Multiple countries are trying to force porn sites to have an efficient age verification. With frightening numbers like half of 12 year old boys go monthly to porn sites.
Sure for an adult who remember the time where at best one kid would have brought a magazine to school, it feels concerning. However, it’s been easily 20 years that every household has high speed internet which is full of porn. So the kids under 30 (let’s call them Gen-Z) had a massive access to porn while growing up.
Is there any “sociologicial” studies about how it impacted these young adults ? Are they sexually more fucked-up than the millennials ?
Idk man I’m too mucy of a whimp
Early access to porn is nowhere near a new thing. As a millennial, I was exposed to sexual content at a very young age thanks to the internet being largely unregulated. I turned out fine. GenZ and Gen Alpha will be fine too.
Access to porn when a person is at a stage of development where they’re exploring sexuality on their own anyway is not a problem. That age varies for each person because puberty varies for each person. And because some people are more or less interested in sex than others naturally.
Making adolescents fend for themselves with no education or support and shaming them for the physical changes and impulses that all humans go through and have always gone through forever when they reach puberty is a problem.
Porn has always existed and will always exist. Adolescents masturbate themselves and fuck each other, always have, and always will. The only choice we have in the matter is whether we choose teach them to be safe, responsible, and respectful with their and others’ sexuality or we choose to abuse them by instilling fear, guilt, and aggression into them about sex.
Your post is an example of the latter. Change your fucking perspective.
Your comment gave me an idea:
Can you imagine if a government, instead of mandating the stupid age verification system, would not bar “minors” from accessing the sites. But rather they would force the sites to implement a “tutorial on sex, sexuality and consent”, similar to the shitty corpo-mandated tutorials on topics like harassment, racism, security and GDPR. Heck, doesn’t even have to be as lengthy every time. Just simply play back a 30 second segment when opening the website and then have the individual answer a set of multiple choice questions to verify they have paid attention.
The government could sell it as “Teach the Children!” instead of “Protect the Children”. But here’s the biggest benefit of the former compared to the latter:
- It teaches children
- It’d also teach adults indiscriminately, who then may or may not really learn something (“Wait what? No really means no? I have a clitoris? How is babby formed?”
- It’d also eschew implementation of e-id and state monitoring
I can report having access to porn did not cause me harm; if anything it made me calmer and less agitated.
I think that the difficult thing about sexuality is that it’s illegal. Having essential and normal parts of yourself criminalized is the problem and causes all bad side-effects. Having easy access to porn breaks that barrier and allows people to accept themselves.
The only people this effects is people who don’t know how to operate a torrent client or have a friend that does, e.g the old people that dream up these ineffectual laws. They want to put the genie back in the bottle by making it someone else’s problem and it will fail like the war on drugs has utterly failed.
Meanwhile, back in reality, developing normal sexual relationships is much more complicated than abstaining from porn. It comes from a cohesive society that values education, healthcare, community and compassion for others. How are we still trying to make abstinence only methods work despite their horrible track record? Our politicial class are mendacious morons from a bygone era.
I have a few friends that were exposed at like 7 and have CSAM floating around of them, but that’s more so ADULTS causing the harm and not a natural cause of it being easy to find. Other than that, is say almost no damage.
I would say living in Florida where education is piss poor, there should be more sex ed about how to stay safe. Most harm could have been EASILY prevented by having a conversation young.
instead we tiptoe around the subject where you draw a few diagrams of the vagina and watch a birthing video. that was ALL of my sex ed in Florida.Not all parents talk about it (I won’t go into details about my parents) and it should be a requirement to keep people educated and safe. Most men know nothing about women’s bodies and it’s sad to see it never be talked about.
Porn was by all measures irrelevant at worst to any problems I’ve had in my romantic life. I can point to specific sexual content which was genuinely beneficial.
I don’t know why my early education on sex/pleasure for me and future partners had to be from an old lady on a porn site. I’m glad i had that so early on because no one else was teaching it.
Probably the same way easy access to it affected my own generation.
Not a damn bit. At least one out of every friend group had a dad with porn magazines and tapes, and they’d get passed around during, and after school.
I was born in 1976.
This, and the legends of finding stacks of Playboys in the woods. Hell, back then they would’ve had easier access to CSAM, eg Sugar and Spice magazine
I found plenty of porn in the woods. It’s not just a legend.
Was in boy scouts, we had several well preserved caches around the campgrounds with varying degrees of secrecy.
Yet I bet you don’t consider the face to be the natural place to receive ejaculate.
Depends on the face?
If it’s your mom’s? Absolutely.
But that would involve taking the bag off.
Not at all
Porn is used as a fake argument by conservatives to establish groups of degenerates to oppress and attack.
This is effective against religious people who are taught from a young age to feel shameful about sex and their desires.
This is one of the ways conservative con men coopt religions to establish loyal voter bases.
This TED talk discusses basically that topic
Also if you think you are alone in having problems with pornography, Terry Crews admitted it almost destroyed his marriage
I struggled with it for years and finally was able to quit watching it. I think porn is fine for most people and masterbation is normal, but I personally had problems controlling myself. I still wank it, but do so to my own imagination.
