Freedman, Ethan
May 2, 2025
Columbia University School for Social Work, New York
Submitted in partial fulfillment as a Final Research Paper within the requirements for Columbia's School for Social Work program and Dr. Charlotte McCullagh's Human Sexuality class.
Acknowledgements
In introducing the following work, I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory on which we learn, work, and resource from at Columbia University School of Social Work is land of the Lenape and Wappinger indigenous peoples. Let us commit ourselves to the struggle against the forces that have dispossessed the Lenape, Wappinger, and other indigenous people of their lands.
I would also like to acknowledge professor Charlotte McCullagh and their facilitation of SOCWT7305 class on Human Sexuality. If this is all Professor McCullagh reads, it has been a great joy to learn in shared space. With Dr. McCullagh's lecturers, recommended readings, and guidance, this research project took form. Moreover, all my peers in class who contributed to discussions and building ideas that related to the present topic. I would also like to thank Demetra Mallios and her generosity in letting me conduct work at my practicum site with Puberry and middle school boys in The Bronx. With these acknowledgements, I present the following work of my own.
Abstract
This paper explores how adolescent boys in the 21st century develop sexual values through an intricate web of ecological, pedagogical, and digital influences. Grounded in Dailey's (1981) Circles of Sexuality and Bronfenbrenner's (1977) Ecological Systems Theory, this study analyzes how both micro level (family, school, peers) and macro level (capitalism, pornography, social media, and video games) shape adolescent sexual norms. While dominant institutions often fail to provide comprehensive, affirming sex education, young boys are increasingly educated by unregulated digital content that perpetuates toxic masculinity, misinformation, and harmful gender norms. Simultaneously, this digital space also holds transformative potential. Drawing from literature and a case study at a public all boys middle school in The Bronx, New York, this paper evaluates a counter narrative via the implementation of a gamified and medically verified puberty education platform called Puberry. Findings illustrate how digital platforms, when ethically designed, can foster agency, consent, empathy, and inclusive understandings of sexuality among youth. The paper concludes by advocating for relational, inclusive, and accountable health and sexuality education frameworks that actively involve youth, educators, and digital tools for co-conspiring healthier sexual values among all agents.
Key Words: Adolescent Health, Digital Media Influence, Sexuality and Health Education, Masculinity and Gender norms, Gamified Health Education
Introduction:
In the present moment, the sexual development of adolescent boys in the 21st century is unfolding within a profoundly different landscape than prior generations. With shifts into digital environments and its impact on mental health captured by Haidt's The Anxious Generation (2024), a flood of materials ranging from Netflix's limited series titled Adolescence (Thorne & Graham, 2025) to critiques and confirmations of each source of information from which young boys are learning has seeped its way into mainstream discourse of health and sexuality education.
While school based health curricula remain largely outdated, unequitable, or absent, today's youth learn about sex, relationships, identity, and power through a complex web of digital, cultural, and emotional infrastructures targeting young men especially. While young girls are impacted too, the failures or inadequacies of sexuality schooling disseminated by education systems results in a pivot away from these structures. From pornography and video games to social media influencers and gamified educational technologies, the mediums shaping sexuality are ever expanding, contradictory, and largely unsupervised.
Despite there being some documentation on how these informal curricula educate via complex pedagogies of pleasure, risk, consent, and power, Dailey's (1981) Circles of Sexuality and Bronfenbrenner's (1997) Ecological Systems Theory enables expansion of one's understanding around the microsystems and macrosystems educating adolescent boys. The sexual values of youth and young boys are not fixed, but are shaped in a dynamic style by micro level forces such as family, school, and peers. In tandem, macro forces like capitalism, state institutions, and rapidly changing digital ecosystems including sexual technologies, pornography, influencers, social media, and video games have tightened grips around the minds of young men.
Although digital technologies often reinforce harmful scripts of sexuality and gender hierarchies, they also hold transformative potential to cultivate expansive, ethical, and reflexive sexual values among young boys. This positive capacity is particularly evident through the lens of a social worker and health educator in a case study of critical engagement with a gamified health education company called Puberry in the population of a public preparatory charter middle school for boys in The Bronx, New York.
Sexuality is a Central Aspect of Humanity – and Adolescent Boys are Human
When shaping space for understanding adolescent boys' sexual development, it is of great necessity to construct a framework expansive enough to account for pleasure, power dynamics, identity, and learning. Dailey's (1981) Circles of Sexuality Model offers a concrete foundation by defining sexuality within five overlapping domains: sensuality, intimacy, sexual identity, sexual health and reproduction, and sexualization (Turner, 2020). Through this lens, the common flaw of formal and informal curricula reducing sexuality to something dangerous, shameful, or pathologized is mitigated depending on the agent wielding the perspective.
