Teenagers talk porn: ‘Whoever’s got a smart phone watches it. It’s free. It’s everywhere’

In Eoghan Cleary’s wellbeing class in Temple Carrig School in Greystones, a group of transition year students are writing up the sexual expectations they think society has for their own gender. This is part of the Let’s Get Real Programme on media, popular culture and pornography, devised by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre.

Earlier, Cleary showed them four television ads for perfume and fast food, to demonstrate how the wider culture is bombarding them with gendered and sexualised imagery from a young age. (He asks them: “What is the ad showing? What is the ad selling? What is the ad teaching men? What is the ad teaching women? How does this ad make me feel?” “Targeted and self-conscious,” says one girl to the latter question.)

It’s early on in the process so the students are still a bit shy, but that changes as the course progresses.

“What is expected of your gender?” he asks one group of teenage boys.

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“I think dominance,” says one boy, speaking for the group.

“How do you feel you’re expected to show dominance?”

He looks down at the page. “We’ve written: Aggressive. Strong. Muscular and in control. Taking charge and making decisions.”

When the girls’ group is asked what they think is expected of their gender, a girl reads: “Be innocent and submissive, but know what you’re doing at the same time.” Another girl says, “Be hairless from the head down.” There’s a lot about body image.

Amid the sexual expectations, the words “slapping” and “choking” appear. As does a quote, apparently from controversial social media personality Andrew Tate: “Slap, slap, shut-up bitch.”

“Four years ago, ‘choking’ didn’t come up,” Cleary tells me later, “But now it comes up in every single class.”

All of the suggestions come from the students. Cleary is very careful not to bring in anything that they don’t introduce themselves.

After a while he says: “Are your parents the ones teaching you these things? Are teachers teaching you these things?”

They shake their heads. “Where’s it coming from?”

Several voices say: “Porn.”

Cleary is officially an English teacher. Five years ago in class, some of the boys espoused some misogynistic ideas and the girls began “actively responding to and rejecting those ideas. It was providing great debate in my English class but was also giving an insight into embedded beliefs that some of the guys had that were just totally not based in reality.”

[ Consent, online pornography and gender stereotyping part of new proposals in sex education syllabus ]

He started a gender studies class as part of the TY wellbeing course. In the context of some of the attitudes he encountered, he asked, like today: “Who’s teaching you this?” There was a long silence. Eventually someone said, “It’s porn, sir.” Cleary sighs. “They gauged my response so closely and when they realised they could talk about it, that’s all we did for the rest of the class.”

At around the same time, he got a disclosure from a student about a sexual assault. He engaged all the support he could for her. At one point he asked her what else she’d like him to do. “And she said, crying, ‘Just teach us about it… this is happening to more people than me... Nobody’s teaching… that it isn’t appropriate.’”

He began to focus more in the class on consent, pornography and media literacy. Subsequently he got in touch with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and learned that it was working on the same things. The school now uses its BodyRight programme to teach consent and awareness of sexual violence to third years (within the SPHE hours), and its Let’s Get Real programme to discuss media literacy and pornography with TY students. Parents are supportive, he says. “I send something home at the beginning of every year with a list of the topics that we’re going to cover, so that if parents want to know what their child is discussing in school that week, they can continue the conversation at home.”

He has no strong opinions about porn use for adults. For him, this is about children and teenagers seeing things for which they have no safe context. He feels that most kids have been abandoned to their always-on smartphones and that adults, largely through ignorance, haven’t been giving them the guidance that they need. He has invited me to Temple Carrig to see what they do, and to talk to some students who’ve previously done these courses.

Pornography could easily reinforce a really unrealistic standard

Firstly, I meet a group of teenage boys from fifth year who’ve taken both the Let’s Get Real and BodyRight courses, and are happy to talk about it.

How did they feel about doing this course at the start? They laugh. “At first I was a bit uncomfortable,” says a boy named Neil*.

“I remember you in class,” says Eoghan Cleary. “‘Why do we have to do this?’”

“But hearing other people in the class talk about this stuff made me feel like it’s all right to talk about this stuff,” says Neil.

Did they ever talk about these things with each other?

“We might have joked about it,” says Jordan. “You didn’t delve into it too much.”

“You get slagged about it if you watch [porn], but you get slagged if you don’t watch it as well,” says Cillian. “But I didn’t understand that nearly all my friends had watched porn for pleasure... Before that you thought it was just you.”

When did they first see something inappropriate on the internet?

