The Landscape – Part 1
PG-13 warning…This is not a kid-friendly episode.
We raised our kids in the 90’s and 2000s in Christian households which, if you follow/believe the 20/20 hindsight of modern-day sex, probably means that—totally unintended—our messages (ie,. The church’s messages) about sex may have piled on some shame.
In trying to walk a line between explaining that sex is a good thing, meant for our enjoyment and within the family context a vehicle for making babies, we also, as parents, tried to be cautionary. There’s a time & place for it. In our view, this is within marriage not before, and with one person, not many. (People may take advantage of you; don’t let them. There’s such a thing as consent; promiscuity is not cool or healthy…I want you to be safe & valued.)
It’s the cautionary part (& within the rising purity culture at the time) where messages may have been mixed up or miscommunicated. If you DO have sex or even cross stated or imagined lines before that no-man’s-land, you’re ruined, beyond reach, somehow “bad.” For a lot of people, that shame & guilt carried forward into their relationships and marriages and has created issues.
There’s a lot of responsibility/concern parents carry & it’s not always easy managing that part with the message that—ultimately, sex was intended to be positive. We want to offer them sexual guidance that recognizes caution—AND respects a moral standard—but without unintended shame.
Today—2025—the landscape has changed. Expectations and language have changed, the way teens and young adults relate to one another has changed, and it feels like it’s at a breakneck pace. Parents are quickly left behind and naively think the kind of birds and the bees sex talk that used to do the trick is enough. It’s not.
For one thing, (& we’ve had episodes on this), we know the average age of first viewing porn is now EIGHT, several years before the first hormone twinges of puberty. Frequent exposure to porn rewires young brains, teaches them unrealistic and unhealthy expectations about relationships.
Which brings us to the crux of this episode. It’s a good idea to have the basic sex talk earlier than you think your kid needs it, not necessarily because they’re curious or pre-pubescent, but because they’ve probably already been exposed to sexual things they’re not equipped to and need to know you’re safe to talk to. And that you value them. They need to know that SOMEONE values them.
In case you’ve missed it, there’s been a flurry of press lately about the changing dynamics of teen/young adult relationships. An Atlantic article by Stephanie Murray documents the rise of sexual choking among young people. Relatively rare 20 years ago, the practice has become fairly common among college-age kids, with the majority of female college students surveyed at one large American university saying that a partner had choked them during sex. 40% were under 18 when it first happened and most said their partners “never or only sometimes asked before grabbing their necks.” (Yes, Your Kid: What Parents Need to Know About Today’s Teens and Sex by Debby Herbenick, 2023).
In the name of “not shaming” our kids, a more liberated culture seems to have trapped young people in sexual dysfunction. Acceptance of sexual variety has swung to an expectation of sexual violence. This violent nature of modern sex (fueled by the porn industry) is likely one reason why young people are having less of it.
Elizabeth Morgan, a psych prof at Springfield College, has this to say: Young people gather information about whether they should be having sex, and what it ought to involve, from a diversity of sources—subtle and not—over years.
Taken together, these data form the “sexual scripts” they rely on in the uncertainty and vulnerability of a sexual encounter. “Teens are not being raised in a vacuum, and they are exposed to a variety of images and messages and song lyrics and pictures and magazines and TikToks and social medias and friends,” Morgan says. “All of that is shaping their formation of what, when they get maybe alone with one other person, what they’re supposed to be doing.”
And it happens whether people realize it or not. In a study published in 2006, Morgan found that among 334 undergraduate students, those who watched dating game shows were more likely to hold gamelike, adversarial beliefs about dating. Some participants reported watching the shows to learn about relationships, while others insisted they watched just for fun—but both groups seemed to internalize the game’s messages about dating as a brutal competition.
The prevalence of rough sex is evidence of the degree to which porn in particular and the internet in general have hijacked the sexual formation of young people—and how dysfunctional sexual dynamics can get as a result. Much of the sex that porn depicts is, well, fake. It is ordered not toward the pleasure of those who appear in it, but toward the titillation of those watching it. And the way that sex unfolds on-screen—without much discussion, as though everything that’s happening is intuitive, expected, and welcomed—creates the impression that it is okay to proceed, without asking, with the expansive list of behaviors it depicts, including the violent ones. Learning sex from porn is like learning to drive from watching The Fast and the Furious.
Now, choking is “just kind of what you do when you have sex,” Herbenick said—which means that if you do not want to be choked or slapped or spit on in bed, you have to say so ahead of time.
