Protecting children (sons) from the influence of porn

How do I help them see that it’s not a realistic view of sex?

The porn that is available nowadays is not simply unrealistic (eg perfectly toned bodies etc) it is violent, abusive and degrading to women, and men and boys are not repulsed by this, they positively enjoy it.

It is not nice to have to face this, but if you (or any other parent) refuses to face this then things will never improve. The starting point is that your son (like nearly all boys and men) gets aroused by abuse, rape, torture, degradation, continues to seek it out, takes pleasure from it and believes he is entitled to an on-demand supply of women online or off to use in this way.

"Not realistic" doesn't even begin to touch what you are facing here.

@captainproton

Personally I am not letting them have smartphones / iPods or internet enabled devices until they are 16 and finished their GCSEs.

You will struggle with that.

My youngest has just finished year 7. In secondary school, not only are they able to keep their phones with them. Even if they don't have their own they will be able to see others but they also use their phones to research the internet during lessons.

As well as managing their social interactons.

I assume your children are very young at the moment. Hopefully you will realise your position is untenable at best and damaging at worst by the time they are older.

Captainproton

I get you are concerned about porn and the internet, but you seem to have a really extreme, borderline obsessive fear about the result of letting your children access electronic devices. Hundreds of thousands of children use personal electronic devices every day and manage to NOT get groomed, NOT become porn addicts and NOT send pictures of their genitals to strange men in the Philippines.

I'm 100% behind you in the sentiment that you are there to be your children's parent, not their friend, however like most things in life, moderation is key.

What your proposing is so extreme that your children will be social pariahs.

Your call, but I'd maybe ease off a bit if I were you. You can still control their use of devices without being so Draconian.

When people say 'your kids will hate you' they definitely will, but you'll probably make them hate themselves and their lives as well.

And the teenage mind is not built for self control. Once they’ve had fun with porn they will not think oh I can live without it now, they will want to masturbate to it all the time. A lot of self discovery happens in the teenage years. They WILL seek it out. Why you would want them to give them the easiest means to do so is beyond me.

My children will hate me. I am sure they will. But they will be loved, they will still be able to access social media from a desktop pc. They will still be allowed boyfriends/girlfriends and to go to parties and hang out with friends.

It’s just I don’t want them stuck in their bedroom sending pictures of their anus to ransoms from their smart phone, or accessing filth at 3 am in the morning some of it of questionably legal. Being bullied or joining in bullying vulnerable classmates, or being obsessed with selfies. I HAVE seen this already with my step son. He had one from age 9 and his parents had all the internet safety set ups, randomly checked his phone etc.

I don’t let them have gaming devices either. And we’ve just spent the summer holidays without the TV being on. Because I want my children growing up thinking if you’re bored you read, that you get some exercise and daylight every day.

I don’t want to be my children’s friends I want to be their parent. I believe porn, social media and smart phones affect the mental health of our children.

This is a really useful thread. Thank you to all who have posted. DS is at primary school but I feel like this is something that we should be preparing for sooner rather than later.

Just placemarking, as I know this is coming up for us soon. We have had to explain the terms porn, pornography, rape, exploitation, and prostitution to our eldest this last year, it won't be long before we need to approach them with the youngest.
They've both known how babies are made for a very long time, and what sex is, in an abstract way.

While I agree that trying to bring up boys so that they never even see or use porn is probably an impossible dream, I think we have to at least do all we can to raise boys who are repulsed by the violence and misogyny in the list posted by Ekphrasis. At the very least we need them to be saying, "How vile, I want something where the girl is having a good time too."

At the very fucking least.

If I had a son, I'd probably go on the basis that he is going to watch porn, and I would talk to him about it. I might even go on sites with him and talk about some of the images and videos...that may be enough to do the job...find some videos where the woman looks like she's having an incredible orgasm and explain why it is physically impossible for her to be really enjoying it. Analyse the hell out of them and kill the moment.

Recent article by Jessica Eaton, Doctoral Researcher in Forensic Psychology about the impact of language about sex / porn especially on young people worth reading:

"When I started to search the terms I had heard and read, I easily found memes, articles, discussions and blogs using this language about women in a completely normalised way. Men saying to their friends ‘The girl next door, I would ruin that!’ or ‘She’s gonna get it hard. Beat that pussy up!’ "
She goes on to discuss the work needed with young people.
victimfocus.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/beat-the-pussy-up-the-way-we-talk-about-sex-with-women/
thread discussing this www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3253264-Very-good-article-by-Jessica-Eaton-about-language-used-to-describe-sex

Also Tom Farr:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3292203-The-Porn-Industry-Offers-Us-a-Glimpse-Into-The-Future-and-the-Future-Looks-Very-Bleak-Indeed

Recent thread from the Relationships board.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/relationships/3335081-Boobs-pubes-and-porn

One Mner got sent a screen shot of a t shirt that read "my beard is the only hair that should be between your legs"

Do you teach them not to rape torture and abuse women? Or do you pretend boys wanking to women being raped is perfectly acceptable entertainment?

Ugh, why do people work so hard to defend porn? Feminism board, remember?
We know the statistics, it's overwhelmingly men watching and it's overwhelmingly becoming more and more violent.

No, I don't worry about forbidden fruit. I'm happy to do what I can to protect their developing brains from this kind of damage.

Do you worry about forbidden fruit when you teach children not to hit or stab people with knives or beat people to death with baseball bats?

Yeah, that's the same...

I wasn't suggesting that allowing some access means kids then won't want alcohol/social media/access to sexual content. I'm saying that I believe that you don't change their behaviour either way but if you entirely forbid these things you risk creating a dangerous situation where if they do them and end up in trouble they feel they can't come to you about it.

