Like some others have said, I don’t think a teenage boy reading a Playboy is going to necessarily make judgements about women’s appearances in real life. Frankly, when I was at the age that porn was starting to get interesting, boobs were boobs, it didn’t matter if they were small, or lopsided, flapjacks, or something that looked like it was from a National Geographic magazine. All of them were interesting.
I think I would do the same thing as my dad. Hide them, but not explicitly forbid them.
FWIW, I’ve seen most of the rather disgusting Internet fare and a good bit of the cleaner Playboy fare and to this day I can appreciate the average female naked body with the rest of 'em, lemme tell ya!
A question to parents of teenagers, or posters who were recently teenagers :
Is the OP question even relevant in this internet age? Aren’t hidden stashes a thing of the past, when everything you can think of (and much more) is available at a click of a mouse?
I was privileged enough to be pubescent during the time of speedy 56k connections. While there is a ton of pornography available at the click of a mouse, most of my friends and I, used magazines to improve our searching abilities. It was kind of like using a card catalog at the library. We would flip through the magazines, say “Oooh, I like that one. I am going to go look up…busty…blonde…brunette or something or other”
Besides, we did not have an Internet connection in our fort so our hidden stash of magazines was considerably more practical.
I was a teenager very recently. Although my peers didn’t necessarily have the equivalent Internet access when I was very little, my parents worked with computers before most people knew what they were, and we had Internet access before I was old enough to understand what it was. I could just as easily download Internet porn when I became interested in it–and believe me, download Internet porn I did!–but it was still a rush to rifle through my parents’ secret stash. My dad knew (I know this for a fact), and he didn’t like it much, but they didn’t do much about it. I knew far more details about their not-quite-ordinary sexual life than I want to, anyway, and I’m pretty sure he was aware of that, so there’s not much he could say.
Well, I don’t think I would just up and out of the blue ask my kid one day if he wanted some Playboys. That might be a bit creepy.
But if he asked, or we talked about it and he hinted at some kind of desire - I wouldn’t mind getting them for him. (The OP mentions something about it being different for a daughter? Has this ever happened? :))
Early 20s, so I was in teenagerhood throughout the advent of the home interweb:
Yeah, you can find porn online, easily and you can have a great time too. But back when we first had the internet (which was about the time I first started wanting to look at porn) we had one computer, it was in the lounge room (firstly because that’s where the only phone point was, outside of the kitchen and then that’s where the cable was run later). Unless I did my pr0n surfing when everyone was asleep, which meant waiting until after midnight some nights, or when everyone was out of the house, it was easier to have a stash of magazines in my bedroom which nobody went into anyway.
Nowadays it’s different, with most houses having multiple computers and networking them all to the internet anyway, so having your own computer porn is much easier. But there’s still something awesome about having your magazines hidden where nobody else can find them…
Just had to come in here and make this point, which I really can’t fathom that noone has brought up. In some states (I haven’t researched every state law on this, no), supplying your minor children with sexually explicit material will subject you to an investigation by child services. I can personally attest that I, as a guardian ad litem, have worked on more than one case involving this situation.
Now, if this were an isolated incident without any other inappropriate behavior, maybe they wouldn’t do anything. But still, IMO and the opinion of many others I know who do social work, it’s not an appropriate thing to do.
Speaking as a mother, I expect my sons to one day (maybe already) have a secret stash of magazines. I wouldn’t go looking for them, but if I found them, it would depend on what type of material it was. Playboy- okay, they can handle that. Double-Penetration Gang Bang Babes (or whatever, I’m not up on the titles of them)… we’d certainly be having a talk, and possibly seeking outside counsel. There’s no way they will be mature enough to handle something like that until they’re well out of my house. But you would never catch me actually supplying them with anything remotely erotic.
One of the big advantages, at least for me, of having and buying physical porn mags was that you could enjoy them whenever you wanted.
As others have said, the PC was either located in Dad’s home office, or (when we moved) in an area that could be seen from the lounge (because that’s where the phone jack was). My parents were (and are) night owls, so the oppurtunities for looking at Teh Intarweb Pr0n were generally limited to “When everyone was out of the house”, and the odds of both my parents AND my brother being out at any given time were fairly low.
