Can they be taught to see it more critically? Photo illustration by Sara Cwynar. By Maggie Jones. Then in ninth grade, he found online porn sites on his phone.
The videos were good for getting off, he said, but also sources for ideas for future sex positions with future girlfriends. From porn, he learned that guys need to be buff and dominant in bed, doing things like flipping girls over on their stomach during sex. Girls moan a lot and are turned on by pretty much everything a confident guy does.
One particular porn scene stuck with him: A woman was bored by a man who approached sex gently but became ecstatic with a far more aggressive guy. But around 10th grade, it began bothering Drew, an honor-roll student who loves baseball and writing rap lyrics and still confides in his mom, that porn influenced how he thought about girls at school. Were their breasts, he wondered, like the ones in porn? Would girls look at him the way women do in porn when they had sex?
Would they give him blow jobs and do the other stuff he saw? Drew, who asked me to use one of his nicknames, was a junior when I first met him in late , and he told me some of this one Thursday afternoon, as we sat in a small conference room with several other high school boys, eating chips and drinking soda and waiting for an after-school program to begin. Next to Drew was Q. He was 15, a good student and a baseball fan, too, and pretty perplexed about how porn translated into real life.
Watching porn also heightened Q. Leaning back in his chair, Drew said some girls acted as if they wanted some thug rather than a smart, sensitive guy. But was it true desire? Was it posturing? Was it what girls thought they were supposed to want?
