The effect of porn on teenage boys and young men

[DeviTheGaelet]

Did anyone else hear the section on R5 about porn addiction the other day? They spoke to a doctor who is looking into the defects of porn on men. A study in Italy found 40% of young men were having erectile issued, of those 60% were psychologically caused ( I think those were the stats).
The doctor suggested that watching porn during adolescence is training men to be aroused by purely visual stimuli and the visual stimuli are not realistic. As a result they are not being wired to find the smells and touch of actual sex arousing. As a result they are having election issues.
He described porn as "stunt sex" and said it was creating a generation of men who's sexual relationships were with their hand and a screen rather than another person.
I found it really interesting. We talk a lot on here about the harm porn causes women and girls but I've not heard so much about the impact on boys.
I think this should be discussed in PSHE in schools. Maybe this will be the personal impact many men need to see how harmful porn can be.

Yes I totally agree. Some people like to argue most porn is fine. I don't think it is, most appears to be violent and degrading to women. I think in effect it would be a total ban on what's currently there but we need to have some guidelines on what's acceptable as a society

Yes I totally agree. Some people like to argue most porn is fine.

The problem is that porn continually pushes the boundaries. It's an intrinsic aspect of it's business model. Let's face it, very few people would pay to watch a video of a normal, middle-aged couple in the missionary position with the lights out but that is (or was) 80+% of normal sexual activity. Porn has to shock to keep its audience and what is shocking today becomes boring tomorrow so they need to come up with something more shocking.

I don't see why we can't have clearer standards defined for what is allowed to be distributed. It won't eradicate the more extreme stuff but making it illegal at least gives the authorities power to act and forces service providers and facilitators in distribution to up their own game.

It used to be the case that films or publications on general sale could not show penetration, ejaculation or even erect penises. That was written into law as I understand it. When exactly did those laws get repealed? Maybe they still exist and are just not being enforced, I don't know. If you wanted anything more than what was referred to as soft porn you had to go to a specialist shop. I assume even they had limits on what they could sell as I'm sure I read about arrests for illegal porn back then. There was also a different public attitude. I remember a chain of sex shops (think it was called the Private Shop) tried to open a branch in my town and they got forced to close within a couple of weeks due to public pressure. That was in the eighties so hardly the Victorian era.

I don't think it's just men and boys who are affected.

um be very cautious of the 'put into your browser' argument. I advised on a workplace case where the investigating officer on a disciplinary was all proud of himself (Uk University ) for finding loads of porn from seemingly innocuous words from an employee's search history entered into his home browser..when he did the search at home..it brought up loads of porn. When it was done on the employees computer...no porn whatsoever.. All it showed was that he, the Press Officer for the uni, browsed shit loads of porn at home. Google identifies your isp and computer amd peedict searches according to your preferemces....think on!

I don't quite get you scary.
Are you implying that beach is getting the results she is because she surfs loads of violent porn? Seems unlikely given her views. I think it's more likely that most porn is now violent. I don't watch it any more. I used to a bit (several years back) but stopped due to the increasing prevalence of anal and violence, I don't find it erotic and I don't believe the women involved can be enjoying it. Threads on here have made me think and put me off altogether. I cba hunting for "ethical" porn when there are far easier ways to get my kicks.

When you were watching it, Devi, where were you getting it from?

Why is that relevant?

To be fair mostly films via DH and a bit of Internet. It was when it went onto the Internet I stopped really because it just went really awful.
I pretty much agree with Caitlin Moran's POV in how to be a woman. I think it's natural for people to be aroused watching others have and enjoy having sex. But porn now has gone so far from that it isn't about that at all.

Anyhow I'd prefer not to derail onto my sexual preferences

Because various people (Qwerty for example), have been discussing ways that porn should be restricted. One of those ways is through people paying for porn.

If you were watching porn via subscription to a studio, and their content increased in violence, you could email the studio to complain, cancel your subscription, move to another studio etc.

My impression is that the vast majority of porn is violent and abusive, but if someone is already using porn, why would a change in what the majority watch necessarily impact on their viewing directly? If you already have a porn source, you don't have a need to randomly Google porn and click on the first link in the way Beachcomber did.

So, not a criticism, but I'm asking how your specific porn source went in a more violent direction? That leads on to other questions like did different people start viewing it, did the producers change or did the tastes of the regular audience change?

I think it is possible to explain the way the studio, employee or other source operates without discussing the actual sexual content at all.

I can guarantee you that my landing on the video I did is not related to my search history, which does contain searches for stuff related to pornography such as references to Gail Dines, but not actual searches for pornography itself other than the one I just did (which I was actually careful to do in a private browser window because my children use this device).

And although I didn't watch the video I landed on, I very much doubt that it was what is considered "hard-core" today. It has become "mainstream" to show images of women having their hair pulled /choking in videos with abusive, misogynistic and racist titles. The modern "hard-core" stuff is yet another level of nastiness.

I'm pretty sure that if there was a desire to better control pornography on the internet it would be possible. In fact I know it would because I used to work for Google.

For me the discussion is not so much how can we technically do it but more how can we get people to want it. Where there is a will there is a way.

Kids are not only being exposed to pornography in a way they never have before but also that pornography has got much more hard-core (read violent and abusive). It can't be allowed to go on.

So I checked that out earlier. The content has definitely changed, even the front page is full of stuff that totally wants to make me immediately close the browser, like granny porn, anal and hair pulling. I searched for content by a company I used to watch stuff from and that's all been taken down. Grim.

The front page of what? A studio?

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

The homepage of a porn website, obviously.

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.

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

This is what I mean about cba. How would someone who isn't a connoisseur of porn know that? You are making a massive assumption when you say people have already made a decision they don't care. I assume many people, especially young people, don't think about where what they are watching has come from. They just find it and watch it. In the same way as someone eating a Maccy Ds hasn't necessarily analysed the welfare and nutritional standards of the food.

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.

Things that are physically harmful to the actors should be banned
That would include anal, anal to PIV, anal to oral. Condoms should be used.
Things that are hatred towards women should be banned. That includes language like "cumsluts", "take it, bitch" and also hair pulling, slapping.
I don't think that's particularly controversial? If that means most porn gets banned, that shows how bad things are wrt violent/degrading sex as the norm in porn.

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.

Ethics are something you already do everyday offline and just naturally do online
Okay then. If you say so. I wasn't aware there was a porn equivalent of Netflix where people could sign up for porn produced to high ethical standards. But I guess I'm not in the loop.

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.

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

Well of course we can and have in the past. The effect on boys was a new one on me though. Sadly the stack of evidence of harm to girls doesn't seem to have influenced a change, I cynically thought maybe evidence porn also damages boys might have more of an impact