Magazines, on the other hand, I could enjoy in the privacy of my bedroom- under the guise of “Studying” or “Homework”, if needed.
The other thing to bear in mind was that you knew what you were getting with a magazine- if the cover showed a hot blonde in thigh high boots waving her ass at you, you could bet that there’d be plenty of similar pics inside. Internet porn, at least back in the late '90s, was a fairly hit-and-miss affair… you didn’t always know if you were going to get hot lesbians having a dildo-fest, or some totally non-porn picture, or something really twisted and far out there.
Sure, sometimes the magazine shoots would be dull, but often there would be some real gems that had a much better aesthetic appeal about them than images captured with a digital camera in a motel room somewhere.
The irony is that, since I had a TV and VCR in my room after I was 16 (the fruits of an after school job!) I found Porno VHS (and later DVDs) to be MUCH better than anything I could ever hope to get off the Internet, and that was true until we recently got Broadband Internet at our flat. It just takes too long to download a movie clip on a 56k connection, whereas with a DVD/Video you can go to an Adult Store, peruse their selection, and make an educated choice- as opposed to hoping that “Jenna Jameson-Aria Giovanni Strapon Film- Awesome!” is what it says it is, and not an episode of “Will & Grace” or whatever. :eek:
Of course, now I live out of home, I can enjoy Internet Porn AND DVDs in my home office whenever I please, but the thing is that since I have a wonderful fiancee, it’s a supplement to our relationship, not a replacement for it- which I think is another way of saying that “Looking at nudie mags when I was a kid didn’t warp my fragile little mind, and it’s not likely to warp any other normal teenager’s, unless they’ve got other problems already.”
As long as your kids understand Porn isn’t real (just like Roadrunner & Coyote Cartoons aren’t real, either), and there’s a time and place for everything, I’d say having a stash of Playboys is a valuable life step, and also teaches them discretion and respecting other people’s boundaries (ie, don’t leave that issue of Penthouse Lesbian Lingerie Fest lying around where Mum can find it, or else!).
Well, again, like I said, porn sites are usually the ones that infect your computer with spyware and trojans. That’s what I’d be most upset about. That and that they usually launch a million pop ups and clog up your history.
To me, bottom line, this is an issue of boundaries between parent and child. If I were to reproduce (and God help me if I do) I would be perfectly aware that teenage boys seek out porn with the verve of Ponce de Leon seeking the fountain of youth. And some teenage girls do too. Which means it wouldn’t bother me to know they were - but at the same time, supplying it to them is violating the boundaries that should separate parent and child. A teenager’s sex life is separate from that of their parents (hopefully) and that’s one of the main ways they become separate human beings. It strikes me as deeply intrusive to get too deeply involved in the child’s sex life. Answer questions, supply sex ed books, and the like - but it doesn’t seem like a good idea at all to get personally involved by supplying the porn. I wouldn’t search for their hidden caches of it, either - it’s their business if teenagers want to keep porn around. Their business being the operative word - they’re separate human beings, and me getting involved in their sex lives can’t be a good thing. It’s about maintaining healthy boundaries between different people.
I don’t necessarily worry that my teenage child would take the appearance of Playboy centerfolds to be some sort of beauty standard.
My problem is what they might come to believe was a behavior standard.
There is an entire sub-section of the economy devoted to emptying the wallets of men who apparently have aneed to believe that there is world full of women who desperately want to fuck them endlessly no matter how unclean or obese they allow themselves to become, how obnoxiously they behave, or otherwise how repulsively they choose to conduct themselves. It seems some men never get over the disillusion they face in the real world and will pay through the nose for ridiculous fantasy.
I will not condone a member of my family contributing to the continuance of this pathetic myth.
MrSin and I had a subscription to Playboy before our little Sinkids were born. For what it’s worth I really liked the interviews :). We never hid them from the kidlets. Sinkid #1 was three when his little sis was born. He was flipping thru a Playboy shortly after Sinkid #2 arrived. He got to the centerfold, pointed at it, and said MOMMY!!!
Made this out of shape, just past pregnant Mommy feel pretty good.
Neither Sinkid has grown up to be a pervert or ax murderer.
