The thing about the old days is they’s the old days.

You may have missed, buried on page 29 of the French edition of Elle, a couple of weeks ago a report on a school in Milan where some of the girls have set themselves up as “baby-escorts”. A boy, or boys, sends a text message and the girls rendezvous with them in the toilets to perform sex acts either individually or on in a group. In return the girls receive credits on their mobile phones, clothes or cash. It’s not just an issue in Italian schools. There is a lot of emerging anecdotal evidence and some, as far as I know, unpublished research that mobile phones and the internet are having a big impact on the way that teenagers connect with each other and that it is adversely affecting the girls.

Colleges in some parts of England, concerned about the sexual health of their post 16 students have done a lot of work on getting over messages about safe sex. Part of the follow up  has involved workshops and surveys to see just how relationships form. Some of the results are unsettling. Not because young people in the 21st century are obsessed with sex. It’s the way the technology has changed what happens and the expectations that are placed on the young women which suggest that the power relationships render the them almost totally subordinate to what the young men want.

Among the things that are now current are large scale video recording of sex, frequently by a friend of the young man; the sort of thing mentioned in the Elle report; the expectation is that if the young woman has agreed to go to someone’s house that she has to agree to everything that is demanded, not to do so results in being labelled as “frigid” though to do so too often earns the “epithet” slag”. People who run these discussions say that the two things which are absent are an idea that sex can be fun or that the women have the right to refuse. They also say that much of what happens is sex as an attempt to recreate what happens in hard core films. The pressure to conform buckles all but the strongest wills though a tiny handful refuse to join in citing their religious beliefs as a reason.

To an extent which those of us who don’t follow it may find incomprehensible the behaviour of celebrities is the consistent answer when the participants are asked why they allow themselves to get involved in these patterns of behaviour. They are as familiar with celebrity shagging videos as they are with footballers or singers and their archetype is Parasite Hilton who kick started the trend. The thinking among the young people who follow her lead reason that if someone that rich and famous is doing these things then a bit of the Hilton glamour rubs off on them when they are in a college toilet or a Luton council flat. The de facto coercion is accepted as completely natural and the idea that the young woman has the right to refuse is considered so absurd as not to be even part of the conversation.

What seems to have happened is that young people, from about the age of fifteen, depending on who you talk to, are being introduced into sex and relationships through what they see on the Internet and take that as representing how people behave and what sex looks like. The thing that the boys have gleaned from it is that the girls in their college should behave like the women in the videos and what celebrity culture has taught the girls is that the key to success is behaving like Hilton.

Listening to people who have conducted this research your first reaction is that as far as mass youth consciousness goes feminism is a forgotten ideology. A few anecdotes about this university or what a couple of individuals did somewhere else don’t change that. We can rage against it all we want and we can quibble about the scale but the emerging trend among large numbers of people in their later teens and early twenties is an acceptance of this model of human sexuality. It’s hard to see it as anything other than a hard core regression to a time when society’s expectation was that women did what men told them to and the women were expected to obey without question.