Thank you for posting this. This is a topic that I've long been fascinated by but never knew anything about. I'm way in the older end of the bell curve of age distribution of Hacker News readers, so I've personally experienced how pornography has evolved over the past thirty (or so) years, i.e., ever since I became curious about sex and turned on by naked women. And without a doubt the "hardness" and easy availability of pornography today is in a completely different universe to the sort of pornography I was consuming when I was thirteen years old. There's no escaping the fact that pornography must do _something_ to children's and teenagers' minds, in terms of expectations about sex, their own self-esteem, or whatever, and I've often wondered what these effects are.
Moreover, and moving on, now that I'm a new father with a two-year old daughter, I cannot even _look_ at pornography without feeling queasy. The full nastiness of the activities, production, what obviously goes on behind the scenes, etc, hits you in the guts and is truly sickening.
David Foster Wallace had some interesting thoughts on this. From my interpretation he came to the conclusion that you can't blame the pornographers. They're just responding to market demand and the market is demanding more and more deviant and salacious content.
His thoughts on why the market is demanding more demeaning content has to do with the social acceptance of pornography - or at least of porno of the time you're talking about. One of the big allures of pornography is that it is "naughty" and deviant. As it becomes accepted the quest to find content that is not socially OK pushes pornographers to create it. A market gets created. To the point we are an asymptote of snuff films more or less.
So that although groups that would traditionally balk at porn and forced what we'd consider even mild porn into the underground are annoying, they may be providing a service in social health in limiting progression into a darker and darker realm of pure humiliation films, faux rape films, etc.
The article was titled "Big Red Son". Worth reading.
Is there “no escaping” that conclusion? Maybe it’s wrong for the same reason that “violent movies make kids violent” theory was wrong: people know how to distinguish reality from fantasy/entertainment.
> people know how to distinguish reality from fantasy/entertainment
So you think 15-year-olds who never experienced sex know how to distinguish reality (sex with a real partner) from fantasy (porn). Where would they have the knowledge how real sex is from?
From talking to their friends, or older siblings, or parents about their experience. By watching non-pornographic films where sex scenes are more realistic. By reading online accounts from other teenagers or adults. By talking about it in sex ed class. By reading articles in the newspaper such as "What Teenagers Are learning from Online Porn".
Moreover, the 15-year-old doesn't need to know what real sex is like in order to suspect that porn is fantasy. "Snakes on a Plane" is not treated as a documentary by people who have never travelled on a plane.
I am on day 81 of a 90 day porn reset. It’s been hard at times but my real life sexual experiences seem greatly improved and I plan to continue abstinence from porn after the reset period ends. Seeing that I can modify behavior by setting attainable medium term goals has made me excited to tackle some other personal challenges too.
The site https://www.yourbrainonporn.com is what got me interested in trying to quit. Lots of good information there if you are interested.
I've tried quitting either for years, very much addicted. Or at least a very strong coping mechanism.
If you're anything like me, it's more or less impossible to quit one and have the other. Watching porn will eventually lead to masturbation and vice versa.
I've recently tried taking the half-measure of exclusively audio pornography (/r/gonewildaudio) - in an effort to see if I notice any changes in my perception of women or anything. Been on it exclusively for a few weeks now and I feel the same. If anything, I'm more tired since it takes much longer without the visual stimulation.
In the case of #1, you start to lose your association of fake or staged sex acts with real sex acts, and hopefully are able to re-educate yourself on what real sex is actually like.
In the case of #2, you deprive yourself of a completely natural pleasure.
I would put my bets behind quitting porn over stopping masturbation if the goal is to develop a healthy outlook on sex. I'd love to hear someone on the other side's thoughts though.
Why not both? Let your SO be the only one who pleases you on this level, physically, mentally and emotionally. Ignore those voices that try to tell you that you can't be happy without these old ways of pleasing yourself. Your relationship will improve 100x, I speak from experience.
Well sex kind of inherently requires an SO (however you choose to define "significant"), and porn inherently has to do with sex. Masturbation is trying to be your own SO, but sex inherently is a two-person job. I know these things are controversial these days, but they're pretty obvious and self-evident if you ignore recent ideologies and politics.
Ignoring your distasteful name for a moment; you have a very black-and-white view. 2 person job? Said who? 1 person sex, or 3 person sex, or more... Who says 2 is the only or even the best way?
The physical nature of human beings: a single penis fits into a single vagina, and that's how babies are made. It takes exactly two people for this to work. Sex can be done in other ways but this is the magic formula for sex to make a baby, and making babies seems to be the primary purpose of sex within nature. And my name isn't meant to be tasteful, it's meant to be honest. I committed the crime of public indecency and am a sex offender for life.
I think this is a very uninformed opinion. If what you said was true, there is no logical reason for why humans would have sex while they are already pregnant.
I won't even point out all the reasons your argument doesn't make sense, because it's clear you haven't thought about what it would mean if what you said was true. It just doesn't match up to real human behavior.
My mother is a retired police officer who sometimes worked on homicide investigations.
She once pointed out to me that the way police work is portrayed on TV series is very different from what police officers do when investigating a homicide. And with good reason: If TV showed an accurate version of how murders are solved (or often enough not), it would be really, really boring to watch. On the other hand a real-life murder investigation can be quite harrowing because somebody actually died by the hand of another person. That element is very hard to reproduce, which is why death is portrayed so banally in crime programs.
