Porn has fuelled a 400% increase of child on child assaults

[NeurotrashWarrior]

A very depressing read.

It's clear to me that access to online things via the Internet, mobile phones and social media is a huge problem for our teens in many ways.

fightthenewdrug.org/how-porn-fuels-child-on-child-sex-attacks/

Interesting that it's the NSPCC that provide the data on this. And valine data it is.

What's needed is to actually parent these children. Teach them about how to treat others. Consent. To not be so easily influenced.

I've shared this before but it's worth saying again. I had software on our home PC to block porn but a boy from a troubled home (DM had a stream of men sleeping in the house) showed DS2, then 11, some horrible porn.

We were sharing a room on holiday. In the dark, in the middle of the night, it all came pouring out. He'd been disgusted and horrified by the idea that he would have to do all this when he grew up.

I reassured, told him sex in real relationships was loving and fun. Made him laugh at the thought of his friends' parents doing all this bizarre stuff, and how improbable that was.

I was so pleased he confided in me. A parenting success. And his relationships as an adult are lovely - he's 23. But I wonder what attitudes the other boy carried forward.

Sarah

I agree with this, people are exposed to violent or sexualised imagery and don’t act on it. You have to be able to think of another person as just a thing to be able to do this. This crime against Ana was planned, I struggle to get my head around planning to do this to another human being. It’s the dehumanising of other people (specifically women and girls) this has to come from somewhere not just porn.

If 50% of children between the ages of 11-16 are exposed to porn and then acted on it it would be chaos out there. But they don’t. Teaching children about consent, boundaries and just human decency would go along way. Men need to take responsibility for how they talk and how they behave. Boundary erasure for children is getting worse and worse. It’s utterly depressing.

What annoys me most about this debate is that when people say oh we need to stop these kids accessing porn (and our Taoiseach said this in response to the conviction of the 13 year old boys this week) they immediately follow it up with (not him but other people)

"oh but we cannot censor what adults watch and obviously, adult can watch whatever porn they want cause you know, liberal, free love, empowering women, kink positive yeah... all good" (I'm paraphrasing facetiously here)

But why can we not have the real conversation which is that all porn harms all people ???????

adults who normalise this stuff. (Including art exhibitions.)

DD (9) was around where the Kiss My Genders exhibition was the other day, and she saw two big posters, one of a man in a thong and other (I couldn't quite work this out) of a woman with a mouthful of cornflakes having milk poured into her mouth. She found both of these images really upsetting.

I don't think porn is inevitable or censorship is like China or 'you can't stop consenting adults'.

I don't want to live in a culture where the lynching of women is considered a legitimate form or entertainment. If there was not a male erection involved what is being consumed as porn would be considered viewing a crime. Many of the acts in kink porn come under the definition of torture. Plus, one cannot consent to GBH or ABH, it is against the law and consent is no defence. I do not think our legislators, judges, police etc. can treat women as equals if they are viewing this stuff. We have to demand change and make it culturally more unacceptable. It used to be considered a legitimate form of family fun to attend the lynching of black Americans, that has changed. The Untameable Shrews, Object and other groups are challenging the cultural acceptance of porn. Young girls and women are being groomed into accepting this crap as 'sex-positive' or 'liberating', they are a generation growing up without feminism. We must have the courage to stand up to porn and show these young women that you can say no, your not abnormal for thinking this is not o.k.

Many things are censored - child abuse imagery, bestiality, extreme violence, purchasing weaponry or drugs. It is o.k. to not give in to men's desires. To censor it on phones and use age verification is key. Gambling requires age verification, so why not porn?

It is do-able. Look how quickly websites and internet providers react when there is a copyright violation. For example, swathes of videos are removed from Youtube very promptly if it infringes someone's profits. Many women are quickly removed from twitter for gender thought crimes, and they are telling us they can't remove the porn from the website?

ThatDoctorEM - 100% agree with this.

I think its asking way to much to expect education to stop teenagers a) watching porn and b) acting on what they see.
Porn normalises degrading sex acts and teens are curious and experimental about sex. Parents talking about it can be easily disregarded as prudish/out of touch etc.
I think we need to do a lot more to restrict publishing of the most degrading and violent porn. The internet seems to manage policing CSEA and copyright breaching reasonably stringent, it is ridiculous that huge sites like p*rnhub can host the stuff they do and governments just shrug.

I also think many older people aren't aware just how degrading a lot of porn is. We were bought up in an age where magazines showing boobs was counted as porn, now its anal gang bangs and bukkake [puke]

I hate porn, porn use destroyed my marriage, and yet the patriarchy wants it to be seen as fine so men can carry on wanking off to whatever takes their fancy.

X post doctor and yours is much more eloquent

Is it porn or is it unsupervised access to the internet?

Your right Quentin I was not pro-porn but of 'the consenting adults' shrug off until older feminists showed me what porn was - I peaked so hard it was like shooting a rocket into space. We need to make people aware as to what is considered porn these days, and that the awful stuff is not extreme but bread and butter.

If porn was not having an impact, just fantasy amaright, why is the advertising industry worth £1.2 trillion? Why is porn exceptional from other imagery in regards to influencing behaviour and perspectives? If anything it will reinforce messages harder than say car adverts because of the involvement of the orgasm - the chemical release is like Pavlov's Dog. Studies are showing that porn use is changing neural pathways, specifically the mesolimbic dopamine pathway , particularly in the amygdala.

It's both.

