I don’t mean in a ‘sex is horrible, pretend it doesn’t exist until you are married’ way either. Here is what I’m wondering.
When I was a kid the internet and cell phones didn’t exist. If you wanted to look at pictures of girls you had either the underwear ads, or if you were lucky someone had gotten a porno mag from a parent. But now a kid can go online and look for porn.
Buuuuuut, if a kid is 12 how do you ensure they aren’t looking for pics of people their own age? I was reading a reddit thread recently and several people commented how when they were young teens they would go online and look for porn from people the same age. But that really could screw up the kids life, especially if the parent gets blamed for it.
So what do you do? Do you explain to them how to use the mainstream porn sites and let them know never to look for porn among their age group?
But even explaining to a kid how to use mainstream porn sites (which filter out the illegal stuff) sounds like something that could get you in trouble. If a 13 year old was bragging that they watched porn and a parent taught them how to use the mainstream streaming sites, that could also get the parent and/or kid in trouble.
It just seems in today’s day and age of cell phones and internet, how do you let kids know how serious society will retaliate about any improprieties regarding their sexuality? Sending or receiving photos of peers on their cell phone, going online and looking for pictures of people their own age, etc. How do you explain how serious society at large takes that stuff and let them know not to do it? Or do kids for the most part already know? According to this, 54% of teen girls have sexted when under 18.
Do people have this conversation with their children now? If so how do you do it? How do you explain to not look for any pornography that is illegal (explain to a 12 year old to only look at pornography that features performers age 18+ and to only use the mainstream sites), all the negative consequences of sexting (the pics being used for cyberbullying or the child being charged for manufacturing illegal pornography, etc) and have it stick for a child who probably doesn’t take any of that stuff seriously or understand the risks.
Having said that, many of your concerns are quite frankly not very realistic. For all practical purposes, child porn simply does not exist on the easily-accessible parts of the internet. And somehow I doubt that the average young teenager has learned how to access the Dark Web.
As far as underage sexting goes, a lot of prosecutors have gotten some common sense in the last few years. More of them are declining to prosecute teenagers, except in special cases, and of the ones that do prosecute, it’s often misdemeanor charges. An educational approach has been adopted in many areas.
IME, young teen (boys especially) are not looking for young teen girls. They’re looking for the big-titted, big-bummed ladies who are the girls of their (wet) dreams. And they will find them on the regular interweb without too much effort or grief.
And as Flyer mentioned, to access actual kiddie-porn would take much more skill and determination than your average teen kid could muster. Unless they’re a techno-uber-kid, I don’t think you’d have too many problems.
As with every parent I know, with kids in this generation, which is a lot, I have yet to meet one, that hasn’t discovered their kid (boys and girls) usually middle school age but sometimes younger, surfing porn on the internet.
When my son was 11, we had a follow up to our sex talk from a few years earlier, when we discovered his porn trail on the family computer. I told him that porn isn’t what real sex is like. These people are actors pretending to act a certain way while having sex. That I didn’t want him to get a distorted view of sex from watching porn, and that he shouldn’t be watching porn until he is much older, if he wants to. I warned him that I had the ability to see whatever he websites he was watching and that I would continue until he was much older.
I’m sure that he found other ways after that to peruse, but he is now a full grown man in a happy healthy relationship, so I don’t think I did any harm and hopefully did some good.
I hope this is the case. A lot of the people who were posting in the reddit thread mentioned using p2p networks which do not exist the way they used to.
In the old days of kazaa and usenet you could certainly accidentally find CP, then, knowing what key words to look for, purposefully find much more. These days since it’s far easier to get high quality free porn from curated web sites, this is much less of an issue.
It’s probably still possible to get pictures or videos of under-18 year old subjects from “nudist” sources, the legality of which is not something I’d care to challenge if it became an issue.
When my son was fourteen or fifteen or so, I told him that I was quite sure he’d seen a lot more than I had by his age, and to keep expectations realistic.
I tell them that the people in porn (and on TV) DO NOT EXIST in your local neighborhood, school, Walmart, etc.
So if they get “spoiled” - to where they are only attracted to these fictional looking people, they will have a very difficult time when having sex with real, not-so-good-looking people, in their home town.
So best for young people to not look at porn.
