This has come up in a pediatric forum and the conclusion of the docs is that we, as a gut reaction, feel strongly about limiting childhood access to pornography (talking the 13 and above, who as a normal function actively seeks it out, not the pre-teen, for whom we’d think more confidently that early porn-seeking behavior is a potential marker of problems) and advise filters, monitoring programs, etc., but recognize that we have absolutely no data to base this on. And that fact makes some of us uncomfortable with our level of discomfort (if that makes sense). Anyone aware of sociologic data to support the concept that exposure to porn is harmful or harmless to early teens? (Not talking Playboys here, but the hardcore stuff currently available on-line, sorry I won’t provide links! :)) I was thinking of putting this in GQ, but I think it is more likely to end up a debate if it gets any discussion at all.
The Nixon administration did a huge project on pornography. They were absolutely certain that it would prove a major problem. The results were that it does not cause unwanted "bad"behavior.That it was harmless. They of course supressed it.
It seems so logical to blame porn for our evils ,but it doesn’t wash.
Ithink if a child fleetingly runs across porn that you should be in control of yourself enough to discuss it. Explain why they are to young to understand and handle it. Most often a kid will go Yukk and go back to games killing people and blowing things up.
If a young kid keeps going to it, you have a problem,but porn isnt it.
Personally, I was one of the earlier adopters of internet as a youngun (1990ish) so I got to see all the tentacle, pedophilic*, scat, snuff, mutilation, and all the other good stuff. Now admittedly I was very mature for my age and reading Shakespeare and Andrew Vachss at the time, but still I would tend to think that a large part of what keeps kids immature is having the real world hidden from them and being presented with a view of life like “nothing bad can ever happen.”
Certainly I don’t see that if you’re at an age where you are going to be whacking off anyways that there is any particular use in hiding whacking material. It’s not like they don’t already get the idea. And living in Japan, I can say that having your porn censored is really frustrating, nor that it seems to be a particularly healthy approach (referencing the high rates at which the afforementioned tentacle, mutilation, scat, and whatnot tended to come from the minds of Japanese.) In total, my impression has been that holding off realistic sex, and even the funky stuff, if anything mostly just helps to build up sexual frustration.
Certainly I can see that having a societal “Do not have sex, there is no sex, and if I catch you at it you’re dead!” could limit the number of children born to teens. For instance, Japan comes in the lowest for teen pregnancies in this list of various countries, and probably also has the most puritan approach of any. But then, I would tend to lead the view that while they may behave as teens more, once they do get marry, I don’t trust that many of the frustrations put down in dirty comics aren’t coming out in the bedroom or with their own children. Of course, there is no way to know that for certain at the moment.
So in total I would argue that, porn should only be hidden enough to make it fun for the kids to get that rush of sneaking into Dad’s stash, and that what is on the internet should be there to be found and talked about if the kid has any issues. I don’t see that seeing any of that stuff is going to harm the kid. The only possible fallout could be potential teenage pregnancy increase, but personally I would blame that more on teaching kids about sex but not about real life. Most kids should be read some Vachss by the time they hit the teens.
- And hey, when you’re eleven, having eleven year old porn was actually pretty nifty. Not to say that I wouldn’t beat up whoever took the pictures.
And prevents a realistic outlook. <- I should have added.
One of my co-workers recently bought a heated paint stripper which had an instructional video with it. With a mischevious grin, he told me he’s going to lable it “Hot Stripper” and hide it where he’s sure his twelve-year-old son will find it.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. The way we try to hide sex from children is unnatural and a bit neurotic. Every child is naturally curious, but some parents make them feel their curiosity is bad or dirty, possibly leading to some hangups about a natural part of life.
Back in the Olden Days, children were very aware of sex and saw the consequences of it. They watched animals on the farm breed, and often slept in the same room as their parents. The girls would help their mothers give birth.
It wasn’t until the Victorian age that we started encouraging sexual ignorance in children and treating sex as if it were something shameful which must be hidden and not discussed. The US seems to cling to this idea more than Europeans do, and I’ve always had a pet theory that it may explain why we have higher rates of sexual violence.
My son and his cadre of friends were looking for internet porn and trading URL’s at school starting at about 10, so you might want to adjust your attitude on pre-teen porn (assuming, that is, that the entire city of Evanston is not breeding a generation of serial killers). We discussed it, first covering “this isn’t what most people do in the bedroom, you know”, then going to “I understand it’s exciting, and that’s natural.” and then “What virus has locked up the computer now? Dammit, it’s from another porn site!” to “STOP DOWNLOADING THE GODDAMN PORN!” However, it should be noted that these talks were given both to my husband and my son, (but not at the same time.)