Here’s a long-form interview between a sex researcher and a urologist (MD) about how porn really effects us; both on an individual level; and in aggregate as a society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEqe5dHuQYE
TLDR: Porn is a bit of an over-stimulation on the brain, but the scale of the effect is similar to caffeine or nicotine. Far less impactful than that of any hard drug like cocaine or heroine. And unlike a chemical stimulant, it’s impossible to overdoes. Some people have excessive reactions to watching porn and having it readily available, so things like porn addiction are real and shouldn’t be dismissed. But the frequency of this is low (far lower than nicotine, gambling, or alcohol as comparison points) and the severity of such addictions are often minor (addicts skip other social interactions, but are unlikely to go into debt or lose jobs except in the most extreme cases).
There is no strong evidence that early exposure to porn via the internet has significant adverse effects. There are worse effects from exposure to violent content (including violent porn) than pornography in general.
This makes sense as from an evolutionary standpoint seeing other naked humans is expected. It’s only recently (in evolutionary time frames) that we’d not expect children to see other naked humans regularly or be unexposed to sex at all until an adult age. From a biological standpoint it makes perfect sense that our brain can handle seeing other people engaged in sexual activity.
I’m curious if you’ve seen this TED talk and what you think of it. It’s an interesting argument that while our brains can handle porn, excessive use can cause behavioral changes such as preferring porn over a real partner.
I’ve not seen it before, I’ll check it out. Thanks!
I’m not gen-z nor against porn broadly speaking but I’m in the 5% of people who develop addiction/compulsion to it and it completely destroyed my sex drive to the point that I’d rather watch porn than have sex. Personally I don’t mind but it makes having a romantic relationship quite difficult and it has now cost me two of them.
I don’t feel like early access to it is the problem here however. It’s excessive consuption thorought my entire life.
10 days clean now. Wish me luck.
Good luck!
Good luck!
It didn’t. We always had easy access to porn. Sounds like if anything kids today are having less hook ups and generally are more respectful of each other.
From what I can gather, they have fewer hookups because they have social anxiety.
I remember when the media discovered there was a web browser on the original PSP and dubbed it the Playstation Pornable.
I was a teen in the 90s. Can confirm there was a lot of foreplay with a lot of people, and then full sex
Gen Z here. Watched quite a lot of gay porn since around age 11.5-12. The only thing I remember confusing me was why penises “looked like that”. In the sense, that they had a pink head, had a weird pyramid like spongy rubber-ey top and why they were so big.
Turns out, I was looking at cut cocks, and our school had removed all sex ed. The new syllabus just taught, “penis go in vagina -> woohooo congratulations -> babyyyyy”. Oh also, on an unrelated note, our textbooks also said that cell phones make people selfish and autistic lmao (Science 2 textbook, SSC Maharashtra, 2020).
Anyway, I don’t prefer video porn anymore cuz I find it very shallow. It’s good, but feels like eating candy. Written smut on the other hand has a lot more depth. It’s like eating a super rich fruit salad.
So do I think porn negatively affected me? I don’t think so.
Anyway, I don’t prefer video porn anymore cuz I find it very shallow. It’s good, but feels like eating candy. Written smut on the other hand has a lot more depth. It’s like eating a super rich fruit salad.
very well said, very well indeed
Most of it is in line with what you’d think: not that terrible unless you’re repressed and think that sex is bad or you have the religious hang ups that dictate sex should be sacred in some way
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27105446/ - higher consumption of pornography in adolescence leads to more permissive sexual attitudes (eg casual sex)
https://www.ovid.com/journals/jpsh/fulltext/10.1177/26318318231153984~pornography-and-its-impact-on-adolescentteenage-sexuality - association (not necessarily causal) of pornography use and earlier loss of virginity as well as greater risk taking in sex (such as inconsistent use of condoms, which could perhaps be addressed by the industry using them more)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30919052/ longitudinal studies find weak or no links between increased use of pornography and decreased psychological well being
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35294070/ while there are longitudinal studies that show correlation between pornography use and sexual harassment/assault there are studies to suggest that this may not be causal and other confounding variables such as peer environment, family attitudes, or personality traits may be more causal in nature)
Lots more but a lot of the negative effects are often tied to guilt and shame which is socially derived and possibly without basis
We really need to distinguish between porn that displays harmful attitudes towards women and everything else. There are libraries of porn available online that normalize coercive acts or people in positions of power taking advantage of others. Not ALL porn is like that but the questions are: what are adolescents watching and how would we expect that to impact their perception of a healthy sexual relationship?
I believe sex to be a spiritual experience (not tied to any one religion) that can absolutely involve kink and domination/submission play but ultimately should come from and maintain a state of balance with mutual satisfaction as the ultimate goal. There is absolutely porn that portrays this but I’d say a lot (perhaps the majority) does not.
That being said, as a millenial I did grow up with access to porn on Kazaa and what not. Saw some uncomfortable shit and my value system / attitudes towards sex remained relatively ok despite it. Ultimately, I had to read Indigineous thought and the philosophical aspects of the Kama Sutra (which emphasizes a woman’s autonomy and pleasure and is open to same sex relationships) to arrive at my current, very open, attitudes toward sex.
Purely anecdotal, but the dominance/submission dynamic is something that many women seem to actually want. I have never steered things in that direction since it’s not my thing, but everyone I have been with has asked for some actions like that, being held down, light choking, some pain, etc. Remember how popular 50 shades was? It saddened me, like, “this is what mainstream women actually want”? It’s not what I want.