Building on Dailey's model, Turner (2020) argues sexuality can be a powerful tool for social work, proposing it as a strength based approach centering the client's wellbeing. Rather than framing adolescent boys' sexuality as something to manage or suppress considering the harm rooted in patriarchal values of heteronormativity and capitalism, Turner (2020) recognizes sexuality as a core component of humanity. Calling on educators and practitioners to facilitate explorations of identity, intimacy, and pleasure in age appropriate settings affirming of agents, Glickman (2000) expands on this using the language of sex positivity. Defining the term as something different from being tolerant, sex positivity is a commitment to respect, agency, consent, and pleasure across diverse identities and orientations (Glickman, 2000). "Being sex-positive means acknowledging the parts of sexuality that are beautiful and life-affirming while also honestly engaging with its risks," employing how truly ethical ways of generating sexual values in agents includes their personal desires (Glickman, 2000).
From Philips and Neustifter (2022), another crucial layer of intersectionality is added to the foundation. Arguing for an approach centering human rights and access in sex education curricula, the systemic denial of sexual autonomy for marginalized populations and identities must be challenged–particularly for queer youth, youth of color, and disabled youth (Philips and Neustifter, 2022). Emphasizing sexuality is a human right and training equipping future therapists and educators must approach identity as sites of empowerment rather than shame or pathology, Philips and Neustifter (2022), Turner (2020), and Glickman (2000) provide a critical conceptual understanding that reorients the conversation around adolescent boys from suppression to support. Moving from fear to potential is what the Circles of Sexuality Model establishes as a generative starting point for this topic.
Manipulation and Influence: A Core Mechanism for Developing and Ingraining Sexual Values
Despite the model centering agent's strengths previously put forward, human sexuality is also a site of intense manipulation and structural control. This manipulation operates through a spectrum of forces ranging from media representations and school policies to biological essentialisms – something all youth are subject too. While Gray's (2013) work is not inherently deterministic, evolutionary discourses are frequently co-opted to justify gender essentialism by framing boys as biologically predisposed to aggression, conquest, and sexual dominance. The naturalization of masculinity contributes to problematic sexual cultures society explains, excuses, and celebrates.
Countering this essentialism, DeLamater (1981) provides sociological analysis of how institutions control sexuality. Identifying realms of control in the family, religion, law, media, and education, sexuality is seen as something disciplined and policed by many societal pillars. Religious institutions are capable of influencing and manipulating agents to promote abstinence and shame, while laws regulate access to contraception and sexual autonomy or media scripts reinforce narrow standards of gender and desire (DeLamater, 1981). In tandem with Turner (2020), DeLamater's (1981) analysis of the school system calls for expansive education with a focus on pleasure. Despite this, boys are not encouraged to understand their sexuality, but rather to control it, displace it, or manifest it in culturally acceptable ways (DeLamater, 1981; Turner, 2020).
These tensions are compounded by intersectional inequities as boys of color, queer boys, disabled boys, and boys from working class or immigrant communities often experience intensified forms of sexual surveillance and discipline (Philips and Neustifter, 2022). The rights of marginalized boys to explore their sexuality with safety is implicitly denied through criminalization of behavior, pathologization of desires, or total erasures of experiences in curricula.
While Dailey's (1981) Circles of Sexuality Model and Turner's (2020) focus on strengths provides a hopeful vision for sex education, it is important to mention the role of manipulation and influence around sexuality. Despite the focus of manipulation from Daily (1981) being on behaviors like flirting, performance, vocal changes, or other situations between sexual agents, larger forces of manipulation and control are at play. Understanding this contradiction is essential for addressing the gaps between what boys are taught and what they internalize about sex, power, and intimacy.
Expanding on Forces Manipulating Sexuality: A Basic Bronfenbrenner (1977) Model
Bronfenbrenner's (1977) ecological systems theory reminds that individual development does not occur in isolation. While it is expansive beyond two categories, a binary breakdown of microsystem and macrosystem can explain a lot. The microsystem can be broken up into family, school, and peer groups. It is the most immediate and intimate layer shaping how adolescent boys understand, experience, and express their sexuality.
These micro level relationships are where the first scripts of sexual norms and gender roles are written, and something Zaman et al. (2024) discusses alongside the presence of supportive and communicative parents who are directly associated with more positive and informed attitudes towards sexuality among adolescents. Emphasizing sexuality education must occur in schools, the household is where values are first transmitted (Zaman et al., 2024). For boys in conservative micro-spaces, discourse around sexuality may be nonexistent and leave them to seek answers elsewhere. In the absence of parents comfortable to hold conversations with their children and education systems avoiding curricula entirely, McFarland and Williams (2016) describe abstinence only education models as discourse creating voids filled by misinformation and stigma. Being "told to just say no, but never taught what to say yes to" captures how absent comprehensive education becomes its own form of pedagogy rooted in fear, shame, and ignorance (McFarland and Williams, 2016).