'Porn' is not what it used to be.

There was a very horrifying read linked on here a couple of years ago where a brave woman had analysed the porn on porn hub - sex, context, theme - it was inherently misogynistic and violent towards women. Zero kissing. Huge amount of anal, humiliation and violence.

The gay porn contained kissing.

Teddy it is both, porn is the major problem. Porn is the public health crisis of our era.

Here I wrote about Tumblr, Porn and teenage girls: medium.com/@doctorEm/tumblr-porn-and-teenage-girls-160c2a3f776e

Neurotrash that was Suzzan Blac and me (I was using Contemporary Pankhurst then).

Suzzan's blog is here, content warning to high heaven: theviolenceofpornography.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-hatred-of-women.html?zx=53f8c7f2528fdc31

I agree wholeheartedly DrEM.

This is a thread on the brutal murder of Ana Kriegel with aggravated sexual assault. It's an horrific read. The two boys A and B were 13 at the time Ana was murdered and brutalised sexually.

twitter.com/FiLiA_charity/status/1141373180772265985

I do think a lot of older people don't appreciate how much porn has changed since their youth. If it wasn't for DS2 and his experience I would only have found out here, much much later.

I used to watch the odd bit of very mild porn with DH, though only where the women involved were enjoying themselves and what was happening appeared to be pleasurable to them. But this was decades ago, when porn was very different. I don't recall ever watching anal, let alone choking or pain.

Porn Hub tailors searches via it’s algorithms and recommends different things at the top of the list depending on prior viewing history. There are also various age verification checks on the site. So clearly the woman who did the research has a pretty shady search history already. I only ever get straight ‘romantic’ porn recommended with kissing etc.

Similarly, when toddlers are given unsupervised access tablets for many hours pretty sure nobody realises that YouTube often has ‘fake cartoons’ where Peppa Pig etc have sex. As the child grows old enough to use Google those preferences are then ‘remembered’ in their search alogortithms and so porn sites (such as pornhub) will be the first sites recommended when these kids try to find more material.

This is not really a porn problem. Porn is for adults and always has been. It’s a problem of parents not being bothered to check routinely (or having systems that check for them) what their kids are accessing online.

Studies are showing that porn use is changing neural pathways, specifically the mesolimbic dopamine pathway , particularly in the amygdala.

Which is dominant in children and teens; it is responsible for spontaneous immature and anxiety driven actions, the hippocampus starts to take over during the teen years into the early 20s. It over rides the amygdala with rational thought.

FWIW: (very simply)
In sheep studies the hippocampus is negatively affected by hormone blockers. I found another paper once that showed that fresh air and exercise positively supported the development of the hippocampus in the teen years.

The amygdala can also become changed during long term stress and anxiety and is something to do with depression / anxiety; anxiety is a primal response.

A quick google on the implications of this:

*Amygdala
It is involved in the encoding and storage of memories that have a significant emotional component

People who damage their amygdala have difficulty learning emotional responses and interpreting expressed emotions.

We tend to be more likely to remember events that produce strong emotional reactions, than events that do not.

One reason: amygdala attaches emotional significance to information and stimulates the hippocampus to encode the explicit info regarding the event

Another reason: Norepinephrine 'tags memory of an event with important emotional details and strengthens its long term storage

(Increased levels of norepinephrine at amygdala during arousal communicates to hippocampus that details of the exxperience are significant- strengthen stroge by hippocampus)

The hippocampus is crucial for long-term memory formation (not all types), specifically:
forming or encoding new declarative explicit memories (semantic and episodic)
not directly involved in forming or retrieving implicit procedural memories

This role is called consolidation, where newly forming memories are strengthened to enable permanent storage*

teddy without the study to hand I can't comment but I don't believe she did it like that. Also believe she looked at titles as a part of the research.

I totally and utterly disagree with you Teddy. The evidence totally and utterly disagrees with you Teddy.

Also, how wonderful you presume to know academics and private researchers methodologies.

There are no age verification checks on Pornhub - only when one clicks on advertised external sites. You are speaking hooey to try and justify your wanking to the abuse and degradation of women, your consumption of paid rape.

Ah cross post dr em! Thank you so much for the link.

I don't want to read it again but your research had a profound impact on my views of porn.

Finding bits of a dirty magazine in the park as a child definitely affected me.

Neurotrash do you have any recommendations for reading? Your post was fascinating and I've learnt from it.

Lol. Erm. I'm absolutely no expert but I do read bits here and there.

That was on quizlet. I think it's revision cards for what various parts of the brain do. Very basic.

I'm often interested in the brain (eg Dr sacks) and what parts do as there are various areas of the brain affected by autism. Many of my various bits of training for teaching children with autism has includes bits on this.

I know when I suffered from anxiety and panic attacks, the book I was prescribed by a counsellor talked about the way the amygdala affects / drives anxiety and ptsd.

Ruby Wax has looked at a lot of that in terms of long term depression and mindfulness, physically reducing the amygdala.

To me it's all obviously linked.

I know the thread here about the Tavistock a while ago had links to the sheep study (that's on Miranda Y's blog) and I put a study on that that looked at helping teens with exercise and impact on hippocampus.

mirandayardley.com/en/the-science-of-gender-what-influences-gender-development-and-gender-dysphoria/

Lots here on adolescent brain development.

I'm going to double check what I said about hormone blockers impacting hippocampus.

Cool, thank you I will have a look around.

Yes it was the hippocampus.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306453016305595