In post 12 0f 100, I made the suggestion that to confront the pervasive influence that Patriarchal Misogyny (PM) is exerting on the youth, especially young men, through pornography, the best approach is a decentralized attempt to “flood the box” and change the conversations that kids are seeing society have about sex. How do we do that?
I do think it is important for parents to try our best to keep open lines of communication with our children and not shy away from awkward or difficult conversations, and to be real with them about behaviors that we might feel hypocritical about, or even shame over…I also think that our kids should be expected to try to “do their own research,” get outside perspectives on these topics, and to talk to their peers about it too. Kids are going to push back against our attempts to control their access to different kinds of media, and they should, because we want them to be capable of critical thinking. But just as important as the conversations that we have directly with our children, and the freedom we eventually give them to explore difficult and confusing ideas on their own, is the conversations that our children see us have with other adults about these topics, and how we respond to various depictions of masculinity and sexuality in the world around us.
Kids are sharp. Whether they consciously identify it or not, they watch how the adults in their lives experience and portray their gender and sexuality. They notice when it is only women at family gatherings clean up after meals or do all the cooking. They notice when the men have conversations that veer into politics and issues of social justice and exclude, ignore or belittle the contributions of women to these conversations. They notice when papa storms out of the house angry and really struggle to process that, especially when the resolution to that conflict might happen outside of their ability to overhear or observe it. And as they reach puberty, they have been paying attention for years about what topics their fathers and mothers and care givers seem confident and competent at talking about, and which ones they should avoid bringing up around the adults in their lives at all costs. If we want youth generally, and young men especially, to have better frames of reference to learning about healthy sexual behaviors than the misogynist “free” pornography that pops up with their first internet searches on these topics, we have to make sure that they are used to seeing adults talk about these issues in healthy and constructive ways, even when they aren’t sure they know how to do that…as long as the adults also display healthy and constructive ways of admitting where their knowledge is lacking, or wrong, and a have a willingness to learn from their mistakes.
This is much easier to say than to do, especially for adults who might have very little experience existing in communities and spaces where having healthy conversations about sex and sexuality is common or even valued. That is ok. It is ok to admit that there are topics we don’t really know that much about or are difficult for us to talk about. It is especially ok to help our/“the” kids understand why these conversations are difficult for us, and share with them the horror stories from our own attempts to learn about and explore our gender and sexual identities. Simultaneously though, we can’t just let “I am not good at talking about this stuff” stand as the final word adults have with the youth that come to them with these questions. We have to demonstrate a willingness to do the work to get better at these conversations too. When we say “I am not sure I know an answer to that question,” we need to follow that up with “but I can try to find out,” or “would you like help finding someone with better answers than me with whom to continue this conversation?” I think masculine-identifying folks need to be very careful about redirecting these difficult conversations about developing emotions on to feminine-identifying folks in the child’s lives, especially for children socialized as males, as that has a heavy risk of teaching them that men can and should expect women to provide the men in their lives free labor of emotional support, and I think the best way to do that is make sure that us male-identified adults in the lives of children have networks of care and emotional support that include more than just our own family members and romantic partners.
We need to participate in these kinds of vulnerable and sometimes awkward conversations about gender identity and sexuality with each other more often, until we start to feel comfortable enough to keep having these conversation in front of and with the children/kids/youth in our lives. Because in 2025 USA, conversations about gender and sexual identity are taking place all around us and the youth in our lives, both in person and all over the internet, and judging by how badly the left was caught off-guard by how effective Trumpism’s use of misogynistic medial platforms to mobilize voters and create an army of dangerous loyalists, I don’t think that we can expect kids to miraculously demonstrate better media literacy and awareness than we have demonstrated ourselves when it comes to sorting out what ideas about sex and sexuality are healthy, and which are going to place them and their potential sexual partners in harms way.