To think that porn mags are a "lesser evil" compared to internet porn?

[Muffsies]

A couple of times recently my 11 year old son has drawn my attention to porn mags on the top shelf in newsagents we have visited. I have not noticed this in years, so I'm assuming that some people have gone back to using magazines since the introduction of age verification on internet sites.

At first I thought this is a bad thing, I'm not particularly happy having to explain porn mags to my son, and I don't like having to see this sort of thing myself, particularly in a public place.

But then I thought maybe it is a 'good' sign if this change is because people are starting to move away from internet porn? Magazines are likely to be far better regulated, and what you see won't as easily lead you into worse content, like happens online. Is it the lesser of two evils (I don't think porn is actually 'evil' btw, but we have to somehow balance freedom of choice with reducing the known damaging effects on young people)?

Afterwards, I also realised that I'd had the conversation with my son at a crucial time before he starts secondary school, we'd spoken before about puberty & healthy relationships, but not porn. I warned him about the internet and how damaging the content can be and how it has ruined some young men's lives, hence the change in the law. So I guess some good has come of it.

My memory might be playing tricks but I always remember back in the 80s or early 90s the bomb disposal squad had to carry out a controlled explosion on a suspicious package found in the toilets of the local shopping centre.

Turned out that it was a stash of porn videos that had been left there for someone to collect.

To a young person seeing boobs and a fanny is more than enough to get the job done, every time. Most won't be getting a gf for several years, let alone actually having sex. Can you imagine being exposed to all the most extreme sex moves imaginable before you've even touched your first bra strap? No wonder we're having so many issues with kids having all sorts of hangups.

It took me years to explore my sexuality, what I liked and disliked, etc. I feel lucky to have been able to do that with another person who was also trying to work out the same things, and we did it together. I feel like now you might have all these preconceived ideas about men and womens expected roles in sex, and what you should be doing and liking.

It's really sad, and I actually feel bad for these young men, all these commercial porn sites are exploiting them.

I haven't noticed it. I don't think I've seen a porn magazine since I was last in a sex shop.

Are they openly displayed in the shop with pornographic images on the cover? Or are they covered in plastic?

I don't have kids - and I have huge sympathy for parents who are trying to navigate their way through this stuff. As you say, there's so much potential for kids to see stuff that's genuinely damaging and that's a huge concern.

I guess all you can do is keep having sensible, non-scary and non-shaming conversations about it - but even for parents who are really open with their kids, it must be a difficult and embarrassing topic to broach in any detail, for both the kid and the parent!

In both cases the porn mags I saw were literally just like the ones 'back in the day", with women in lingerie on the front, sticking their bums/boobs out, etc. No plastic over them, they did not look like quality publications (but then, what does a quality porn mag look like? Is there a hole in this market??). I didn’t notice what they were called.

Nope. But I realise that on Mumsnet, anybody who thinks that porn is a nuanced issue and isn't as simple as "all porn is harmful and should be illegal" is a rare breed of human.

I don't think kids should be able to access porn, at all. But I don't think all porn is intrinsically harmful or unethical and I think some of what people can access online is a lot healthier and less harmful to women than the content of the average top shelf magazine. Equally, plenty of it is a million times worse. It's not a case of one is 'less evil' than the other because 'internet porn' is simply too broad a category to make a meaningful comparison to, eg, a copy of Razzle.

(I have no idea if Razzle still exists. It was the cheapest and bestselling top shelf magazine when I worked in a newsagent aged 18, and it's lodged in my brain because it was so bleakly depressing.)

Thanks for your response.

I think you're spot-on about keep having the conversation, and keeping it light and non-judgemental. If you make a kid feel shame, they'll never discuss that thing with you again, and they may develop bad feelings about themselves, or start keeping secrets from you. I'm not going to pretend I'm perfect at this stuff, but I think the key is to keep the conversation open, even if it didn't go so well last time.

I can’t understand why a woman would show her most intimate parts in a degrading way in a top shelf magazine . It surely will come back to haunt them down the line .

It must have been so embarrassing for you having to handle this stuff at the till .

I'm not trying to 'justify internet porn'. I'm pointing out that 'internet porn' is too vast a category to make any comparison to a top-shelf magazine and that in my opinion, some internet porn is a lot more harmful than a top shelf magazine and some is a lot less harmful.

Saying 'Is a porn magazine less harmful than porn on the internet' is a bit like saying 'Are the stories in books less harmful than stories in films?' - it's just too broad to be meaningful as a comparison.

If you think all porn is immoral and should be banned, that's absolutely fine, I'm not trying to tell anyone they're wrong for thinking that. It's not an opinion I personally share, but I don't think it's unreasonable for anyone to hold that view. I'm not arguing for or against its existence.

