When your son (or boys in your classroom) are within reach of puberty, who initiates The Talk? Who teaches them about the birds and bees? Does their sex education include a chat about porn? It should.
In his book Man, Interrupted, author Philip Zimbardo speculates that if a 15-year-old boy watches a couple of hours of porn a week (while you think he’s doing his homework upstairs online), he will have had 1,400 pornographic sexual experiences before doing the actual deed at, say, age 17. Not healthy for him or that first-time partner.
“Porn is giving teenage boys a skewed version of relationships, body image and female desire,” reporter Erin Anderssen wrote recently in The Globe and Mail, Friday, April 15, 2016, Section L, “Boy Problems.”)
Anderssen quotes Dr. Frank Sommers, a Toronto psychiatrist who specializes in sex therapy: “In porn, you don’t see the ups and downs of a relationship, there is no depiction of tenderness, sooner or later the men turn into sexual acrobats, and this is the picture young men grow up with.”
“Parents, especially dads, are advised to talk more to their sons about sex, including how pornography is a multi-billion-dollar business,” Anderssen wrote. “Parents need to be as explicit talking about sex as the porn they hope their boys aren’t watching.”
More insight on the topic:
Boys, Sex and Media by Crystal Smith
Talk Sex Today by Saleema Noon
