What a cat I put among the pigeons last week by suggesting, in answer to a question about pornography at a literary festival, that it should be considered suitable for pupils to watch and analyse this material in schools. I was accused, on social media of course, of being a danger to innocent children, and, yes, I received my first online death threat.

What, I wondered, do so-called grown-ups think our youngsters are up to when it comes to sex? The internet is the wild west of the information age, and the younger generation is far more adept than the older ones at gaining access to its more unsavoury territories.

Teenagers will always be drawn to the raunchier aspects of whatever culture is available to them. This would once have been a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, passed around the classroom with a giggle, disguised beneath the cover of Calculus for Beginners.

Teaching pupils to make sense of pornography | Letters Read more

In the 1990s there were the lads’ mags, and lots of work for any feminist mother trying to persuade her sons that the exploitation of women – putting semi-nude pictures of them on a bedroom wall – was not a good idea. That was a difficult one, because you didn’t want your kids to think sex was dirty or to make them afraid to share their interest in it with their parents. You just wanted them to know that women should never be used or objectified.

Where has the parent been who has not spoken to their son or daughter about the danger of a 'dick pic' or naked selfie?

Now it’s a smartphone, a tablet or a laptop, always in the pocket or the bag, always ready for a selfie; and parents should know what the technology is being used for. It’s generally not just phoning home to reassure Mum and Dad they’re safe, or looking up the meaning of a word on the internet.

As a Baby Boomer who grew up during the sexual revolution, I’ve always laughed at the idea that a woman’s lot was to “lie back and think of England”. Our sex education back then tended to concentrate on fear of pregnancy, infection and loss of respectability – as, I’m told, is often the case today.

But we had free, reliable contraception, Aids was unheard of and we made it our business to find out about our pleasure. Books like Our Bodies Ourselves gave us the information, and the Women’s Liberation Movement encouraged us to become familiar with our genitals with a mirror and a torch.

There were meetings to try this in a group. I didn’t go, but I’m full of regret that we haven’t managed to pass on the knowledge we gleaned as young feminists about intimacy and pleasure to our daughters and granddaughters, for whom everything seems to have gone back to the olden days – possibly worse. Recent news stories have illustrated the territory of male entitlement that women continue to navigate, including Donald Trump’s comments that when he sees a beautiful woman, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,” and the detail that the footballer Ched Evans – acquitted of rape last week – didn’t speak to the complainant in his case before, during or after intercourse. Evans now says people “need educating on alcohol and consent”.

Surely we’re all aware by now of what’s been going on among schoolchildren, behaviour that often leads to embarrassment and heartbreak. Where has the parent been who has not spoken to their son or daughter about the danger of a “dick pic” or naked selfie being inappropriately shared and the subject of the image being universally shamed?

Then, of course, there’s the instant admission any curious teenager can obtain to sites that would probably appal even the most liberal among us. I have looked at a number of such sites – for research purposes only, naturally – and any parent ought to be very worried. What is on offer is deeply dispiriting, even on those sites that are dedicated to “normal” sex without straying into abuse or other perversions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘What is on offer online is deeply dispiriting, even on those sites that are dedicated to ‘normal’ sex without straying into abuse or other perversions.’ Photograph: Alamy

I haven’t seen one example where a woman is anything other than a purveyor of pleasure for a man or men. She has no body hair. There is anal sex and oral sex. The women receive the former, seemingly always with pleasure. They give the latter. They make a lot of noise – of apparent delight. They are, of course, actors. The noises are there because a film needs a soundtrack.

But that’s not the way the girls are reading it. In a very important book, Girls and Sex, the US journalist Peggy Orenstein details the results of her interviews with some 70 girls and young women aged between 15 and 20. Her study chimes with work done by the National Union of Students in Britain, where 60% of youngsters say they have used porn as sex education.

One girl in Orenstein’s study said her boyfriend asked why she doesn’t make the same noises as in the films. The British Medical Journal did a study of anal sex among school pupils and found that boys were pushing for it. The girls said they’d been coerced into it and that it was painful. Girls talked to Orenstein about oral sex – they were expected to give it, but never received it. They said they didn’t enjoy giving it, but “it isn’t about me”. What? Girls don’t think they have a right to a quid pro quo?

A national study of sex in the US found that, in a culture where pornography is used without analysis as sex education – and 60% of teens of both sexes use pornography in this way – girls’ sexuality is damaged. Their experience of sex becomes “a performance for male pleasure”. In both Britain and the US, rates of teenage pregnancy have fallen significantly in recent years – the obvious conclusion made in both countries is that vaginal intercourse has gone out of fashion, as oral and anal sex are held up instead as the ideal.

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Young people need guidance. We happily entrust our children’s teachers to keep them safe during the long hours they spend away from home. And we expect them to instruct our children in how to think critically.

So why not take the sex out of sex education? Put the physical, scientific side into biology lessons, and instead have boys and girls attend gender education classes. This title would be less likely to frighten off the parents who don’t want their children to learn about sex, and who live under the delusion that their offspring are not getting up to mischief, ill-informed and in secret, away from home. I have not, by the way, as the NSPCC erroneously claimed last week, called for sex education to be abolished, merely for it to be renamed and restructured.

Carefully chosen examples of pornography could be shown to teenagers from, say, the age of 15; and just as they would be asked to seriously consider the content of other films, books, newspapers or TV shows, so too they would have the opportunity to assess and discuss pornography – and, with a teacher’s help, develop the critical faculties required to understand the imagery with which they are bombarded.

Every child has the right to be informed. Information is power and enables girls to say, “No, I don’t want that. What I’d really like is this.” And if the boys have learned that girls have as much right to pleasure as they have, we might be moving towards a much healthier sex life for all the young people we care about so much.

• Jenni Murray’s new book is A History of Britain in 21 Women: A Personal Selection