You can put locks on kids phones preventing them from seeing this stuff but there will always be a mate who can get access on their phone and will share it with mates . This used to go on with top shelf magazines years ago . Someone I know was a cleaner in a boys school and they were always finding the mags in bins or stuffed in toilet cisterns .

You mean like her glowing green vulva appearing to her at night and cursing her?

Yeah, this is what worries me. I can only do so much, but most kids will see this stuff one way or another. At least with the mags it was just some tits and vulva (as tawdry as that is), but now they get s&m, spitting, degerdation, strangling..

Well, interestingly enough, I had to handle them less often than my male colleagues, because most men didn't feel comfortable handing a copy of Fiesta over to a young women/girl and would simply not buy them if I was the one serving.

When I did have to put them through the till, I remember the embarrassment factor being kind of dependent on the person who was buying. We had one regular customer who was a long distance lorry driver who used to buy a couple of magazines every month along with his daily paper and his 20 cigs and his copy of Truck Driver Monthly (or whatever it was!) and I was never embarrassed at all by that, somehow. He was a really pleasant, polite, chatty guy and just handed them over with his shopping without a second thought. I think at the time I just thought 'Ah, well, he's away for days at a time in his lorry without his wife, I can see why he wants something to, er, entertain him' and I didn't think much of it.

But I also remember a couple of blokes who were quite creepy about it - standing there browsing the bloody things for 10 minutes before buying and sniggering or trying to make eye contact and looking visibly hot and bothered. That was always gross, especially when I was in the shop on my own (which was often, as I used to open up the shop every morning alone at 6am). They tended to be older. So yes, that was utterly grim, especially as I was so young at the time.

Interesting discussion. I’m not sure if a PP was AI but despite being anti porn in general I thought sone of that was interesting. That a woman in a couple looking like she’s having fun (or maybe she was actually having fun, problem is one would never really know) could be less problematic than a passive body in a mag. I need to think on that as it’s quite a valid way of looking at it.

who buys these mags now? Genuinely? Hasn’t everyone got the internet. Maybe people in their 80s etc haven’t but would they really be arsed going to the shop to buy a magazine still?

Not necessarily, my cousin was a page 3 girl and was also in the Sunday Sport and now in her 60’s is incredibly proud that she once had the confidence and body to do it.

Just go online and search for any porn related sites. There are literally hundreds still active. Apart from half a dozen "main" sites, it seems that none of the others have implemented any verification, and I doubt the government has the resources to do anything about it.

Great law!

Our village newsagents have never stopped selling them. They've been constantly a feature of the top shelf for the 30 years we've been going in it. Just that the number of them has dramatically fallen and now it's just a handful whereas a couple of decades ago it was a few dozen, now a few in a corner rather then the entire top shelf.

Our family used to have a newsagents in the 70s and 80s and we sold a lot of porn mags - probably not that many fewer than TV/Radio Times and weekly women's magazines - we had the top shelf full of them, several copies of each title. The porn for women mags were also very popular! What we didn't sell was the hardcore "under the counter" stuff - when we bought the shop, the previous owners did and it was a very lucrative sideline, but we stopped doing it during the first few weeks, probably mostly because me and my brother were young teenagers and we both worked in the shop so not appropriate for us to be selling that kind of stuff!

The likes of WH Smith stopped selling them maybe 20 years ago as a guess - they used to sell them, but I don;t think the supermarkets ever sold them - don't think the likes of Asda and Tesco would have thought them appropriate, but can't be certain.

As for accessibility, porn was widely available in our school - lots of pupils had a mag in their school bag and we'd gather round to look or borrow to read.

Even the ones that have age verification are dead easy to access by using a VPN, which kids will know about because they're using VPNs to watch foreign broadcasts of premier league football matches, etc and cheap licences for gaming software. Again, how to do it is readily passed between people in the school yard and via kids group chat groups.

These are all fair points, and exactly why I wanted to start this discussion. Nothing is black and white in this world, and there is never just one approach or just one way of looking at things. Taking on the opinions of others who have opposing views, and perhaps different or more experiences than yourself, can actually be a huge help. If you're willing to listen.

Keep living and learning. Having a closed mind and refusing to learn and keep up with reality of modern life is going to do no favours with bringing up our kids.

It is interesting! I also wonder who buying the mags. My immediate conclusion was due to the new internet porn filters, but it appears that is unlikely having learned how easy that is to get around, maybe it's a nostalgia thing?

I think these magazines show a lot more than topless women .

Some of the young girls I worked with said their boyfriends pulled their hair during sex as if it was normal .

They show bottomless as well, front and back, but no "action" and nothing explicit.