The relation between porn and real-life sexuality is strikingly similar, is it not?
Honestly, like all addictions, it starts having an impact when you start depending upon it for pleasure and substitute parts of your life with it. That tends to happen when your life in general is not working well, or you're caught in situations of chronic stress and unhappiness. So the real long term strategy here would be to elevate the general quality of our lives and our interrelationships with each other, which would make porn pretty much a mildly amusing curiosity at worst. But when endemic stress predominates in society, good luck trying to prevent people from falling into one addiction or another. It's like plugging a boat made of Swiss cheese.
Well, the article states that the claim advanced by one of its subjects that there is no such evidence is a fact.
There is, however, considerable evidence that compulsive pornography use and other compulsive sexual behaviors, at a minimum, have many addiction-like features, though there is considerable debate about both the criteria to consider non-substance-use compulsive behavior as addiction and how particular compulsions fit any proposed criteria. Portraying the state of the science as “no scientific evidence of pornography addiction” is both strictly false and substantively misleading.
Who says porn is not addicting? I want to watch porn every day even in normal sex life. I used to get excited by bootlegged black and white paper books. The it moved on to static images at the beginning of internet. Now with broadband I only watch clips. By the the clip is over I am over. You know what I mean.
The insistence of parents to control their children via censorship and other means, as well as view them as some perfect child is more harmful than any porn.
The fact that the article itself and comments to the article talk about kids learning about such things from other kids and websites instead of their parents is pretty much case and point.
There is no downside to talking to your kid about sexuality and other things at, say, 10. Common rebuttals to such an idea is usually centered around the false notion that if the parent doesn't speak of it, then the child will never know. This couldn't be any more false.
"Censorship" here is a big scary word for very basic common sense parenting: recognizing that kids of different ages, personalities, and emotional maturity are not ready to be exposed to some things.
I agree with your assessment that parents should talk to their kids more about difficult topics at all ages, in an age-appropriate way, of course.
But you can take this too far and end up with the idea that parents should be fine with their kids seeing any kind of sexual, violent, or other disturbing content no matter their age or maturity level.
> "Censorship" here is a big scary word for very basic common sense parenting: recognizing that kids of different ages, personalities, and emotional maturity are not ready to be exposed to some things.
Though there's the other common-sense side to this, which is recognizing that there are things your kid is going to be exposed to regardless of whether you think they're ready for it (in this case, hearing about sex from their agemates at school). At which point it becomes a choice between introducing it yourself and doing the best you can, or hoping it all works out when you're not involved.
But why is that too far to assume a child can be exposed to the same things as an adult, ask the same questions, etc? There's this concept that if a child is exposed to something too early it will corrupt their morality or sensibilities and I just don't see it.
I'm not a child psychologist or mental health professional, so I'm not sure what to tell you, except that it seems reasonable to me to think that just maybe exposing kids to certain types of materials before they have the experience, emotional maturity, etc, to process those things can be incredibly damaging. And I really doubt that trying to avoid my 3 year old daughter watching violent pornography is going to harm her, but yeah, I don't have the data. Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.
Well I'm not sure about corrupting their morality or sensibilities, but strong violence or scary movies can certainly affect a small child more than an adult. My son would have nightmares for days after seeing something too scary for him. Plus some things you can't explain properly to a small child because they don't have the capacity to understand at that point (ex: unusual types of sex acts).
> Fewer teenagers have early sex than in the past (in a recent study, 24 percent of American ninth graders had sex; in 1995 about 37 percent had), and arrests of teenagers for sexual assault are also down. But you don’t have to believe that porn leads to sexual assault or that it’s creating a generation of brutal men to wonder how it helps shape how teenagers talk and think about sex and, by extension, their ideas about masculinity, femininity, intimacy and power.
I am tired of seeing issues framed this way: "Despite the objective evidence, my ideology drives the view that it must be making men brutal and compromising women's power"
> For years, Gallop has been a one-woman laboratory witnessing how easy-to-access mainstream porn influences sex. Now in her 50s, she has spent more than a decade dating 20-something men. She finds them through “cougar” dating sites — where older women connect with younger men — and her main criterion is that they are “nice.” Even so, she told me, during sex with these significantly younger nice men, she repeatedly encounters porn memes: facials, “jackhammering” intercourse, more frequent requests for anal sex and men who seem less focused on female orgasms than men were when she was younger. Gallop takes it upon herself to “re-educate,” as she half-jokingly puts it, men raised on porn.
This article seems more like activism than inquiry to me. The foot feels heavily on the scale. I believe the topic deserves better than this.
>I am tired of seeing issues framed this way: "Despite all objective evidence, my ideology drives the view that it must be making men brutal and compromising women's power"
The paragraph you quoted is literally saying "although evidence suggests porn does not increase assault, no matter what you believe about it it helps shape the views of people who watch it on sex and gender" which is the most obvious, tepid, noncontroversial statement that is devoid of any framing at all. You are literally complaining about an example the author uses of an opinion she does not have. The primary complaint you should have about this paragraph is how contentless it is, not some weird claim about how the statement that media effects culture is somehow malicious framing.