“I was quite young,” says Neil. “I was seven or eight and it was quite upsetting. I was at a friend’s house and I was shown it. And I remember we got in trouble. It made me think: ‘this is really bad’ and I couldn’t stop thinking of it. It created this fear.”

“The first time I saw it we got given out to too, but I just didn’t understand it,” says Liam. “I was just over at a friend’s house and he showed me this picture. And you saw it and thought that’s weird. I’m not touching that. It seemed so wrong to me. I was about nine.”

Did parents or teachers ever talk to them about this sort of thing before? “‘Sex education’ was a bit more straightforward,” says Neil. “‘This is sex. This is what happens with sex. Porn is bad’… But in Mr Cleary’s class we actually got to look into it. We actually got to go ‘Oh, this is how porn affects your mind.’”

[ The Irish Times view on modernising sex education: a step forward ]

What was different about this? “It was a conversation,” says Jordan. “And it was about the experience of sharing stuff. So it wasn’t just about getting the information taught.”

Did they feel a sense of relief that it was being discussed?

Everyone nods vigorously. “100 per cent,” says Jordan.

“In the class Mr Cleary made it feel like a safe space,” says Cillian. “He set rules at the start of the class and it really made me feel like what was said in the classroom didn’t leave it. When you’re talking about something so seriously, you start enjoying it.”

“We could trust Mr Cleary,” says Neill. “We feel free to talk about stuff around Mr Cleary and not feel like he’s judging us. It was nice to have that.”

Was it important that it was a mixed group with boys and girls?

“Definitely,” says Jordan. “Having an open discussion with both genders really made it feel more shared.”

“Hearing some of the stories that the girls were telling about being catcalled and stuff,” says Neil. “I’d seen catcalling happening and I didn’t think it was a big deal but hearing how they felt was an eye-opener for me. I didn’t understand that girls felt that uncomfortable in those scenarios... And it really opened up my mind to think about it.”

Do they think the messaging that they were getting from social media and pornography could affect how they saw girls and women?

“Definitely,” says Cillian.

“Pornography could easily reinforce a really unrealistic standard,” says Jordan.

“You wouldn’t really consider how it affects your thinking before,” says Liam. “Some things are obviously very blatant, but most of it is sort of subconscious. You don’t think wait a minute, this could affect me. And that could have an impact on a girl watching this as well.”

What about people who worry that courses like this teach you about the existence of pornography?

“It’s pretty hard to avoid,” says Neil.

“You’re always going to come across it,” says Cillian. “Whoever’s got a smartphone is going to watch it… It’s free and it’s literally everywhere, so figuring out the right from wrong is really helpful.”

“Not being taught about it, you aren’t able to guard yourself from it, you’re letting your brain get damaged,” says Liam. “And then you’re just going to grow up to be someone trying to fulfil that dominant, aggressive, unrealistic role. No one wants that.”

“And if it’s not talked about, you feel alone, thinking it’s just me,” says Cillian.

How do they think pornography affected them? “Some of the content [I saw] made me question a lot of stuff about sex itself,” says Liam. “How violent it seemed... It made me not like the idea at all and not want to be in a relationship.”

“It makes you nervous about going into relationships,” says Cillian.

“You’re scared about what people will think if you’ve got something wrong,” says Neil.

“Did that change for you?” asks Eoghan Cleary.

“Definitely,” says Liam. “[Sex can] have meaning when there’s thought and emotion behind it… When you see that content on your phone, it doesn’t tell you this is a loving relationship. It doesn’t seem like an expression of love; it tells you that it’s violence.”

Do you think these courses have had an impact on their relationships or future relationships?

“Before this I was really worried about getting into any sort of relationship, because I knew that there should be boundaries but I wasn’t sure what they were,” says Jordan.

“The sexual boundary thing [on the Bodyright course] that we did with Mr Cleary, that was one of the most helpful things we learned,” says Neil. “I was really scared about all that stuff. I was really worried that when the time came, that I wouldn’t know how to do it, how to get consent and how to be respectful. It was really good to learn there’s a proper way and to hear girls in the classroom say, ‘That’s fine’ was a reassurance.”

“I’ve been able to recognise when I feel uncomfortable,” says Liam. “And I know that I don’t have to do something just because they want to. Recognising that there’s some stuff you don’t have to go along with even though it’s made out that you should. Some stuff just isn’t okay. And you’re able to say that and bring it up.”

“It keeps people safe,” says Cillian. “You can talk to the opposite person much better and it’s safer for everyone.”

