Let's talk about sex... and development

Sex and sexuality are very personal, often private, topics. What I want to talk about about is how sex being taboo in our culture has led to sex being polarized in our culture. I want to talk about how a lack of education makes for sexual victims and perpetrators and how if we teach some basics around sex and sexuality, we can help future generations to interrupt unhealthy sexual behaviors.

That last line feels a bit loaded, so I'm going to unpack it. What I mean by 'unhealthy sexual behaviors' is anything that might fall under abuse or maybe even an abuse of self.

Sexuality from a Developmental Standpoint

I have clients of all ages, from preschool years to late adulthood. What I have noticed is how constricted conversations and approaches to sexual education can lead to experiences with lifelong shame and hurt.

Some basic origins of shame, include engaging in sex play at a young age and then feeling like some crime has been committed which deserves ongoing shaming of self. Sex play is a sexual exploration through play of similarly aged kids and is absolutely normal through age 6. Beyond age 6, it's still normal for kids, especially of the same gender, to continue having curiosities about bodies and even role play-- up until puberty when children have increased hormones, rising insecurities and increased self-awareness. There are some distinguishing facts between sex play and abuse.

Abuse occurs when

• a child is coercing or forcing another child into a sexual act

• a child is 5 (or more) years older than another child and engaging in sexual play

• a child is referencing adult sexual language or adult sexual acts

Sexual abuse can lead to shame and confusion throughout development. When sexual abuse occurs, individuals may assume responsibility for the abuse, begin to see themselves as only valuable for sexual interactions, perpetrate against other children and feel shame about having done so, become hypersexualized throughout their lives and become more likely to experience sexual abuse again throughout their development.

I want to state very clearly here that the shame of childhood sexual abuse is always the perpetrator's to own.

A child is never responsible for bringing on their own abuse. I also want to point out how when children perpetrate against other children, it is likely because they have experienced their own abuse.

It is the responsibility of adults to prevent and intervene through support and education to prevent these types of behaviors from occurring.

If our children know what is safe touching and not from an early age, and we cultivate a space where they feel safe enough to talk with us if abuse were to occur, then we can prevent child-to-child sexual abuse.

A simple way to approach this is making a rule that no one can touch where a bathing suit covers, and to develop a safety plan of three safe people to tell if this kind of touching ever happens.

What happens after puberty starts?

Eric Erickson, famed developmental psychologist, put forth the idea that in each stage of development, we are challenged by specific conflicts of self. In the teen years, Erickson asserted that we have the task of identity development. In young adulthood we have the task of understanding intimacy. What I often see is how when identity development is skipped over, there can be identity attached to intimate partnerships in adolescence. When break-ups happen, it's earth shattering and feels like we're dying.

When we engage sexually, we release all kinds of great chemicals in the brain, including oxytocin, which helps us to bond to another person. This fact is kind of pop psychology at this point. What isn't discussed is how the male brain also assesses the sexual viability of others within 1/5th of a second, according to 'The Male Brain,' a book by Louann Brizendine, M.D.

This is important for all genders to understand for a few reasons. When we don't discuss this as a fact, then we can't confront how to move forward with this inevitability in a healthy way. For male-brained individuals, this means you can train your brain to either lean deeper into these assessments and create fantasies within them or to mindfully excuse the judgment as a thought. I've heard some men discuss building whole lives based on the involuntary fraction of a second assessment. Having an automatic judgement which is reflexive is not anyone's 'fault'. But what can happen is a pattern of then taking that moment and extrapolating upon it with consistency. This is training your brain to live in fantasy and to see others' bodies as commodities, which is something on a cultural level that has been present for a long time.

As a practitioner, however, I've been hearing a rising use and exposure to pornography, even in kids younger than preteen years. With unlimited access to the internet, comes unlimited and often accidental-at-first, access to pornographic content. The average age of exposure is now around 11-years-old . This figure also reflects how exposure and use of porn by kids has gone up by 20 percent in the last decade. The reason why this strikes me as particularly problematic is because the brain during these ages of preteen through adolescence is in a stage of great plasticity, similar to that which we see from birth through the preschool years.