>Seriously, NYTimes? This is activism, not inquiry. I'm disappointed.
Yes, how dare someone who writes about a topic have actual experience with it that informs their opinions. I think it's actually far worse to have a "detached, impartial observer" (which of course does not exist) writing about a topic on which they have zero relevant experience. Which is pretty much standard operating procedure with NYT. How many articles are there in NYT from media elites pretending they understand the poor? Countless. This article is a refreshing positive change.
In general intuition is a tool that can be used to help uncover things, but should not be used as a basis for a view by itself. You might be inclined to call the following the most "obvious, tepid, noncontroversial statement" "It's self evident that you shouldn't expose people with bacterial infections to something that comes from the blue green mold that emerges on rot." Of course as you might know, I actually just described penicillin. Our tendency to think our knee jerk intuition is something that can stand alongside data is undoubtedly a big part of what caused it to take years for penicillin to come to be accepted, even after the results were published and shared.
Oh I certainly agree. And in general, beware anyone who uses the phrase 'common sense' - it turns out it is often not so common, not so sensical, or both.
But the notion that media influences culture (for which there is overwhelming evidence not only scientific but in the form of every for-profit organization that has a marketing division, and which is even a truism - media IS culture) being stated in the New York Times in 2018 is like taking a paragraph in a Nature article to explain yes, the moon exists.
So the men you meet on a hookup site (and particularly, a hookup site for people you’re unlikely to choose to build a life with) are less romantic than the men you met organically?
Moreover, people with a very specific fetish. What she did is that she gathered some personal experiences with men who are into older women and compared it with what she remembers happening 30 years ago. This is actually more a study about her rather than online porn.
It's specifically saying that the evidence is that it doesn't do the things you mentioned but that one still might "wonder how it helps shape how teenagers talk and think." It doesn't seem to be the author whose ideology is driving their view here.
It’s a common reporter shtick. “Here is objective evidence that supports one view. Without disclosing that I have an agenda, I’m going to present completely anecdotal information to support a contrary view.”
Once you recognize the pattern, you see it in articles everywhere.
You're doing that HN thing where someone cherry-picks a couple of segments from the article, wraps them in a bit of leading commentary, and pastes it at the top of the comments for everyone who skipped reading the piece to attach their agreement to.
I didn't think it was possible to choose a position for a comment appear in. I do learn new easter eggs about HN from time to time like formatting. Most of my comments start in the middle or bottom from my questionable memory.
"You might think that {something} would cause {the outcome that fits my, and the audience's agenda/preconceptions}, but the data doesn't show that. However, it's reasonable to ask if there's something going on, right? Also, feel free to quote the first sentence in clickbaity titles and social media posts! If you repeat it enough times, it will actually become truth :)"
I agree with the general sentiment but honestly this is just the worst kind of article. It’s superficial and yet also felt emotionally exploitative
Sorry but I guess I’m annoyed because I spent a lot of time working through this specific topic recently and had to wrestle with very some interesting questions:
What is real and what is fake? Why did we create these fantasies and what draws us to them? How much of our culture is fantasy? What if the fake is more “real” than the real? What does that imply for the future? How does pornography hold up a mirror that reflects us? Why is America so scared of reality?
But instead all the article gives us is: porn kills intimacy and reinforces gender roles, plus some weird obsession with facials.
I think this is an important topic for teens to understand and be able to openly talk about with their parents or other trusting grownups.
As grownups, I think we start to ignore hoping that kids will be able to figure out on their own without realizing what lasting effect it will have on their future relationship
The impression I've gotten is actually that women's demand for rough sex (and "kink" more generally) outstrips the number of men that enjoy it. I don't know to what degree it's related to porn, but ... if you're worried that porn is making men too into choking for the real-world sexual climate, I don't think that's true.
I told my wife that our 3rd grader had most likely seen porn at school. It turns out I was right. She had several friends in the 5th grade, and about 90% of the fifth graders have smart phones.
My math was simple: if you give 10 twelve-year-olds unfettered internet access, at least one of them will find porn, and that one will show it to their friends. If any of them have an older sibling, the odds just go up.
This is a great reason to avoid giving smartphones to kids, and a big reason we haven't. It's important for them to not have to deal with things they aren't mentally, physically, or emotionally ready for yet. They need to be kids right now.
> The clips tend to be short, low on production value, free and, though Pornhub
True as opened with “tend to be” but such a poor description of Pornhub in an article meant to help parents understand pornography. For example, the company behind Pornhub owns many production companies and paid sites. High production value clips promote those sites as do does the advertising.
My oldest son recently developed a porn habit in secret, and the things we saw in his search history showed a clear progression from googling "boobs" and "nudity" to "pissing" and "bondage".
Pornography isn't even close to what it was 30 years ago when you for the most part only saw it in nudie mags that your dad had (or friend had who stole it from his dad). Today, kids have easy access to a wealth of horrifying and bastardized hard-core pornography.
But not only that, the ads and search results and images that show up for the more innocent things will lead them to the more awful things, because they're just readily visible and accessible right there.
To be honest the only solution we have found is twofold: to change our wifi password to disable internet on all devices (he was sneaking his Nintendo 3DS into the bathroom for 2 months to look at porn on it) and to proactively start teaching them that life is more than a constant quest for more and more intense pleasure, and that if you allow yourself to give into that base mentality, you are throwing away a good portion of your future that could be filled with meaningful real relationships and legitimately joyful times, in exchange for maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain until you die.
