In my lovely state, the GOP-led government has decided to move on from regulating women’s sexuality to regulating pornography. Apparently they simply have nothing better to do, such as tackle the pollution problem, figure out how to improve public transportation, how to stop the cops from shooting unarmed civilians, or other mundane, un-important topics; no, they are totally focused on sex this year. Regulating other peoples’ that is. Skipping right over the topic of why the government thinks it has any right to impose a certain set of moral values on the population, let’s go to their big excuse for doing this:
Watching pornography hurts children.
Why and how, I don’t know. Apparently it’s ok for children to watch endless amounts of violence, but not ok to watch people make love because it causes what?
My wife just completed a tour of jury duty, the case concerned a 13 year old boy charged with raping young girls, the youngest was 6. Where did he learn this? According to the prosecutor, watching porn with his father.
For the purpose of this thread, can we define children?
I have wondered though, with the ubiquity of porn on the internet, and millennials coming of appropriate age to have sex, do they know that some of the extreme things they see in porn such as gagging and ATM is not the way people typically have sex? Do they realize the sex can be a loving tender moment shared between two people?
“Making love” and pornography are not the same thing. In many cases porn is a form of violence. And if it’s not violent it’s probably showing very unrealistic ideas of sex that can harm people.
My natural inclination is to answer “no” to the OP’s question, but, frankly, a lot of porn is such evil garbage that I’m honestly not 100 percent confident anymore.
It’s a complete mystery to me who and what a lot of porn is for. I mean, much of it clearly isn’t titillating. More disgusting. And nothing like actual sex. Maybe some people get off on it, but they must be in the minority, surely? It all seems very strange, and I’ve yet to see a good explanation for it.
I have no problem with pornography in principle. and, thankfully, there certainly is some perfectly nice and clearly non-harmful porn out there. It’s not all wall-to-wall insanity. But the freaky stuff seems to make up the vast majority of what is produced, and I honestly don’t get it. What’s the point? How can there be a market? I’m a very, very liberal guy, and I’m no prude. If something rocks your boat, that’s your business. I’m not for banning any of it. It just seems so bizarre. I’m wondering if there’s some kind of joke going on, and I’m missing the punchline. Any help in clearing this up would be appreciated.
I don’t actually think it’s a problem that children have the opportunity to watch it, in practice. I can’t imagine why children would *want *to watch it. Presumably, they simply click the link, go “holy cow, WTF”, close the window and reach for the brain bleach. I mean, like most people would. It seems like it would be the natural reaction.
It does kill kittens, though. So there’s that to consider.
I think to a certain extent, watching porn might best be compared to drinking alcohol. Can 90% of the population handle it just fine? Yes. Does 10% have serious problems with addiction, and does early abuse of alcohol contribute to lifelong addiction? Yes. But will half a glass of wine with family at dinner damage a 13-year-old? Nope, and it might even be better for him in terms of learning healthy habits.
But all porn is also not equal. Soft core, romantic stuff is not the same as bondage, slapping, rape-simulation hardcore stuff. So it might be that some “porn” is fine and some is unhealthy if you use a very broad definition of it.
I have a son and a daughter and my concerns for them seeing porn are quite different.
As far as the violent stuff, I remember seeing some of that as a young teen, and just being totally turned off by it. It seemed stupid and pointless and entirely unarousing. At the risk of generalizing, I think most who lack that fetish would be the same.
For my son, I would worry that it would distort his expectations of what’s on offer out there from women. That he would see a lot of sex acts as being casually on offer without putting in some time. Men shouldn’t expect shaved pubes, they shouldn’t expect anal, they shouldn’t expect threesomes or sex on the first date. Great if you can get that stuff, but you can’t feel entitled to it.
I guess for my daughter I have a related worry, that she’ll feel pressured to offer these things out of a distorted impression of how normalized this behavior is. Or alternately, porn will give her a horrifying look inside male sexuality and she’ll be terrified by it forever.
I know a 13 year old who is addicted to porn already. I won’t go into details, but this kids love life is seriously wrecked already. He can’t look at normal looking people and get excited - needs porn. Sad! (Best to keep kids away from it in my opinion.)
Damn it, I have the opposite problem. Too much porn, and now it doesn’t do anything for me anymore. I need real people. Which certainly complicates my love life, it was easier when I could do it all by myself.
While I’m not positive what the general answer is here, an environment where a 13 year old boy is watching porn with his father is very likely going to be harmful.
Otherwise, this question needs a definition of children, porn, watching, and harm.
Honestly I think having such a volume of porn so easily available is going to have to have some kind of effect on kids and teens attitude towards sex. Of course porn was always in existence but you can’t equate finding your older brother’s stash of Penthouses and VHS tapes with what we have today.
At the very least Porn will influence kids who have sex on how to have sex which doesn’t always work perfectly because porn sex plays to a camera.
Look at the current Nice Guy thread, and see if you can’t make a connection between the misogyny on display in those sorts of discussions and common porn acts…
Dan Savage has made the point that a large part of the paying porn market are lonely men that are bitter about their lack of relationship success. While the vast majority of men are be looking at porn, producers aren’t going to target the audience that only looks at free porn for a few minutes a few times a week. That makes sense to me, though I’d love to see some statistics to refute or confirm that hypothesis.
As I’ve said before, this question, thankfully, is currently being answered by way of experiment. Starting from whatever age it is when they have even the slightest inclination to look at such things, most kids now are finding themselves buried in an absolute avalanche of smut. And there is no realistic way of keeping most of it away from most of them, even if you try. And for the most part, we’re not really doing all that much in the way of trying.
As soon as this generation of kids grows up, we’ll have an answer. If society doesn’t collapse, and they don’t turn out more warped than usual, porn will be in the clear, and we can chill out about this once and for all.
My prediction is that it’ll be fine. Well, I am looking into zombie outbreak style survival tactics, a little bit. You know, just in case. But I mostly think it’ll be fine.
But here’s an article from the New York Times that notes that the actual research is far from definitive at this point. It’s a tricky thing to study: you can’t exactly do a controlled, double-blind experiment.
