During my first sexual experiences it took me some time to realize that almost everything my partner and I experimented with came directly from the porn that he looked at.
At the age of 14, my understanding of sex and intimacy was extremely limited. My previous relationship had never gone beyond a quick kiss or hand in the hands, and I had been completely happy with that. So when I started dating another boy in my year, the shift felt intense.
My knowledge of sex and sexual touch mainly came from the short sessions for sexual education we had at school. The focus was strongly on sexually transmitted diseases, with little explanation about how they were actually contracted. At home my parents and I never had a ‘birds and the bees’ conversation, and I doubted that they thought I would need it at that age. My main source of information was therefore my colleagues and my partner, who were both very open about looking online at pornography.
The first time my partner came to my house, felt no different than dating a boy earlier. Only when he got up to leave that he pushed his hands over my pants while he kissed me. I remember that he quickly got away and it didn’t go any further. The next day, however, his friend told me that he had not done anymore because he “did not expect me to be so hairy”. I was stunned and all my pubic hair shaved as soon as I got home.
That feeling of shame stayed with me during our relationship. I allowed him to lead us to oral sex and other sexual touch because I believed he understood sex better than me.
All the ‘knowledge’ he had come from his friends and the porn they watched. Our sex education was so bad that it is difficult to imagine where they have learned about sex differently. At the time, porn was easily accessible on sites such as Pornhub, long before the recent increase in explicit content on social media. Only now, ten years later, people start to notice the problems with pornography and its influence, but these problems started as soon as people could share explicit images for free.
Once I was shaved, it didn’t take long before we have oral sex and copy the videos he had seen. It didn’t stop there: he often sent very explicit text messages that describe porn scenes that he wanted to try. Looking back, I realize that I was not completely comfortable with everything we did. I was worried that if I said no, the relationship would end, and I didn’t want that.
At that time I was also vulnerable. My grandfather died of cancer and dealing with such a mature issue made me comfort outside my family. I was desperate not to lose that sense of support.
Another challenge in understanding permission and maintaining the relationship was group pressure. In my year at school everyone shared everything. There was no privacy. It felt like people compared notes about their sexual experiences and about the pornography they watched.
Classmates I hardly knew asked if the rumors were true about me and pressed me to describe what had happened. A boy even told me that if I was bored by my partner, he would like to “show me a good time”. The attention gave me a strange sense of status, but I was too embarrassed and disgusted that everyone seemed to know what I was doing. I feared that my parents or family might find out.
Eventually I started to avoid my partner. I would not meet him outside of school and apologize to spend time with my family when he tried to make plans. I told him that until much later I would not have any penetrating sex in the relationship that I think it surprised him because until that moment I had just gone with what I thought was normal.
He finally went out with me because I no longer spent time with him. To be honest, I was relieved.
I don’t blame him. We both had failed due to the lack of the right sex education at school.
I don’t think one of us really understood permission or what a healthy sexual relationship should look like. As far as I know, his only reference points were pornography and what his friends said. My own ideas about sex came exclusively from him and what our colleagues did.
I believe that good sex education is crucial to prevent young people from trusting in pornography and social media for information. By teaching about permission and open, honest conversations about sex, we can reduce the wrong information and help to delay experiences that young people may not be ready for.
I wish my own sex education had been better and that my first experiences were not so heavily influenced by pornography. But without that trip I might not work with Brook today.
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