Mia Freedman Thursday 7 July 2011 2:48pm

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Gen Y, I hope your hand is up. According to a Family Planning NSW survey of women aged 16-25, 50 percent of Gen Y women say they’ve sometimes been pressured to give oral sex. And many say that young men ‘expect’ to receive it.

Sexual pressure is a terrible thing, no question. Should be stopped. But did Gen Y guys invent it? Haven’t men of all ages always wanted oral sex?

Other stand-out revelations from the survey:

- Young women were overwhelmingly positive about oral sex – 82 per cent said they found it ”enjoyable and rewarding”.

- The most common reason for having oral sex, according to the survey was: ”It feels good.”

- A quarter of those surveyed saw oral sex as a less intimate alternative to penetrative sex, for which they said ”they weren’t ready”.

- A further 14 per cent considered oral sex safer than other forms of sex, because there was no risk of pregnancy and less risk of picking up a sexually transmitted disease. [WRONG!!!!!!!! You CAN pick up an STI]

According to a report in The Age:

The survey reinforced the findings of the latest national survey of secondary students by La Trobe University’s Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society. In 2008, 57 per cent of students said they’d had oral sex by the time they were in year 12.

But the Family Planning survey indicated that, contrary to popular belief, young women were not getting their information about oral sex from pornography or movies or television. Half of the young women polled (48 per cent) talked about oral sex with their friends, and roughly a third of them (32 per cent) learned about oral sex from magazines.

A 2008 Senate inquiry into the sexualisation of children rejected calls to classify Girlfriend and Dolly as suitable for those 15 and older. ”It’s a big part of why teen magazines exist,” said Girlfriend magazine’s editor Sarah Cornish. ”To answer these questions.”

I’ve never had a problem with teen magazines talking about oral sex. Education and knowledge is everything. Doesn’t mean you’re going to do it, just that you want to gather information about it – especially true for girls who like to know what they’re talking about long before they act. And when I worked at Dolly, I saw many studies confirming that those girls best able to resist peer or partner pressure to be more sexually active are those who know their stuff. So when he whimpers ‘blue balls’, she can knowledgeably reply ‘well, go sort yourself out then, it’s not my job’.

I’m interested in the stats around pressure, though. To re-cap: 50 % of Gen Y women say they’ve sometimes been pressured to give oral sex.

Do you think this is a new thing? Was it different when you were a teenager? Have you ever been pressured into doing something sexually you didn’t want to? What would your advice be to someone who was?