Should parents tolerate children watching porn?

[gvozd]

Almost all parents seem to think that their kids should not watch porn, and they should prevent them from watching, or least try to. As it is the case for 99.9% of male teenagers, it certainly didn't stop me, and now that I've grown up, I sincerely don't see anything bad watching porn since young age has done to me. I don't plan on having children but if I had them, I wouldn't really try to stop them as long as they watch it in a discreet manner at a moderate level. Certainly, proper sexual education is necessary, so that they don't believe what they watch on porn is real. In fact you can't really stop teenagers from watching porn - you just catch them on spot once in a while and humiliate them.

Mods, I'm sorry if this is the wrong forum.

[aruvqan]

Why the hell would you want to embarrass them?! Sex, and curiosity about sex is perfectly normal. If you embarrass them, then if they have a problem or question, they bloody well will not discuss it with you. I would rather have my kids feeling that they can trust me than to embarrass them about perfectly normal issues.

[dukette71]

most of it may not be "harmful" to a person's psyche but it is a misrepresentation of sex. In other words, men who learn about sex from watching porn are horrible lovers.

If I had kids, I would discourage it.

[jtgain]

To me, it's the equivalent of your child showing interest in a career of demolition for road construction, so you let him watch Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner to learn more about blasting.

Kids are curious about sex, but porn teaches nothing, and at that age they won't be able to distinguish between what they see in the movie and how sex really is. That being said, if I caught my kid watching porn, I wouldn't go ape shit, but I would have a talk with him about sexuality and how what he is watching is ridiculous and he is not to watch it again until he turns 18.

[Slithy Tove]

The conversation was about avoiding trick pay sites and malware, and that was that.

[Kimstu]

How does "girls' porn" in the form of trashy romance novels and so on fit into this discussion? Print (non-photographic) erotica is generally a lot less closely monitored these days than the electronic-image kind, but it arguably provides just as unrealistic portrayals of sex and relationships.

If you wouldn't let your kid watch Ivy League Hookers Gone Wild, would you let them read Lady Throbbingbust's Passion or stuff of that ilk?

[florez]

This memory is from over thirty years ago, but while in college, I moved into a neighborhood
close to school.
The hearsay and gossip on the block, was that a certain family allowed their young children to look at pornography, and watch pornographic movies.

The ages of the children were from eight to about eleven or twelve.
This family, under scrutiny, was trippy hippy, but educated and fairly well off financially.
Parents in this neighborhood were adverse to these porn watching kids playing with their own children; and understandably so, if one believed all the stories that were going around.

One of the problems I heard of, was that these children, maybe quite innocently,
acted out the things they were seeing in the pornography, when playing with other children.

I was not fully invested in what was going on, nor the outcome, because I was leaving at the end of the school year.
Also, I was not a parent at the time, so I was not completely sharing the larger group's level of concern, and some were considering a call to the authorities.
I did notice these children seemed a bit off, and had dark shadows under their eyes, but I could not say for sure what was really going on with them, and only went by what others were saying.

My opinion now, is that shame about sex is most likely going to be a part of our upbringing, in this society, and it probably starts at a young age.
I have read that pedophiles often groom their child victims by first exposing them to pornographic images.
But also children may innocently come upon pornography, and share it with other children, like the typical situation of finding your father's hidden stash.

In a perfect world shame and sex would not have to go hand in hand, but also in a perfect world, children would not be in danger of sexual predators.

[shy guy]

Originally Posted by jtgain

To me, it's the equivalent of your child showing interest in a career of demolition for road construction, so you let him watch Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner to learn more about blasting.

It's more like, if your teenager has an interest in road construction, you ban him from watching Wile E. Coyote cartoons so he doesn't get the wrong idea about physics.

With teenage boys, sure, there's some pseudo-educational component to looking at porn, but in large part they do it because they're unbelievably horny and they want to get off.

[Voyager]

12 year old kids - way too young.

17 year old kids - they should be smart enough to cover their tracks. If they were not interested at this age, I'd worry. I was.