We aren’t teaching relationships and sexual education at the level that is relevant to the students, [and] children are filling that gap with the porn industry

Based on a survey which staff of Temple Carrig undertook at the school, more than 50 per cent of the student body regularly used porn. A quarter of the male students accessed it more than once a day. Five years ago, surveys suggested that children were first encountering pornographic images online at about 11 or 12. Newer surveys suggest that that’s dropped to as young as eight. Young people look at porn for pleasure, but also for education. Many of the girls look at porn to learn what they think is expected of them. Whether a student has ever actively sought out porn or not, it will likely have been sent to them on social media, and it will certainly be affecting the expectations of other young people around them. “It impacts on their lives as soon as they start having sexual interactions with people,” says Cleary.

He thinks that many Irish adults are in denial about what this means. Sex and pornography are usually dealt with by a handful of lessons given by teachers or parents spaced out over years. But as soon as children get a smartphone, they can access inappropriate content every single day.

It’s not enough to tell them that what they see in porn “isn’t real”, says Cleary. “They know it’s not real, but they don’t have an alternative. It’s still what they rely on to decide what’s expected of them… What kids are taught about sex in school is how to do it. But from the end of primary school they know how to do it… We aren’t teaching relationships and sexual education at the level that is relevant to the students, [and] children are filling that gap with the porn industry.”

Cleary thinks courses like these should be embedded in the curriculum, and not left to the discretion of individual teachers and principals who then need to fight for space on a competitive timetable. Caitríona Freir from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre agrees. “Teachers frequently report a desire to do the [BodyRight and Let’s Get Real] trainings. However, they have difficulty getting cover for their classes. If [these classes] were recognised by the Department of Education, substitution cover would be provided for the teachers. Furthermore, if BodyRight and Let’s Get Real were included in the SPHE/RSE curriculum, we could ensure that all students were receiving relevant, standardised, evidence-based information.”

[ Billie Eilish: Watching pornography from the age of 11 destroyed my brain ]

There are consequences to not taking this seriously. Every year, Cleary and his colleagues get disclosures from students about upsetting sexual experiences that sometimes constitute sexual assault. “We get between two and four a year that need external support, whether it be counselling or even Tusla or the guards.”

He can sometimes see a student realising, during these classes, that something they experienced wasn’t right. “They’ll remember something that they haven’t ever thought about before or realise that what they’re currently experiencing isn’t healthy and they’ll come and ask for support... I’m thinking of one girl in particular who was in a relationship that was not healthy. [She] sought our help and ended the relationship. I don’t think she would have realised otherwise, because there was just no space for her to reflect on it.”

And he wants to stress that boys are also vulnerable. “We’ve also had examples of guys coming [to us] upset having had sex with somebody over the weekend when they didn’t want to, but not feeling like they had the vocabulary to discuss it with the person.”

It [porn] makes sex quite scary for women. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be just for a man

A small group of fifth year girls who’ve done both the BodyRight and Let’s Get Real modules join us in the library. They’re smart and funny and eager to talk.

What guidance did they get about pornography before? “‘Don’t watch it!’” says Emma. “It would have been kind of negative. But in this class, we wanted to stay after the bell and keep talking and have discussions. When we came out, everyone had a completely different mindset on porn and everything else than we did when we first went in.”

“I think that they probably just thought that if they don’t talk about [porn], we wouldn’t really know about it,” says Anna.

And what sort of sex education did they get? “It was always very biological,” says Maya. “It wasn’t about relationships or any of that.”

Did they talk to each other about pornography? “I don’t think girls really talked about it that much,” says Emma. “If it was brought up in a conversation with girls in maybe second or third year, everyone would get really awkward and say, ‘I don’t know what that is.’”

“We’d talk about it now,” says Anna.

Is it accurate to say their generation gets most of their information about sex from porn?

Everyone says “yeah” together. “Or we’ve heard rumours from years ahead,” says Emma.

Do they remember the first time they saw something pornographic online?

“Pop-up ads,” says Emma.

“They’re the worst,” says Gemma. “Obviously you shouldn’t go on illegal websites but if you’re trying to watch episodes of a show that isn’t on Netflix, [you’d] see: ‘Elena is two kilometres away’… That was definitely the first time that I ever was exposed to something like that. I was really, really young. I was just like ‘What the hell is this?’ I was probably around six or seven. I was so confused about why anyone would want to see that.”

“When I first got an iPad, I think I was nine or 10, even the legal games you used to get had ads with cartoons of simulated sex,” says Iris. “And I had parental controls on my iPad.”

How did it affect you? “Mostly I didn’t want my parents to see it,” says Iris. “Because I didn’t want them to delete the app.”