The microsystem also includes peer relationships, which play a critical role in affirming or challenging sexual scripts. Boys often learn to perform masculinity and sexuality through peer validation, pressure, or critique (Zaman et al. 2024). Zaman et al. (2024) highlights how adolescents often prioritize peer norms over parental expectations–especially when parents are silent or judgemental about sexuality. From here, the importance of embedding sexual health education into contexts with peers like classrooms or extracurriculars is illuminated. Even in environments where supportive adults are present, Turner (2020) reminds that without frameworks like the Circles of Sexuality, educators may inadvertently reproduce harmful norms. Glickman (2000) notes that values like consent and pleasure must be explicitly named to bring slightly positive outcomes. If parents are imperfect and falling short in educating on sexuality and comprehensive education consistently has gaps, youth and adolescent boys are retaining mixed messages leaving them vulnerable to confusion and perpetuating harm.
The microsystem often fails boys by being either too enforcing or too silent. Without intentional and inclusive conversations around sexuality rooted in an agent's personal values, boys are left to define it through fragmented inputs–many of which come from macrosystems.
Introducing the Macro Influence on Adolescent Boys: A Response to Micro Level Shortcomings
At the macro level, adolescent boys are exposed to vast networks of cultural production that shape their sexual values and behaviors far beyond the reach of families and schools. These include media, capitalism, state policy, and global digital platforms which create structural conditions capable of manufacturing and reinforcing sexual values–often in conflict with emotional and developmental needs of boys. While media content operates as a parallel sex educator capable of scripting sexual behaviors, desires, and emotional expressions, messaging is especially suggestive for boys whose micro environments are unreliable (Brown, Steele, and Walsh-Childers, 2002). Media simultaneously invites exploration while enforcing conformity and encouraging boys to desire sex via narrow, heteronormative, and possibly violent lenses (Brown, Steele, and Walsh-Childers, 2002). With focals being shaped by gender and race, adolescent boys often witness and interpret dominant and normative feeds rendering them empowered – especially white boys (Werner-Wilson et al., 2004). Boys of color might find themselves feeling alienated or even threatened, highlighting media influence and manipulation is not unidirectional (Werner-Wilson et al., 2004).
Goldfarb (2008) adds a slightly feminist analysis and provides a critique of capitalism as an enabler of media and consumer culture that commodifies sexuality – specifically girlhood – for male consumption. Adolescent girls and young women are "buying into sexy," but this directly relates to boys who are sold a version of desire hyperlinked to consumption (Goldfarb, 2008). To be desirable is to consume and to consume is to dominate, perpetuating a capitalist logic echoed by DeLamater (1981) which frames sexuality as something transactional, performative, and validated externally. While Turner (2020) pushes for generating antithetical values, macro influences of media and capitalism flood boys with opposing images and narratives.
As a result, broader systems are not reflective of cultural norms, but architects of them. Zaman et al. (2024) and DeLamater (1981) emphasize institutional systems operate as enforcers of sexuality tasked with normalizing certain expressions for masculinity and femininity, and boys are socialized into believing media scripted performances of power and dominance are portrayals of desire and measures of manhood. While the macro systems serve as construction sites for adolescent sexual development, their influence often conflates more nuanced and value based learning possibly occurring in the microsystem.
Expanding on Macrosystem Influences: The Manipulation of Adolescent Boys in Digital Realms
The macro level influences shaping adolescent sexual values are increasingly located within digital domains that blur the boundaries between education, entertainment, commerce, and intimacy. Adult content, internet based social media, and sexual technologies (technologies centering topics found in Daily's 1981 model) emerge as major manipulators of how boys sexual schemas.
The Capacity for Media and Adult Content to Push Negative Sexual Values
Haidt (2024) argues today's youth are part of the “anxious generation” retreating into “virtual worlds” including not only gaming and social media, but also digital adult materials and pornography. While Haidt’s (2024) research positions this withdrawal as negative and capable of transforming boys' perception of intimacy and sexual connection, Echols (1983) historicizes this transformation by analyzing Playboy’s cultural project to shape the “good sexual citizen” in a postwar America. Porn is not merely fantasy, but a newly established ideal. It teaches boys how to be men through consumption, heteronormativity that centers physical conquest, and detachment from their own bodies (Echols, 1983). Berg (2021) updates this perspective with an ethnography of porn performers and producers, revealing adult media labor as enmeshed in late capitalist dynamics of performance, uncertainty, and emotional compartmentalization. For boys who consume this content without critical thought, the embodied and external labors behind pleasure are erased and lessons absorbed reinforce misogynistic and unrealistic expectations.
