[vy8vWJlco]

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... :\

[objclxt]

>"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.

[1]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140197110...

[vy8vWJlco]

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 with your conclusion.

[jlgreco]

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.

[sp332]

porn is one of the few "safe" ways for young people to figure their junk out.

I'm not exactly an expert at either porn or in-the-flesh sex but... I've always been given to understand that they are quite different.

[GuiA]

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).

[sp332]

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".

[jrockway]

How do you know the sex you're having with your partner is "regular"?

The answer is intuition, and even teenagers have intuition.

[sp332]

"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.

[vy8vWJlco]

> "People who watch porn are only learning how to make porn."

That's a very narrow perspective. I can honestly say I have never felt like a porn actor (or director) in the bedroom because I watched porn as a teenager (to which I also attribute my ability to draw, FWIW...).

If there were magically a safe partner for everyone at all times, regardless or age or circumstance, I have no doubt there would be less porn. But we don't live in one of those worlds, we live in an emotionally-wrought, often isolating one. Teenagers feel alone, yet it's also a time when the instincts and cravings are the strongest, the most out of control, and the least satiable. The type of flirting and friendships I can take for granted, are not even on the table for them. Teenagers are still cutting their teeth on their communication skills. They don't know how to cope with a lot of things, one being the deeply-rooted drive to procreate. Pursuing those feelings safely can be difficult. Masturbation is one way for them to explore their feelings in the _safety_ of their own room - to take control of their feelings - without resorting to extremely poor decisions (unwanted pregnancies, unhealthy relationships, getting tattoos that claim they will love someone forever when all they really wanted was to see them naked...). Would a real partner be better? Perhaps. Is that always the best option? No, and I think it's harmful to act as though it were. Everyone has genitals and the feelings that go with them, but for better or worse, society pretends young people don't. For lack of a better term, they are screwed; they are on their own: they get to figure things out, hopefully without ruining their life in other ways.

Some forms of experimentation are more dangerous than others, and watching porn is one of the least dangerous options available to young people to explore their feelings. Ignoring that (prohibition, for example) won't help. Assuming we emphasize the difference between fantasy and reality, porn can serve a person well over the years. In that spirit, I would much rather see a "this film is fantasy, and does not necessarily reflect a healthy realtionship" warning on porn, rather than all those copyright threats... It's pretty obvious what our priorities are.

[cheald]

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.