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...

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…