A lack of critical thinking is particularly dangerous because adult content is often the first point of contact with sexual imagery for boys. Haidt (2024) notes the average age of exposure to pornographic content continues to drop, with little oversight or opportunity for meaningful contextualization. Boys may interpret exaggerated, violent, or degrading portrayals of sex as normative, and the accessibility of porn through the internet contributes to a widespread unspoken curriculum undermining emotional connection, consent, and sexual diversity. Mainstream adult content upholds racist, transphobic, and ableist tropes teaching youth whose bodies are desirable and whose are not, something Berg (2021) understands as performers of color, queer performers, and those outside normative bodies are routinely marginalized, fetishized, or excluded. Even beyond content itself, the mechanisms of ad-driven platforms, clickbait headlines, and algorithmic recommendation systems through which pornography is delivered function to escalate novelty (Berg, 2021). Users are encouraged to consume further, faster, and more intensely, replicating capitalist logics of endless satisfaction with no regard for ethics or empathy (Berg, 2021). Haidt (2024) links this to broader mental health trends among adolescent boys, where compulsive behaviors, emotional dysregulation, and distorted expectations about sexuality become normalized through digital spaces.
These concerns do not mean all pornography is inherently harmful, but the widespread consumption of mainstream porn without accompanying education or critical thinking skills to provide ethical safety nets constitutes a powerful macrosystem influence shaping how boys develop their sense of self, gender, and the erotic. The consequences of this gap are individual and structural as it reinforces a world in which power is eroticized and vulnerability is punished.
Social Media and Influencers Control Over Young Boys
Social media and influencer culture exert profound macro level influences on the development of adolescent boys (and girls) sexual values. These platforms do more than reflect cultural norms; they actively produce and circulate ideologies shaping how masculinity, desirability, and sexuality are understood and performed. What is particularly troubling is the rise of figures like Andrew Tate and adjacent manosphere personalities who use digital platforms to generate masculine ideas cultivating affective loyalty through misogynistic messaging and hypermasculine performances.
Johanssen (2022) describes the manosphere as a site of “fantasy and disinhibition,” where male users feel liberated to express hostility, entitlement, and insecurity conflated by perceptions of agency. Platforms like Youtube, TikTok, and reddit function as echo chambers where adolescent boys are introduced to content ascribing value to control, conquest, and emotional suppression (Johanssen, 2022). These messages are rarely received passively; they become internalized through affective parasocial bonds with influencers who present themselves as mentors or saviors from a supposedly “feminized” society (Johanssen, 2022). Boys who are experiencing isolation, low self-esteem, or mental health struggles are uniquely vulnerable to this digital radicalization (Murphy, 2023). In a study on incel forums and influencer pipelines, social media is responsible for being an entry point into deeper misogynistic communities (Murphy, 2023). Algorithms designed to prioritize engagement over well-being of its users amplify polarizing and extreme content, creating feedback loops rewarding dehumanization, fetishization, and maladaptive rhetoric pushed by the manosphere.
As an extension of Johanssen (2022) and Murphy (2023), the concept of “affective homosocial currencies” adds to how boys perform emotional allegiance to figures like Andrew Tate in order to gain status among their peers (Haslop et al., 2024). Humor, irony, and shared disgust become ways to signal alignment with patriarchal norms that serve to establish an environment where empathy and vulnerability are seen as weaknesses, and detachment and aggression are rewarded (Haslop et al., 2024). This creates a culture where sexual values are defined by social capital garnered through performance of dominance and not care or connection with those outside of masculinity. In a review of gender normativity in social media, Koester and Marcus (2024) emphasize the systemic nature of this influence and how platform design, content moderation, and monetization schemes all contribute to the entrenched hegemonic masculinity.
The cumulative impact of these systems is a form of sexual socialization that discourages emotional vulnerability, distorts relationship expectations, and reinforces harmful hierarchies. Boys are watching misogynistic content, and being trained to desire its power through embodiment and replication of its logic in their own lives. This cultural concern transforms into public health issues of consent that demand intervention through digital literacy, platform accountability, and alternative narratives of masculinity and desire.
Video Games as Novel Manipulators of Sexual Values
Video games also contribute significantly to the formation of adolescent boys’ sexual beliefs on a macro stage. Smith and Moyer-Gusé (2004) demonstrate how digital games reinforce stereotypical gender norms by portraying male characters as dominant, powerful, and hypermasculine, while female characters are frequently sexualized and objectified. These representations are embedded within the interactive and immersive structures of gameplay encouraging boys to associate dominance with heroism and female bodies with conquest and reward (Smith and Moyer-Gusé, 2004), but Robinson et al. (2009) extend critiques with a content analysis of official video game websites. Violence, sexuality, and gender stereotyping are revealed as central to game marketing, with the sexualization of women in games linked to aggression, competition, and the reinforcement of a worldview where relationships are battles and partners are trophies (Robinson et al., 2009).
