[cue_the_strings]

I'm genuinely curious, how old were you when you were first exposed to sexual content? I think I was like 7 or 8.

Like, we had a channel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTV_Palma) publicly broadcasting porn after midnight (I don't remember watching that) and all the older (~15YO) kids around the neighborhood were collecting porn magazines from who knows where and hiding them around in "caches".

I remember all the older kids being really excited about it, and us younglings being curious but grossed out. There was some pressure to pretend you were interested, kids love pretending they're more grown up than they are. Funnily enough, I remember having the same feeling about football world cup, like not getting the whole fuss about it, but being expected to be interested.

Couple years later, I naturally found out what they were excited about... For football I never did, though.

[arp242]

I don't think you can really compare staying up late to sneakily watch a (typically soft-core) porn and things like that to always having this content being pushed on you with a device always in your pocket every day.

It's really a matter of degree and scale.

[Spivak]

I guess but I had unfiltered access to the internet starting around this age and it was fine.

There were two stages of my life, too young to understand or have any desire for sexual content, and old enough to want and seek out sexual content. At 13 I was well into the second stage and it's super weird how we pretend that tweens and teens aren't horny as hell despite all of us having lived through the hormonal onslaught.

Looking back having access to stuff beyond extremely sanitized softcore porn was extremely healthy. I learned from a young age that sex was a thing people did for fun, it wasn't super serious, and desires I had and were ashamed of were completely normal and honestly kind of vanilla.

[afro88]

Sure, but go to one of the main porn websites and you're shown extremely hardcore content on the front page, in video thumbnails. Often there's something "rough", probaby something about step siblings, and in most cases the actors are being exploited or quite possibly trafficked.

I agree with your sentiment though. Removing access to pornographic material isn't the answer. But these days unfiltered access comes with a different set of issues that likely have negative consequences on development of a healthy attitude to sex.

[kredd]

You have a point, but my guess is it's simply a numbers game. I remember everyone in middle school sharing explicit, gore, "rough" LiveLeak vides in our school-wide MSN group chats. Probably a percentage of people suffered because of it later in life, but at that point still not everyone was connected to the Internet. Even if the percentage of people that get negatively affected stays the same nowadays, the absolute numbers are bigger, so it makes it to the headlines more often.

[mock-possum]

That’s pretty much exactly my experience and my opinion as well -

I knew what I wanted, I figured out how to get it, I never had a moment’s hesitance at the time, and I’ve never had a moment’s regret now as an adult. I sought out sexual material when I became interested in it, the same way I sought out sex when I became interested in it. I can’t even imagine what the adults in my life could have possibly done to stop me.

[doublerabbit]

Meanwhile I encountered the wrong, extreme side of porn at 15. And it spiraled from there. It really caused me issues in my twenties and its only now in my thirties that I finally feel I can start to bury the ashes. I'm on track, I've eliminated what I was obsessed with and still fighting the last of the demons.

I'm not who I was and it's been an insane hard task to change myself. I understand why people don't. That's what I have to remind myself every morning.

During my twenties I was easily wanking 5-8 times a day, I couldn't get enough. I existed within a fandom, the hint is in my username, which is now a thing of the past and I have nothing good to say about such fandom! But, still feels like my horny switch is glued to on. I've even been mulling over the idea of castration just to ensure I have no libido.

God forbid, I was a creep and my mind, psyche was an horrorshow. It was only when I accidentally took a heroic dose of an psychedelic I saw who I was. During the psychosis the devil on my shoulder and where I was to stay in the after life. I hit rock bottom, one step away to the point of no return.

My parents tried, I beat their system. I moved out after college and then had my own place with no restrictions.

Porn is no joke.

In true crazy, I even documented the episode somewhat. old site, so no ssl et cetera, exists for legacy.. /face palm

http://pixc.pl/argh/blogs/paws_palace.html

[mock-possum]

I mean… no offense man but it sounds like your problem wasn’t porn, your problem was you.

[doublerabbit]

Debatable.

The problem did originate from porn. I didn't know what was right and what was wrong, I was naive. And unfiltered internet access, I was a rogue. I could talk all day about warez, CC gens, botnets. I'm just luckily I've had a solid family environment. The internet was my social outlet then.

My maturity age was a lot lower than to how old I was. And because the internet was not a commodity in 2000 and really the wild west, what could folk do? I was just a cowboy who took all the wrong paths. Kept taking the left rather than right and hid it well. No one knew the dangers of the internet back then, nor knew how to navigate the dark side. As well not having the maturity required.

Prior to this, I was kicked out an school subject for "hacking" and discovering a Windows 98 DCOM exploit. I wasn't allowed to touch any computer apart from one. It may of been that I also got pissed off with another student and sabotaged his coursework under the school's news paper account. A true uprising of an menace.

