The effect of porn on teenage boys and young men

I'll find them and post them.

I showed my son age appropriate videos about the effects of porn

Do you have any videos that you recommend? I have spoken to my sons about this since they were young as well, but I know for a fact that one of them clearly didn't take much notice. Videos might be a good idea because it isn't then just coming from mum.

I showed my son age appropriate videos about the effects of porn from the age of 13 upwards for a couple of years. I did the same for prostitution and the affects on women and what led them down that path. Ditto for consent and drugs. We talked about how porn did not reflect reality and that women generally did not want that type of sex. It was embarrassing but I pretended I was unfazed and he asked loads of questions. At 16 he was in a relationship and after a few months asked about the best contraception to use as they were ready to take things forward. It would be each others first time. She talked to her mother too who took her to the doctors. They decided on the pill jointly as did not want to risk pregnancy and there was no STD risk. I was really proud of their approach and that he could talk to me, and also that it was a joint decision between them. I think tackling it head on when puberty hits is the only answer before sexual tastes get hard wired. Also explaining there's not two types of women, the ones that do "that" and the ones that are mothers, sisters, daughters etc is important.

My husband doesn't watch porn. It's 100% true, I know he doesn't because for the longest time I didn't give a fuck. It isn't a moral thing.

I cannot say this anywhere, I am not allowed. If I tell anybody that my husband doesn't watch porn I am mocked as gullible and naive. Of course all men watch porn, of course all women would hate this, of course all husbands lie to their wives about it, of course wives are stupid enough to believe them.

After typing the above out of curiosity I just Googled "porn" and hit the top link. Seriously, what is the fucking point of even caring anymore?

There are some amazing posts here. I completely agree with beach, pax, qwerty, et al.

I copied some of the posts and sent them to my husband and a friend (and told them where they are from) who are anti-porn and they loved them.

I can never get my thoughts across as well as you all did, so thank you for taking the time to post such insightful and thoughtful posts.

No, very many people do not care at all about the wellbeing of the performers.

It does seem extraordinary that no action is being taken regarding pornography. All this hardcore pornography is being accessed all the time, even by children, becoming a new normality. And in the process all sorts of damage is being done to viewers and performers. Do people not realise how many porn actresses are trafficked? Do they just not care?

All government do is once in a while make a silly, unenforceable law concerning which sex acts can and cannot be depicted. They never address the root issue of access.

Is this because politicians have friends with a vested interest in the multi-billion dollar porn industry remaining unregulated I wonder?

I haven't read all the pages here but I'd also add that porn is harmful to males of ALL ages.

Beach, I entirely agree with you that many teens and children are not very good at making ethical decisions about sex and pornography.

So people under 18 shouldn't be exposed to pornography (by which we appear to mean largely violent and abusive sexual acts on film).

One of the main ways people under 18 are exposed to pornography is through hubs, which are widely available because adults choose to use illegal pornography.

It is not a complex moral decision for adults to chose not to use illegal pornography.

While there may also be complex moral arguments about the subjugation of women, choosing not to watch sexual violence is also not complex for most adults.

There is a very great difference between saying this is a complex area to be unpicked and saying that the average person cannot make a judgement about porn that is a. violent, b. illegal or c. both.

I mean, there's complex ethical issue and then there's crossing an ethical line and waving from a very great distance.

Agree beachcomer. It is hate speech.

I wish we could also have a conversation regarding poem on girls. An increasing number of girls are having access to porn and the effect on them is so damaging

tartansnow, you are expecting children, teenagers and adults to behave ethically around an issue that is politically very complex; sex.

From my position, which is that pornography is misogynistic hate speech, most of which is marketed as titillating entertainment, your above argument isn't taking context into account.

Profound sexism is normalized within society to the point of much of it being invisibleized. There are political and ethical concepts which are integral to analysing pornography that I don't think it is realistic to expect young people to pick apart. So although I guess some young people may be able to understand that hubs probably contain illegal content, and they may stay away from that content. Good. But I think it is utterly unrealistic to count on children and teenagers to analyse concepts such as consent, the eroticisation of subjugation and domination, girls and women as the sex class, the dynamics of abuse, sexualized violence, etc. It just isn't going to happen and therefore ethical choices just aren't going to happen.

Due to structural nature of the sex based oppression of girls and women, there is a societal wide blind spot about pornography. That's why all this really nasty stuff is all over the internet, because it's being done to girls and women and because it's related to sex. It's just an upping of the ante of the social wide idea that this is what girls and women are for.

It's clear that people don't make ethical choices when it comes to pornography. If adults don't do it we can hardly expect kids to do it.

And so we are now in a situation where our boys are sexually harassing our girls in schools. It was so obvious that this was going to happen, that this is where we were heading. Now we are actually there. The gravity of the situation calls for pretty radical action IMO.

Okay, I have teenagers. They are very aware that large amounts of illegal, often pirated, email is available on the Internet.

If I search for online movies, the first two pages of results are illegal sites. Yet DS went to university and managed to sign up for a streaming service rather than watch illegal sites.

DD came home from school and told me about a lesson they had in IT on piracy and illegal Internet content.

So I would expect it to be common knowledge among teenagers that hub sites, regardless of whether or not they are pornographic in nature are full of illegal content. I would expect people to know that such content will include material that would not pass censorship laws and film classification in the UK.

I would not expect my teens to browse illegal material because they couldn't be arsed to find a streaming site that was legal, or believe that people who had signed up for Netflix were connoiseurs of cinema!

Behaving ethically online isn't some extra effort. Ethics are something you already do everyday offline and just naturally do online. I don't receive stolen goods in real life, so I don't do it online. I wouldn't enter into a sexual situation with someone offline without making some attempt to find out about them, their age, their general wellbeing, so I don't do that online with porn performers. Clearly very many other people take that approach or social media would not be one of the main referral mechanisms for porn.

If the majority of people chose to access mainstream cinema through hubs, film classification and censorship would simply collapse, because people would be viewing material outside of the law. The same is true of porn. To enforce whatever porn laws are advocated, you need the government to enforce it by going after illegal porn, and you need the porn watching public to say they can be arsed to stick to legal sites.

Devi yes, I am also for restrictions. But that is not what many people are saying. And the "Some people like to argue most porn is fine. I don't think it is, most appears to be violent and degrading to women."

Well as discussed earlier, what you find "degrading" others will not, and by the kind of things people have written on here, most is "degrading", which again boils down to banning the majority of porn. So you are applying different standards, restrictions on alcohol and cigarettes are fine but for porn you call banning "degrading" things as "restrictions" and pretend it's the same as restrictions on other things. When in fact it's simply a ban.

Well, obviously.

But if it is, for example, a porn hub, you have already made the decision that you don't care about obtaining porn legally, and then you can't be suprised when most of the content is horrific.

If you are obtaining porn via a studio or via performer referral, you can be surprised to view horrific content you were not seeking out.

The homepage of a porn website, obviously.

The questions of how we technically (or practically) do it and how we get people to want to can't be separated.