I'm sure it's a difficult position as a parent, although I have no experience in that department.
That said, have you wondered why you find those things "horrifying"? I might be a bit concerned if it was rape porn, but besides that I am unconvinced that there'such harm to come from children seeing porn, either at an individual or social level.
As I've noted before, if a child is looking at porn, that means they have a desire for it, which I think is difficult for parents to come to terms with. I certainly wouldn't want porn foisted on children, but if they are seeking it out through their own volition, there really isn't much you can do about it; a parent's treatment of a child viewing porn probably has more potential for a negative outcome than the porn itself since it is ultimately blaming human beings for their innate instinct. As if there is something wrong with naked adults having consentual sex, or practicing paraphilias.
I discovered porn when I was 10 through AltaVista image search. Just type in a female name and presto! By this time, there wasn't a whole lot my parents could do because I was going to look at porn one way or another. As with violent video games, parents have no governance over what their kids have access to at their friends' houses. In that case, establishing trust with your children will go a lot further than making them fear something that they innately understand to be practically harmless.
By the way, parents could actually talk to their kids about sex and, yes, even porn. If you're a good parent, your words will likely have an impact even if your kids continue to get their hands on porn.
You watch an action movie because it's exciting, it's thrilling, and things explode. Basically, everything is carefully managed or faked to give you the feeling that everything is amazingly awesome.
Porn is just like an action movie, only it's about sex instead of guns and martial arts. It's fun, but it usually has very little to do with real sex.
This should be more prevalent too. The difference between children and adults is typically that children can process what's happening just as well as adults. They can't process the why behind it, though, so they take it at face value. That's where parents and, in general, adults have to come in and help them explain or find the resources that explain what's going on. Without that, you end up with sheltered children that have to come up with their own reasons for why things exist and are the way they are. When that happens with fictional/sensationalized materials, they become the norm for them.
> Porn is just like an action movie, only it's about sex instead of guns and martial arts. It's fun, but it usually has very little to do with real sex.
Except in action movies, people don't take real ideas back to the bedroom and end up wanting to act them out. Porn modifies brain chemistry[0] to alter how we think about sex. Porn is a common thread in serial murderers[1].
In my own life, I've had to reprogram myself to get away from ideas that haunted me for 10+ years that hurt myself and others.
People do definitely take real ideas from martial arts movies and try to act them out (although not necessarily in the bedroom). Action movies probably also modify brain chemistry if you watch them excessively, since almost everything does.
And your second link? "Do serial killers or murderers exhibit common behaviors? Based on the hundreds of crime dramas I've watched, I believe they do." Seriously?
Citing NetNanny on this is pretty silly. Serial killers existed long before pornography was around, and I suspect you're getting correlation and causation mixed up there. Your average porn consumer manages not to cut heads off.
Pornography goes back to at least Greek times, and probably is roughly contemporaneous with the invention of art.
There have been, perhaps, a few hundred serial killers? Even if all of them had seen porn, that's a few billion people who saw porn, enjoyed it, and then didn't kill anyone else.
Pornography always leads people down this path where they ignore all the things that don't support demonizing it. I can't think of many things besides drugs and music that get a similar armchair evaluation from people who are always insistent they have the moral high ground. My family was never the type to stray from talking about sex (very European sensibility about it) so it was always "You're going to see porn. If any of it confuses you, ask me about it." Why can't most people be like that? It's always gotta be "Porn, movies, and video games create serial killers" while completely ignoring that there are literally millions of people that enjoy all those things and continue to be just fine, productive and mentally healthy members of society.
You also assume that people lead relatively normal lives with porn, but what about the subtle effects?
Don't you think that the objectification of women as sexual objects or the demeaning of marriage to something that gets in the way of people's sexual pleasure has any sort of effect in a civilized society?
If I was a kid who's parents were actively monitoring my search activity, cutting off my access to the internet as a whole because of porn, and were trying to equate me watching porn because I'm going through puberty (presumably) with throwing away meaningful relationships in my future. . .what that teaches me is to never, ever go to my parents for any problems I have remotely related to sex, because their draconian. And that's bad. If I'm not going to my parents with those, who am I going to?
There's merit to what you're saying, yes, there's an unhealthy push for hardcore stuff in the modern porn landscape. Yes, in excess it's bad (as is everything else, by definition, but this more than many other things). But mostly I just feel bad for your kid. I get if he's like 13 or whatever you don't want him immersing himself in violent rape porn, but I feel like there's better ways to solve that than "no internet for you, and internet you do have is Being Watched".
Also unimportant, but does anyone develop a porn habit not in secret?
We've never let them have free reign to screens, whether computer or TV or phone, because there's a whole host of other problems that come from that. So it's not like we're taking internet away from them and that they're used to it. We've been teaching each one, the other they get, how to use computers and the internet responsibly, and we've always supervised to make sure they're not accidentally running into something. But a search for some Magic the Gathering cards on eBay is what started this, when he accidentally saw an image of a nude woman in the results, and decided to google it behind our backs on the family computer (while my wife and the younger were in the same room!) and since he broke that level of trust with us, and showed a complete lack of understanding of the gravity of his actions, we had to take stronger measures against this disease in his mind that led him to put his younger siblings in danger of seeing something far more confusing and graphic than they're ready to at their ages.