Now that he’s 13, we recently discussed how porn, like gambling and alcohol and drugs, is something that some people can handle in moderation, and it’s nobody’s business, and other people become addicted to it and it starts to hurt them. He now has his own laptop with internet access, and while I considered putting a filter on it, I decided that open communication is better than a police state for our household. I’m sure he’s gone back to looking at porn. I’m also sure that I’m not helping him when his computer gets a virus from it. He’ll have to pay someone to help him out (probably his dad) and suffer the embarrassment in due course.
(I know I started getting masturbatorilly interested in my dad’s Playboys and my brother’s Penthouse at about 10, so there’s that whole glass houses and stones issue…)
I am trying to just listen for a while, but I can’t let this pass without comment. REAL WORLD?!? Whoa. No real world that I’ve ever lived in, maybe you live in a different section than I do, but I think very few of us live on your block. No, that is not real world for the majority of us, and the argument goes that we do not want our kids getting the impression that it is. For most of us, the real world actually is sex as part of committed relationships and play and fun but hardly a group endurance gymnastic event. Most of us men can’t have sex with someone in another room. Now if someone wants to argue that teens can tell fantasy from reality, fine, but you seem to be a case study that maybe they can’t!
How are they to get the impression that it isn’t if never even aware of such a thing?
Would homosexuals have been persecuted more or less, do you think, if everyone was exposed to the possibility of homosexual sex at a young age without any sort of outside influence but what happened to come up on the internet as they were going through looking for anything they came upon?
People don’t see bestiality/gay sex and become bestialists/gay because they saw it and now “know” that it exists. A kid sees a girl and a dog/guy and guy getting it on on the net and he just kinda snorts and keeps going on to find something that actual flies his kite. It doesn’t hurt any, but he is at least aware that it exists and at an age where he can grow up and take it in as part of his world view and be able to approach it realistically instead of sudden terror when he finds out suddenly one day that…people do that and aren’t they gross and need to be burned at the stake!
Do you think kids shouldn’t know that people murder each other, commit suicide, or whatever? What age can you safely tell them about what goes on in the world (even in the minority) before they can get a handle on the world actually existing with people doing that? So far as I can tell, there is no use in hiding it besides in fostering people who react poorly when being confronted with it years later because they had never been exposed to even the idea that such a thing could be.
And as in the bestialist/gay thing, who are we to decide which things are bizarre and which are harmless and potentially what might be the healthy way for the kid to proceed with his life. If may end up that couples who practice BDSM contribute more to society and raise healthier, more honest kids than any other group out there. There is really no way to know, and really it isn’t our place to say that kids can kinda grudgingly look at pinups of Pamela Anderson, but not a couple going at it with anal fisting. I would personally lay down money that he is going to be less likely to end up being a BDSM anal fister having lived in an environment where he was able to find out such existed than never even being allowed to see nipples except if he risked a spanking (which is already setting up the fairly obvious linkage of spanking=nipples and goody stuff.)
Personally, if I were you I would be much more worried that I had to use bolded, all-caps, multiple exclamations against one world view when your object is to ask about whether you are being too limitted by your own to make the right choice.
Well, it would greatly depend on the porn they were looking at, wouldn’t it? A lot of the porn I have seen on the 'net directed at males is images of the woman touching her nude body. (Admittedly, I haven’t searched the wide world of this stuff, but the free, ametuer stuff is often just the woman.)
Nor do I think that if a young man stumbles across images of women in bizarre positions or in an orgy that it will make them think “Oh, so this is the way fucking is done.” Nah, they get HBO. They’ve seen images of passionate “normal” sex on TV.
Is there any objective, documentable evidence that porn harms kids? Considering that attitudes like DSeid’s are quite commonplace, is it even POSSIBLE to obtain such evidence?
Certainly, all that is required is comparing the effects of laws as they are added to and removed from various countries and then how that effected various statistics over the next 20 years or so.
The main issue with that is, of course, that most of the statistics you would need weren’t even mentioned things 20 or 40 years ago. Like, I would personally be fairly willing to bet that there was a fairly high rate of in-home pedophilia or spousal abuse during the 50s in the US, but of course there is no way to know as “there was no such thing” at the time, though I would imagine the cops of the time had a pretty good idea but weren’t alowed to report such things about their society.
When doing my research on prostitution, I did note that Sweden did some good research of different countries for that issue though. They might have researched this one some.
Might I ask what the professed reasons for these “feelings” are? I understand that you’ve said it’s a “gut reaction” and are looking for actual support, but isn’t the former a stark indicator that something is amiss in “the docs”’ viewpoint?
