Teen attitude to sex ‘uncovered’

THE youth organisation Spunout caused controversy when its website suggested threesomes for teens. Parents and politicians demanded to know why public money was used to promote kinky sex among teens.

Does Spunout reflect a view among adolescents that sex is routine, even casual? The 44% fall in the number of births to teenagers since 2001 should not make us complacent.

“It’s almost as if today’s teenagers have skipped two generations, they’ve fast-forwarded so much,” says child and adolescent psychologist, Dr Kate Byrne.

“Many of the teenagers I deal with are sexually active. The youngest age is about 14 and this would be full sexual intercourse,” she says.

“From an early age, there’s an inordinate amount of accessible knowledge — they’re getting older younger. There’s a lot of talk about sex. There’s a very open attitude towards it among teenagers themselves.”

Sex is linked with alcohol and drug abuse, but porn is not the biggest contributory factor. . Children are inundated with sexual imagery — in films, advertisements, songs and even clothes.

“There is a precocious sexuality happening with the younger ones, because of the pictures and information around them — everything from clothes to music has become far more sexualised,” says Dr Byrne.

Among some girls, “a kind of popularity-based contest to have sexual experience,” begins, she says, with sex “seen as cool”.

It’s a generalisation to say that boys just want sexual release while girls seek a deep emotional connection, says Dr Byrne. For some girls, sex is about scoring points within their peer group — not about emotional connections.

Sex has become casual, say adolescents — even younger teenage boys take for granted that oral sex, or even intercourse, is theirs for the asking, says one 18-year-old male. “I think girls are being degraded by what goes on, but because it’s become such a normal thing, they don’t feel nearly as degraded or as bad as they should about it.

“I’d much rather be a boy than a girl. The way girls are expected to act, after everything that’s happened in the last 100 years, is amazing — there’s still a massive perception that young girls should be submissive.”

It’s powered by a strong laddish culture, he says. “The boys have more control. The girls dress up to try and impress boys and the boys just pick from the selection.

“When a girl goes out on the dance floor, she’s trying to impress a boy. From the boy’s point of view, they’re all out there lined up for him to pick from.”

Girls who want to be ‘popular’ can expect to provide oral sex, or sexual intercourse, says one 18-year-old female. This is a distorted sense of status. “Some girls do it because they want to do it — sometimes they want to be known for doing it, because it makes them popular with boys, and having loads of boys hanging around you makes you look popular to your own friends. Sex is nothing big, anyhow.

“Some boys expect to just get oral sex from girls. A lot of girls are much ‘easier’ than they used to be, years ago, and the boys have come to expect it.

“Some girls will do it because they think it’s expected and they don’t want him to be disappointed or get annoyed, because they like him.

“There’s no sense that it isn’t right. It comes back to feeling wanted and to the girl’s own sense of insecurity. Appearing to be popular with boys is all they care about.”

This isn’t just true of older teenagers, she says — this casual sexual behaviour is part of boy-girl interaction as early as second-year in secondary school. “A boy will get with a good-looking girl, and then he’ll tell his friends what he did with her. The friends will try to get with that girl — and when they get what they want, they move on.”

Deirdre Seery, CEO of the Sexual Health Centre in Cork, is not surprised, but says the research indicates that young people are not having sex as early or as often as people think. “It’s not the same for everyone, but you just have to go out and see it”.

She points to Junior Cert night. “It is very scary, because young people who are not used to drinking get dressed up and drink vodka. By 5pm or 6pm, they’re falling around and there’s a lot of graphic sexual behaviour going on. A lot of this kind of sexual behaviour is alcohol-related.”

The majority of young people are not having sex until after the age of 17, she says. As the Irish Study of Sexual Health and Relationships shows, when young people have sex before they’re ready, they tend to regret it, and those who start before the age of 17 are more likely to be at risk of STIs.

“There are serious problems there — one of these is the way alcohol affects behaviour. Sex is often unplanned and unprepared for, because, often, drink takes over and we don’t have a culture of taking personal responsibility for our behaviours,” says Seery.

However, part of the problem is that, “like the emperor with no clothes, everybody thinks everybody else is doing it and so they have to do it.”

When she and her co-workers go into schools and ask about first sex, Ms Seery says, students say it starts at 15 or 16 years of age — but the organisation’s confidential questionnaires tell a different story.

“The questionnaire shows very few of them are having sex while still in school. Some of it is played up.”

However, she says, a major issue is the need for good quality sexual education, which is not just about biology and reproduction, but about the emotional and relationship side of interaction with the opposite sex.

Parents, says Dr Byrne, should explain that while teen magazines, and other media outlets, may lead adolescents to believe that sex is an awesome experience, they will find that early sexual experiences are often uncomfortable and even unpleasant, and for it to work sex has to be part of the kind of loving, committed relationship that develops as you get older.

Asked about the sexual education she received at school, the 18-year-old female remarked: “You’d be surprised at the number of girls who don’t bother using contraceptives.

“They don’t think about STIs or pregnancy — we should get a lot more information in school about this. I only ever got one sex talk in school, and it was all mixed-up with information about your periods, anyway.”

Her comment is reflected in statistics that show the effects, just a few years on, of this casual promiscuity — an estimated 60% of all new STI cases are among people aged 20 to 29 years, according to figures from the Health Protection Surveillance Agency.

So where is this all coming from?

Somehow, and from an early age, our daughters are getting the message that they’re not good enough, says Dr Patrick Ryan, a clinical psychologist at the University of Limerick.

“Why are our young girls leaving childhood feeling they are second best? What are we doing to our young daughters that, when they reach adolescence, they feel they don’t have enough to offer and that they have to do something like engage in sexual activity?” he says.

The loss of traditional, old-fashioned values and principles about the connection to family, or community, may have something to do with it, he says.

Another issue is pornography. Teenagers can now access sexually explicit material in a much freer and unregulated way — 24 hours a day on their phone, if they want.

“This has an effect, because it helps to perpetuate the image that sexual activity is a behaviour, and it does not teach young people that it is only one part of a meaningful, intimate emotional relationship,” he says.

If pornography is unregulated, and not balanced with meaningful conversations in the home, it becomes a problem, he says.

Parent-child conversations around this issue are the single biggest factor in preventing early sexual behaviour.

“We know, from our research, that if you want to influence young people’s sexual attitudes and information and beliefs, conversations have to happen at home,” says Ryan.

“Yet the vast bulk of young adults tell us it does not happen. Parents should be open to talking about sex.”