Apropos of David Cameron trying to save the childrens from online porn, how old were you when you first got your sticky fingers on pornographic material (be it online or dodgy mags found on railway sidings). Define ‘porn’ using your own personal standards.
I was 11 when I first found a couple of Playboy at an uncle’s house. I liked the cartoons.
Should add that I was 12, and apart from the voices telling me to kill the whores it’s never done me any harm. 56k modems, staying up all night and only seeing 5 women!
Dad had a gift sub to Playboy from Mom, and photography mags with nudes. Never thought anything of it but usually remembered to hide the Playboys before friends came over just in case their parents had different ideas about what children should have access to re nudity. Occasionally stumbled across some porn mags and video that the parents hadn’t hidden very well. It was interesting, but no big deal.
Two of my closest girlfriends were raised in very conservative environments where nudity was taboo, one divorced a husband who she “caught” entertaining himself with porn and the other is headed for divorce because she’s convinced her husband is a pervert for enjoying looking at naked women online. I’m relieved that nudity and sex were rather casual topics in my family because I’d hate like hell to lose a marriage over something as private and personal as occasional porn consumption.
Wow…I have to admit, I was shocked at the age ranges in the poll. I was expecting it to be more like ‘Under 15’ and then like 15, 16, etc. Did people really see porn so young?? I didn’t even know what it was until I was like 17. And the only reason I even saw it at 18 was because I’d just gotten this awesome thing called the ‘internet’ and was feeling curious and could pursue said curiosity in the privacy of my bedroom.
I found the magic of chat rooms in my youth at age 12, and managed to find a room on Yahoo called “Cat Chat”. No, I’m not going for a double entendre for “pussy” here.
In actuality it was a bunch of raunchy middle aged ladies and every now and then they’d post up a link to their favorite porn site in the flow of conversation.
I think the very first picture I saw was a dominatrix scenario.
Also, for some reason a lot of people I know have had the magic “porn in the woods” scenario happen to them as children. Just piles of porn mags dumped in the woods. I guess a black trash bag in the dumpster is just too conspicuous for some?
Oh yeah, I was definitely in elementary school. The first time some kids on the school bus had gotten a hold of some dirty magazines, and the second, a neighbor kid had gotten a hold of some videos. Then after that, my brother had porn mags in his room that I would routinely look at while he was gone. By the time high school rolled around, there was the internet. There were also dial-up modems and parents who were terrified of The Scary Internet Corrupting Everything, which made things harder, but where there’s a will.
Why does it have to be something you saw? I read “Valley of the Horses” when I was 10. It’s pretty much graphically described nonstop fucking.
When I was 12 or so I was at a local park looking for aluminum cans to recycle for money, when I came across a paper bag sitting next to the parking lot full of magazines. Not just playboy, but hardcore, fetish, bdsm, and other things. I sat on the curb and perused them for at least an hour, trying to absorb what I saw. I had never been exposed to any of this, and it came as a shock. I couldn’t understand why people would do that stuff to each other. I sort of concluded that it was like WWF wrestling. That they were just pretending to do those things, it wasn’t really real. It was kind of hard to do though, it really did look like those two men were doing that the woman.
For a while I thought that that’s what sex was, that everyone did those things. I tried to avoid adults as much as possible. I wondered how many sex toys adults I knew had, or what exactly went on at those parties my parents went to, how many people they had done it with, etc. Discreet inquiries eventually let me know that this was not normal, and almost everyone just did normal vanilla sex.
I stashed the mags in a hole in a corner of the park, and took every opportunity to go up there and read them. At the end of that summer the park did some beautification project, which included filling in any holes they found. To this day I still mourn their loss.
Found some porn mags at age 11 in the scrubby, slightly wooded vacant lot near home where the vagrants camped. From talking to other people my age (50-ish), I thought that was the usual age & place to first run across porn.
The first porn I ever saw was a magazine I found in the back of my grandparents’ car. I was around six, and had already developed the habit of reading whatever was in my vicinity. My grandmother was horrified when we got to the store and she saw what I had.
I think it was more of a gradient. I’m sure I saw “boobies” and R rated films with sex scenes at a very young age, 5 or 6. Even saw a movie about a torrid threesome (“Summer Lovers”) in second grade without any problems. My parents let me have an adult library card and I consistently read far above my grade level. Whatever I wasn’t ready for just kind of went over my head, but didn’t disturb me. I probably stumbled upon one or two Playboys and maybe a Playgirl at various point in the elementary school period, as well as the usual naked natives in National Geographic. I probably saw my first soft core cable stuff in junior high, and hard core stuff in high school. Didn’t have real Internet until college, or I probably would have encountered seriously hard core things at a much younger age.
I don’t know if I’m atypical, but I was exposed to adult content of various kinds (sex, drugs, violence) from a very young age, and for the most part it didn’t disturb me unless it was especially scary with kids involved (Amityville, Poltergeist) or if the adults around me were uncomfortable and I could sense that. On the contrary I was relatively well adjusted with regard to that sort of stuff. I was not violent at all, despite enjoying horror novels, didn’t start drinking until college. I was a little bit obsessed with sex once I hit puberty, but didn’t find an outlet for that until college.
In fact, I probably developed a very keen sense of media awareness, rationalizing, analysis, and introspection.
When I was 13, or maybe 12, I saw a guy dump a stack of magazines in the vacant lot next to my house. Somehow, I knew that stack was worth investigating. I kept one copy of Playboy and I swear that woman, whoever she was, defined my vision of beauty.
My son found the internet when he was 13. He was checking out things that I find pretty disturbing before we got the parental controls on. I didn’t think that defined his vision of beauty but what does a parent know?
I don’t consider Playboy pornography, so I will say 12 years old in 6th grade. We found a dad’s collection of hardcore mags and stole them and hid them in the woods where we could look at them whenever we wanted.
Depending on how you define “pornography,” I was seeing titties on late-night Skinemax as early as seven or eight. Full-on penis-in-vagina penetration probably by age 13.
My friend and I found the proverbial stash of Playboys in the woods. We assumed it was an encampment of “teenagers,” and worried that they would come back and find us messing with their stuff.
Being a girl, I was much more interested in the cartoons and not-quite-understood dirty jokes than the naked ladies.
A friend of my cousin’s smuggled us a Playboy and a Penthouse that he’d swiped from his father’s collection. I was 9 at the time.
I was around 10. It was awesome!
Yeah, I found a magazine under one of the chairs in the living room when I was 7 or 8. I was looking for a lost toy, don’t ask me what someone was doing looking at porn in the living room instead of their bedroom. And I saw all kinds of R-rated movies like Porky’s around that age, too.
Define pornography please. My friends and I were looking (and giggling) over paintings and drawings of naked people and people having sex at a very young age. Our local library had a lovely collection of art books from the ancient world to the Renaissance (and a few on New World pottery).