I am only 31 but when I was growing up, I used to have to plot for weeks to look at or swipe one of my family members Playboys. Thay had about 7 pages of pretty softcore nudie pictures in it. That seems like it is going to be one of those walking to school in the snow stories on day if it isn’t already.
Now, I get at least 20 emails a day of hardcore, sometimes twisted spreads embedded in them. The web obviously has hundreds of thousands of hard core sites accessible to anyone. Most require authorization to enter but the intro pages usually have plenty to see on them as well. Even if you limited yourself to the intro pages, that is still more than enough porn for a lifetime. Of course filters are available but many computers they can use don’t have them, they can get around them if they want to, and many parents probably are not savvy enough to set up a secure system even at home.
That makes me wonder what kids and teenagers of all ages are generally being exposed to now. It is kind of hard to ask them directly so that is why I am posting here. What are the typical ones being exposed to either inadvertently or by choice. What effect do you think this will have?
Hmmm, lets see. I’d say the imminent downfall of Western civilization, screaming hordes in the streets, mass blindness and cases of “hobbit foot.” General panic and disorder.
Seriously, I don’t think much. I can’t see that it’s that much easier for kids to get porn if their parents don’t want them to. Unless every fourteen year old kid has a computer in his bedroom with a dedicated T1 circuit, Evidence Eliminator and Window Washer and hours to himself, a little parental supervision could go a long way. Inevitably, some determined kids will get their fill (Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for titties, for they shall get their fill), but most kids won’t have any easier time getting to porn dot com than they will getting a Hustler.
Well, I am now 22 so I am not really a kid anymore…but I have been online since I was about 9 years old.
I definitely would agree I was exposed to a lot more hardcore porn at a younger age than people in prior generations. As a female, I have never had the fascination with porn that most guys seem to have (though I realize there are women who love porn and men who hate it, I’m speaking generally there), so I didn’t really seek it out. It was easy to find it through just following links.
I think it made me a lot more jaded about sexual topics than I probably would have been otherwise. I feel like I’ve almost “seen it all”. There isn’t much that anyone can say or do that shocks or surprises me since I have encountered so many weird fetishes and kinks online. In my own life, I am not at all promiscuous (still a virgin, even) so I don’t think it has had any influence on my values for what I find acceptable sexually. I don’t take the sexual attitudes portrayed in porn to heart just as I don’t take the violence or sex depicted in more mainstream entertainment seriously…or at least not on a conscious level.
Still, if/when I have kids, I don’t think I will allow them to use a computer unsupervised until they’re at least 16, maybe 18 (maybe just have a computer in the family living room where it’s easy to keep an eye on what they’re doing). I could easily see how some of the things I’ve run across online could really mess up a kid’s head.
Even back then I knew more about computer than my parents, so if I wanted porn online, I’d get porn online. I almost never did this, though, because we had dial-up and because the computer was in the living room. Also, the fact that my parents didn’t seem to even care made it less fun.
Instead, I had lots and lots of cybersex.
Once I got a computer in my own room, I downloaded porn every so often. I seem to have survived. I have never encountered pornographic images that I wasn’t actively seeking, except in the occassional spam email. I’ve never understood how some people can just stumble upon porn online. Dammit, I spent a long time back in my teen years LOOKING for it, and it was difficult to find anything worth looking at. (Without a credit card, and without knowledge then of the best free porn site on the Internet, I was mostly without luck.)
So, in my experience, yes. Teens get exposed to a lot of porn online. But in the large majority of cases it is because they are actively seeking it out. And looking at pictures of naked people will not hurt anyone.
Geez, how else do you think boys can learn how to treat women? :dubious:
To answer the question, somewhat, I believe the advent of internet and all that porn are just a part of the general trend towards cruder, more casual attitudes towards sex. Respect for fellow humans is regressing towards the Dark Ages. Passive entertainment, like TV, Movies, Computers, etc. have made us more detached from the fabric of humanity. Within a few generations, we will be completely ambivalent as to whether we fuck someone or kill them.
