Why so many young girls are agreeing to sexual acts their mothers considered unimaginable. It’s not just choking and it’s not just because of porn… Mums tell JANA HOCKING the trends leaving them terrified

I lost my virginity at 16 years and 11 months.

This exact timing felt deeply important to me then. I was convinced I could not turn 17 – gasp! – a virgin. 

I had been dating my boyfriend for almost a year and he had already had sex, so my 16-year-old brain felt slightly guilty for making him wait. 

My 42-year-old brain now has a fairly obvious question: why the heck was a 20-year-old dating me in the first place? Perhaps that’s an investigation for another day.

Thankfully, he was an adoring nerd of a man who never rushed me. Our first attempts mostly involved getting started, only for me to panic and declare, ‘No, no, no. Actually, let’s try again later.’

This continued for about a month until my 17th birthday began looming and I decided it was time.

‘Right! Let’s do this,’ I announced with all the romance of someone wanting to simply tick something off their ‘to-do’ list.

So we did, and it turned out to be… fine.

Did I have an orgasm? Lol. Not even close.

But as we continued fooling around – slowly and at a pace I was comfortable with – it became much better. Over the next four years we experimented more, but I always felt in control of how far we went and how quickly we got there. I could stop halfway through. I could change my mind. Nothing painful or frightening was ever assumed to be part of the deal. 

Looking back, those gloriously awkward beginnings now seem almost innocent.

Because, in a rather sobering turn, I was dismayed to discover just how different – and daunting – the sexual landscape has become for teenage girls today.  

Acts women of my generation once regarded as extreme are now seen as a routine part of sex – sometimes before these girls even know what they actually enjoy.

We’re talking spitting, hair-pulling, being filmed, anal sex treated as a milestone rather than a personal preference, pressure to kiss other girls or have threesomes for their boyfriend’s benefit, and intense expectation to send nudes.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but unfortunately, I’m not. These are stories people have shared with me.

I’ll never forget a close friend who teaches at a high school telling me they had to intervene after discovering many girls were giving boys oral sex before they’d even had their first kiss. 

Just let that sink in for a moment.

Last month, a 16-year-old Sydney girl died following a suspected sexual choking incident. Police are still investigating exactly what happened.

Her death has forced Australia to confront a sexual practice many parents still struggle to imagine, despite 61 per cent of young women surveyed reporting they had experienced sexual choking.

How did something so dangerous become so normal? And why are so many teenage girls agreeing to it?

The immediate answer is porn.

But stick with me because I think there’s more to it…

My generation got our sex education from awkward teachers and even more awkward parents sitting us down for deeply uncomfortable chats about the ‘birds and the bees’. 

I’ll never forget the sleepover when my friend stole her dad’s VHS of the Pammy and Tommy Lee sex tape. Looking back, it featured unexpectedly tender honeymoon sex – basically a Hallmark movie compared to what girls can now find online in seconds. 

These days, kids can watch things on their phones that would have made our teenage heads explode.

Of course that has changed what they think sex should look like. But seeing an extreme sex act and feeling as though you’re expected to perform it are two very different things.

So what is happening in the space between the two?

I put a call-out on Instagram asking mothers what their daughters had told them about modern sex that genuinely shocked them.

I also asked the younger generation of women whether they had ever gone along with something in bed because they were worried that saying no would make them seem boring or inexperienced.

Now, I knew choking would come up. But even I wasn’t prepared for some of the stories that landed in my inbox. One mother told me her daughter had been having sex with a boy for the first time when, without any warning, he spat directly into her mouth.

Her daughter came home crying. She said she had felt shocked and deeply degraded, but in the moment she hadn’t known how to react so she just went with it.

The mum was most shocked by how casually the boy had done it. He had clearly assumed that spitting in a girl’s mouth was a normal part of sex.

Another woman, who is my age, told me she had recently started dating a 25-year-old man. The first time they had sex, he reached for her throat without any warning.

She described going into shock. She hadn’t asked to be choked and nothing had happened beforehand to suggest she wanted it. He simply assumed it was part of sex.

Then I came across the story of a woman who had been on a second date with a man she genuinely liked. They had spent hours talking and, when he walked her back to her car, she happily kissed him goodnight.

Within seconds, he became forceful. He pushed her against the car and placed his hand around her neck, tightening his grip when she stopped kissing him back.

She froze.

Eventually, he noticed how frightened she was and stopped. He blamed the beers he had drunk and claimed he had simply ‘got ahead of himself’. 

She remained polite until she was safely inside her car, where she burst into tears. In the days afterwards, she noticed discolouration and broken blood vessels around her neck.

What haunted her was the fact that she had continued being agreeable towards a man who had just terrified her. Her body had frozen, yet she blamed herself for the way she responded.

Then there was the woman who discovered her boyfriend of just a couple of months was secretly recording her.

They had returned to his house after a date and he offered her a massage. She was lying on her stomach in a T-shirt and underwear when he suddenly pulled down her underwear and began touching her sexually. 

Already uneasy, she turned around after he grabbed her waist and saw his phone wedged between his body and the couch. It was recording.

When she confronted him, he denied it. He swiftly tapped something on the phone before handing it over – by then, the video had vanished.

He claimed the phone must have started recording on its own. She packed her things and left.

The thing that I couldn’t stop thinking about as I read all the responses was the common theme of ‘well, this is just what people do now’.

Porn has clearly shifted the goalposts, but there is something else going on here too.

Girls have spent years being told to feel empowered about sex, which is a wonderful thing and something I will advocate for until the day I die. However, somewhere in all that progress, ‘sexually confident’ appears to have become confused with ‘willing to do absolutely anything’.

And God forbid a teenage girl admit she would prefer some kissing and a nice cuddle over being slapped across the face by a boy who still needs his mother to book his dental appointments.

There’s no denying my own first time was awkward and underwhelming. Completely undeserving of its own Pornhub category. But it happened at my pace.

At 16, I was chuffed that I had managed to lose my virginity before my self-imposed 17th birthday deadline.

Looking back now, I’m far more grateful for the month of false starts, when I kept changing my mind and the boy I was with simply accepted it. We tried again when I felt ready.

I wish every teenage girl could take something from my gloriously average first time. Bring back the lovely vanilla doona shuffle, minus the performance girls now think they have to put on.

Because being sexually adventurous should never require handing somebody else the power to decide whether you take your next breath.