For those unfamiliar with this jargon, what I'm saying is, there are certain, critical timeframes for brain development where the brain develops its foundational pathways for how to function for the rest of our lives.

If a child learns sex is supposed to look like porn and there are no conversations to contradict that, then what is the foundation laid for the sexual/romantic relationships that individual will enter into throughout their life?

How does porn impact us

While most men report feeling like porn in adolescence is a natural and normal part of development, consistent porn use over time has the effects of erectile dysfunction, relationship dissatisfaction, inability to have in-person sexual experiences, and conditioning oneself to find arousal in pornographic content which they otherwise might not be interested in. In 'Your Brain on Porn,' the author discusses numerous anecdotes collected from interviews and off websites for individuals recovering from porn addiction. In this collection, there are descriptions of how porn can pull a person towards increased novelty to reach climax. The chemicals released in the brain during that climax, create associations of attraction. So if an individual stumbles upon a novel but deviant (from their own standard) form of porn, they can create a new, and sometimes confusing attraction for sexual activities which challenge values, morals or sexual identity. This point is concerning when we consider the amount of aggression demonstrated in most porn. For example, studies indicate correlations between viewing aggression in porn as an adolescent and an increased likelihood of enacting aggression in sex as an adolescent.

Just to be clear, we are talking about a time in development when the frontal lobe is notoriously not fully formed yet, when the rewards system is hyperactive, and when people are known to make not-so-great decisions.

Sexual exploration is normal and natural, but what is not being disclosed to children (people who are under 18) when they are exposed to aggressive pornography or when pornographic content is normalized in our culture, is the necessity for consent.

Consent and Sexual Assault

As exposure to mature content continues to happen at higher rates and younger ages, it's disheartening for me as a practitioner to hear stories about clients who didn't know they had a choice in sex, or were confused about what consent was, or felt a duty to engage in sex, or on the flip-side, thought they got consent but weren't sure.

I want to define date rape here, just so everyone is clear. According to the Colorado Legal Defense Group,

"Sexual assault involves any sexual intrusion or sexual penetration on a victim without their consent. This includes sexual assault by submission of the victim, knowing that the victim is incapable of consent, or facilitating sexual assault by giving the victim drugs or intoxicants."

I think the key words in here which become a space of confusion, resentment, shame and contention are, "by submission of the victim." Submission does not have to look like being violently forced into a situation. It can look like saying "no" over and over and then giving in. It can look like laying perfectly still while someone has sex with your body. It can look like crying during sex. It can look like a lot of things, including but definitely not limited to, violent coercion. So the general rule?

If it is not an emphatic "YES," it is a "no".

But since we don't talk about these topics, we can't expect people to understand them.

The Conversations

Why do we have warnings on plastic bags to not put them over our heads, but there are no required warnings for porn use to define it as acting between consensual parties with the potential hazard of negatively impacting sexual relationships throughout one's life? Why don't we have warnings that say, "watching this video may make you more likely to become a sexual predator or victim"? Why don't we require porn sites to educate users?

Again, the lack of conversation around these personal and often private aspects of ourselves leads to a lack of understanding around the potential impacts, the risks, and our personal morality behind sexuality. And since we don't have an organizational or governmental authority willing to confront these topics for us on a systemic level, we have a responsibility to educate our youth on these topics on an individual level. Even though these conversations can be awkward, embarrassing or terrifying, we owe it to future generations to provide them with the information to be empowered to make decisions which they won't regret later in life.

Some topics to consider for conversations about sex and sexuality are:

• Appropriate touch in early years and safety planning

• What is consent when teens are working towards becoming sexually active

• How brain development in teen years can create impulsivity and pleasure seeking

• How individual identity development can become complicated by engaging sexually in the teen years

• The potential impacts of porn on our views of sex and sexual relationships throughout life

• How male brains are wired to assess the sexual viability of women but they can control how deeply they go into this experience to reduce ruminations

• Explore themes of personal morality/ moral codes within romantic and sexual relationships