{"id":505240,"date":"2026-07-01T23:35:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T23:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/505240\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T23:35:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T23:35:11","slug":"how-porn-on-social-media-has-shaped-young-kiwis-sex-lives-under-the-influence-episode-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/505240\/","title":{"rendered":"How porn on social media has shaped young Kiwis\u2019 sex lives \u2013 Under the Influence, episode 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c[In] 2023 particularly that transitioned from being more marginalised to mainstream, where over 50% of girls and women were saying that they were experiencing that.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is pretty normal now for young people and young adults and not something that older adults are even aware of.\u201d <\/p>\n

\" Julia, a 20-year-old student, talks in the online video series Under the Influence about the social pressure girls feel to have rough sex.<\/p>\n

Julia, a 20-year-old Christchurch student, describes the normalisation of rough sex. <\/p>\n

\u201cI feel as though the climate of everything kind of primed me to think that I had to be going along with things, even if I wasn\u2019t comfortable with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she raised her concerns with some of her friends, \u201cthey sort of brushed it off and told me not to make a big deal out of it\u201d.<\/p>\n

Her friends even warned her that if she spoke up about it, she would ruin her own reputation.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, the fear of being ostracised is greater than the fear of what can happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\" Dr Jo Robertson explains the influence of porn in social media in the online video series Under the Influence.<\/p>\n

Robertson says statistics show two-thirds of NZ teens say they have not had a conversation with their parents about porn. <\/p>\n

More than half were 13 or younger when they first saw porn online. What they see challenges old-fashioned perceptions of \u201cvanilla\u201d pornography \u2013 46% of the 200 videos that New Zealanders watched had an incest theme, 35% contained non-consensual behaviour and 10% were physically aggressive (punching, kicking or strangling).<\/p>\n

She explains that kids no longer need to head to porn sites to be exposed to this, as social media has become the digital storefront for the porn industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cYoung people report seeing content they describe as unsafe, R18 or illegal, 35% of the time on a social media platform, not on a mainstream porn site.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I think people need to reconcile with is that if they\u2019re going to have their 13-year-old on a platform like that, then they need to be prepared for them to see that or they need to have a very honest, explicit kind of conversation about that and that sexual practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\" Invitations to watch porn appear in a young person’s social media feed in the online video series Under the Influence.<\/p>\n

Dr Marcelle Nader-Turner, a counsellor and neuropsychotherapist at St Hilda\u2019s Collegiate in Dunedin, has found a novel way to help girls find the answers for themselves.<\/p>\n

These days the online world changes so fast that you could have the best sex education programme in the country in term 1 and by term 4 it could be out of date \u2013 so the all-girls school has pioneered a remarkable, responsive, student-led programme, called Ask Aunty Hilda.<\/p>\n

Each week girls can anonymously submit questions about their experiences. A group of Year 13 \u201cAunties\u201d then meet in a safe environment with Nader-Turner to discuss the issues and craft responses. These go out via email to every girl at the school, and are put up on the website.<\/p>\n

Nader-Turner says the programme is very popular among the girls \u2013 and it\u2019s working.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s changed the conversations that are happening in our school around relationships and sex and what\u2019s expected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under the Influence is produced by Overactive Imagination for the NZ Herald. The series was made with support from NZ On Air and Screen Canterbury. You can read more about the Ask Aunty Hilda programme on Saturday July 4 and watch the next episode, Technoference on Monday July 6 at nzherald.co.nz\/undertheinfluence<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201c[In] 2023 particularly that transitioned from being more marginalised to mainstream, where over 50% of girls and women…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,21039,6871,221,11946,807,6187,1073,111,139,69,90,9945,7680,27302,1072,223,8238,4741],"class_list":["post-505240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-episode","tag-has","tag-how","tag-influence","tag-kiwis","tag-lives","tag-media","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-porn","tag-sex","tag-shaped","tag-social","tag-the","tag-under","tag-young"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}