Thank you for explaining further, that helps narrow down the situation.
"we had to take stronger measures against this disease in his mind that led him to put his younger siblings in danger of seeing something far more confusing and graphic than they're ready to at their ages."
This is what leaves me unconvinced (and I don't have expectation of changing your mind either - you operate with the most information here so that's probably a good thing). Certainly, what he did was inappropriate, but. . .a boy in puberty looking for porn on the internet is not a "disease". Even offensive porn. There's not something wrong with your boy. He did a bad thing (or a few bad things). He's a teen. Doesn't mean he should be let off the hook, but. . .diseased? Nah.
It does sound like you're having some conversations about this (and importantly, providing the idea that there's something better out there), though, so that's good.
Haha! I mean, fair. Obviously OP has the most information, so ultimately is probably best placed to make appropriate choices. I don't dispute that.
Childless millennial software developers (or otherwise generally technical) are in a better position to understand puberty in the modern internet driven landscape than someone who went through it 30 years ago, though. That's a relevant perspective here. . .no? The whole idea is to provide alternative perspectives, so that we can have the most information and thus (in theory) make the best choices, right?
> Childless millennial software developers (or otherwise generally technical) are in a better position to understand puberty in the modern internet driven landscape than someone who went through it 30 years ago, though. That's a relevant perspective here. . .no?
I'm a millennial software developer who went through this exact thing 15 years ago. So we're in the same boat, the only difference being I have kids. And poker is a whole different game when you're not playing for keeps.
That's a good question, and I'm not sure. I think the. . .popular mentality is that you model proper behavior/approaches, but I don't think that really works here as well. The idea is that you have someone wiser than you who you can compare experiences with, and they can help guide you away from damaging choices - e.g. violent rape porn is probably a bad choice because X, Y, and Z. But I don't know what to generically recommend for reaching that place.
Play a little good cop / bad cop: you know mom is sensitive to stuff like that, but guys can have a little fun. And it's better when you don't have to see the naked dude.
Maybe in a week reinforce healthy arousal: this one's my favorite, look at this curve.
Talk about how you'll "know what to do" when the time comes, but it's important to work on just noticing details, women like that, and to be in control of your emotions and the situation.
Does it? These kids are going into a world saturated by the Internet. Does it make sense to disallow Internet access and prevent them from participating in culture, education, entertainment, and pretty much everything else in life while their peers are getting ahead and they're left behind? This is one way to prepare kids for almost certain failure in our increasingly technology-based society.
Neither of us have any data here, but I really doubt this is true. I suspect that any deficiency in technical skills at, say, age 12, can quickly be overcome. But the downsides in terms of problems with social, emotional, and behavioral development from being exposed to technology 24/7 from a young age seems like it might be much more difficult to overcome.
My position is that moderate and supervised technology use from a young age probably is the best path, but if the choice was between two extremes of “unrestricted access from 0-10 years old” and “no access from 0-10”, I think the latter is the choice that I’d make. I highly doubt my kids would be at a long-term disadvantage.
All of this stuff is accessible in real life, and in a fuller way. I don't think missing out on 1000s of hours of Instagram consumption is a particular disadvantage, especially if those 1000s of hours were spent actually hanging out with friends or playing sports etc.
Why do you think you need to prevent your son from watching porn, especially to the point that you need to completely remove his access to the Internet?
Once he started doing it, everything in his life declined. He stopped having healthy relationships with his siblings and his friends at school. He started to be much more angry and even sometimes violent, and when we examine the situations in detail, we see that none of it is justified, and he's always the one saying everyone is out to get him when he is actually the one doing wrong. He's become a lot more arrogant and a lot more reserved at school and obnoxious at home. His grades at school declined sharply. He's developing a narcissistic personality, and won't participate in things that he doesn't personally see any value or benefit in, even when everyone around him tries to convince him it's a good or worthwhile activity. Overall he's declining in mental and emotional health.
First, how are you sure it's correlation and not causation? Perhaps he's being driven to porn/developing the habit as self-medication?
Also, as to your previous point that it will lead to "harder" stuff, a recent study says no. Yes, there will be more opportunity and exploration of the topic, but that's something that will happen eventually to all individuals. It isn't studied very well, but at least this initial one says we don't naturally become more tolerant and require "harder" pornography over time.
https://www.lehmiller.com/blog/2018/2/5/can-you-build-up-a-t...
There is more to it, and it's hard to pinpoint cause and effect. He did have issues that existed before the pornography habit. But they worsened significantly since the month he started looking at pornography regularly. I do believe that his pornography habit has lowered his mental and emotional intelligence by a noticeable factor. I also look back at when I was his same age, and see my own struggles as very similar to his. So I could be mistaken with some of the internal presumptions I've made about him, but the external ones match up almost exactly.
OK, fair enough. Hope you guys figure out an appropriate intervention plan then. Is going to a therapist on the table? Sounds like there's something deeper going on and just cutting off the porn doesn't usually solve it in my experience.