[Dogzilla]

Originally Posted by dukette71

most of it may not be "harmful" to a person's psyche but it is a misrepresentation of sex. In other words, men who learn about sex from watching porn are horrible lovers.

If I had kids, I would discourage it.

Quoted because, well, this.

Recently, there was a guy who was hitting on me. He started asking me about certain acts, did I like this, did I like that? All of the acts he asked me about (and, presumably, expected me to be enthusiastic about) were things I've seen in porn that perhaps looked good on camera (from a guy's perspective, especially an insecure guy who gets off on degrading/humiliating acts) and might even feel good to the guy, but there's nothing about those acts that would be pleasurable for the recipient. I told him he watched too much porn, he thinks of women as subhuman, and if he was actually interested in me, as a human person with feelings, he'd be better off asking me open-ended questions and then paying attention to the answers. If you just want to try out all the gymnastic (high-risk) monkey sex you saw on your laptop last night, just go hire a hooker, because you obviously don't care if there's a real person there in the room with you and sex is obviously not about sharing pleasure with another actual live, breathing, sentient human.

That said, I have no moral qualms about porn, but I wouldn't want kids who have no sexual experience at all to get ideas about what sex is supposed to be from porn. I'd rather they experiment on their own and then later, as adults, they can watch porn should they so choose. By the time you should be allowed to watch porn, you should already have an idea about what is realistically pleasurable and what just looks good on camera.

[gamerunknown]

I'm ambivalent about porn in general. I was more enthusiastic about it until a few months ago, when I had a sort of conversion experience watching this (dw, more or less SFW). I thought back to Homage to Catalonia and how Orwell describes how much more effective a glimpse at freedom was at dismantling prostitution there than invective from the Church. A moment's reflection and I realised that quite a bit of the content on sites I visited would qualify as demeaning: not something someone would volunteer for if their quality of living didn't depend on it. Not something I wanted to contribute page hits to, after consideration.

While I don't think pornography is bad qua itself, the conditions it is produced in are not conducive to depicting a loving relationship. That said, I don't think techniques learned through pornography are necessarily demeaning or unpleasurable of themselves: cunnilingus was a positive example given in the other thread for instance.

[FinnAgain]

Originally Posted by dukette71

men who learn about sex from watching porn are horrible lovers.

Of course, because it's not different strokes for different folks and no woman likes being fucked like a pornstar.

[TriPolar]

A lot of this depends on your definition of porn. It used to be Playboy magazines. Now it's the stuff online, which is kind of horrifying to think of as someone's introduction to sex, but they're going to see it one way or another if it's out there.

[Vinyl Turnip]

Originally Posted by FinnAgain

Of course, because it's not different strokes for different folks and no woman likes being fucked like a pornstar.

Touch a nerve there, Finny Wadd?

[Theobroma]

Originally Posted by shy guy

It's more like, if your teenager has an interest in road construction, you ban him from watching Wile E. Coyote cartoons so he doesn't get the wrong idea about physics.

Ha! Wish I'd thought of that. I told my teenager, "I know you will see online porn sooner or later, whether you're looking for it or not. I just want to warn you that using porn to learn about sex is like watching Spongebob to learn about marine biology."

[FinnAgain]

Originally Posted by Vinyl Turnip

Touch a nerve there

Nope, it's just a very silly comment. There's a large enough spectrum of sexual styles that pointing to a 'pornstar' vibe hardly means that there won't be women out there who're looking for exactly that.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by FinnAgain

There's a large enough spectrum of sexual styles that pointing to a 'pornstar' vibe hardly means that there won't be women out there who're looking for exactly that.

But that doesn't mean that a "pornstar vibe" is typical of real sex. C'mon, it's hardly controversial to say that a lot of porn isn't very realistic.

Guys whose expectations about sex are mostly derived from porn are likely going to have some adjusting to do to get used to situations with real-life partners.

[FinnAgain]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

But that doesn't mean that a "pornstar vibe" is typical of real sex. C'mon, it's hardly controversial to say that a lot of porn isn't very realistic.

