Written by Suzanne Harrington for the Irish Examiner. Originally published on September 6, 2019.
When it comes to ideas around consent, sex is no longer perceived as something to give or to get, depending on your gender, but something to share equally via mutual negotiation for mutual pleasure. That’s the theory anyway. Teenagers, beginning their sexual journeys, have never been more exposed to porn, yet never more aware of the idea of consent, as our culture swings paradoxically between porn saturation and informed, emotionally literate sexual behaviour in a post #MeToo era.
Porn, widely consumed and graphic — according to research from NUI Galway, 58% of Irish boys are under 13 when they first encounter it — is used by up to 50% of young Irish men and women to learn about the mechanics of sex. Yet beyond demystifying the physical, porn is the fake news of human sexual behaviour; nor does it cover the important stuff like sexual negotiation and consent. (And condoms. Porn hates condoms).
Since 2016, workshops on sexual consent are part of the freshers’ curriculum at Trinity College Dublin and other Irish universities, run by students’ unions, following similar initiatives at Oxford and Cambridge. Yet there is still some way to go within the sexual behaviour evolution; teens, especially when away from home for the first time at uni, may not always act in their own best interests or the best interests of their sexual partners. Hence the importance of empathy, education and emotional literacy when it comes to having lots of gloriously fun, fulfilling sex. (And how to deal with bad sex, because let’s face it, bad sex happens).
Hooray then for a clear, smart, teen-friendly book from Inti Chavez Perez, a sex educator and advisor to the Swedish government on the sexual behaviour of boys. Respect: Everything A Guy Needs To Know About Sex, Love and Consent has an aubergine emoji on its cover and starts with a universal teenage boy preoccupation: “Is my dick normal?”
Yes, reassures Chavez Perez, of course, it is. When he teaches sex ed, he says “guys often want to know how to make sex feel good for both people. My answer is that respect is the basis for good sex and good love.”
His book walks teenagers through 10 uncluttered chapters which cover everything from female masturbation to sex during menstruation — it is all refreshingly direct and normalised, with friendly how-to sections on everything from kissing and flirting to resolving arguments to breaking up compassionately— while highlighting the real crux within heterosexuality: the gendered power imbalance. (He covers same-sex relationships too, reassuring boys there is no pressure to decide where you are on the gay/straight spectrum).
READING THE RIGHT SIGNALS
It’s ideas of consent and respect which form the backbone of the book. Not so much hammering home old school no-means-no responses, but encouraging teens to evolve towards better communication, both spoken and unspoken. “I’m trying to move away from the concept of no-means-no,” he says. “Instead, what I’m saying is that you need a yes if you want to access your partner’s body. This requires much more tuning in, because a yes could mean perhaps ‘yes, take off my bra but don’t take off my underwear’. It requires an active listener to understand the meaning of a yes. The upside of understanding yes in sex is that you’re getting lots of information about your partners’ desire, so sex gets easier and better.
He spells these out in the book. Yes signals from a partner include actually saying yes, making sounds of arousal, kissing, caressing, helping you undress, taking the initiative, holding you. No signals include saying no, being too drunk or drugged to effectively consent, stiffening up, being completely silent, not kissing you back, looking like they are in pain, or simply not sending out any yes signals.
While this is obvious for (most) adults, such unambiguous clarity is more useful to teenage boys than any amount of unrealistic porn downloads. (Another excellent resource is Cindy Gallop’s Make Love Not Porn online initiative, launched after her 2009 TED talk, which walks young men through the differences between sex with real women and sex with porn actors, starting with the super basic — like female body hair being a thing).
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