I’m with you. I’m not a parent, don’t want to be, and I’d probably not try to block certain sites from kid. What strikes me as odd, though, is the “Whatever, the kid will do what he wants, so feh” that I’m seeing. Suppose it weren’t porn, would people say, “Your kid is going to engage in [insert activity here that decidedly is and/or can be harmful, but kids do all the time, despite the admonitions of people wiser than they], so just forget it”?
Really, the point isn’t even about whether something is good, bad, harmless or benign. The point is how parents should be able to set boundaries for their children. Basically, what BigT said here:
You are seriously underestimating the innate horniness of the average male teenager! There is no stronger urge. They WILL find ways to see it regardless of what their parents intend, and if the parents are extremely vigilant about preventing this, they may well cause a great deal of unnecessary damage to their son’s evolving sexuality.
I’m of the mind that if you are old enough to want to look at it, you are old enough to see it.
There is no way to effectively restrict “porn” as much as you may want to. If you are so obsessed about restricting porn then maybe you have a problem.
Your job as a parent is to teach your kids to only have sex with people they truly care about. It’s not all about abstinence, it’s about the repercussions of having irresponsible and destructive sexual contact. If the people having sex truly care about each other and are engaging in it while looking out for the best interests of the other person it will be fine. In other words, teach responsibility. If you can teach your kids that one principle you will not have to worry about their sexual health. The “porn” will become irrelevant.
I don’t know, exactly. I’m uncomfortable with the thought of him seeing violent sexual images, for example. I feel like a young teenager might not be mature enough to understand why someone would be aroused by such fantasies. It seems like I should try to limit his exposure to such things, but I can’t pinpoint the harm that I think it will do.
As for the internet filtering, I’m trying to find out it’s helpful because it would at least slow him down, or useless because it’s so easily bypassed, or causes more harm than good by presenting him with a challenge. I appreciate all of the advice.
I was a computer nerd teenager when it really got crazy. What you might “shudder to think” isn’t half as bad as what is actually out there. It didn’t fuck me up that bad. Frankly it helped me find out early where my limits are.
To get back on topic though, putting the computer in a public place won’t limit the amount of porn he downloads. It will, however, increase the number of times you catch him masturbating.
Nothing’s gonna happen to him, no matter what he sees (and no matter what you do, he’ll still see whatever he was gonna see without your efforts). Exposure to the breadth of Internet porn is de rigeur now; and yet, for all that, assuming he’s already a typically intelligent, decent person, he’ll turn out perfectly fine, just like every other normal kid in the developed world.
You don’t want him to be violent towards women? Well, if you’ve already raised a son who isn’t a violent person, porn isn’t going to change any of that. He’ll watch it if he likes it and stop watching it if he doesn’t, but he’s not going to start thinking “Hm… they do it in the movies, so maybe, even though this would normally shock my conscience, I should start hurting people in real life for my jollies.” Etc.
If your kid is even reasonably smart, he’ll find a way around it. If he’s a teenaged male then he has the patience, too. I’m sure I’m not the only one on this board who remembers watching scrambled porn or stealing lingerie catalogs and bringing them to my friends at school.
You can’t stop it. Frankly, it’s unnatural to try. The best you can do is talk to your son, explain the complications and outline the responsibilities. Try to remind him that women aren’t objects (because by age 15 or so, he’s completely forgotten this) and this isn’t just funtime.
I’m with you, MOL, in that I don’t necessarily see porn as a prob but the attitude “They’re going to do it anyway” doesn’t seem all that logical.
Then again, when I was a little kid and my parents would tell me to not to masturbate…well, yeah, let’s just say I can relate to the, “They’re going to do it anyway” argument. Endorphins are hard to argue with.
Totes. Luckily I have only been caught twice, and never in the act, only in the desperate ‘hear your mum coming down the hall tuck everything back in and close the browser’ moments.
