Sex File: My boyfriend's sex talk is off-putting

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My new boyfriend, who is in his early 30s, uses some very laddish language to describe sex. He refers to "shagging", for example, and uses other blunt-sounding ways to describe various sex acts. I find it really crude and something of a turn-off. I don't expect him to be a poet, but I find this sort of directness unappealing. Am I a prude?

You need to tell your boyfriend that his sexual vocabulary is a turn-off. It is best to do this outside the bedroom at a time when both of you are feeling relaxed. Try to be constructive by explaining that his vocabulary feels disrespectful and offering him some acceptable alternatives for the words that trouble you most.

Really it shouldn't be down to you to teach him how to talk about sex. But sadly this need does arise, which I put down to the fact that sex education is so dismal that often young men end up learning their sexual vocabulary from porn.

When Dr Mark Limmer, an academic from the Division of Health Research at Lancaster University, explored how young men learn about sex and relationships he found that boys tend to acquire different kinds of information from four different sources: schools, parents, peers and pornography. From schools boys learn about what they should not do. They are taught about morals and risk and the teaching is didactic, rigid and one-way. Parents teach boys about family values, expectations and safety - from the parents' perspective. From peers boys learn about social norms such as how to behave or whom to have sex with, but, importantly, in a face-to-face context peer education does not allow boys to ask questions or to admit ignorance or inexperience.

Porn is different. It communicates deeply misogynist attitudes, behaviours and vocabulary surrounding sex. If boys or young men use porn as a way to learn about sex, some of them will not be able to separate this from the real world, and they may believe that this distorted view is what sex is actually like. Of course, this is not the case for all young men. But there are some who, emboldened by perceived insights and equipped with the appropriate vocabulary, enjoy suddenly being able to contribute to laddish sexual banter. 

It sounds to me that this might be what happened with your new boyfriend, and he seems not to have learnt how to talk about sex in any other way since then. It's odd that as a grown man he has not yet realised that real women do not talk or behave like porn stars, and that most of them will be deeply unimpressed by someone who uses this kind of banter.

He needs to learn how to talk about sex in terms that are more respectful, and while I don't think this is your job, you could help to educate him.

Your decision will be determined by how much you care about this guy and how willing he is to listen to what you say and to adopt grown-up ways of expressing himself. If he refuses to take on board what you are saying, you should ask yourself whether your differences are confined to your sexual vocabulary.

But trust me - you are not a prude at all. Communication is so fundamental to any relationship that if you can't agree on how to talk about sex, talking about anything else is likely to prove difficult too.

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