Is he anywhere between 13 and 17? Because that behavior sounds like about 60% of boys between those ages. Testosterone makes people quick to anger, often unjustifiably, and until they learn to control it they aren't fun to be around.
Teenagers are also famously self-absorbed, and this age is also marked with a shift from reliance on parents for guidance to outside sources like peers.
This was all the case before the internet, before video, before printed media. Porn isn't the cause.
This is probably honestly just be puberty, and porn may actually be a release that helps with this stage in his life and all of the unseen anxieties he has right now.
There may be a correlation but you really have no idea what the cause is. You shouldn't assume it's this one thing. It may prevent you from being able to offer more meaningful help.
It's possible you're mixing up cause and effect here.
The hormonal changes that tend to cause kids to become interested in porn can cause those other elements as well. It's not unusual for even a teenager with no interest in porn to be quick to anger, feel persecuted, be arrogant, etc.
"Won't participate in things that he doesn't personally see any value or benefit in" probably describes 98% of high school students.
plenty of recent studies show that pornography use is manifestly harmful to our brains, especially developing brains. Cursory searching yielded these articles, but there are many studies to be found.
I wouldn't say it's necessarily the thing to do, but there is a chance that it forms an addiction and/or bad habits which life might be more enjoyable without. I don't prescribe to the "porn is evil" mantra, but that doesn't mean it can't do harm.
There are whole comminutes of people who are trying to recover from porn addiction because of the way it had negatively affected their lives. See /r/nofap and yourbrainonporn.com.
If you've never been negatively affected by it, good for you. I can see why you be skeptical that it could do harm to anyone. Most people rely on their own anecdotal experience to form their opinions. But keep an open mind, not everyone responds the same way to these things.
I don't blame parents for trying to look out for their children. They just need to make sure they're doing it in a sane, reasonable way.
Most of the time, I see the puritanical christians going the route of "sex is evil". It's the unsaid thing as well, but they are also the ones pushing for "abstinence-only training". This is literally dumbing down discourse to students at an age who sorely needs it.
I'd also be willing to bet that this family has no compunctions about letting the son watch extreme violent TV shows and movies. People being tortured, maimed, and killed is usually OK. Show a nipple, and people lose their shit.
EDIT: In the end, this article is flagged for what amounts to Christian Moralization vs Non-Christian Moralization. I need only read "traditional morality", "psalms chaper#:verse# one of", or citing netnanny as an authoritative source to understand what the real problem is here.
This is what would be classified as a straight up religious conflict, and "teenagers, online porn, sexuality" are one of the major battlegrounds in this culture war.
The puritanical attitude is wrong. Sex is an amazing and great part of life, just like roller coasters or having 3 beers. Life is meant to be enjoyed. But over-doing it, or using something in a way it wasn't meant to be used, can ruin that joy. Nothing is wrong with sex within a healthy relationship. But nobody who goes to a hooker really believes afterwards that they found true happiness there.
We also avoid movies like Saw not only for our older children but even ourselves. Why fill out bellies with filthy water when there's plenty of fresh water all around us, free for the taking? Only people who convince themselves that there's no fresh water, or that it's not good enough for their belly, will look for filthy polluted water and convince themselves it's their only hope.
> But nobody who goes to a hooker really believes afterwards that they found true happiness there.
There are a lot of assumptions rolled up in that sentence.
Rather than try and unpack them all here myself, I'd encourage you to talk to actual sex workers. Not people who engage the services of sex workers, but the people actually doing the sex work themselves. Ask them about the work they do, why they do it, what their customers are looking for, and what role they think they're playing in their customers' lives.
I think you'd be surprised by some of what you hear.
A few months ago one posted here on HN, explaining how most of her clients were men who threw away their actual families to chase after fast-paced careers (like start-ups), and often wanted to just talk and have her role-play being a wife (including sex). I have no idea how many people here on HN fall into that category, but her clients didn't sound like they were finding that fulfillment in her services that they seem to ultimately be seeking after in life.
> The puritanical attitude is wrong. Sex is an amazing and great part of life, just like roller coasters or having 3 beers. Life is meant to be enjoyed. But over-doing it, or using something in a way it wasn't meant to be used, can ruin that joy. Nothing is wrong with sex within a healthy relationship. But nobody who goes to a hooker really believes afterwards that they found true happiness there.
But that's what I'm taking about. There's no (supernatural, physical, legal) law that states for everything fun and good, I have to suffer equal amounts. That's just moralization in the puritanical strain, which I reject.
And I would also like to call out the sentence: " Nothing is wrong with sex within a healthy relationship."
Nothing is wrong with consensual sex, period. I needen't be in a marriage or relationship with them. I don't care if it's vanilla, scat, bdsm, cuckolding, or whatever. We have more than enough science and technology that people can have sex with little fear. It's only when governments want to inflict their "morals" on people do people really start to hurt. They do this by keeping drugs, devices, and techniques away. Thankfully, The Satanic Temple has been challenging these "moral precepts" as the religious laws enshrined into to state laws. (Seriously, who'd have thought that TST would fight for peoples' rights?!)
And I also have no issue with prostitutes. I've never procured the services of any, but I see no shame in doing so either. It's no more a temporary feel-good similar to that of a roller coaster or a concert. It's just "bad" because of the puritanical beliefs that all sex is bad, outside a marriage (later turned to relationship).
