Boy, am I glad my Mom didn't have a "no porn rule." I'd have been really confused about my body and people's behaviours. (I also would have been in a totally different field; turns out optimizing a 386 for fast porn teaches you everything you'll need for your career.) I might have even turned to religion.
Our society is set up in such a way that porn is one of the few "safe" ways for young people to figure their junk out. Heaven help us if they do censor the net.
He probably thought he'd get to play Angry Birds under his superman blanket. (Remember reading comics with a flashlight?) Instead he got an obligation and an emasculating letter. "Don't say anything you wouldn't say in public" probably would have sufficed. He can't even throw it under a bus for what it represents, because it isn't his. It's hers, and she's loaned it to him... :\
>"porn is one of the few "safe" ways for young people to figure their junk out"
I disagree with this. By virtue of the market, most porn online is targeted towards men. The majority of pornography thus fulfils masculine desires, which is not necessarily what women want.
One Swedish study (abstract here[1], but you can find the stats I use cited elsewhere in full) of 4,000 high school students found that a much larger proportion of girls described pornography as "sexually off-putting" (it is worth noting that Sweden has an extremely progressive sex education policy in its schools). Pornography re-enforces masculine stereotypes - someone viewing pornography at a young age may take that to be 'how it is done', rather than illustrating a fantasy.
Now that doesn't mean there isn't healthy pornography: as other people have pointed out, there's something for everyone when it comes to porn online. But a 13 year old boy (or girl) looking for porn is almost certainly going to start at the lowest common denominator, and that's porn that's often denigrating to women at best.
Before I'm flamed into oblivion, I am not against pornography: I am merely suggesting that typical porn - the kind that you may run across as a teenager, on the more accessible sites - is not "one of the few 'safe' ways for young people to figure their junk out".
This is why I think if you are a parent it is important not to ban, or discourage, your children from watching pornography, but to make sure they understand that porn fundamentally is about fulfilling fantasies, and is not always an accurate portrayal of reality. Those first encountering porn may not necessarily be aware of that.
Yup. Fantasy != reality. I actually think the Internet helped me learn that early.
By "safe" I mean safer than the alternatives (public indecency, teen pregnancy, unsafe or exploitive real-life situations, etc, etc), not categorically "best," or even necessarily useful for everyone. If girls are statistically put off by porn, that's OK. I want it to be OK to seek what feels right for me too, and I'm glad I was able to at a time when I was high on testosterone; the difference between a sex offender and a nice normal guy can sometimes just be whether or not a person has a "safe" outlet.
Video games provide stress relief and can be seen similarly (girls might not play the same types of video games, even though most FPS games are some of the most common), but as long as people can distinguish fantasy from reality, they can be healthy outlets. Self-moderation is also a learned skill.
I'm not trying to be prescriptive, I just hate to see a nifty tech "gift" become a point of shame (emasculation). As jlgreco said, it's biologically hardwired. IMHO, he's probably still going to look for porn, only now he may feel like it's "bad"... That he's bad. Prohibition is a land-mine of social and psychological problems. Just look at catholic priests.
I agree, though I think a "no porn" rule is just as likely to backfire on a parent by driving a child away from religion. When religion is just that thing that forbids doing things that you don't want to do anyway (murder, steal, build a cow out of gold in your backyard, etc) it is easy to never bother putting any thought into it one way or the other. But when you tell a teenage boy that his biologically hardwired desires are evil... there is a good chance that kid is going to start wondering what exactly the purpose of that rule is and how relevant it is to his own life.
It could go either way I think, but it is a very polarising thing to impose on a young adult.
Porn is vast. You can find videos of pornstars exaggeratingly copulating, like you can find amateur videos of two 20-somethings having perfectly regular sex.
Both, if seeked out by the teenager, are a subset of a perfectly healthy sex-education (much more so than the very politically correct discourse that passes for sex-ed in the US these days).
But how would an uninitiated teen know which ones are exaggerated and which are "regular"? It seems like watching porn would,not be,as stimulating as real sex, so people would seek out exaggerated videos which are not as, um, "educational".
"Regular" is strongly influenced, if not completely defined, by what you see around you. Porn might partly reflect what people want but it also definitely changes what they want. e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124922 People who watch porn are only learning how to make porn.
Relying on porn to teach kids about sex is about as reasonable as relying on the Twilight movies to teach them about how to have healthy relationships.
Not really. My parents knew that regardless of any rules or restrictions they would place on me, I'd find a way around them and watch porn anyway. So the subject was never brought up.
My father had equally pragmatic rules about alcohol and drugs. He made sure I was educated about the effects of drugs. He made sure that I knew that my mind was pretty awesome and putting it at risk is stupid. (He also knew that kids do such things- but try to be smart about it.) He told me my grades had to stay up and I couldn't lose my job. And he said that if the police came to the house and knew my name- if I was somehow involved enough in something and didn't have sense enough to get away- I would lose all of my freedom. Guilty or not. And if he ever caught me driving under the influence- the same.
I had a lot of freedom, and I made some mistakes, but overall it worked out.
I think that's a really good model for educating the kid, because it's actually a representation of how society at large works. We have lots of freedom, but if we abuse that freedom then we lose it. Driving licenses can be suspended or revoked for breaking traffic rules, hefty fines can be charged for misdemeanors, the individual can be imprisoned for more serious crimes, etc. Props to your dad.
Our society is set up in such a way that porn is one of the few "safe" ways for young people to figure their junk out. Heaven help us if they do censor the net.
He probably thought he'd get to play Angry Birds under his superman blanket. (Remember reading comics with a flashlight?) Instead he got an obligation and an emasculating letter. "Don't say anything you wouldn't say in public" probably would have sufficed. He can't even throw it under a bus for what it represents, because it isn't his. It's hers, and she's loaned it to him... :\