I bought a BB gun at school, started showing it off till someone reported me. I had no intention to do anything with it. This is in Europe, I just thought it was cool. Already having the rep of "hacker boy" some older year student reported me, I got in trouble and then someone randomly pulled me aside handed me a CD-R copy of Quake 3 Arena.

It kept me occupied but sadly never saved my soul as after college went to university, had my own dorm room, when I got my own place I was too hooked to porn and in other area's. The twenties was all mistakes but, made through it just.

And here I am now mid-thirties, job, mortgage and someone who even surprises myself. Still working stuff out, most at work don't understand me. I have near to zero friends, but regardless, myself is making great progress.

I was dealt the wrong set of cards and took all the wrong paths. And I've flipped them, both physically and mentally.

[avgDev]

What do you mean by "it wasn't super serious"? Sex is seriously some serious business.

Pornography definitely caused issues for me. It isn't an accurate representation of a healthy sexual relationship.

[dkarl]

I was exposed to porn before I was even interested. I think I was seven. My friend's parents had the complete cable package that carried all the channels the local provider offered (which at the time I think was around thirty channels) and one of them showed porn. I only saw it once when I slept over, so I don't know if it was a dedicated porn channel or if it was just late night. The few minutes I saw was soft core, but looking back in retrospect, I'm pretty sure it was leading up to a hard core scene. My friend was also seven, but he seemed pretty obsessed with it. I left him to it and played video games instead, and I never slept over again.

I didn't get exposed to porn after that until a couple of high school trips where we got to stay in hotel rooms and of course figured out how to access the pay-per-view porn. But that was it. The "inspiration" for my teenaged solo sexual activities came from catalogs with models in lingerie, relatively tame TV, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues, tennis magazines, and my imagination. The closest thing I had to porn when I lived with my parents was pausing a rented VHS tape of an R-rated movie, on one of the rare occasions when I had the house to myself.

[throwaway22032]

When I was younger porn was a properly seedy thing that people would consume but almost no-one knew anyone that 'did it'.

Nowadays you have OnlyFans models or similar basically all over every social media platform, businesses trying to sell it as a legit lifestyle, etc. It's completely different, because it's becoming much more bidirectional and open now.

[tennisflyi]

Porn and OF are not similar. Porn is more of a job and OF a lifestyle

[probably_wrong]

OF is porn with a fresh coat of paint.

Sure, it is advertised as something one does as "a lifestyle", but when the model works for a professional studio with metrics to reach and gig workers chatting with customers while pretending to be her [1], how is that not a job? And more important, how do you know that the model on screen is doing what (s)he's doing because of their "lifestyle" and not because they are behind on their weekly numbers and may otherwise lose their spot in the agency's rotation?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391797

[AlexandrB]

I don't follow. In my mind OF is just "democratized" porn that doesn't have to go through seedy producers/distributors. It's like Uber for porn.

[tennisflyi]

The top of OFs is usually a couple gallivanting courtesy of simps dedicated to a model or producing content from their modern apartment while fucking/taking nudes thus lifestyle.

Riley Reid/agency models go from job to job as an IC and gets a check from the company via simps dedicated to a certain website.

The former is a much easier sell/explain and a bit easier to justify to puritans. It’s all very samey but different.

[throwaway22032]

I think that what you're saying is that oldschool pornography jobs are different to how pornography works on OnlyFans.

They're both still porn and they're both definitely a lifestyle. One does not merely "do porn".

[ajsnigrutin]

But it's different... you actually had to seek porn to find it back then (like stay up past your bedtime, turn on a relatively bad tv station, and sneak sticky magazines from somewhere.

Now it's seeking you... open instagram, and you get porn ads, even if you're 13.

On the other hand, boobs in shower gel ads were pretty normal back then, and noone really got excited by them. Also asses in thongs for suntan location ( https://svetkapitala.delo.si/media/images/20200217/322547.wi... )

[usrnm]

> you actually had to seek porn to find it back then

You clearly haven't seen early Internet. Giant flashy banners with semi-porn content everywhere

[ajsnigrutin]

Not really.. maybe on some seedy piraty ('warez' back then) websites.

If you visited whatever site agreggator was popular locally, and opened any of the sites in the first two pages of any category, you didn't get to see a single boob.

[cmrdporcupine]

Culture around this stuff is completely different in the Anglo-American world, for one. Europeans are accustomed to nudity and the like everywhere, and it's not even particularly ... anything.

But also, 1980s porn magazines or whatever are very different from today's porn content. A brief visit to any of the free "tube" sites exposes you immediately to a level of intensity that you wouldn't get from Playboy or Penthouse in the 80s. Right on the front page you'll find choking, incest ("stepdaughter"), BSDM, etc.

I don't particularly want my teenage son traipsing into that before the context and patterns of healthy mature sexual relationships have been established.

But more than anything, I don't want it pushed on him.