And regarding SAW, the show was meh. It's a slasher for slasher's sake.
Is that entirely true? If I say "nothing is wrong with eating Big Macs, period" that's right in one sense. But you and I can see with our own eyes what an unrestrained diet of Big Macs might do, and it's bad, if not legally wrong.
You might say the problem with unrestrained eating is the desire or relationship with food, not the object (the Big Mac), but in that case traditional morality is also saying something about the focus of 'healthy' desire, not the sex act.
Even if you strip away the "wrong," the way people incorporate sex into their relationships and ethics will make lives better or worse.
the puritanical value is 'sex should be enjoyed in marriage, monogamously'
pornography is harmful to our brains, many studies have shown this.
plenty of studies also show that people who have fewer sexual partners are ultimately happier in their sex life.
and it doesnt take much thought to see that STDs would spread much more slowly if people were monogamous.
lots of good things come from that value. on the inverse, the 'have sex as much as you want' mentality leads to unplanned pregnancies/killing unborn babies, devaluation of the gift of sex, and spread of disease. but hey, you get to have 'lots of fun' so is it worth it?
sex and money are the greatest idols in our society, and the worship of either does not yield good things.
What teenagers are learning from online porn is simply that the behavior of "shutting myself alone in my room with a computer" leads to (simulated) sexual satisfaction. This is in contrast to every generation before them which learned that the behavior of "being sociable / gaining status in society" leads to (non-simulated) sexual satisfaction. So a million young people learning to shut themselves away from the outside world, I wonder how that's going to work out for the West? I say West, because China bans porn.
The availability and ease for this type of content is scary especially when children are more connected than ever. Pornography kills love (Edit: https://fightthenewdrug.org/how-porn-kills-love/). Love is extremely important for human beings and civilizations. It drives art, philosophy, faith, religion, etc. It is love that produced great works throughout history.
I read some where there was going to be a TLD for porn (.xxx I think). I wish they did that and all the porn content was only on that TLD. Then browsers can easily block all porn for underage viewers. I know I would do that for my children until they are adults and I believe they can make their own decisions. There is a level of maturity and education one needs before exposed to this type of content.
Personally I find it repulsive and I try my best to avoid it as best as possible. Sadly it creeps into TV shows and movies nowadays.
> I read some where there was going to be a TLD for porn (.xxx I think).
There were ideas about that for years, maybe even in the late 1990s, and eventually about 5-10 years ago it was set up.
Ironically, many in the "porn industry" were strongly against it; I think more to do with the company running it, though, than the idea of being confined to an online ghetto.
Most porn still remains on .com or on country TLDs and few people have probably even heard of .xxx, let alone visited a .xxx site. Now there are hundreds of new general TLDs, several more are porn related (.sexy, .porn) that basically nobody uses.
> Sadly it creeps into TV shows and movies nowadays.
I'm not a fan of depictions of simulated sex on TV/movies, since it's often for shock/viewing figures and/or holds up the plot, but I think irresponsible gun usage, torture/violence and military propaganda, which occur far more often than sexual content in TV and movies, are much worse for kids in particular to be exposed to.
I would actually prefer a world where the TLD in a domain name had actual semantical value, but except .gov, .edu and a couple others that opportunity is lost.
how does calling it a drug make it bad? people take drugs all the damn time. i'm drinking a stimulant that my work bought for me right now! almost everyone at the office drinks one or more a day.
i actually used to live down the street from one of the "fight the new drug" offices in SLC. the problem in Utah, imo, is the seriously weak sex ed that they provide in schools here and the shit cultural attitudes towards sex.
the problem isn't porn, the problem is that parents are allowing porn to replace them as educators in this space. obviously that's going to lead to fucked up attitudes unless the young person happens upon some of the more healthy sexy spots on the internet.
if you want censorship, go ahead, but nobody has to make it easy for you. education is going to do a lot more for you tho. my parents tried to censor my access to porn when i was a teenager so i made an isolinux disk (ubuntu + tor) and used it to avoid their keylogging and filtering software.
i was/am mostly into erotic literature and sex positive forums vs other types of pornographic content, but that isn't thanks to my parents. i value intimacy, but finding sexual online places that share my values is difficult. i suppose the economics don't work out for that type of content. i know people who have had issues with porn interfering with their ability to be intimate, but it has never been a problem for me personally.
TL;DR don't be a fucking baby and talk to your kids about sex and physical intimacy. you can't "protect" anyone from pornography, but you can influence your children's attitudes towards these important topics.
You bring up a good point regarding education. No matter how much censorship there is, education is better. The way we educate young people about alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, etc. should be similar to the way we educate people on pornography.
> I wish they did that and all the porn content was only on that TLD. Then browsers can easily block all porn for underage viewers.
This is about as practical as the evil bit[1].
> I know I would do that for my children until they are adults and I believe they can make their own decisions.
"and"?
This implies that you want to control the media consumption of your adult children if you don't believe that they "can make their own decisions." Is that what you intended to say?
Love is the wanting good for another person even if it costs you personally. Porn teaches you to want pleasure for yourself, even if it costs someone else. That's not love, that's lust.
