Hey Google. . . what is sex??!

Most people who have access to the internet, especially young people in my generation,  know that you can find almost anything you want by simply searching the internet. In terms of sexuality and relationships, the wide variety resources you can use to explore these topics leaves young people with a multitude of different views.

Personally, I did not experience sex education in school, nor did my parents talk to me about it. Therefore, I turned to the internet, which, in retrospect, is not the best place to get information. The internet has too much information, and often does to line up with reality. I believe I first turned to google for simple questions like “what is sex?” I recall eventually figuring it out, however social media and social situations helped more than google.

As I got a little older romantic teen books and fan fiction came into the picture. I first acquired my sense of romantic relationships in novels such as, The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska, and Eleanor and Park. These fairly innocent books gave me a false sense of how dramatic romantic relationships were. This was not realistic. When it comes to sexuality, I learned a lot from online books. I read on websites or apps, such as Wattpad. One of the books I read was the infamous Fifty Shades of Grey. I knew that the violence in fifty shades of grey was not the “typical” way sex occurred, it was more the romance that caught my attention. Other fan fictions I learned from included One Direction stories. The main one being the After series, a work I later learned many girls my age had also read. These works taught me a lot about sexual encounters that I would have otherwise not known. The only downside is that they set unrealistic expectation for sex and relationships. They were dramatic and intense. To balance out the drama, social media taught me a little more about the reality of sex and relationships.

On social media, specifically Twitter, most things were not censored. Random sexual images and videos would pop up on my timeline every now and then, and people would talk about relationships. Most things on social media were exposed in a more genuine, and sometimes not pretty, way. Over the years I have figured out a pretty realistic version of sexuality, however the internet taught me many different versions of these ideals.