Most of this resonates. Just as the article points out, porn is one of the most accessible ways of getting mostly servicable, if greatly skewed sex education, in the sense of being able to consume it from the privacy of your own home, away from adults and peers, and be exposed to a variety of actual situations that depict sex acts. This makes abstract lessons about condoms and bananas -- but maybe not periods and pregnancy -- more concrete, especially as you're at the age when you're trying to figure out what you want emotionally. And that's even if you got a school lesson about condoms and bananas at all.

As for just how skewed porn is, and how much it influences tastes and posturing of its impressionable consumers, is something worthy of more study. While one must be careful to suggest that adult human societies are still shaped by primitive patterns descendant from ancient, hypercompetitive eras lest we erase many years of social progress, societies of adolescents -- especially captive environments like school, camp, and social networks -- show less nuance, and more base urges that are products of either nature or nurture.

Notably, school is a captive social environment in which social competition can develop, and the proliferation of social networks extends this captive environment outside of school hours and into the middle of the night. The youth experience largely consists of top-down busywork about school-selected abstract topics vaguely about adult life, while being exposed to a shifting social landscape in which real events happen with real impact on their immediate surroundings. Sex is one such event, and everyone's still figuring things out.

When you're not actually sure what you want, because lots of things appeal in theory, but you're not sure if that appeal will translate into practice, a confident partner is compelling in ways that go beyond their gratifying presence in porn. They can be your guide and encourage you to engage in the things you want to do, while easing around the ones you don't. Older, attractive, sociable people, who often have more sexual experience (by virtue of their attributes) can project this confidence and match younger partners, despite in many places laws against the contrary. If the relationship remains mutually beneficial, the resulting experiences will allow the bottom partner to gain confidence of their own to apply with future partners, and enables them to explore their preferences.

Meanwhile, adolescents seeking close-in-age partners are faced with a conundrum: project confidence, or admit that they're unsure? The latter, for many, is untenable. A tactic that has developed to project carefree nonchalance instead, to mask deeper conflicts with plausible deniability and a dose of youth-transcending nihilism. This has made "chill" a socially acceptable byword for winging it. This is the territory of mindgames, of unspoken consent (or lack thereof), and a lowkey desire to impress the other -- behaviors that many will retain into adulthood and create more problems then.

It's imperfect choices all around: either have real experience from prior encounters to project confidence, lean on porn and hearsay muster up artificial know-how, engage in a vague slow-motion game where one effectively becomes a recipient to a series of events and one-thing-led-to-anothers, or admit all of this is making your head swirl but watch as the person you like makes headway with someone who was sure a few weeks later?

It always boils down to information and communication. Porn is information where alternatives are not nearly as illustrative, and it enables a vocabulary of communication in a world where talk with adults is a both-ways taboo, talk with peers is a social risk, so most communication isn't verbal. Porn enables vernacular literacy in these matters, while other instruments don't. Of course, it's produced for a different audience, but porn and other artifacts of intimacy produced for (and by) a more relatable audience is illegal, so it's the next best thing.