While Robinson et al. (2009) reveals the problematic blueprint for one way boys understand relational dynamics, Murphy (2023) links these behaviors to broader subcultures and communities rooted in manosphere values of hyper masculinity generated via online spaces. These games become more than entertainment as they function as emotional spaces for boys to experiment with dominance, control, and loneliness, while communicating with other adolescent boys and grown men through a microphone that compounds the indoctrination of problematic sexual values isolated from emotional or ethical considerations (Murphy, 2023).
The gamification of masculinity thus becomes a macro level influence and educational force as it teaches that success comes from control, vulnerability is failure, and relationships are something around which to develop strategy rather than embrace. These values are deeply ingrained via repetition, peer validation, and algorithmic promotion. Without alternative narratives or critical intervention, these digital games become classrooms too–ones implicitly instructing boys to replicate harmful power structures when they remove themselves from these realms.
The Positive Capacity for Digital Space: Education as Positive Influence
Despite the pervasively documented harms associated with digital platforms, technologies also offer expansive possibilities for reframing adolescent boys’ sexual education, ethics, and identity formation. Media, adult content, social media, module-based platforms, and gamified education programs are increasingly leveraged to fill gaps left by inadequate curricula and reimagine sexuality as inclusive, participatory, and an affirming part of development.
Ethical Content and Media Can Make a Drastic Difference:
In the realm of adult media, Smith (2015) outlines how ethical pornography challenges traditional heteropatriarchal scripts pushed by male narrative mainstream hardcore content by centering enthusiastic consent, pleasure, and authenticity. While no child under the age of consent should be consuming adult content, ethical porn repositions adult media as a space of counter-narratives capable of disrupting hegemonic fantasies of domination and replacing them with representations of queer, feminist, and disability centered desires (Smith, 2015). Arrigton-Sanders et al. (2015) found sexually explicit material played a complex role in sexual development of Black same sex attracted adolescent boys, becoming a source of exploration and a site of internalized stigma. Findings suggest pornographic media can simultaneously affirm queer desire while reinforcing racialized and heteronormative standards complicating a narrative of harm. Halberstam (2011) further suggests the failure and fantasy in these media forms can offer imaginative frameworks detaching sexuality from performance or conquest to align with the goals of education. Not just informing youth about sex, but helping them to consider what kinds of intimacy are meaningful and ethical. Ethical adult content and feminist oriented sexual technologies are also spaces where pleasure is not solely commodified, but contextualized. Albury et al. (n.d.) describe emerging sexual technologies as tools capable of embedding values of accountability, care, and inclusivity to provide young people with personalized sexual knowledge, confidence, and access to information often omitted in school curricula. These platforms do not simply show sexual activity, but offer opportunities to understand the complexity of intimacy and sexual agency by informing on the usage of adult toys or alternative forms of intimacy. In the end, harmful mainstream content is reaching adolescents and young boys before the age of consent regardless of what is done to mitigate internet usage (Haidt, 2024), and ethical, feminist, and queer content centering diversity and non-normative experiences has the capacity to make a profound difference.
Social Media’s Capacity for Generating Positive Sexual Values:
Social media’s potential is similarly nuanced as Gusé et al. (2012) demonstrates that new media based sexual health interventions increase knowledge and positive behavioral changes in adolescents. Platforms like YouTube and Instagram, when used to disseminate culturally relevant and youth designed messages, can create digital spaces affirming multiple ways of being and loving (Gusé et al., 2012). Burns et al. (202) reinforce this through research on web-based interventions for Black male youth showing peer facilitated and identity affirming campaigns can foster trust, agency, and engagement when among populations often excluded from mainstream sexual discourses. These platforms can create opportunities for “critical engagement,” where adolescent boys can encounter alternative masculinities, access nuanced narratives, and participate in identity exploration beyond normativity (Koester and Marcus, 2024). Young boys and men can become more than consumers, but curators, learners, and collaborators in their own sexual development.
Internet Based Modularized Sex and Health Education Programs:
In parallel to social media based methodologies, sex and health education programs administered through internet modules offer adolescents accessible, evidence-based, learning environments combining digital literacy with behavioral insights. Chen et al. (2023) found online modules improved content retention, empathy and respect in sexual partnerships among adolescents. Decker et al. (2020) highlights the capacity for hybrid models working via the internet and interpersonal connection to facilitate dialogue and reflection strengthening adolescent boys’ capacities to navigate both informational and emotional complexities. Moreover, when caregivers were integrated into tech-based programming, communication between children and those responsible for them improved and safe sexual behavior followed (Chokprajakchad et al., 2020). This reveals the architecture of digital spaces for education on sexual values can be collaborative, holistic, intergenerational, and something positive.