Also some porn makes it look like “weird sex acts” are normal. Difficult to learn what is normal and what would be considered normal by say that girl you are taking to the prom.
• NO, not every teenage boy would prefer to ogle adult women or consider them to be hotter than the girls in his 8th grade class. And for that matter, 9 year old boys probably prefer to stare at images of cute 9 year old girls. I know I did. No interest in old ladies (i.e., old enough to be my babysitter, yeesh!!)
• On the other hand, underwear ads are more enticing than most porn. And they aren’t illegal to own or to stare at with prurient interest. And you don’t get malware on your computer as often from those as you do from porn sites.
If I had children or other minor dependents for whom I was responsible, I’d go over the legal ramifications of chid porn and the malware risks as well, condemning those things for those facets (and for the exploitatation of the subjects where relevant), but not condemning the wider practice of enjoying visual representation of cute sexually attractive people for whatever purposes one wishes to make of them.
I had zero interest in looking at girls my own age at 12.
Donna Douglas, Barbra Eden, Catherine Bach (Daisy) were the iconic objects of my desire.
My female classmates couldn’t hold a candle to them. Not that I didn’t find any of them pretty, but seeing them naked was never on my mind.
But I digress, I had progressive parents that left Playboy magazines on the coffee table that I had free access to for as long as I can remember. And my parents never cared either.
Maybe it’s yet another way in which I’m wired up different in the brain. Or other relevant nerves. I’ve been attracted to female people since I was in early elementary school but fully adult women with fully developed breastparts were not of much interest to me sexually until I was their age.
I told mine that the easiest way to get a sexually transmitted disease now was to get a computer virus off a porn site. It isn’t the porn that’s bad, its practicing safe surfing as a teenager that is difficult to do.
Porn magazines are, IMHO, rather trashy - but no one has ever had a keylogger planted on them or ransomware installed through a paper copy of Penthouse.
When some porn sites started showing up in the home computer’s browsing history, I told my kids that someone - maybe one of their friends - had been looking for porn on the computer, that I’d like them to police that, and pointed out that you’d need a credit card to get the hard core stuff.
Oh, they could get free hardcore, kunilou, it exists. But well played anyway, nice face-saving there.
Now, now, There are some quite conventionally attractive people in porn. Just as there are some IRL. And then as IRL there’s a whole bunch more who I do not care for seeing getting it on (and that’s not counting the normally good looking ones that proceed to screw it up with utterly disproportionate boob/butt/lip/pecker enhancement implants, douchebag facial hair, inkompetently done tattoos, and a close friendship with harmful chemicals)
But really it’s not that it creates an unreal expectation of attractiveness, but rather that it can create an unreal expectation of how people make and respond to sexual advances and engage in sexual activity. It promulgates a world of always-hard studs and hot eager hos who are there just so penis can ensue and the studs can shower them with their, um, love (and other substances). In pornworld there is an unreal notion of how widespread is eagerness to kneel down, open wide and gobble deep just because that’s what you do with someone you just met, or ofhow pleasing and sustainable it is to haveyour partner hold a vertical split while you pound at 120bpm from a semi-inverted position for a half an hour, in a supply closet.
(Emphasis added) Son, skip the professional productions, amateur porn is the real deal.
Plus dude, you implied that i) you knew what sex was like and ii) you had it, most likely with Mom. An 11 year old would rather die than think of that.:eek:
My old pastor is very involved in the anti-prostitution movement, and he says that in his area, the incidence of forcible anal rape and other violent nonconsensual activity within dating relationships, the aftermath being witnessed by ER doctors, has skyrocketed (and apparently the women themselves do not seem to think this is anything abnormal) and the first question being asked by infertility doctors nowadays is “Are you having penis-in-vagina intercourse, and if so, does he ejaculate inside her?” These doctors have told him that many couples do not! He says they have even encountered men who did not know what women are supposed to have pubic hair.
I asked these questions on a medical message board, and got a lot of “What kind of weirdo is your pastor and the people he associates with, anyway?” responses. In short, he claims that young people these days are, for the most part, not interested in normal sex or engaging in it because they got their sex education from hardcore pornography, by which I mean stuff like Max Hardcore (don’t Google that unless you have a very strong stomach). Makes me wonder where their parents are, and if perhaps the parents INTRODUCED them to this?