I moved out for 5 years, then ran out of money and had to move back home fora bit, but I had my own computer in my room. Once mum knocked on the door to say goodnight, so I had to quicly fix myself up - she opened the door and asked what I was doing. I replied “havin’ a mazz.” She never bought it up.
I don’t really see the problem with porn - there are some extreme sites out there, but the majority of that stuff requires two willing participants. I’m guessing your son is going to be hard-pressed to find a similar aged partner who will threaten to decapitate him unless he Fs THAT PUSSY RIGHT NOW!!! and whatnot.
I’m kinda glad for the porn I looked at when I was that age - it helped me realise that I was bisexual and be totally okay with it from a pretty young age - unless that’s something you’re worried about.
Also, I just finished university and wrote my final 5000 word crit paper on porn - and it was pretty good. So it’s not always bad
There is a small chance that he might take up erotic asphyxiation and kill himself by accident. According to Cecil it kills 50 people annually nationwide and the victims are mostly young males.
Other than that, I would agree that simply looking at porn is not going to make him do stupid things. If porn does influence him then the problem is that he is ignorant enough to be influenced and not the porn itself. Does porn have some magical power that a movie or music doesn’t? What about the financial marketing industry? If he starts thinking BSDM is a good idea, and you just block all the BSDM sites, what’s going to protected him when he gets approved for a credit card with 0% APR?
I would just fix the kid’s ignorance and then not worry about him facing shaky situations. The world’s going to throw a lot of them at him and he won’t know how to deal with it if his parents just block everything from him.
If you want, there are ways you can spy on his browsing habits. That way you’d know if he is viewing healthy porn or not.
I don’t think anybody is advocating a hand off approach. To just shelter your children from things completely is stupid. The smart thing to do, is try to explain to them and help prepare them for various milestones in life. Like death, drugs, sex, etc…
Imagine how f’d up you would be if at 18yo you just found out about this thing called death. You’d hardly be able to relate to the rest of the modern world.
Just limit his time on the internet. Sure there are websites out there dedicated solely to pictures of dead women, but you actually have to go diving the interwebs before you happen across that crap.
If he has an hour a day to surf, he’s not going to get very far.
On the Dope, maybe not. In my community, porn is something people get divorced over. When I say “addicted”, I mean that you find it necessary to continue viewing it throughout your life. Dopers don’t seem to mind their significant others looking at other women and fantasizing about them, but, around here, it’s considered the equivalent of having sex with them, and is effectively cheating. I don’t know how many people I know who go to psychiatrists to get over what they consider a sexual addiction.
Plus there’s the simple fact that I don’t get it. What is so great about porn? It seems that most people that like it use it as a masturbation aid. Since I don’t need any help with that, I don’t see the point. Is not needing help atypical?
BTW I never would have thought about that being mean until you mentioned it. I find I am quite atypical around here.
I was pretty much of the same opinion. Then my 12ish y.o. son started to complain that when he mistyped some common (and safe) kids domain names, he was hitting typosquatting gay porn sites, and was being upset by it. That made me pretty mad (and the typosquatter did get hammered for it a few years later). I did throw some filtering on then, but removed it a few years later. Of course, I do remind him (now that he is 17) that the server still does log web site access, and that I do look at the logs from time to time. I think that it keeps things seemly…
Eleanor asks a simple restrained question about whether she should put some sort of restrictions on her thirteen year old child and that’s being “obsessed” and “having a problem”??
Oooookay…
BTW your second para is in conflict with your first. The porn industry is completely built off the back of people who are having sex with people they don’t really care about at all, for money. Is Eleanor supposed to be teaching him that that’s ok for them but not for him?
@the OP
I’d just like to observe that it’s easier to take off restrictions that you’ve decided are no longer necessary than to put them on later. Also, there’s stuff out there that even a horny teenage boy may not actually want to see, but it’s pretty easy to get an eyeful of something you weren’t actually looking for, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.