Isn't porn like 50% of all internet traffic or is that just an urban myth?

When I look at porn sites, I don't see extreme or violent clips...maybe these are being sought out by some men/boys.

They're definitely out there. However, when I watched it in my early twenties I was only turned on by passionate scenes with kissing/tenderness etc and there's lots of that too.

I also remember reading a thread on here a few months back (damned if I can remember which one) where quite a few female posters stated that they watched porn. This is also my experience and somewhat obfuscated the matter as it's not just men 'disrespecting' women.

Regarding the other point, I can see how it could be a release for some but become an unhealthy obsession for others (like that guy who was watching strangulation snuff videos before he murdered a woman).

Captain good luck with no smartphones until post 16. We felt like this. My 12 year old has a smart phone. It is how this generation interact, your kids will HATE you. it's just not possible.

When I look at porn sites, I don't see extreme or violent clips...maybe these are being sought out by some men/boys.

I don't have a son but I explained to my daughter that porn doesn't reflect the norm in sexual relationships. She does freely talk to me, so I'm fortunate in that respect as we can discuss anything.

Do you worry about forbidden fruit when you teach children not to hit or stab people with knives or beat people to death with baseball bats?

patrachypersonified

Yes, instead of calling those things crimes we have created a grey area where we now call them "kinky sex". So no rape has been committed in our far superior western world. A woman just got strangled and doesn't think she can go to the police because she consented to sex. From my experience and friends, I believe that men just do what the fuck they want now and call it sex-positive.

captain - are you not worried about creating forbidden fruit? I ask not as a criticism but because I've also thought about it - but I keep thinking about my friends as teenagers, and my experience is that those who weren't allowed to do things like go to parties, drink, etc. still did them but in a much less safe way because they were sneaking around and couldn't talk to their parents about problems that did arise. I had quite permissive parents and that worked well for me and I would ideally like a similar atmosphere in my home - but then I worry that the pressures that will be on my child will be much greater than in my own teens, and so maybe that model isn't adequate to the challenges of the internet and social media.

I see this loads on Mn with regards to drink and I completely disagree. Drugs, alcohol, porn are all addictive substances. The harm comes simply from how much you consume. You might see some porn and be intrigued but whatever you want, you won't get to watch 8 hours of it. Same with alcohol. Nothing will convince me that weaning a preteen on to alcopops i somehow going to make them not as interested in drink later on.

Post by VaguelyAware from thread linked up post on 19th Feb.

"Another link below - petition against the Ann Summers / Pornhub collaboration.

https://www.change.org/p/ann-summers-ann-summers-dump-pornhub

The titles of the videos on Pornhub alone speak for themselves:

"Unwanted Painful Anal" (3.9 million views)

"Noose around her Neck, Real Hanging" (118,000 views)

"No Daddy Stop. I’m not Mummy" (2.5 million views)

"Human Toilet Girl gets a Stomach full of Fresh Urine" (71,000 views)

“Anal Tears” (1.5 million views)

“Extreme Brutal Gagging” (472,000 views)

“How to Sexually Harass Your Secretary Properly” (10.6 million views)

When Ann Summers suggests “Ways to Spice up the Night”, "Bring the Glam" or “Romance is What You Make it” .. is this what they mean?"

Porn is the practice, rape is the reality.

On one of the threads linked at the behinijnb (or on the original thread which I can't find but was I think about 'all the boys do strangulation' at a poster's daughter's school) there was a blog that analysed the porn on porn hub.

Heterosexual porn was predominantly or all violent/ / forced/ rape, no kissing and mostly anal. Gay porn was more loving, included kissing and obviously included anal but not in the same violent and forced way.

Wtf is with all the porn apologists in this thread? You know it's in the feminism section right? Where we call out misogynistic exploitation and violence against women as the abhorrent societal cancer that porn is.
I hate porn. Vile vile stuff. This isn't just curiosity anymore, this is hardcore brainwashing - motor neuron rewiring.

An interesting counter-argument against the 'pervasive evil' of pornography (as characterised on this forum), would be that there is significant evidence that access to pornography actually decreases instances of sexual violence and rape.

At the macro level this phenomenon is easy to see, (compare the rates of sexual violence in repressive, cuturally conservative places like Saudi Arabia or India against Europe/USA) however it also holds up when you compare culturally similar countries that have different attitudes towards porn/sex.

But of course this could be due to a number of other factors, so studies have been conducted in the USA where they compared the different states and the dates that they adopted the internet in a way that would lend itself to streaming video. (All states adopted internet at different times/dates)

They found extremely strong correlation between the widespread adoption of hi speed internet and a significant reduction in sexual violence and rape, the strongest correlation was amongst the youngest groups studied ( males aged 18-25) who are coincidentally the most likely group to be regular porn users.

The proposed explanation being that watching porn, even potentially violent porn, provides a critical 'safety valve' for young men that has the potential to prevent them from acting out some of their fantasies in real life.

If you think that having an outlet for sexual energy and feelings isn't important, look at what happens when you don't allow it (catholic priests anyone?)

Of course some people like to argue that watching porn makes men more sexually violent, however there is no real evidence to support this and its actually reminiscent of the desire to ban 'video nasties' in the late 90s (in the wake of the James Bulger killing) in the mistaken belief that watching violent films or playing violent computer games made children more violent.

So maybe the whole 'porn is bad' narrative isn't entirely true.

I do agree that its worth talking to your kids and explaining that porn differs significantly from what normal sex is like. I really liked the comparison of WWE to regular fighting, I think I will use that myself when my kids are old enough to receive the 'porn' chat.