“Most people aren’t able to do this job for more than two years.” It was a strange comment for an introductory training session, but it wasn’t an average first day of a new job. I was 27, living in Herne Hill and learning how to be an online sex and relationships advisor for young people on a salary of around £24,000 a year. “There’s no shame in quitting,” my trainer reassured me. “This type of work really takes its toll on a person.”
But, despite her warnings, I was excited for this next step in my career. I’d worked as a journalist and editor at a youth charity website for three years and they’d asked me to step into this new role. It was my first time working on the ‘front line’ of the charity and I had a no-doubt idealised concept of what it would involve and how fulfilling it would be. Two years later exactly, I was handing in my notice - a shell of the person I was before.
It was a position of immense privilege — being privy to the most intimate concerns of young people. The anonymous online nature of the service meant they felt free to share their most vulnerable questions about their sex and love lives. What struck me was how much shame they had about such commonplace issues. The same questions would come up again and again.
I love my best friend, do I risk the friendship by telling them?
I’m lonely at university
I feel like I’m too old to still be a virgin
I love my teacher.
I think I might be gay.
Is my penis normal?
Is my vagina normal?
Can you get pregnant if someone fingers you?
How do I tell them I have herpes?
Why does nobody love me?
Am I normal?
I’d be honest in my replies and relate how many times I’d answered a similar question, to let them know they weren’t alone. There was nothing weird, or wrong, with them. Their thoughts and experiences were normal. However, pretty quickly, I realised there was one issue coming up over and over that shouldn’t be considered normal, but extremely concerning.
Is it normal to have sex you don’t want to have?
My boyfriend is pressurising me to have anal sex.
Sex with my boyfriend really hurts but he doesn’t seem to mind.
I woke up to find my boyfriend having sex with me.
I said no but he had sex with me anyway.
Almost every shift, it would happen again. A young girl writing in, describing what was quite clearly a rape, but not fully understanding that’s what had happened to her — almost always with a boy she was in a relationship with.
Every day, young girls would describe being pressured, coerced, manipulated, and downright forced to have painful sex, degrading sex, violent sex, and sex like their boyfriends had seen in porn. This charity wasn’t a rape crisis charity, but it was becoming one. I wasn’t a rape crisis worker, but I was becoming one. Quite quickly, I started to dread my shifts. After I’d clocked out, I didn’t feel fulfilled for my altruistic contribution to the world, but a deep rage at what was happening to young girls.
Almost every shift, a young girl would write in describing what was quite clearly a rape, but not fully understand that’s what had happened
The impact of pornography appeared to infiltrate every shift. It happened in overt ways, like girls worried about the safety of being choked, or being expected to have anal sex, and then there were boys writing in, getting increasingly addicted to porn, unable to be turned on by a ‘real’ girl, and worried about their penis size or how long they can last. But there was a worrying covert impact too. A mass miseducation about what sexual consent really meant, sold to a generation raised on free, explicit, violent porn where up to 90% of the content shows physical aggression or violence, and women were the targets of this violence 97% of the time. Women in porn are almost always depicted as responding to this violence with pleasure or neutrality, meaning a generation of teens are internalising assumptions and expectations about the ‘sex’ expectation of young girls.
I’d regularly have to counsel rapists themselves. Boys would write in, pissed off, and asking why their girlfriend was ‘being weird’ with them after they’d slept with her while she was unconscious, or they had pressured her into a certain sex act.
I can’t pretend this job didn’t impact my views on men. I had a monthly compulsory clinical supervision with a psychotherapist, and I’d invariably have to debrief and unpack my rage at this epidemic of normalised sexual violence. “It’s changing how I see men,” I told my psychotherapist. “I’m starting to believe they’re all like this.” She explained this was a natural reaction to this type of role. “If you worked for a charity that dealt with victims of dog bites every day, you’d soon start to feel like all dogs bite,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean all dogs do.”
I felt an increasingly desperate helplessness in the face of what I was encountering. I tried to fight back. The charity launched a ‘Porn versus Reality’ campaign, and we developed an app that educates young people about consent. But, as I opened my inbox each shift, and connected with another young girl, struggling to process what had just happened to her, I’d weep at the seemingly futility of any attempt to stop this.
After two years, my psychotherapist gently suggested it was time to quit, and I handed in my notice. By then, I would be taking long breaks after each shift, wandering around the streets of London, crying, with clenched fists. My manager smiled as I tearily explained I couldn’t do it anymore. “Thank you for the time you’ve given it. Feel pride at who you’ve helped, not shame that you’ve had to leave.” And another noble soul stepped into my place to keep up the vital work.
My rehabilitation took many years, and I’m forever altered by what I saw. It’s rare for a day to pass when I’m not reminded of the job by some gruesome news article. When the recent news broke about Russell Brand allegedly raping a sixteen-year-old, I felt the rage and the helplessness return (Brand denies all allegations). Whenever I mention I used to be a sex advisor, people are curious, expecting me to regale hilarious titbits about malfunctioning body parts. But, when I start talking about the realities of the job, and the ongoing epidemic of rape, it kills the mood instantly. Nobody wants to hear it or accept things are this bad.
I’ve been the author of teen fiction for over a decade now, and yet it’s only in my most recent novel ‘You Could Feel So Pretty’ that I have felt able to write about what I experienced. It’s taken seven years for me to feel ready to write about the almost dystopic sexual expectations that are sold to our girls as ‘normal’, empowering even. I no longer believe that all dogs bite, but I do believe we need to challenge the sexual scripts being sold to young people as ‘sex’ when there seems to be so little pleasure, patience, empathy, and, vitally, consent involved in teen relationships.
I may have only stayed on the front line for two years, but what I encountered there has informed my life’s work, and inspired me to write this latest story. A book where any reader feeling weird or pressured learns they’re not alone, and we can fight for better.
