.

Content warning: This article discusses sexual violence.

The noise greets her the moment she walks into the classroom. The sound is guttural, a low, insistent moaning. It begins with one boy. Quickly others join in, enjoying her confusion and embarrassment when she understands the intended meaning. It is a daily sport. I first became aware of the phenomenon of sexual moaning in our institutions of learning when visiting a large public school in regional Queensland early in 2021. I asked the girls what messages they would like conveyed to their male peers.

‘Please ask the boys to stop making sexual moaning noises in class.’ This was new to me. ‘How many of you have heard boys make these noises?’ I asked. In unison, 300 girls raised their hands.

It wasn’t just in the classroom either, they told me. It was on the school bus. At weekend sport. At a party. In the line-up at Maccas. While walking down the street. Even at home, where an older brother had trained the younger in the art of sexual groaning. But this community was not an outlier.

From then on, I asked every female student in every school I was able to enter in the COVID-disrupted year that followed if they had been similarly confronted. ‘Yes, of course we hear these noises.’ ‘It’s normal.’ ‘We thought we just had to put up with it.’ They think this practice of boys simulating the noise of orgasm at any female in their midst is normal. Not unusual, not rare, not out of the ordinary, but normal.

I added ‘Please ask boys to stop making sexual moaning noises’ to other messages girls routinely asked me to relay, including:

Please ask the boys to stop telling us about the porn they watched last night. Please ask the boys to stop ranking us according to the bodies of porn stars. Please ask the boys to stop making jokes about our bodies. Please ask the boys to stop rubbing up against us in the corridors. Please ask the boys to stop sending us dick pics. Please ask the boys to stop pressuring us for nudes.

These everyday sexual affronts tell us a great deal about how entrenched the objectification of girls is. They also tell us how widespread is the callousing of our young men, the erosion of empathy, the decay of civil behaviour, and the social arson caused by mass pornography saturation.

‘These everyday sexual affronts tell us a great deal about how entrenched the objectification of girls is.’

At a NSW Christian School just before the June 2021 lockdown, girls said boys were filming themselves simulating masturbation using hand sanitiser bottles.

At a Perth public school, girls arrived on their first day back after lockdown to be greeted with photocopies of boys’ penises taped to their lockers. And the most recent story, from a regional NSW public school: boys were masturbating on the school bus in front of girls.

Choking, bruising, bondage, whipping, rape-play: p*rn-driven expectations

Exposure to pornography has been linked to an increase in in sexually aggressive behaviour and adolescent dating violence. Boys wanting to enact the signature acts of pornography on girls has also become more common. More young men expect facials (ejaculation on the face), anal, and oral sex. Debby Herbenick, a leading sex researcher at Indiana University, advises students, ‘If you’re with somebody for the first time, don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.’

More girls tell me boys expect to choke them: ‘He put his hands around my neck without even asking.’ Young women experience fear and some suffer injuries after young men carry out porn-inspired sex acts on them, including anal sex and strangulation. Strangulation is not ‘kink’; it is a red flag for homicide and should be treated as such.

A UK study found that girls were being coerced into anal sex they didn’t want and found painful. The main reason they gave for engaging in the act was that boys ‘wanted to copy what they saw in pornography’.

‘If I have a girlfriend, do I need to strangle her when I have sex with her?’ queried a boy, as recorded in a 2016 report by UK Labour MP Sarah Champion titled Dare2Care: national action plan for preventing child abuse and violence in teenage relationships.

Allison Pearson wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald about a conversation she had over dinner: ‘A GP, let’s call her Sue, said: “I’m afraid things are much worse than people suspect.” In recent years, Sue had treated growing numbers of teenage girls with internal injuries caused by frequent anal sex; not, as Sue found out, because they wanted to, or because they enjoyed it, but because a boy expected them to.’

And yet Teen Vogue has published an anal sex guide for teens, further normalising the practice.

These porn-inspired behaviours spill over into TikTok. ‘KinkTok’, a popular genre within TikTok, has 6.2 billion views on a platform where more than 30 per cent of users are minors. There you will find teens promoting choking, whipping, bondage, sadism and submission. A 15-year-old is depicted fantasising about being choked. Many girls present themselves covered in bruises from rough sex. Growing in popularity is the ‘consensual/non-consensual’ (con-non-con) genre, also known as ‘rape play’.

Our Watch, Australia’s peak body addressing violence against women, notes the concerns of young people themselves in their background paper Pornography, young people, and preventing violence against women, including: ‘that pornography could create uncertainty and demands around sexual relationships from their male peers and partners’ and ‘that young men may pressure young girls to perform unwanted, degrading, painful or violating sexual acts that they have seen in pornography’. As one 17-year-old female observed: ‘I am worried about the effect porn has on boys my age i.e. the expectations they will place on me and other women as a result of viewing porn.’

Girls are expected to provide sex acts for tokens of affection. Asked, ‘How do you know a guy likes you?’, a Year 8 female student replied: ‘He still wants to talk to you after you suck him off.’ A male high school student said to a girl: ‘If you suck my dick I’ll give you a kiss.’

Young women are saying yes when they mean no — what Katherine Kersten in the Star Tribune describes as ‘the default of the yes’. They don’t want to appear inexperienced or unwilling or anything other than ‘sex positive’, even when it means compliance with degrading acts that leave them feeling cold and used.

The culture around young women tells them that depersonalised, hurtful sex is actually hot and this is what empowerment looks like, so you really should be up for it and if you’re not, there is something wrong with you.

The ubiquity of porn also leads to girls being classified based on how they compare, which is taking a toll on their mental health. UK author, journalist and mental health advocate Rachel Kelly writes:

While both sexes have ready access to pornography, girls tend to be more objectified by it. Studies suggest that porn use can reduce the capacity for intimacy, feed body shame or encourage coercion into unwanted sexual acts. According to [David] James [deputy head of Lady Eleanor Holles, a private girls’ school in south-west London], ‘Girls are objectified and classified more quickly and publicly than ever before.’

The behaviours described should not surprise us. They are the inevitable outcome of a generation of young people having grown up alongside the global commodification of sexuality: coming-of-age in a society in which the sex industry, harnessed to aggressive consumerism, has popularised the selling of female flesh.

P*rn’s grooming starts young

Parents and carers share with me distressing stories that demonstrate the gangrenous impact of porn on children, and how it influences children’s ideas of sexuality. One mother writes a harrowing account about how her child’s life unravelled after being exposed to porn from the age of eight. I’m told of children inappropriately touching other children, using sexual language, playing ‘sex games’, requesting sexual favours:

‘My 10-year-old granddaughter was approached by a boy while waiting for the school bus and asked, “do you do arse?”’ 

‘My eight-year-old found a note in her school bag which read, “Ready for sex?”’

‘An eight-year-old boy told my eight-year-old girl he wanted to “f**k you hard”’

‘A 10 year-old boy told my 10-year-old daughter that he was going to break in and rape her.’

‘My daughter was sexually assaulted at her primary school, aged six, in a four-month campaign of violence by six boys in her class and the year above. They called her a bitch, hit, punched, kicked and pushed her over as well as touching her genitals to frighten her. The school called it rough play — I wonder where all the men got the idea that sexist terrorism was play?’

Movement Director Melinda Tankard Reist featured on MelbourneCatholic.org

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