Y’know, trying to fit the data to reach a pre-ordained conclusion is a terrible way to do science (or recommend policy). I have a healthy respect for your posts / arguments and I’m guessing there’s more to it than that, hence the question.
Good point, and one that Marjorie Heins makes in an excellent book, “Not in front of the children”. From the back jacket blurb:
However:
Comparing laws over time with statistics (of crime, I assume you mean) over the same time does not establish a correlation. Just because A is followed by B does not mean B was caused by A. In the case of laws–many, many social factors are at work as well.
Certainly, but that’s still better than nothing. And yes, of course you will always need to pass some judgement on what was the result of which.
But still, given data–just because there is some amount of randomness–doesn’t still mean that certain things can’t be consistent. For instance, that every time legalised prostitution has been instituted by a country that the amount of illegal prostitution rose. That comes out true for every country that I, at least, could find stats on. And similarly, countries which have more open views to sex have higher incidences of teen pregnancy (ignoring the outliers of the US and Russia for whom the issue is pretty obviously one of poverty and crime.) That is something that could indeed be set to statistics and debated.
But at least you are debating data rather than gut feelings. Regardless of whether the tide turns to preventing teen pregnancies by limitting pornography access, at least it was a reasoned decision. And certainly I could see censorship winning for that reason over my unbacked assertion that spousal abuse, pedophilia, and intolerance will be raised by preventing access to knowing about weird and gross stuff. But given as I do lack the data to back that, there isn’t much I can do but fight for a world in which we at least try to get as much figures on what is going on in society to really be able to fight my side (or give it up if it does appear to be baseless.)
But in total, I would argue that given two generations (40+ years) or so, of allowing kids to see dead bodies and dog sex on the 'net would result in a more rational public and lower instances of all sex crimes.
As a country, going the route of censorship, I would predict that fetishes are going to increase and within…oh say ten years we’re going to start getting kids practicing BDSM and accidentally choking each other to death and what-have-you. Either that or the current fundy-craze will continue and we’re going to start getting some nice Klan-style things happening to kids who are gay, androgynous, and so on. Simply, the cat is already out of the bag. We all know that Zed is dead, and that Japanese like tentacle sex. In the Fifties you could keep fringe sex hushed because adults weren’t even allowed to admit it existed or talk about such things amongst themselves, while as today even if your parents don’t talk about it, your older stoner brother is going to tell you about all the kinky stuff. I mean, I certainly knew that Michael Jackson was in trouble for messing with little boys back in the eighties. And that was a little town out in the middle of no-where. All we need is some guy to get famous for doing donkeys and within a couple of weeks you’re going to have a lot of frustrated 13 year olds who can’t get their hands on any porn putting them on Fido instead.
woot alarmism!
All of which is being a little over the top, but as said, I am at loss for statistics. Though I would be willing to enter a friendly wager about there being at least a couple cases of BDSM kids (10-14) gone wrong within ten years.
This book, Saving Our Children from the First Amendment, that I spotted on Amazon, but won’t buy, since it lists for $50, argues that the government has the right to restrict, First Amendment-wise, minors’ access to some material.
I don’t agree. I believe it should be up to the parents, not the government. Not that they will be any wiser as a group, but if the government makes the decision, people will be going to jail for personal beliefs that differ from others’ personal beliefs, no matter how logical or illogical they may be.
It is this kind of danger that the Freedom of Religion concept was developed and written in the US Constitution. No one asks the Church of Our Lady Of The Night to justify its beliefs – whether they harm church members or not. Likewise, no one should ask parents to justify their childrearing beliefs.
I will accept limits on both, but only at the extreme ends of the “harm” spectrum, where very little disagreement exists.
I’ll start with this one. Nope, not looking for data to fit the conclusiion. Looking for data that either supports or contradicts the parental gut reaction that I have and being very cognizant that the evidence seems to be non-existant. Some of us, myself among them, are very uncomfortable having an opinion that has no evidence to support it. But without evidence we have nothing but our gut reaction to go on. “Amiss”? I don’t know. Products of our culture moreso and uncomfortable with the fact that our kids are viewing images of women eating and smearing themselves in feces (yes that was among the sites that I’ve caught one of my kids going to, Lissa). On the one level the answer is easy: as parents we always try to teach our children values that we respect. Like Whynot my response has been to take advantage of that event as a “teaching moment” of what I consider healthy sexuality and why I find those images objectionable. And to set the rule that my computer will not be used by him for those purposes and that I will know as I will have a monitoring program in place. Be warned. Now he’s grown up to be a very healthy man and discusses sexuality maturely, much moreso than his peers. But then as a teen we also had him taking classes in figure painting and he was exposed to nude models as a matter of course from early on. I do not actually believe that a child being raised in a family with reasonable models of relationships (be they hetero or homosexual) is going to be harmed by watching a girl masturbate or watching videos of oral or anal sex, but I want to transmit my values anyway. And to me those values include that the human body is a thing of beauty to be respected. Sexuality that relies on degrading another is not okay to me (although I have no objection to others finding it okay for themselves in privacy). I would love to have actual evidence of the non-harm of usual porn and without evidence of non-harm I am unwilling to allow my child access to the stuff that I find disturbing. Without evidence we have to risk one sort of error or the other; I choose to commit the error of protecting my child from that which I fear may be harmful until I have solid evidence convincing me otherwise.
