Teens Sexual Behavior and the Internet

Teenage Sexual Development:

"They Know What Boys Want"

Teenagers have always learned about sex from their peers as well as their parents and teachers. However, the Internet is another easily accessible form of information that provides uncensored and often extreme images on which very young adolescents may model their sexual selves. According to a 2011 article in New York Magazine, entitled "They know what boys want," of the students interviewed by the reporter, "every one of them said he or she had seen 'inappropriate material' online" (2011, p.2). Many of the girls reproduced the professional, pornographic sexual images they saw online in their own selfies which they posted on Facebook and other social media. Even if the teens express disgust at the images, the pictures clearly provide them with a model of how to present themselves, a way of depicting their sexuality which the teenagers are apt to mimic as a rite of passage.

Interestingly, in a study by Nahom (2001), males rather than females were found to be more consistent in following through with their resolve to use condoms although girls seemed to perceive more peer pressure to engage in sexual activity. The sense of what is normal and what other people are doing can have a powerful influence upon adolescents and the Internet can act as another form of such pressure, even normalizing what might be considered in previous eras relatively extreme behaviors. "The girls know to be wary of strangers on the Internet -- but they're also wary of how the web is affecting the boys they might actually want to date" and according to a number of the girls, "with certain guys, they'll see something on the Internet and then they'll want their girlfriend to do it" (Morris, 2011, p.3). A number of the girls expressed their belief that this was due to the fact that males are more sexualized than females and more apt to wade in the dirtier aspects of sexual behavior but in light of the Nahom (et al. 2001) findings, it may also be simply that males are doing so because they believe they 'should' do this, based upon what they have seen on the Internet.

Sexual experiences where risky behaviors are normalized between the partners has been found to overcome the earlier resolve of teens to resist such advances (Nahom et al. 2001). Similarly, even though teens may express disgust at what they see on the Internet, the apparently incontrovertible evidence that such behaviors are out there and normalized, the New York Magazine article suggests, indicates that a perceived barrier has been broken. Even the teens themselves seem to sense that the media influences them. "I think they're pressured by the Internet ... When you see some of those things, you actually get a negative mind" said one girl about the common phenomena of boys asking for naked photographs (Morris, 2011, p.3). Even girls who do not indulge in their boyfriend's fantasies are frequently the subject of rumors, like one girl in the New York article whose boyfriend said that she had 'done it' even though she had not -- which generated just as much misery for her socially as a girl who had been sexually active.

According to a 2015 article in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health in a cross-sectional survey of 13-18-year-olds the use of the Internet for sexual stimulation or sexting between partners was associated with a higher risk of engaging in physical sexual activities and "risk and psychosocial measures largely followed similar patterns for males and females. Recent sexting was associated with increased odds of past-year participation in every sexual activity assessed: kissing; fondling; stimulation with a finger or toy; and oral, vaginal and anal intercourse." Of course, there is always an issue of correlation versus causation. Teens who engage in sexual activity may be more apt to take risks online, including viewing explicit material and sexting, and the online stimulus may not be the cause of the behaviors. Still, viewed in light of the New York Magazine article, it seems like the number of such risk-taking teens is increasing, fueled with the sense that sexual behavior at a young age is normalized, based upon their consumption of media on the Internet.

Teenagers are commonly said to go through three stages of romantic relationships -- forming first crushes or romantic relationships with the gender they desire; entering into their first romantic relationships, and finally establishing real, genuine romantic bonds as they enter late adolescence. Interestingly, the injection of the Internet into teenage life has both slowed down and speeded up such behaviors. On one hand, teens seem to be engaging in highly explicit sexual behaviors at younger and younger ages. Also, young teens may call their partners boyfriends and girlfriends, even though the relationships they have with them are very shallow and are solely based in sexual exploration. The deeper bonds that teens should develop, at least the teens in the New York Magazine article, seem lacking even in older teens that define their romantic lives via the Internet. The focus, at least for Internet-heavy consumers, is on the physical aspects of the relationship and extreme behaviors because that is what the teens are modeling.