1. It doesn't have to be typical, the claim made was that a 'pornstar' style was plain bad, not atypical.
2. And yes, it's not controversial, and I think that's a sad thing since it's such an absurd claim. No realistic? Of course it is. There's a vagina, the penis goes inside. Pretty sure that's how sex tends to work. And since there's every type of porn from intimate, love-making erotic scenes to whips and chains BDSM, I'm also reasonably certain that "porn style" entails not just the entire gamut of human sexuality, but is still perfectly realistic in terms of its mechanical presentation.

Originally Posted by Kimstu

Guys whose expectations about sex are mostly derived from porn are likely going to have some adjusting to do to get used to situations with real-life partners.

Why, real-life partners have a different anatomy?

[Vinyl Turnip]

Pity the poor teenager who discovers---in the course of his new backseat explorations---that much to his surprise and chagrin, his brand-new girlfriend is not particularly eager to gag herself on his cock until she retches, or to have her mouth spit into, face slapped, windpipe squeezed to the edge of consciousness, or any of the other tender gestures young lovers are now expected to mimic.

[FinnAgain]

Well, yeah, that's one type of porn. A guy who spends his teen years watching reasonably tame missionary followed by wild and daring doggy is hardly going to be terribly out of place when he actually gets a girlfriend. Then again, a guy might very well find a woman who is into all that D/S stuff, but meh.

[B. Serum]

As a way to alleviate sexual urges, porn is great.
As a way to illustrate what having sex is actually like, porn is crap.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by FinnAgain

Why, real-life partners have a different anatomy?

Different behavior patterns.

Let's face it, porn is a dramatized, fictionalized representation of a sexual encounter, designed to look exciting to the (mostly male) viewers rather than to be fulfilling for the participants. (Hence, for example, all the semen splashed around where the viewer can see it, even though most men having real-life sex most frequently prefer putting it somewhere it can't be observed with the naked eye.)

Sure, no doubt there are some real-life women whose preferred sexual activities are exactly the sort of thing one sees in typical internet porn. But I don't think it's unrealistic to point out that they're probably a fairly small minority.

[FinnAgain]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

Different behavior patterns.

Now, if that's the objection though, it takes the whole issue to another plane. "That's not realistic" is a different claim than "That behavior isn't statistically common and any sexual partners you find might not be interested in that type of sex."

[B. Serum]

Originally Posted by FinnAgain

1. It doesn't have to be typical, the claim made was that a 'pornstar' style was plain bad, not atypical.
2. And yes, it's not controversial, and I think that's a sad thing since it's such an absurd claim. No realistic? Of course it is. There's a vagina, the penis goes inside. Pretty sure that's how sex tends to work. And since there's every type of porn from intimate, love-making erotic scenes to whips and chains BDSM, I'm also reasonably certain that "porn style" entails not just the entire gamut of human sexuality, but is still perfectly realistic in terms of its mechanical presentation.

Why, real-life partners have a different anatomy?

It has nothing to do with anatomy, Finn.

Porn sex is made for the camera, to be watched. The moaning doesn't come from sexual pleasure, it's created for production value. Depending on what you're watching, there's the strong possibility that it's amped up for that visual payoff. Kind of like how a boxing fight from a movie is an exaggerated version of a real boxing fight. Porno is like an exaggerated, spectacle-version of real sex (although depending on what you're watching and what you're into, maybe not).

If I was a parent with a teen boy, I would just want to make sure he knows that he knows porno-style slam-fucking may not satisfy his girlfriend the way it satisfies himself. That he should take guidance from what she responds to, especially if it doesn't look like what he's been watching in Backdoor Bitches 7.

[FinnAgain]

Well, but yah, that's a separate issue. Some people really do prefer porn-style sex. What you're talking about it a fairly rational bit of birds-and-bees talk to let a teen child know that while the sex in porn is accurate, if posed for the camera, most women will prefer if he learns what they like and not treats them like a porn starlet.

[B. Serum]

I agree. But I feel like this simple talk isn't happening very often.

[Maeglin]

Originally Posted by B. Serum

I agree. But I feel like this simple talk isn't happening very often.