I exposed myself to a decent amount of porn as a teenager online (I’m now 20), and I’ve had internet access since '96 or '97. It barely ever has presented itself without my seeking it out. And now I have quite a healthy sex life, with a great deal of mutual affection and respect.
And frankly, despite what certain conservatives and feminists say about porn, it’s some of the best sex education kids are getting in America, thanks to efforts to keep them ignorant through poor schooling. I know that the only female genitalia they showed us in high school health classes were the grossly diseased specimens. The female experience with erect male genitalia was pretty much the same thing. And hell, I don’t really remember any sex ed devoted to homosexual sex acts.
So how do curious young people educate themselves about these things? That’s where porn comes in. While some of the dirtier details about sex are hidden in sex ed classes due to political correctness (not just of the liberal kind), porn has no such pretensions. Unfortunately, porn has other drawbacks: it’s meant for arousal, so it leaves out the unerotic details like condoms, birth control, STDs, vaginal farts, premature ejaculation, impotence, etc., and even the erotic but not “hardcore” details like mutual respect or nuances of technique. But porn isn’t made for educational purposes, so let’s not insist that the pornographers bear educational responsibilities when they make what is strictly a form of entertainment.
Despite its drawbacks, porn is still an aid (and encouragement) to masturbation, the safest sex teenagers can have. So despite the wishes of prudes everywhere, I wholeheartedly advocate letting teenagers have access to all the porn they want, provided that the making thereof didn’t involve illegal/unethical acts like child molestation, bestiality, necrophilia, etc.
My father used to leave his Playboys lying right out in the open. I only read 'em for the cartoons, especially “Little Annie Fanny”–is she still in there?
Well, I am 21, but have been online since I was 14. I never had any problems accessing porn, as the family computer was set in its own room, and I knew/know far more about computers than my parents.
I will say the porn has had an effect on me. Before the internet, I remember as a 13 year sneeking around to “borrow” my Dad’s Playboys, and when I first got the Interweb, softcore stuff was quite exciting. However, over time, it got boring, and eventually I had to turn to harder and weirder stuff. Now, I am so jaded of porn that nothing out, even seriously illegal and/or illegal stuff gets more than a “Meh” from me.
I still have a rediculously large pr0n collection, though I never watch it any more.
I’m 23, and have had my own computer in my room since I was a little kid. I sought out porn at a young age (I remember when ASCII porn wasn’t a joke) and I would occasionally lock myself in my room and look up porn. I was (and still am) a very sexuallly self-aware girl and I think that having access to porn made me more comfortable with my sexuality and I think that it’s important for women to be comfortable and aware of sex before they start doing it.
We’ve had computers in my household since before I was born, but I didn’t get exposed to porn until I went to High School. That’s when I started exploring online. At first I read fanfics, then I started looking and pictures and now I love looking at porn. I like to look at incredibly strange, kinky stuff because it makes me laugh. Regular heterosexual porn has never really interested me or turned me on. What gets me going is mostly role-playing, which I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing without the internet. The porn I like, I collect and I have a healthy collection. I look at it from time to time, but I’ve never felt like I had a porn addiction or that it was out of control. I will get annoyed when I am horny and my roommates are home and I can’t do anything.
Despite all my sexual awareness, I haven’t gone out and have lots of crazy, wild sex. In fact, the girls that have done stuff like that tend to be the ones that don’t have nice porn collections like mine. I lost my virginity to someone I was completely in love with and wanted to marry. We have since fallen apart, and while I would like to have sex again, I don’t think honestly that I will have it unless I fall in love with another person.
I don’t think that sex is bad as long as people are properly educated and use protection. I am friends with a lot of young, high school aged girls that love porn and send me links to nice websites. I’ve educated them on proper sexual protection. If I didn’t have an open mind about porn and they weren’t open about sex with me, then I wouldn’t be able to talk about such subjects with them.