“I was obsessed with the Harry Potter movies,” says Emma. “So I looked up the cast. I was looking at Daniel Radcliffe. And then something popped up: ‘See Daniel Radcliffe naked’…. Later that day, my mum and dad were like, we need to have a chat because we found naked pictures of Daniel Radcliffe.”

They all laugh. “I had my iPad confiscated for two weeks… I don’t think I saw anything [else] weird, apart from ads, until two years ago.”

Did they think about how pornography was affecting their lives before these courses?

“I was always really scared because I thought that because guys are watching it, even though you’re on the same level of experience, they’re still in a more experienced position,” says Iris. “But you don’t want to put yourself in a position where you’re watching porn that you don’t want to watch, just to see what to expect. It’s always about sexualising women.”

“How did that make you feel about what sex might be like?” asks Eoghan Cleary.

“Terrifying,” says Iris.

“It kind of makes you feel like you’re only there for the man,” says Maya, “like you have to be submissive and you have to take everything. It kind of makes it scary, because maybe you don’t want to be hit or whatever it is. It makes sex quite scary for women. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be just for a man.”

How did the courses help free them from those expectations? “Hearing the boys’ voices was the biggest head-turner for me,” says Emma. “I was just so surprised. They were actually thinking similarly to how we were thinking. Before the class I thought guys just wanted to use girls for their bodies... And then coming out of the class, it’s like, well guys think that they have to do all this stuff because girls want them to.”

“Getting information directly from people your age, rather than getting the information from porn,” says Gemma. “It was such a big difference.”

With each class you come out feeling better

Would they like more classes like this? “Totally, because we’ll be changed by sixth year again,” says Emma. “A class where you can all talk about what you feel… would be good.”

“And I think it should be an ongoing thing throughout the year,” says Gemma.

What could parents do better? “Maybe leave it longer before you give children technology,” says Anna.

“I think make yourself open enough that your kid feels safe to come to you to tell them things,” says Gemma, “instead of Emma getting in trouble for not even meaning to [download something]. You need to be open to listening to what they’re saying. ‘I saw this. I was scared’ or whatever.”

“Our parents were also brought up differently,” says Emma. “My mum, even a mention of [porn] is like, ‘How do you even know what that is?’”

How did they feel about the classes? “It was like a pressure being lifted off bit by bit,” says Emma, “With each class you come out feeling better.”

“It was very quiet at the start,” says Maya. “But then when you got into your groups, and you’re talking about it more, people started opening up.”

“I think we all felt more confident in ourselves,” says Anna.

Why is that? “In my head, before that course,” says Emma, “I’d think guys were expecting girls to do everything in porn and expecting us to look like the girls in porn, whereas afterwards having heard boys’ voices, you understand that that’s not how they think.”

“I felt like a lot of the guys wanted to have aggressive sex or for you to be submissive,” says Maya. “But then when you talk to them, you realise that they don’t want that, they just want to have loving sex. It was really eye opening to see that they actually didn’t want to be like the guys in porn.”

“It made me feel so much better that they were being taught about what we’re scared of,” says Gemma. “And that they can empathise and be understanding.”

[ How do I talk to my teenage sons about pornography? ]

What else did they learn? “We now know how important it is to talk to your partner,” says Maya. “That was one of the biggest points of the class. It’s not weird to talk about what you would like to do and then listen to what your partner wants to do.”

“If something was happening that I didn’t like before that class, I’d probably be like, ‘Don’t say anything, because that’s just going make the whole thing awkward,’” says Emma. She thinks for a moment. “Now I’d be more inclined to wait to lose my virginity… to wait until you find the right person and know that it’s going to be a nice experience.”

“Some people think classes like this will encourage people to have sex,” says Eoghan Cleary.

They laugh. “No one is going to listen to this and go ‘Right Mum, I’ve just learned about sex and now I’m going to go out and have it,’” says Emma.

Is there anything else they’d like to add? “I feel a lot more comfortable around the guys in general,” says Iris. “How I perceived them changed. And I think their perception of the girls changed as well. I think they’re a lot more mindful of what they say and how they think. And that’s made me personally feel a lot more comfortable around them… I think most girls or women will have had bad experiences with guys they know and I feel like personally, I’m a lot more comfortable around [these boys].”

“I think it was the best class that I had last year,” says Emma. “And that’s being in TY where you’re on trips every single day. You come out in a better mood, and you just come out feeling more confident and reassured about everything that you were so worried about before.”

* Some names have been changed.