How would you know if it were?

[gamerunknown]

Originally Posted by Maeglin

How would you know if it were?

"Abstinence only education" would be nothing more than a punchline.

[Docta G]

Originally Posted by gvozd

Almost all parents seem to think that their kids should not watch porn, and they should prevent them from watching, or least try to. As it is the case for 99.9% of male teenagers, it certainly didn't stop me, and now that I've grown up, I sincerely don't see anything bad watching porn since young age has done to me. I don't plan on having children but if I had them, I wouldn't really try to stop them as long as they watch it in a discreet manner at a moderate level. Certainly, proper sexual education is necessary, so that they don't believe what they watch on porn is real. In fact you can't really stop teenagers from watching porn - you just catch them on spot once in a while and humiliate them.

Mods, I'm sorry if this is the wrong forum.

Leave them the hell alone, FFS.

[B. Serum]

Originally Posted by Maeglin

How would you know if it were?

Good point. I don't really, any more than anyone else in the thread. I think my impression comes from my perception that Americans are kind of uptight about sexuality in general.

I suspect sex columnists might be better equipped to respond on the quality of parental sex ed. I listen/read/watch a lot of Dan Savage and some of the ignorance from some kids on basic sexuality is a little dispiriting.

[FinnAgain]

The question isn't so much "should parents let their children watch porn?" as it is: "Shouldn't parents have responsible, honest conversations about sex and sexuality with their children? Oh and also let them watch porn."

This is the 21st century. We're living in the future. Any kid with the 'net can get porn. Hell, that's quickly becoming 'any kid with a phone'. Which is also quickly becoming 'any kid'. Humans like looking at naked humans as well as at naked humans having all sorts of sex. Such is life. There's no point (and a good bit of hypocrisy) in 'not tolerating' such behavior in teens. The real issue is that parents are uptight and would rather not talk about sex with their kids.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by FinnAgain

Now, if that's the objection though, it takes the whole issue to another plane. "That's not realistic" is a different claim than "That behavior isn't statistically common and any sexual partners you find might not be interested in that type of sex."

Seems to me that what I said, namely, "That's not typical of real sex", perfectly conveys the meaning "That behavior isn't statistically common" in actual sex.

You seem to be using "realistic" in a rather, well, unrealistic way to mean "not anatomically or psychologically actually impossible". Well, okay, and by that standard Die Hard is a realistic movie too.

The fact that most porn sex is not in fact "realistic" in the word's more usual meaning of "typical of what happens in real life" is, ISTM, also what dukette71 was getting at:

Originally Posted by dukette71

may not be "harmful" to a person's psyche but it is a misrepresentation of sex. In other words, men who learn about sex from watching porn are horrible lovers.

[gamerunknown]

A majority are also Christian and thus may have qualms about Onanism (if Catholic) or else lusting after women in one's own heart. Other religions have similar injunctions against masturbation: Taoism and Islam off the top of my head. Hell, maybe they want their children to experience a guilty kind of thrill doing something they're not supposed to.

[Guinastasia]

One practical reason to disuade kids from going to porn sites online -- malware. A lot of porn sites are full of it. (Kind of like STDs for your computer)

[kaylasdad99]

No. When parents watch porn, they should make sure that the kids are out of the room where the porn is being viewed. Locked out, if necessary.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by kaylasdad99

No. When parents watch porn, they should make sure that the kids are out of the room where the porn is being viewed. Locked out, if necessary.

That might be a different question, though. Probably nobody here is in favor of porn viewing as a cross-generational family activity, whether or not they would condone adolescent children watching porn discreetly and privately by themselves.

[Voyager]

Not every teenage boy is like the protagonist of Richard Thompson's Read About Love. When I was a kid I was well aware that real girls didn't look like airbrushed Playmates and that real women didn't act the way they did in Penthouse Forum. I'd worry a lot more about the kid not wanting to put out the effort to actually go out rather than him being Casanova during his first experience.
They do understand that it is only a movie.

