This is a post by my friend, Ozymandias at No Seriously, What About Teh Menz about a study about boys sexual health which highlights the problems boys face in relation to sex education and societal and peer pressure around sex, which we know there's a lot of in our society and manifests differently for boys and girls. :\
It doesn't surprise me that a lot of health care providers focus on girls for condom education and asking for sexual history. There's still a big attitude of "boys will be boys" when it comes to male sexuality, and that it's the girls job to protect herself and I think also because girls can get pregnant, there's more of a focus on that (plus the culture of girls needing to be protected and boys as wild animals that we can't talk to or educate). -_- Hopefully this changes, sooner rather than later. It's not a zero sum game, we should educate both genders as thoroughly (and as early) as possible. >:\ (Traditional ideas of genders, sex and the whole "abstinence first education" crap are definitely not helping and I think definitely playing into a lot of the above issues) I also hope that we as a society push messages that will help boys be more receptive to education about condoms and protection. :) It would also be nice if we included more condom use in our media, as something normal that people do as part of sex, and make it pretty much the default thing. :] Like, it'd be nice to see Bond use a condom.
Also I wish porn would get with the program and have their actors use condoms. I have a friend who works in the porn industry and she expresses regularly frustrations at how, not just the actors don't want to, but that the film producers don't want them to and that there's also a culture among the film producers and directors of ENJOYING putting the woman at risk (she actually said that they have said things to that effect, that they like the idea) and that's just ugh. -_- Plus, not using protection risks STD outbreaks and scares among the porn community, as sometimes happens. :\ And, as I said, I think we really need to normalize the idea of protection and condom use in our pop media and that includes porn because porn is sadly a way a lot of our young ppl (of all genders) learn about sex and sometimes strive to emulate.
The coercion part I find really troubling. As Ozy said they don't say whether it's rape or not. I don't know if the definition they were using was really broad and wouldn't necessarily mean rape (the question may also be broad on purpose because I know a lot of survivors may not feel comfortable calling something rape, but be comfortable calling it coercion) but whether it qualifies specifically as such or not, it's definitely problematic and again a lot of our screwed up media pressures on youth play into this: that sex makes you cool, and that boys SHOULD want it (or they're losers), that boys are sex hungry animals who can't help themselves, that "if it's up it's consent" (I heard this repeated by a lot of my male friends in HS laughing about how men can't be raped, I got >:O as you might expect), and that boys can't be raped (therefore girls don't need to worry about consent, esp as I said, since boys are sex hungry animals (which is an idea that would help SO MANY ppl if we banished it to the phantom zone, it's so insulting to men and used to excuse so many awful things) ). -_-;;
And just RAWR >:\
Neways, hopefully studies like these will help wake up health care providers that they need to not treat it like girls are the gatekeepers of sex, or that boys know not what they do... and also hopefully media stops being so awful about their portrayals of teen sexuality and all the stupid pressures and myths and etc about sex, gender and sexuality -_- And also that the media (including PORN) needs to get its act in gear when it comes to not just "promoting" safe sex but making safe sex a default, normal thing that ppl do rather than just something in educational advertising. >_>
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