Case Study of Adolescent Boys Education in Sexual Values:
Summary of the Negative Digital Influences:
Located in The Bronx New York is a public preparatory charter school serving predominantly Black and Latino boys in kindergarten through eighth grade. With the failure of sex and health education in public schools stemming from inadequate or outdated curriculums even before the turn of the century (Malfetti & Rubin, 1968; Pardini, 1968), this site operates as a unique example for the modern day pitfalls around generating positive sexual values in adolescent boys.
Although the community is understaffed in its general education positions, the responsibility of health and sexuality education falls solely on the physical education teacher at this school. If Philips and Neustifter (2022) imply educators who share the same identities as their students or are deeply competent in their significance within the given population they are serving can better educate, this teacher has true potential to lead his students. With the ability to affirm identities through direct micro level interactions and cultural relations, educators who have adjacent embodied experiences from the adolescents with which they work are better equipped to instill strong values (Burns et al., 2020; Zaman et al., 2024). While youth from marginalized communities are more responsive to educators and facilitators who share their cultural, racial, or sexual identities and can offer intersectional awareness, the physical education teacher at this school has fallen short of leading any health education courses outside the realm of exercise.
Given these circumstances, health and sexuality education satisfactory to the New York State Department of Education curriculum is put in the hands of a staffing organization. On a macro scale, this company is invited into schools to fill and supervise teaching roles in realms of creative arts, electives, and health education. Upon maneuvering through the relevant charter school for the entire school year, this organization exacerbates the scale of insufficient educators tasked with instilling positive sexual values in scholars and young boys. The common denominator between the school health teacher and the staffing organization is agents tasked with facilitating health and sexuality curriculums can be severely inconsistent in their approach (Carrion & Jensen, 2014). Sadly, the one consistency at this charter school is adolescent boys are not receiving any sexual health schooling whatsoever.
As a result, an entirely separate staffing organization for social workers and counselors is left to educate young boys on positive sexual values. On a given day in the social workers office, scholars can be heard mentioning manosphere figures like Andrew Tate and repeating misogynistic rhetoric about women, or referring to social media as sources to justify their opinions about the world (Johanssen, 2022; Murphy, 2023). While “affective homosocial currencies” look different depending on the context (Haslop eet al., 2024), adolescent boys at the present public charter show an allegiance to toxic masculinity represented through mediums designed to enforce hegemonic gender norms (Koester & Marcus, 2024). Students may seek social workers for the ways other boys govern or police alternative masculinities because they were called gay or homophobic slurs in effort to inflict harm (Koester & Marcus, 2024), but the very same students perpetuating harmful rhetoric are at risk of discipline and in need of counselors. There is no room for peer-led culturally relevant campaigns discussed by Burns et al. (2020) as the influencers with grips on their minds display behaviors making retreating into digital virtual worlds seem appealing and prosperous (Haidt, 2024). Students can be heard referencing famous Black and Latino internet live streamers who reinforce stereotypical masculine values objectifying women in the content they are creating or the language they are using (Smith & Moyer-Gusé, 2004), while the lessons they are learning from content creators intertwines violence with sexualization and masculine success (Robinson et al., 2009).
Middle schoolers reflect the significance of the internet world on them when they recite their dreams of being internet streamers themselves, but the very next sentence they unravel displays how adult media and content embeds itself in their schemas of sexuality (Haidt, 2024). Despite some students being in primary grades and others being in early secondary grades in reference to their age, porn is already a substitute for real world connection capable of shaping their sexual values in isolation from real emotional development (Haidt, 2024). Scholars are witnessed referencing mainstream adult media stars to their teachers or making jokes about sexual acts displayed and rhetorically categorized on adult content platforms. Given the charter schools context as an all boys education site, even the lack of a gender binary compounds the appeal of the internet as a place for receiving sexual values (Echols, 1983; Arrington-Sander et al., 2015). Every other eighth grade scholar preparing for high school may be excited to go to a school with girls, but very few frame it around a desire to learn how to integrate themselves in a spectrum of gender and are more focused on the possibility of dating. Moreover, young boys ranging from sixth to eighth grade are discussing who has more girls metaphorically attached to their hip, while others are non-consensually passing around pornographic photos they received from girls under the age of consent. There may also be an occasional photo of a boy’s penis sent in a group chat of all boys, or videos taken as a reflection of adolescent boys’ curiosity in experimenting with sexuality. Overall, the significance of digitized media as a facilitator or reflector of adolescent boys' sexual values is beyond evident in the office of social workers.
