There’s a scene in my novel, Such a Nice Boy, just after my main character, Amanda, discovers that her fifteen-year-old son is a sexual bully, in which she’s asked how many twenty-something women she talks to regularly. ‘None,’ she replies. ‘Exactly,’ says her friend.
It was a thought that had occurred to me a few years earlier, too, when the Everyone’s Invited website became headline news. Horrified by the stories about rape culture in our schools, I remember talking to my friends about it one evening. We’d all dealt with bad behaviour from men as teenage girls, but as we’d moved out of the dating world and become mothers — no longer seen by men as fair game — we’d actually started to believe things were getting better for women and girls.
Some of those friends had boys (I have two girls myself). All considered themselves feminists. And all would’ve been devastated to learn their son had mistreated a girl. It was a conversation that would prove to be the spark for my novel, but, as I would soon discover, researching it would leave me so disturbed I’d regularly find myself unable to sleep.
I began my research with the big-picture stuff, wading through studies from academics and charities showing that there had indeed been a cultural shift for the worse. But it soon became clear that, in order to accurately portray this, I’d need to see what kids — and particularly boys — were looking at online for myself.
So I created TikTok and Instagram accounts for Nathan, Amanda’s fictional son, and gave him interests like football, cars and good-looking actresses. It didn’t take long for the nasty content to appear.
Aware that many parents think gaming is relatively harmless, I also made him a gamer. It took half an hour to see the first violently misogynistic conversation in one of Discord’s thousands of chatrooms. What struck me was not just its throwaway nature, but how the conversation on either side of it was so nonsensical that it had to be a chatroom full of either kids or very immature adults. I went on to find dozens of chatrooms clearly labelled as woman-hating on that platform, but I chose not to go into those because I never wanted Nathan to be an incel.
Thanks largely to the drama Adolescence, there is now far greater parental awareness of this kind of extreme online misogyny. But there is another factor that has been linked to harmful attitudes towards women and girls, and which many parents still don’t like to think their child would look at: porn.
When Amanda discovers porn on her son’s phone, she doesn’t find anything now considered extreme; she finds the kind of videos I found on the first page of my first visit to Pornhub. Ones with titles like this: ‘Cutie woke up when I penetrated her holes’ — an act which, if it took place in real life, would be classified as rape.
In her latest report on the impact of pornography on young people, the Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, describes how seeing violent porn is now a normal part of online life for children. And, she says, ‘it is impacting children’s behaviours and beliefs in deeply concerning ways — in particular when it comes to attitudes towards women and girls.’
To put it another way — and these are the words of one of the teenage girls quoted in her report — ‘porn makes boys act vile towards girls.’
Of all the research I did, it was what I saw and read in relation to porn that kept me up at night. As a mum of two girls, it terrified me to think they would soon have to navigate this world and, for a while, I can honestly say I looked at all teenage boys with suspicion, feeling an anger towards them that, deep down, I knew was irrational and unfair.
It was only once I stepped back from the research that I was able to listen to what I’d had to repeatedly remind myself: that boys never asked for this stuff to be pushed to them.
Take, for example, the 14-year-old quoted in one article who wanted his teacher to show him how to choke a girl because, apparently, they’re all ‘mad for it’. He didn’t know not to take the violent sex he was learning from as gospel.
Leafing through the Children’s Commissioner’s reports into children’s online reality, one of the things I kept coming back to was just how clueless our generation has become. The children themselves are saying it loudly: parents don’t understand their online lives or how common harmful experiences are and, even more worryingly, because of that, they wouldn’t turn to them if something went wrong.
So What Can We Do?
The advice from the Children’s Commissioner is to start having conversations about these topics early — and, most importantly, to keep having them. And from my own experience, I can tell you it’s not as bad as you think. Mine were ten when we first discussed porn, and perhaps because they were so young, there was no squirming or embarrassment on either side.
Having grown up in the nineties, my friends and I believed we could see the evidence of progress all around us. But spend any time in the online lives of children and young people, and you’ll see a totally different and, at times, terrifying world.
It’s clear to me now that we parents need to do more. Because if we can’t help our children navigate this world safely, if we can’t influence them to make the right choices, then it will be those who don’t have their best interests at heart who will fill that gap. And no parent wants to be like the mother in my novel, learning the hard way that bringing up a decent, well-adjusted child is arguably more difficult today than it has ever been before.
Rebecca Spargo is the author of Such a Nice Boy, which is available now.
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