A friend of mine who is a single mother talked to me briefly about her embarassing situation. Her son who is 8 found one of her porn DVD’s and potentially watched up to 5 minutes of it. I may go into more detail later but am more interested in other peoples experiences as children or as parents dealing with such situations.
I’m pretty sure around his age the older boys in my neighborhood were already stealing porn magazines and I would have seen them already or by the time I was 9. From that age on there was always a stash of magazines shared by the half dozen of us. I don’t feel damaged by the experience.
In my friends case the DVD was a light girl/girl porn. Do you think that’s relevant/more/less bad?
Do you think the gender of the child viewer makes a difference?
When I was in grade school, like 7th or 8th grade, I found a bag of magazines in the park while looking for aluminum cans. They weren’t Playboys, these were all very hardcore books crammed full of most of the perversions you can think of. Over the next hour I learned about lesbians, strap ons, fisting, anal sex, bdsm, gang bangs, and golden showers. It totally blew my mind.
This was my first real experience with anything sexual. Prior to this, my father had made a stumbling attempt to explain a few things to me, but quit when I started asking questions he didn’t want to answer. At first I didn’t understand a lot of things. I wondered why people did things that obviously hurt, and concluded that it was like WWF Wrestling. But that didn’t quite work, because that man’s penis was obviously not in the correct hole, and it looked like she was enjoying it. It really confused me.
I completely avoided adults over the next few weeks, thinking that they all did all of that stuff. I wondered where my mom kept her big pile of sex toys, and how many men she’d had at once. Or what my mom and her friends had done together. I would see different people talking and wonder how many times they’d done it and what they did. Through talking to other people about it, I figured out that what I had was the exception, and not the rule. I was relived, because I was quite certain that I didn’t want to do at least half of the things I had seen. But I really wanted to do the other half. I’ve always wondered how much this has affected me.
I kept the magazines in a hole in corner of the park. I had them for one really good summer, and then the park managers started a big project to improve the place, and filled in and turfed over any holes they could find.
Found my grandpa’s porno mags behind the television in his bedroom when I was 11 or so. It opened up a whole new world for me and I haven’t looked back.
I guess it depends on your definition of porn. I selected “5 or younger” because my Dad always left his Playboy’s all over the place. It was hard not to see pictures of naked ladies when I was growing up. As I got older I learned to be ashamed of them and put them all on the shelves in his room, then threw a blanket over them so nobody would know they were there.
If you mean pictures and videos of sex acts I can’t be sure. It all just kind of runs together.
Before I voted, I assumed you meant hard-core; then I read some of the comments.
I certainly saw Playboys in high school, and once my sister found a nudie magazine that apparently belonged to my father. I was very disappointed that there were no men in it (I was maybe 12 or 13).
I wouldn’t call either one of those porn. I didn’t see any real porn until I was 21.
Roddy
Does scrambled porn count? At age 10 I discovered that if I tuned to the softcore porn pay channels late at night I could hear the sounds of wild passion and occasionally see a boob. Even if the hue was a greenish blue and it was all distorted, that was still pretty huge at the time. It wasn’t long after that I discovered the joys of masturbation. (and boy did that first orgasm freak me out… but that’s neither here nor there)
I concur that it depends on how you define “porn.” I saw plenty of 70’s era girlie magazines as a kid, starting when I was about 4 or 5 and saw some neighborhood kids with a Playboy or Penthouse or somthing. I don’t remembver exactly what, but it was the first time I saw pictures of naked women. More magazines followed (found, looted or borrowed) thoughtout childhood and adolescence, but it was a time before the internet and even VHS didn’t exist until I was a teenager. I didn’t see hardcore porn until I was a junior in high school. This juvenile delinquent kid I knew had Debbie Does Dallas. That was the same kid that got me high the first time. On the same day. I watched it like 20 times at his house going “wow, man, they’re really doing it. She’s really sucking his dick.” It was quite a weekend.
