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he is at pains to emphasise that pornography is a poor sex educator (Flood, 2007, p. 58). Porn shuts down a boy’s natural feeling, as it places little value on intimacy, empathy or respect of partners in pornographic material. A growing body of research also shows that viewing porn is likely to make boys more sexually aggressive, to do whatever they feel they can get away with, and to want to act out what they have seen (Flood, 2009, p. 390). One Canadian study of teen boys revealed that those who regularly accessed porn tended to think it was okay to hold a girl down and force her to have sex (Wellard, 2001, pp. 26–27). A 2008 White Ribbon Foundation report found 1 in 7 boys thought it was OK to force a girl to have sex if she had been ‘flirting’ with him (Flood and Fergus, 2008, p. 24).
Educators are very aware of the fallout from porn and the wider hypersexualised landscape boys now inhabit. “It all starts with the language – how sex is referred to. Young boys talking about ‘fucking a girl’, ‘having a fuck’,” Sara, a young high school teacher, told me. “They wander around the school grounds saying ‘I’d tap that’, or ‘I wouldn’t tap that’. Or they talk openly about ‘fingering her’. It’s this grotesque, yet casual way they talk in a demeaning way about girls as sex objects” (Hamilton, 2008/2009, pp. 207–208). This exposure can impact a boy’s life in ways it’s hard to retreat from. Bryan Duke, himself a dad, who runs a juvenile regional mentoring program for young men and boys, has real concerns about porn.
    It awakens boys too soon to respond in a healthy way to sexual situations. They’re too young to make commonsense decisions. It’s like kids who have suffered sexual abuse. Their sexual experiences come out in their drawings, their thinking, their perspective. Sex is now part of the perspective of a growing number of kids 10, 11 and 12 (Hamilton, 2010, p. 69).
Studies back this up, showing that children who view porn on the Net become desensitised to this material and may then become sexually abusive towards others (Flood, 2009, p. 393).
Academic and activist, Gail Dines, reminds us of the impact on women and girls as well. “Porn culture doesn’t only affect men. It also changes the way women and girls think about their bodies, their sexuality and their relationships” (in Bindel, 2010). This was evident in my research for What’s Happening to Our Girls? Many professionals expressed their concerns at the level at which girls are now objectifying themselves. “When you talk to girls about sex, they don’t have sex for pleasure or because they’ve got a special boyfriend,” one high school teacher told me. “Most of the time it’s just spread your legs for a boy” (Hamilton, 2008/2009 p. 158). Under-age girls were engaging in oral and anal sex, threesomes and group sex. One of the most poignant stories one teacher told was of an at-risk girl who was having a great deal of difficulty holding things together. Eventually the girl opened up, talking of her many sexual encounters with boys and with her stepfather. As she talked about her life, she had no sense of being violated in any way.
Then there are the young girls who have a ‘friend with benefits’ or a ‘f**k buddy’ – a boy they like as a friend, with whom they have no-strings-attached sex. Others are attracted to, or peer pressured into, more risky situations, such as ‘randoming’, where they see a guy they like the look of but have never met, and make a beeline for him in the expectation they’ll have casual sex.
“Rainbow kiss is an oral sex party game” explains Slight, on the Net. “All the girls put on a different shade of colorful lipstick and the guy with the most colors on his dick by the end of the night usually wins a drink or something along those lines” (Slight, 2006). There are no prizes for the girls it seems.
When Girlfriend magazine conducted an online survey into girls and