Parents find the "socialising online" concept a bit depressing, I say, and unhealthy. This is a follow-up conversation, in a more relevant medium, seeing as teenagers never go to each other's houses any more, just each other's bedrooms, and only in the virtual sense. This is the second time we've talked the first was exactly a week ago, in the flesh, in his parents' house where he lives. I can't see Bühre's laptop because he's using it to talk to me via Skype.
It's the same thing as when you watch a sex scene in a movie and you don't see any skin. We know the difference between reality and pornography. "I don't think it has a big impact," says Bühre. He describes how funny it was once, when his headmaster caught a group of boys watching a hardcore porn clip during a computer lesson: the footage involved people eating faeces. Not that parents or teachers always like what he says when they tap him for advice at one of his readings.
"They're just going to do it at their friends' houses." You can lock their computers if it makes you feel better, "but those security filters aren't that hard to crack".īühre, with his affable manner, his face of a stray boy-band member and ability to talk about private boys' stuff such as masturbation with no hint of mortification, seems to be a reassuring personification of the possibility that your teenage son is not going to turn into a weird porn freak. Just don't go in there." And never ban anything. Bühre's advice to parents doesn't inspire confidence: "Never enter the room of a teenage boy," he says.
Despite the long hours into the night he spends playing it, he looks disappointingly healthy and seems to have plenty of friends.īuhre is here to answer questions about all the unpleasant stuff that adults worry the internet is doing to their children, particularly to their sons. Call of Duty is one of his favourite games. "People think the internet has turned 15-year-old boys into pasty-faced loners who want to go on a shooting rampage in their nearest primary school because they've been playing too much Call of Duty," Bühre complains.
With all the hoo-ha, I had hoped to find something a bit more shocking or revealing in Bühre's room than the clothes, three Lord of the Rings posters, a bookcase full of comics, a neat(ish) pile of half-finished history homework and a Star Trek Lego model that he made when he was 12 but, for sentimental reasons, can't bring himself to dismantle. It's "an insight into the world of an unfathomable creature", cheers a mother in one online review. Parents who've read the book rave about it. His insider account of what all 15-year-old boys "are thinking but not telling you" still now bobs about in the bestseller lists in his native Germany (it was published in Australia earlier this year). Two years ago, when Bühre was 15, he wrote a book whose astonishing sales suggested he had become a spokesboy for a generation of teenagers: Teens: What We're Really Thinking (When We're Not Saying Anything). Just don’t go in there.” Credit:Tom Jackson/The Times/News Syndication “Never enter the room of a teenage boy,” he says. Paul Buhre, now 17, in his bedroom in his Berlin home.