[GIGObuster]

Originally Posted by Guinastasia

One practical reason to disuade kids from going to porn sites online -- malware. A lot of porn sites are full of it. (Kind of like STDs for your computer)

Thing is, it may be the case that when little Timmy tells you that no porn was involved on the reason why the computer got infected, he may be telling the truth!

http://www.technolog.msnbc.msn.com/t...-report-744304

Furthermore, the most common Web threats weren't found, as one might assume, on the seedier side of the Internet. In fact, it's the righteous who appear to be the more seriously afflicted:

Around 52 million of the 8.2 billion URLs Symantec scanned showed malware infections, and of those, only 2.4 percent were porn or adult content. Personal blogs and self-hosted websites were many, many times more likely to have a problem.

Mmm, maybe in this case we should use the old saying: The devil lurks behind the cross.

[WhyNot]

Originally Posted by gamerunknown

That said, I don't think techniques learned through pornography are necessarily demeaning or unpleasurable of themselves: cunnilingus was a positive example given in the other thread for instance.

Except that the angle and style of cunnilingus I've seen in (fairly tame) porn certainly wouldn't "work" for me, or for the other women I've been with. It's too removed, the face too far back, too stiff tongued and not enough lip to vulva contact. Why? So the camera can see the vulva. Real cunnilingus is more like sucking a mango than licking a popsicle while being afraid to get your lips on it.

Originally Posted by FinnAgain

... I'm also reasonably certain that "porn style" entails not just the entire gamut of human sexuality, but is still perfectly realistic in terms of its mechanical presentation.



Why, real-life partners have a different anatomy?

Apparently. Or rather, we arrange our anatomy to have nerve endings that like to rub on other bits actually touch and feel good in real life, but we don't care if it feels good in porn. Again, it's about the camera. It's not that (some) women don't like to have PIV with their leg lifted over the guy's shoulder, it's that his hips need to be aligned with ours so his pelvic bone rubs on our mons pubis and clitoris. Can't do that and still get a camera to film the ol' in-and-out. So the de rigeur thing in porn is to have the male actor angle his hips and enter the vagina at a fairly steep angle (which is possible for him because he has a long penis, probably longer than our eventual real life partner's), and enter only most of the way - either because he's too long to enter fully, or because he doesn't want to block the camera.

Sure, you're right, there may be some women who like that position, but most of us don't. How do I know that? Because it misses most of the external and internal clitoris, where our nerve endings are clustered. It makes contact with only the vaginal opening and the side walls of the vagina, which have far fewer nerves.


We first noticed the online porn around age 14 or so. Our conversations went something like this: "Hey, I noticed some interesting searches in Google's history. I get that you're curious, but two things to keep in mind: that's not how sex usually works in real life and lots of porn websites are crawling with viruses. Please be very careful about what you click. And don't tell Grandma."

"Hey, I'm getting pop-ups on my computer. Please be more careful."

"Kiddo, you can't seem to surf without infecting my computer with viruses. So please stop looking at porn on my computer. When you get your own computer, have at it."

"GODSDAMMIT! WTF AM I GETTING ALL THESE POP-UPS OF COCKS FROM?!?!?!? WHYKID, KNOCK IT OFF!!!!" At which point my husband "accidentally" left a fairly safe (and vanilla) website up for the kid to "find".

This was all about 6 years ago. Now, I might include a bit of advice that amateur porn is far more like real sex, easy to find free, and tends to come with fewer computer STD's.

[Kobal2]

Originally Posted by FinnAgain

This is the 21st century. We're living in the future.

Factually wrong. It won't be the future until we have at least one of either hovercars, robot butlers and/or personal laser pistols. I'll tentatively tack global thermonuclear war and cranial datajacks as further possible litmus tests, review pending.

[drewtwo99]

I don't think I'd have a problem with my (hopefully) future kids watching porn. But I'm not a parent yet so who knows how I'll feel after watching them grow up from being a baby to being a tween-teen who is in need of sexual guidance. I don't really have any hangups about sex, I openly talk about sex with my parents, or friends, or sister... so I don't expect it to be any different for my kids.