The chemicals released in your body and especially brain during orgasm build a closer connection and bond within you to the concepts and people you focused on during it. Pornography trains you to be selfish. Whereas having sex and both orgasming at the same time, focuses your mind on making your partner happy and that mutual self-giving becomes what you crave. Because it's based on love, that same mutual self-giving carries over into the rest of your life, and you find more happiness in giving gifts than receiving them, in doing more chores so they don't have to, etc. That's love.
One might argue that the good sense of joy followed by love is evidence that when one loves someone, one is acting selfish [0], even though he/she might think otherwise.
[0]: People are rational and they wouldn't do things that don't result in more benefit to them than their cost.
Ah, but people do occasionally do seemingly-altruistic things, and by long experience, some of those are worth encouraging.
"Love" in English wears too many hats. C.S. Lewis' Four Loves does a good job explaining how the highest and best use of eros (which can be selfish) is to encourage agape (selfless love).
"The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love."
I made that same exact argument in college to someone who was just trying to help me see how insane I was. Yes, it's slightly self-serving to love and find joy in love. But of all the forms of selfishness in existence, it's the most acceptable and least blamable one.
I'm not sure that not having porn avoids wanting pleasure for yourself. Isn't that what leads to rape, cheating and various other destructive behaviors?
Conversely, consuming porn, even when it substitutes sex with a romantic partner, doesn't preclude having a loving relationship. As you point out, lust and love are different things. Although they are closely linked for most people, that is not the case e.g. for asexuals.
Unless you don't derive your entire life outlook from it. Plus, there is plenty pornography where both orgasm - if anything the porn actresses' seem unrealistically happy.
Most of this resonates. Just as the article points out, porn is one of the most accessible ways of getting mostly servicable, if greatly skewed sex education, in the sense of being able to consume it from the privacy of your own home, away from adults and peers, and be exposed to a variety of actual situations that depict sex acts. This makes abstract lessons about condoms and bananas -- but maybe not periods and pregnancy -- more concrete, especially as you're at the age when you're trying to figure out what you want emotionally. And that's even if you got a school lesson about condoms and bananas at all.
As for just how skewed porn is, and how much it influences tastes and posturing of its impressionable consumers, is something worthy of more study. While one must be careful to suggest that adult human societies are still shaped by primitive patterns descendant from ancient, hypercompetitive eras lest we erase many years of social progress, societies of adolescents -- especially captive environments like school, camp, and social networks -- show less nuance, and more base urges that are products of either nature or nurture.
Notably, school is a captive social environment in which social competition can develop, and the proliferation of social networks extends this captive environment outside of school hours and into the middle of the night. The youth experience largely consists of top-down busywork about school-selected abstract topics vaguely about adult life, while being exposed to a shifting social landscape in which real events happen with real impact on their immediate surroundings. Sex is one such event, and everyone's still figuring things out.
When you're not actually sure what you want, because lots of things appeal in theory, but you're not sure if that appeal will translate into practice, a confident partner is compelling in ways that go beyond their gratifying presence in porn. They can be your guide and encourage you to engage in the things you want to do, while easing around the ones you don't. Older, attractive, sociable people, who often have more sexual experience (by virtue of their attributes) can project this confidence and match younger partners, despite in many places laws against the contrary. If the relationship remains mutually beneficial, the resulting experiences will allow the bottom partner to gain confidence of their own to apply with future partners, and enables them to explore their preferences.
Meanwhile, adolescents seeking close-in-age partners are faced with a conundrum: project confidence, or admit that they're unsure? The latter, for many, is untenable. A tactic that has developed to project carefree nonchalance instead, to mask deeper conflicts with plausible deniability and a dose of youth-transcending nihilism. This has made "chill" a socially acceptable byword for winging it. This is the territory of mindgames, of unspoken consent (or lack thereof), and a lowkey desire to impress the other -- behaviors that many will retain into adulthood and create more problems then.
It's imperfect choices all around: either have real experience from prior encounters to project confidence, lean on porn and hearsay muster up artificial know-how, engage in a vague slow-motion game where one effectively becomes a recipient to a series of events and one-thing-led-to-anothers, or admit all of this is making your head swirl but watch as the person you like makes headway with someone who was sure a few weeks later?
It always boils down to information and communication. Porn is information where alternatives are not nearly as illustrative, and it enables a vocabulary of communication in a world where talk with adults is a both-ways taboo, talk with peers is a social risk, so most communication isn't verbal. Porn enables vernacular literacy in these matters, while other instruments don't. Of course, it's produced for a different audience, but porn and other artifacts of intimacy produced for (and by) a more relatable audience is illegal, so it's the next best thing.
Why is it so common to see people draw parallels from porn to behavior, but then not do the same for other form of video. It was only ~20 years ago that video nasty was a major concern and people thought that TV and film was a major caused for crime and violence, only to be categorized later as mostly pseudo science and moral hysteria.
If porn teaches kids about masculinity and femininity, should we not claim the same thing about romantic drama or comedies? What make porn so special that teenagers can't determine what is real or false, but a romantic drama where every character has exaggerated gender behavior and roles is perfectly clear that it is fake and where naturally no teenager will be effected?
Moreover, and moving on, now that I'm a new father with a two-year old daughter, I cannot even _look_ at pornography without feeling queasy. The full nastiness of the activities, production, what obviously goes on behind the scenes, etc, hits you in the guts and is truly sickening.