Sagerat I think that you gloss over the difficulties in getting decent data. Reporting rates will vary greatly between societies and within societies in different time periods. Laws scarcely accurately reflect viewing in today’s world. And laws reflect a lot else about the society’s values that may independently have an association with a particular outcome. An association between early porn-seeking behavior and later deviancy may merely indicate that such behavior is a marker for risk of later deviancy, not etiologic. So on. Still, I, like you, would rather have some data, even messy data, than none at all. And, to the best of my knowledge we currently have none at all. Hence my call. I cannot myself find studies or data comparing rates of sexual behaviors that I would consider undesirable in various societies stratified by accessibility to porn by children or be degree of censorship. If anyone has any data to offer please do so.
As someone who has very little time and only the internet to go on and yet still try and come out with something that has something like cites behind it, even against my argument, I can quite definitely say that I am full aware of what a pain in the ass childhood and/or sex information can be to attain. Unfortunately I don’t have time to do a big search for this question though. The best I can offer off the top of my head is the pre-posted link (assuming you did further research than just linking to a table on some website and saying “this is what this means”) of teen pregnancies by country and the “openness” of those countries in regards to sex. And then the information that pedophiles often use pornography to desensitize and entice their targets. Neither of which really works towards my argument.
Realize that your “gut feelings” are not an innate guideline. You were not born with some sort of “perversion detector” in you that tells you what is right and wrong. Your “gut feelings” are what was instilled in you by your socialization. Had you been raised in another culture, your “gut feelings” might be telling you that your kids shouldn’t be looking at pictures of women with their faces uncovered.
More important is WHY he was visiting the site. Hell, I might be interested in seeing the pictures myself out of sheer curiosity. A friend of mine used to have a collection of “gross porn” on his computer. He didn’t collect it for purposes of sexual gratification, but more along the lines of marvelling at human oddities. Perhaps your son was looking at it for the same reasons.
I understand where you’re coming from, but remember that your notions of what constitutes a “healthy sexuality” is not shared by everyone. Personally, I believe anything done between consenting adults is “healthy” and I’d be very hesitant to give the opposite impression to a child.
I don’t think it is the porn on the internet or the late night television that is the serious problem, though I certainly don’t think it’s a bad idea to shield kids from the majority of it. I have more issues with marketing ploys aimed at sexualizing children earlier and earlier, so they can be sold clothes, jewelry, hair products, sneakers, make up, music and what-not. If kids run across a few examples of porn, even blatant, weird, explicit porn, I don’t think it’s going to warp them or they are instantly going to think that’s the done thing. It’s the constant exposure to slutty pop stars, and the commercials and magazines showing them kids their own ages in tight, revealing clothes and heavy make-up that is more likely to sway them into promiscuity, imho.
I read an article that i have cut out some excerpts from as well as posted the link to the whole thing. Its more of just staticstics from NCMEC and Cybertipline about teens and online statistics that i found rather shocking. I am not sure this is exactly what you are looking for but its a good article to read. And makes you rethink your own child’s internet safety.
– 61% of 13- to 17-year-olds have a personal profile on sites such as MySpace, Friendster, or Xanga. Half have posted pictures of themselves online.
– 14% have actually met face-to-face with a person they had known only through the Internet (9% of 13- to 15-year-olds and 22% of 16- to 17-year-olds).
– When teens receive messages online from someone they don’t know, 40% usually reply to and chat with that person.
– As well, 37% of 13- to 17-year-olds said they’re “not very concerned” or “not at all concerned” about someone using personal information they’ve posted online in ways they haven’t approved.
– Fully 22% of those surveyed reported their parents or guardians have never discussed Internet safety with them. – On the other hand, 36% of youth–girls and younger teens, most notably–said their parents or guardians have talked to them “a lot” about online safety, and 70% said their parents or guardians have discussed the subject with them during the past year.