Ninth grade – must have been 13. I remember being shocked watching the scrambled out channel (TMC, I think) and finding that the camera didn’t pan away when the girl took off her clothes. And I recorded it, and discovered that my VCR actually filtered out the scramble.
Of course, I’m not sure if it qualified as real porn. You saw the women, but never the men. But the women were topless for no reason a lot.
Also, that’s the same year a substitute teacher used my account to access porn during school hours. (I had loaned my account to the computer lab guy because they only put two ethernet jacks in each room, but an extra phone line, and he really didn’t know enough about computers to get a router. He was supposed to replace it with his free internet account from school.) Yeah, I got my account taken away. What sucks is I falsely admitted that I did it because I had seen a naked girl on my computer once not that long ago, and had been intentionally downloading bikini pics.
What was funny is that I never lost any computer privileges at the actual school. I still was pulled out of class all the time to fix people’s computers. And I was on such good terms with the IT staff (or whatever you call them) that I got my home account back eventually.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen truly hardcore porn, unless you count the unwanted images that sometimes come up when you are searching for less than licit things, like ROMs. Heck, when I say I’m watching porn–I’m watching stuff they can show on YouTube.
ETA: If y’all want to talk about masturbation, I never equated the two. I learned that back at 11, from a book telling me not to do it.
South Africa in the 70’s and early 80’s was a very sexually repressed place - my Dad once had his copy of “The Naive and Sentimental Lover” confiscated upon return to SA by a customs official. The closest we had to porn was black and white magazines with opaque stars covering the models nipples. On the way home from a trip to the UK in 1981 we stopped off in Luxemborg and were blown away (aged 11) by the range of magazines available in the newsagents at the airport.
But I chose 14-15 as porn for me equates to moving images, rather than photographs.
My friend Mark showed me and another friend some Polaroids he found in his parents’ closet, of them having sex.
What we didn’t think about back then was - who was taking those photos?! (And no, these were obviously not taken with an automatic timer.)
And yes, we too found one of those odd stashes of porn in the woods - equally hard core - when we were about 10. Who puts them there? And if it was you - thanks! We liked them quite a bit.
You should have asked us for our current age. I’m 64, and I never saw any porn until the early 70s, when I was already in my late 20s. It just wasn’t available like it is today.
Wow - I always assumed you were in your 30’s today! Really!
So - were the porn photos in color back then?
(DMark ducks and misses the rock that panache45 just threw.)
It’s hard for me to consider something like Playboy of the 1970s to be pornography, but I answered “5 or younger” anyway, since the consensus in this thread seems to be that it counts. The magazine was pretty damn common then, sitting out in grocery stores and in the chairs at the barber shop, and was only slightly more risque than Maxim is now.
Penthouse on the other hand, I’d accept as pornography, even if (until fairly recently) they were on the softcore end of the spectrum. They still had pictorials showing simulated sex acts, which was quite the shocker when I first ran across an issue in 1980 or so, at the age of 6. And, yes, it was another one of those random-porn-in-the-woods finds.
First hardcore was around 12 or 13, when I did under the table work for my friend’s dad’s trash hauling company. We’d clean the garbage trucks, and every truck had a big box of porn in the cabs, presumably the magazines found by the garbage men. Besides the raunchy/softcore Penthouse and Hustler, there was quite a lot of hardcore stuff, all of which was really seedy; people with greasy hair, bruises or with faces blacked out, and poor photography and printing. Of course, we still grabbed some for ourselves; I think this is where I got my preference for girl/girl stuff, because g/g pictorials were usually less seedy. Around the same time, “adult comics” started to become fairly common at comic book stores, so if we weren’t getting our kicks from the magazines, we could see badly drawn, yet graphic sex on our weekly jaunt to the comic shop.
First hardcore porn video was pretty much the week I turned 18 in 1992, when I made my first trip to an adult bookstore. Bought a single g/g video, some “award winner” which didn’t look as sleazy as the other stuff, and was really turned off by it. Turned out to be really sleazy stuff… broke me of wanting to try hardcore video again until 2000 or so, when I finally found stuff that I not only liked, but that my then-wife enjoyed as well.