This is a problem parents can’t simply ignore. They can attempt to delay their children’s exposure to porn. But given the easy visibility of rough sex in general—in pop culture and on social media—there’s no getting around the need for parents to talk with their kids about what they’re seeing, even if it requires the adults to push through their own discomfort.
At baseline, that means offering kids context: Explain that the spontaneous, unnegotiated sex they see on-screen is not real life, that it does not offer a good model for how to engage in sexual behavior, and that the rules of porn don’t necessarily align with the law. Strangling someone without their explicit permission is assault—and even with permission, it could land you in legal trouble if it ends in injury or death.
Today’s sex talk goes beyond mechanics and consent. We also need to be talking about intimacy, connection, care, compassion, not just “did I say this was ok?” Our kids need to know it is unequivocally ok to state “I don’t do that.” It shouldn’t be a turnoff to treat someone else like a human, and if something someone is doing makes you feel that way, that’s a big red flag! (Even in the context of marriage!)
Related: a really eye-opening Atlantic article (Molly Langmuir, What Ever Happened to Getting to First Base?, Sept 25, 2025) describes the dating scripts of Gen Z (Zoomers, born 1997-2012).
This generation (the 20-somethings), beware of “catching feelings” and have a need to keep liaisons chill and nonchalant. With entire buffets of sexual and relationship options available to them, they’re more apt to just “sample a few” or opt out altogether because it’s too overwhelming. They’re following many different scripts in a quickly changing relationship landscape.
Amid this new landscape, Zoomers say, their parents or older relatives they might once have sought guidance from are unable to help. They don’t understand what’s going on. Think about that if you find yourself asking your college kid if they have a gf or bf. It may not really work that way; they don’t use that sort of defining language.
Vulnerability is agonizing. The idea that a person might engage in an act that they see as indicating an emotional investment (HAND HOLDING) before having sex upends the natural order of life. With Zoomers, it’s almost reversed, one college student says. If you had sex with someone on the first date, you’d tell your friends the date was great, etc. but if you went on a first date and held hands, there would be outrage, uproar. Sex is easy and emotional connection is hard.
There’s a need to perform not caring. They think it’s “safer” to stay autonomous and unattached.
Exhibit A: the viral YouTube documentary from late 2024 called I Slept with 100 Men in one Day. It’s a pure artifact of internet culture and social mores of recent years and is about Lily Phillips, a 23-year-old London woman trying to garner followers for her OnlyFans account. The reason the film has become so talked-about is that one short clip—viewed 200 million times on X—shows her crying in the aftermath of the stunt. “I don’t know if I’d recommend it,” Lily says.
Helen Lewis, author of an Atlantic article about the documentary, says having grown up in an era when the worst thing a good liberal could be was “judgmental” about pornography and other ostensible vices—and feminists who criticized the sex industry were dismissed as prudes—that she was surprised by the documentarian’s undisguised skepticism about Phillips’s feat. Perhaps, Lewis wonders, the relentless normalization of online porn has created more space to be open about its excesses.
As parents, we can VALUE our older and young adult kids and teach them to value themselves (identity). Expect being valued by others.
We can help them think through what they want and why. What motivates them with relationships. What do they think about relationships/expectations/etc and why? This is the time of life they’re figuring out who they are so these kinds of conversations can be good food for thought and a helpful means to not just flounder or be swept along by “what’s out there.”
We can also point out the differences between media and what’s true; culture and reality. Because there ARE so many options and scripts, that means there ARE some segments of this generation who opt for monogamy and more defined relationship roles. Their algorithms are made to feed more of what they linger on until a certain perspective is all they’re seeing and therefore seems/feels “normal.”
We were just talking the other day about ways we were rethinking how we’d talked to our kids about sex. We covered the biology and the context, but didn’t go far enough with the mechanics, purpose, and goals. Nothing about communication.
….How we’ve seen this play out in new relationships (early marriages) and seasoned marriages that seem to fall apart “out of nowhere” once the kids leave…. More people (women) than you may think hit their 50s and are totally fine with sex being something they once did but are “fine” with it being a bygone of their marriage.
Why? For women, sex is an outgrowth of connection and I suspect there’s been a long history of a lack of connection/conversation/feeling seen & known AND SAFE within their marriage.
Add hormonal changes to that (looking at you, menopause) and a lot of couples look up and realize it’s been months since they’ve been intimate.
Busyness/distractedness/numbing in other ways.