The Positive Potentials and Puberry - A Health EdTech Startup
With all the negative influences on sexual values of adolescent boys situated in the given context of an all boys charter middle school, as well as some positive capacities for mediums and modes of macro facilitation centered in the broader literature – gamified sex education emerges as a radical pedagogical approach to educating adolescents on sexual values and sexual health. Puberry is a startup and innovative approach to puberty and health education that engages in inclusive and accessible gamified curriculums via an education technology platform for youth ages eight and up (Puberry, 2025). Founded by Demetra Mallios, a Master’s in Business at Columbia University, Puberry aims to eliminate shame and misinformation surrounding puberty by providing medically verified and interactive content capable of opening dialogue (Puberry, 2025). While Demetra established the organization in efforts to help young girls with understanding menstruation, it doubles as an educator for adolescent boys around positive sexual values rooted in healthy relationships and lifestyle choices. Capable of satisfying New York Department of Education requirements in health education or being tailored to parents and school curricula via customizable content based on age level of the students, Puberry correlates with 61% increase in health test scores among students using the application and 90% confidence boosts in discussing puberty (Puberr.org)
In line with Franco Vege et al. (2022) finding that gamified sexual health tools tailored to adolescents were highly effective in increasing HIV knowledge and lowering sexual risk taking behaviors, scholars receiving social worker facilitated Puberry curriculums at the public charter increased their knowledge of hygiene choices and preventative measures around negative sexual health outcomes. While not explicitly teaching sexual health topics due to the school being situated under a 2025 Trump administration and their demands, this medium has real potential for educating youth. In tandem with this, the “PlayForward” game discussed by Fiellin et al. (2017) led to statistically significant improvements in STI prevention attitudes and behaviors noting youth are capable of garnering lessons in hygiene and healthy forms of sexuality. In group settings with middle school boys, Puberry’s curriculum assisted in generating an understanding of how their bodies will change during puberty and what this could mean for their relationships. Scholars generated discourse through Puberry’s discussion questions resulting in peers understanding how each agent shows up with individual embodied experiences in health and sexuality. Moreover, the relationship between sexuality, mental health, and substance use is aligned with gamified courses on anatomy and bullying. Considering these topics are incredibly serious as they have the capacity to raise generations of healthy youth, Alencar et al. (2022) reports serious games are most impactful when grounded in narrative, empathy, and adaptive learning styles. Puberry takes this notion and dives deeper by offering narrative potentials where scholars can obtain rewards motivating learning and building upon each course in a given subject. Despite parents, schools, and teachers being capable of manipulating the content scholars learn to fit the needs of the systems in which they are situated, Kashibuchi and Sakamoto (2001) shows gender role simulation increases empathy and challenges biases among adolescent boys. With Puberry having over fifteen lessons relating to “Women’s Health and Her Menstrual Cycle,” adolescent boys can opt into learning about the differences in biological sexes in efforts to grow a deeper understanding and compassion for the spectrum of identities in the world (Puberry, 2025). Considering the pitfalls of health and sexuality education scholars in the public charter experience, gamified education technologies do not trivialize health and sexuality education – but they make it dynamic, participatory and emotionally resonant.
Breaking the Fourth Wall: My Experiences Educating Boys on Positive Sexual Values
As someone who presents as a white cisgendered man working at a predominantly Black and Latino middle school in The Bronx, New York, there is much to unpack about how it feels to navigate these topics. Barely ten years older than a majority of the scholars with whom I was working, I served as a mentor for them on generating positive values. Ignoring the topics of health and sexuality education within this sentence alone, scholars lacked role models from whom they could learn emotional agency and empathy. I remember leaving the school one day and hearing a male administrator tell a young boy to “hide his emotions” as men must not let others see when they are struggling. This struck me to my core.
While Blechner (2010) operationalized transference within the context of sex therapy as an “expression of erotic feelings towards the therapist,” their discussion of antierotic transference as similar but “expressed in the negative.” Considering I was not holding counseling sessions in topics of sex therapy, Watts-Jones (2010) indirect address of the transference and countertransference through the “location of self” grounds me as I close this piece. As a young man raised by women and taught by men how not to move through this world, I often had to manage my reactions to scholar’s projections of social narratives. Their assumptions that I aligned with masculinity in the same way they did stems from how I performed my identities, and this is compounded in social workers from marginalized backgrounds. I once had an eighth grader sent to my office for calling his teacher the f-slur. He and I had met for the prior eight months and I self disclosed the numerous times I had people throwing the same harmful words from the windows of their car as they drove by me on the street. Watt-Jones (2010) discusses transparency and identity based tensions as an “invitation to clients to participate with the therapist in being mindful of how our mix of experiences may at times create tension, misunderstanding, or frustration and to talk about it.” While this scholar comes from a background where sexuality is oppressed, holding this discussion was a reflection of the power dynamic between a social worker and a student, as well as an effort of reflective countertransference (Watts-Jone, 2010). Creating this space with the scholar served as opening transformative dialogue helping him to eventually apologize to their teacher.
In a group session where I asked scholars if they would rather find love or money in their lives, each scholar said money and one referenced Andrew Tate as motivation. With my coworker who is a Black woman present, I took the opportunity to intervene and tell the scholars it is easy to be misled by the internet and the facades put on by people. Ranging from the student who calls me his school father out of pure transference or the others who changed their answer from money to love because of my intervention, I am proud of my influence on these scholars as someone capable of instilling positive values around sexuality. I only scratched the surface compared to some of the extreme manipulators of beliefs when they step foot outside of the school.