Futhermore, there are many cultures where young people were having sex at the age I was then I was discovering porn for the first time. I think the American culture has been sexually repressed for too long and that this is a welcome breakthrough.
Teenager reporting in. I’ve managed to accidently stumble upon porn on the internet more times than I can count. Just doing a google search or something, even for a subject which one would think would be perfectly innocent, can yield some…interesting…results. There was also the time one one of the guys in my AP psych class decided to send me a disguised link to some porn site that made the computer screen “You’re looking at gay porn! You’re looking at gay porn!” while making popups continually popping up all over the screen that wouldn’t close out until you shut down the computer.
So in answer to your question, yes, it is incredibly easy for teenagers to have access to porn, even if they are not looking for it.
I don’t really wonder about kids over the age of puberty being exposed to porn, but I worry about kids under that age. I was exposed to hardcore under the age of ten (not on the interent, I am older, this was around late 70s) and it totally haunted me. So did other things for sure. I wasn’t too happy about a lot of things, but that was really not necessary at that age. A lot of times when I see something particularly evil on the internet, I wish that I had proof that no kids could see it. I don’t think it does a kid any good to have a lot of extra bullshit to try to figure out. After puberty it starts to be more okay, that when it starts to be time to grow up and face reality, but before that, I feel sad to think about it.
I remember going over to a friend’s house years ago and he was all excited about finding a BBS that had almost naked lingerie gifs on it! We looked at those for about five minutes and then went back to playing Red Dragon or Zork or whatever the hell game they had.
I can only think of one instance where I “accidentally” found porn… at school… with the teacher over my shoulder. I said “Hmmm, that’s not what we’re looking for.” and continued on. She (the teacher) seemed to derive great enjoyment over telling people about this and my reaction.
I haven’t seen any hardcore porn in my e-mail for years… don’t get me wrong, I get it, but I don’t look at it before I delete it. So, yes, teenagers can find porn on the internet… but the porn doesn’t find them.
Our kids have computers in their rooms, but the only computer with internet is mine, and it’s in the kitchen, which is centrally located. If they’re interested in looking at porn, they’d better be darned fast about it, and know how to clear my cache and browser history in record time
I definitely believe that kids have far more access to porn than ever before, and far “harder” (heh) stuff than before the advent of the internet.
A couple of posts in this thread are excellent proof of this - not by what the posters said, but by who they are. Girls who looked at porn while they were teenagers. When I was a teen (a long, long time ago), I couldn’t imagine girls looking at hardcore porn. While guys would seek out whatever they could find, the girls likely would never have any exposure to such things.
With the internet, these girls can explore such things in a way that wasn’t available before. As even sven and ava have said, this can be a good thing in many ways.
I’m sure that there must be a negative side of teenage girls enjoying porn, but I’ll be damned if I can think of what it would be!
But what makes you think that the fact that you couldn’t imagine it as a teenager means that they wouldn’t have had any exposure? Maybe it is true, though; I have no idea one way or the other.
Forgot to add: All I had to do (and would still have to do to this day if it weren’t for the fact that I have my own computer that I bought with my own money so it’s mine and you can’t touch it parents!) is set the history days count in IE to 0. No one ever uses the history, so no one notices, but that’s about the only level of security I need. Man, I got away with just playing my videos in Windows Movie maker for like a year. (until some freaking 6 year old got on the computer and wondered if he could make movies :smack: ) Deny deny deny. (My parents didn’t know I was gay then, so I just said that someone must have sent it to me on Napster. I’m sure by now (if they still remember) they’ve put two and two together.)
In my own life, I am not at all promiscuous (still a virgin, even) so I don’t think it has had any influence on my values for what I find acceptable sexually. I don’t take the sexual attitudes portrayed in porn to heart just as I don’t take the violence or sex depicted in more mainstream entertainment seriously…or at least not on a conscious level.