I would stress the importance of not getting malware or stealing credit cards to pay for porn. I'm not afraid of my kid thinking that porn = real life. I certainly never did, and I watched a hell of a lot of porn as a young teenager and beyond.

[furt]

Originally Posted by gvozd

Almost all parents seem to think that their kids should not watch porn, and they should prevent them from watching, or least try to. As it is the case for 99.9% of male teenagers, it certainly didn't stop me, and now that I've grown up, I sincerely don't see anything bad watching porn since young age has done to me. I don't plan on having children but if I had them, I wouldn't really try to stop them as long as they watch it in a discreet manner at a moderate level. Certainly, proper sexual education is necessary, so that they don't believe what they watch on porn is real. In fact you can't really stop teenagers from watching porn - you just catch them on spot once in a while and humiliate them.

Mods, I'm sorry if this is the wrong forum.

You seem to assume that it has to be totally allowed or totally forbidden. If/when I have kids, I suspect porn will be officially banned, and my wife will want to install a porn-blocker on the computer; nonethless if I find the Penthouse my 14 year old son has hidden under his mattress, I'll do nothing.

[Steophan]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

Let's face it, porn is a dramatized, fictionalized representation of a sexual encounter, designed to look exciting to the (mostly male) viewers rather than to be fulfilling for the participants. (Hence, for example, all the semen splashed around where the viewer can see it, even though most men having real-life sex most frequently prefer putting it somewhere it can't be observed with the naked eye.)

This is entirely true. However, it's true of most behaviour in most films, pornographic or not. Someone getting ideas about how sex really is from porn is no different from someone getting ideas about relationships from Hollywood films.

[Vinyl Turnip]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

(Hence, for example, all the semen splashed around where the viewer can see it, even though most men having real-life sex most frequently prefer putting it somewhere it can't be observed with the naked eye.)

Actually, Uranus is visible sometimes...

[YogSosoth]

Yes they should

[FinnAgain]

Originally Posted by WhyNot

It's not that (some) women don't like to have PIV with their leg lifted over the guy's shoulder, it's that his hips need to be aligned with ours so his pelvic bone rubs on our mons pubis and clitoris. Can't do that and still get a camera to film the ol' in-and-out.

Sure you can. There's plenty of porn, complete with closeups, that doesn't involve any standing-with-one-leg-over-guy's-shoulder positions. But, I still say that it's not any less 'realistic' than gymnastics is. I can't even do a somersault, but I don't have any problem with people who can do back flips.

(P.S. There are also women for whom clitoral stimulation is unnecessary and for whom vaginal sex is more than sufficient.)

[DianaG]

There are some. Not many. Probably similar to the number of men who can come just from having their taints tickled.

[FinnAgain]

I've seen figures at roughly 10-20 percent of women.
Assuming that my own sample has been fairly randomized, that seems to be about right.

[Damuri Ajashi]

Originally Posted by FinnAgain

The question isn't so much "should parents let their children watch porn?" as it is: "Shouldn't parents have responsible, honest conversations about sex and sexuality with their children? Oh and also let them watch porn."

This is the 21st century. We're living in the future. Any kid with the 'net can get porn. Hell, that's quickly becoming 'any kid with a phone'. Which is also quickly becoming 'any kid'. Humans like looking at naked humans as well as at naked humans having all sorts of sex. Such is life. There's no point (and a good bit of hypocrisy) in 'not tolerating' such behavior in teens. The real issue is that parents are uptight and would rather not talk about sex with their kids.

watching too much porn may give kids a twisted, skewed perception of what passes for normal sex. If you learned about sex from porns, you would only rarely use condoms, you would instead pull out right before ejaculation and spunk on the woman's face and then take a dump on her chest.

[DianaG]

Originally Posted by FinnAgain

I've seen figures at roughly 10-20 percent of women.
Assuming that my own sample has been fairly randomized, that seems to be about right.

I'd guess that greater than 20% can climax with no direct clitoral stimulation, but for no clitoral stimulation 10% sounds not terribly unreasonable, 20% is probably bullshit.