Conclusion: The Future of Sex Education is Already Here
With technology becoming ever the more present in society and among youth, the question of whether adolescent boys are being taught about sexuality is futile. From the outset, Dailey’s (1981) Circles of Sexuality and Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) Ecological Systems Theory (1977) lays the foundation for understanding adolescent boys sexual values are shaped by a convergence of ecological forces ranging from families and the classroom to porn platforms and algorithmic feeds. This results from dominant models of formal sex education remaining restrictive, fragmented, and grounded in fear, shame, or ideological discomfort (Carrion & Jenson, 2014; Malfetti & Rubin, 1968; McFarland & Williams, 2016; Pardini, 1998), as well as comprehensive responses being undermined by educators, binaries, and institutional resistance (Philips & Neustifter, 2022; Watts-Jones, 2010). Adolescent boys are then pushed to seek answers from informal, unregulated spaces filling the void left by educational institutions.
While education is a form of manipulation, from this gap emerges the capacity for influencing the sexual values of youth through hidden curricula embedded in media, religion, and interpersonal culture (DeLamater, 1981; Turner, 2020). Gray’s (2013) evolutionary lens frames aggression and dominance as naturalized through subtle indoctrination into beliefs that control is innate and intimacy is earned through a particular performance of masculinity. These scripts and schemas are no accident, but are sold and sustained through multiple systems with a wide range of influence on the mind of young boys.
The primary digital arenas shaping boys are media, social media, and video games. In media and pornography, boys are exposed to adult content long before they can develop emotional literacy around sex, power, or pleasure (Arrington-Sander et al., 2015; Berg, 2021; DePointi et al., 2023; Echols, 1983; Haidt, 2024; Langcaster-James & Bently, 2018). These platforms place whiteness, domination, and conquest on a pedestal while erasing nuance, consent, and embodied differences between agents and sexualities. Social media cultivates toxic masculinities through influencers and online communities in spaces like the manosphere, which capitalize on vulnerability and social isolation (Haslop et al., 2024; Johanssen, 2022; Koester & Marcus, 2024; Murphy, 2023). Teaching through mimicries and rewards, these platforms assist boys in learning dominance garners validation while empathy and complexities correlate to weakness. Video games extend this pedagogy through immersive reinforcement of hypermasculine tropes portraying intimacy as transactional and competitive (Robinson et al., 2009; Smith & Moyer-Gusé, 2004).
Despite pervasive harm, the digital space is not inherently oppressive. Home to emerging models of transformative, affirming, and ethical sex education, platforms built on feminist, queer, and trauma-informed foundations offer counter narratives prioritizing consent, authenticity, and inclusive understandings of pleasure (Albury et al., n.d.; Halberstam, 2011; Smith, 2015). Whether it is social media campaigns led by Black, queer, and youth voices proven successful in fostering agency, trust, and curiosity (Burns et al., 2020; Guse et al., 2012) or structured internet modules and hybrid interventions (Chen et al., 2023; Chokprajakchad et al., 2020; Decker et al., 2020), digital spaces can outperform traditional classrooms in promoting knowledge and positive sexual values.
Gamified education methods offer further potential by becoming repositories of knowledge and spaces for practicing vulnerability, negotiating boundaries, and rewriting what it means to build interpersonal relationships ( Alencar et al., 2022; Fiellin et al., 2017; Franco Vega et al., 2022). Through a case study of a medically verified puberty education platform called Puberry used in a boys middle school in The Bronx (n.d.), punitive and pathologizing aspects of past sex education models is undone. Puberry affirms youth agency, emotional literacy, and health knowledge through play, interactivity, and choice. Boys engaged in the platform asked questions they had previously kept hidden, named emotions with confidence, and rethought what it meant to be in relationship with themselves and others. Puberty is rendered a tool for youth and a model for what happens when boys are trusted with their own growth.
Yet, as Philips and Neustifter (2022) and Watts-Jones (2010) argue, the tools themselves are not enough. Change requires educators who are willing to share power and enter dialogue to construct collective understandings. It is not enough to hand out information, but one must be willing to be present, listen, and hold space for contradiction. Facilitators themselves hold biases stemming from their past as well as the emotional labor of learning with and from youth (Blechner, 2010).
Unless sexuality education is reimagined within collective, creative, and accountable practice frameworks, the education of sexual values of all youth will continue to be outsourced to digital tools like pornography, algorithms, and platforms caring more about engagement than ethics. The future is the present. It is digital and embodied, and up to educators, caregivers, social workers, practitioners, and youth themselves to decide whether to replicate harm or impress transformation.
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