Let's talk abouts sex...

As a society we are stunted in terms of our ability to talk about sex (baby), or so said Benoit Denizet-Lewis at a recent talk at the University of Oregon on writing about sex.

Denizet-Lewis argued that journalists don’t succeed at doing much more than presenting horror stories of pedophiles and predators, and never really examine what the sexuality in a real meaningful way. Journalists, much like most people, don’t want to talk about sex (baby). There will be consequences, Denizet-Lewis says.

The consequence that caught my attention was his warning about a society in which young men are learning about sex on the Internet, which he fears may shape their perception of what sexuality looks like.

When I step back and think about my adolescence and remember “the talk,” it all adds up for me. My dad sat down to explain birds, bees etc. and I left very confused. The next day I talked with my older brother only to find out that not only did animals have sex, people did too! Gross!

The conversations never got much better. My father didn’t want to have them, and neither did I. The last one I can remember went something like this:

“Aaron, you know how condoms work don’t you?”

“Yup.”

Both of us wiped our nervous brows and moved on to a different topic as quickly as we could.

I spent my high school years very unclear about how sex worked. I left my freshman health class, where my skinny ass was cruelly sat next to the freshman head cheerleader, convinced that I would contract some crippling STD from masturbation alone

My own confusion resonates with Denizet-Lewis’ fear of a young mans sexual knowledge. I wanted easy answers, and for a while it lead me to understand sexuality in a way that did not reflect reality.

“They had such a really fucked up sense of women and what women’s sexuality was,” Denizet-Lewis said about the young men he spoke with during his research.

To me, this scenario is all about social economy. People basically act in a way that maximizes their benefit and minimizes their cost. I believe this is heavily in play when young men start having questions about sexuality and hormones kick in.

Take a young man, who has newfound sexual urges, and lots of questions. His options are to talk to his parents, which isn’t going to happen, talk to his friends, who in the mind of a teenager are all Supermen in bed, talk to his girlfriend, and we all know he’s not going to go there, or hop onto the Internet.

The Internet is filled with naked bodies, sex and answers to more questions than he had. He didn’t even know you could put THAT body part in THERE! And look, there’s lesbians! The Internet is treasure trove of answers and sexual gratification. It’s an easy answer to a difficult question, and given his options what other choice would he make?

It’s the choice that I made, rather than seek answers from people, which would cost me humiliation and unwanted exposure. When I was a teenager Pornography provided more than sexual gratification, it provided getting answers. Just how did sex work?

But as is expected, the fantasy-driven, male-dominated picture of sex painted on the Internet canvass hardly reflects reality.

I would like to think that I have come out of my teenage years relatively unscathed -- not without a few wake-up calls about how sex worked outside of the world of pornography. But for just a minute let’s imagine a world in which millions of young men are growing, and developing sexually with Internet pornography as a teacher.

Maybe my reaction is knee-jerk motivated, and my teenage years didn’t turn me into a sexual predator, so is this just a case of “boys will be boys?” Is the Internet the new generations answer to finding Dad’s magazines under the mattress? Denizet-Lewis does not seem to think so, and I worry about a scenario in which one young man’s perceptions of sexuality persuade his partner into something she doesn’t want to do.

Read about Denizet-Lewis at his website, or check out his article about teen sexuality, "What Ever Happened To Teen Romance?"