I’m going to say this whenever I talk about sex. Pornography is not sex. Let me say that again. Porn is not sex. Porn is performance. More, women are generally not the ones that porn is made for. Or by, for that matter. Women are the main subjects of porn, but most porn is made for men. That means, that even when you grow up, if you are a girl/woman/femme most porn is not made for you. And it’s really, REALLY, not meant for kids. Any kids. Not even teens.
That said, there is nothing wrong with sex. It is a completely natural thing. Some people call it a bodily function and I think this is true as long as only one person is involved. Masturbation is healthy. But once someone else is involved if you still treat it like just a bodily function that’s like treating another person like a toilet. In the best-case scenario, you have people treating each other like toilets. Which doesn’t sound fun at all.
Speaking of masturbation, you should do it. A lot. Like I said, masturbation is healthy. Getting to know your body is healthy. And long before you have sex with anyone else, should you choose to do so, you should know yourself. By the time you are intimate with someone else you should have strong ideas about what you like- and what you don’t like.
By the way, sex without consent is not sex. It’s sexual assault or rape. And you can change your mind at any point in a sexual experience. You are not “obligated” to go through with anything. You can consent to one thing and not another. And just because you consented to something in the past does not mean you have consented to it forever. YOU decide what you like. You decide what you want to do.
Consent is not reluctant or given under pressure. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) has an excellent page defining consent. I strongly recommend reading the entire page as many times as needed to get it to stick in your head. But, in short, consent means asking explicit permission. If this is a “buzz kill”, please see a therapist. Asking is the easiest and best way to find out if the other person is into it. And not just once. Keep asking.
Consent includes honesty. A person cannot consent to a lie. A person cannot consent to something they don’t know about. Consent includes the freedom and the capacity to make a choice. This is why when a person lies to get money we call it criminal fraud, even if they were given the money. If I were to lie to gain entry to your home, that would be criminal trespass. But in the US, if I lie to get sex it’s called seduction. In the article, “You Were Duped Into Saying Yes. Is That Still Consent?” Roseanna Sommers, an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan with a Ph.D. in psychology, writes in the New York Times:
“To many feminist legal scholars, the law’s failure to regard sexual fraud as a crime — when fraud elsewhere, such as fraud in business transactions, is taken to invalidate legal consent — shows that we are still beholden to an antiquated notion that rape is primarily a crime of force committed against a chaste, protesting victim, rather than primarily a violation of the right to control access to one’s body on one’s own terms.”
Sommers, Roseanna. “You Were Duped into Saying Yes. Is That Still Consent?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 Mar. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/opinion/sexual-consent.html.
What consent doesn’t look like is assuming anything. Don’t assume what a person is wearing implies consent. It doesn’t. Don’t assume that a person’s job implies consent. Sex workers can say no. Don’t assume that a yes to one thing is a yes to everything. It isn’t. Don’t assume because you did it before you are free to do it again. You aren’t. Don’t take a lack of a no for a yes. Only a yes is a yes. Don’t assume that a person’s gender implies consent. Men are not always “on”. They can say no. Recognize when a person is incapable of giving consent due to age, intoxication, or even a power imbalance. And, so sad and angry that this still needs to be said, acknowledge that NO MEANS NO.