Children and Internet pornography

Children today grow up in a far different sexual world than older readers of this wiki did. No longer is Penthouse the strongest porn you can get. Children today are surrounded by hard-core sex, including parents who deliberately don't conceal their fucking from their children. With the near-universality of the Internet, and the constant decrease in the cost of storage, porn has become abundant. Anyone with a computer connected to the Internet has access to all the porn one could want, for free (goodbye commercial porn industry), categorized, searchable by keywords, and viewer-rated. It's anything but hard to find. The problem may be keeping it away.

Even in the most conservative household it is all but impossible to keep kids who want it from enjoying porn. First, because the dad in the household may love porn (even though he cannot be open about it), and does all he can to reign in his wife. Second, because Internet filtering software (parental blocking) is ineffective against tech-savvy minors. Third, because while it is possible to keep pornography out of the home - no computer, no cable TV, no cell phone pretty much takes care of that - the boy (or girl), unless home-schooled, also goes out of the home. He can see porn at a friend's house, on a school computer, at the public library. (Librarians in general are very pro-First Amendment and as a result porn-friendly.) He would hear about porn from one of the many articles about it (Internet porn) found in mainstream magazines and newspapers, the sort of things one finds, in the U.S., at a high school library.

Children also have, via the Internet, much more access to sexual information, including LGBT information. Sexual information abounds on the Internet, specific to whatever age, gender, sexual orientation, fetish, or ethnic group one wishes. The story of how this happened has not been told, but the U.S. has managed (through case law) to draw a line between informative works and those "utterly without redeeming social value", as the famous 1957 Roth decision put it, and has decided that minors do not need "protection" from sexual information. Ruth Westheimer, and others like her, can run sexual talk shows at times children may be present. Dan Savage's podcast "Savage Lovecast", which is as explicit as it can get, and which declares that its objective is "to get our listeners laid", for which reason a mouthwash is an appropriate sponsor, is available with no age restriction. The information is out there, and it isn't hard to find. Ask your librarian. Look at http://www.scarletteen.org.

Pornography (videos), as seen in the U.S. today (2015), has a lot wrong with it. Some is made by morons. It ignores the realities of sexually transmitted infections; even with testing, infections are epidemic among porn actors and actresses. ("Everybody's got herpes.") Women's sexuality is not well treated. Bisexuality is restricted to a niche. It overemphasizes the visual, and traditionally has been primarily about the male orgasm, though this is changing. Yet the following are undeniable:

• Pornography conveys the message that sex is good, that it's fun to fuck and suck and shoot, as often as you want to.
• Pornography exposes the child to sexual practices he or she is unfamiliar with, like transvestites and cuckolds (but not pedophiles).
• Pornography endorses and encourages masturbation. (Today's kids grow up in a world in which masturbation is not just O.K. but good for you.)
• Pornography exposes the viewer to men and women who are utterly unashamed, even proud of having sex in front of a camera, for the whole world to watch.
• Pornography emphasizes the difference between 17 and 18. Whatever you did before 18, and it probably was quite a lot, we don't want to hear about it. On your 18th birthday you can become a total whore. Once you're 18, you can get gangbanged and pissed on and make porn. Plenty of 18-year-olds want to.
• Pornography evolves. It probes some frontiers while squeamishly avoiding others, although it is not hard to find plenty of porn on any legal sexual practice.

Children as young as six are watching this porn and freely choose to watch it. Pornography is, in fact, what they most often go on the Internet for. It is almost always what is providing their sexual education, or earliest sexual education. (Furthermore, people all over the world are watching it.)

A widely commented-on result is that kids are sexting - swapping pictures of each other that show their genitals. They see nothing wrong with it (and in some cases have been charged with producing child pornography).

But it's more than that. Boys and girls today know, from a young age, that sex is fun, monogamy is just an option, jacking off is highly recommended, older people fuck a lot, and porn is very exciting and free. Abundant gay male porn shows that some men suck dick, pretty much any dick, and both straight and gay porn show the joy of assfucking: some prefer it.

What they don't learn is how many men, and some women, want to love them.