pornography
heather corinna has a very interesting post on her blog today about pornography and young women (and men): http://www.femmerotic.com/journal/2006/11/28/porny-problems-the-next-generation-1/. the following is the comment i left after she solicited commentary from either young people or those who work with them.
I, like crunchywitch, also teach young women 18-21 (at an all-girls university). Like her, I have also found that the young women of this age that I have taught have "much less fluid ideas about sexuality," relationships and gender. (We have not discussed pornography directly, but we have discussed many of the issues being tossed about in this comments section--AND, when something related to pornography was mentioned in passing, I'm pretty sure I remember cringing faces and utters of "ewwwwwwwwwwwww" throughout the classroom.)
Then I go teach community-college men and women two days a week. For several years I taught 18-21 year-old women AND men at a private university in New England.
What I've found, curiously enough, is that TWO factors make a difference in perceptions about gender roles, relationships and sexuality: age and economic class. I have wondered how much of this perception is wound up in power differentials.
Young men and women at the mostly-white private university--where many students drove expensive cars and wore expensive clothing purchased for them by parents--were very open to discussing such things, and expressed views that were generally quite open and less traditional than what I had expected.
Community college classes are notoriously composed of perhaps the most varied population of college students of any schools--but the students I have encountered at community colleges, of various ages, gender, class demarcations and backgrounds--have ended up being perhaps the MOST open to pulling apart societal and cultural "norms" and discussing possible alternatives and solutions. In fact, I've really had to do the LEAST amount of teaching work with community college populations in terms of giving background to or easing them into controversial topics.
At the private all-girls university, most students do not have expensive cars or clothing, and come from what are normally considered either economically disadvantaged or lower-middle class families. Several of my 18-year olds have children already. With the exception of one or two of them, they have steady boyfriends (or they at least claim to) and write things into their papers about dreams of "white picket fences" that indicate an unquestioning fantasy of what many would call an outdated American dream. Essays I thought they would warm to about topics ranging from personal empowerment and women's self-realization to the problems with being perceived as "exotic" have fallen rather flat, and I've been running into a lot of backlash and resentment against other women. (I've also figured out that most of my female students are very insecure and do not feel powerful AT ALL, in the context of social and intimate relationships as well as in a socio-political context.)