Multiple countries are trying to force porn sites to have an efficient age verification. With frightening numbers like half of 12 year old boys go monthly to porn sites.
Sure for an adult who remember the time where at best one kid would have brought a magazine to school, it feels concerning. However, it’s been easily 20 years that every household has high speed internet which is full of porn. So the kids under 30 (let’s call them Gen-Z) had a massive access to porn while growing up.
Is there any “sociologicial” studies about how it impacted these young adults ? Are they sexually more fucked-up than the millennials ?
I’m not gen-z nor against porn broadly speaking but I’m in the 5% of people who develop addiction/compulsion to it and it completely destroyed my sex drive to the point that I’d rather watch porn than have sex. Personally I don’t mind but it makes having a romantic relationship quite difficult and it has now cost me two of them.
I don’t feel like early access to it is the problem here however. It’s excessive consuption thorought my entire life.
10 days clean now. Wish me luck.
Gen Z is very well messed up, no matter what form of pornography there is. Neigsendoig (my producer) doesn’t do that anymore on the video side, and finds other ways to explore his heterosexuality (he was never outside of heterosexuality in the first place).
Gen Z here. Watched quite a lot of gay porn since around age 11.5-12. The only thing I remember confusing me was why penises “looked like that”. In the sense, that they had a pink head, had a weird pyramid like spongy rubber-ey top and why they were so big.
Turns out, I was looking at cut cocks, and our school had removed all sex ed. The new syllabus just taught, “penis go in vagina -> woohooo congratulations -> babyyyyy”. Oh also, on an unrelated note, our textbooks also said that cell phones make people selfish and autistic lmao (Science 2 textbook, SSC Maharashtra, 2020).
Anyway, I don’t prefer video porn anymore cuz I find it very shallow. It’s good, but feels like eating candy. Written smut on the other hand has a lot more depth. It’s like eating a super rich fruit salad.
So do I think porn negatively affected me? I don’t think so.
Here’s a long-form interview between a sex researcher and a urologist (MD) about how porn really effects us; both on an individual level; and in aggregate as a society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEqe5dHuQYE
TLDR: Porn is a bit of an over-stimulation on the brain, but the scale of the effect is similar to caffeine or nicotine. Far less impactful than that of any hard drug like cocaine or heroine. And unlike a chemical stimulant, it’s impossible to overdoes. Some people have excessive reactions to watching porn and having it readily available, so things like porn addiction are real and shouldn’t be dismissed. But the frequency of this is low (far lower than nicotine, gambling, or alcohol as comparison points) and the severity of such addictions are often minor (addicts skip other social interactions, but are unlikely to go into debt or lose jobs except in the most extreme cases).
There is no strong evidence that early exposure to porn via the internet has significant adverse effects. There are worse effects from exposure to violent content (including violent porn) than pornography in general.
This makes sense as from an evolutionary standpoint seeing other naked humans is expected. It’s only recently (in evolutionary time frames) that we’d not expect children to see other naked humans regularly or be unexposed to sex at all until an adult age. From a biological standpoint it makes perfect sense that our brain can handle seeing other people engaged in sexual activity.
Dad had lots of porn, mags, movies, stories, not especially hidden. I turned out healthy enough, and I don’t particularly have any hangups. I will say that at least mainstream porn was much friendlier than a lot of the new stuff. I’m late Gen X, btw.
I turned out healthy enough
Me too, but I have to say I find the rise of ‘stepmother’ and ‘family’ oriented porn especially in the US, pretty disturbing.
It didn’t. We always had easy access to porn. Sounds like if anything kids today are having less hook ups and generally are more respectful of each other.
I was a teen in the 90s. Can confirm there was a lot of foreplay with a lot of people, and then full sex
I remember when the media discovered there was a web browser on the original PSP and dubbed it the Playstation Pornable.
I’m not sure about gen z, but I worry about gen alpha. My wife works in a hospital for behavioral health and she sees an alarming number of kids (as young as 6 or 7) who are acting out sexually, and most of them consume a considerable amount of online porn. Many of them are there because they’ve sexually abused a sibling.
This is anecdotal, and of course in a behavioral health hospital my wife is going to see only the children who are acting out the most, and those children are by no means representative of the average child. It is also likely that some children have always acted out sexually, for various reasons, long before Internet porn. But the number of children they see for sexual predation is very concerning.
Most of it is in line with what you’d think: not that terrible unless you’re repressed and think that sex is bad or you have the religious hang ups that dictate sex should be sacred in some way
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27105446/ - higher consumption of pornography in adolescence leads to more permissive sexual attitudes (eg casual sex)
https://www.ovid.com/journals/jpsh/fulltext/10.1177/26318318231153984~pornography-and-its-impact-on-adolescentteenage-sexuality - association (not necessarily causal) of pornography use and earlier loss of virginity as well as greater risk taking in sex (such as inconsistent use of condoms, which could perhaps be addressed by the industry using them more)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30919052/ longitudinal studies find weak or no links between increased use of pornography and decreased psychological well being
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35294070/ while there are longitudinal studies that show correlation between pornography use and sexual harassment/assault there are studies to suggest that this may not be causal and other confounding variables such as peer environment, family attitudes, or personality traits may be more causal in nature)
Lots more but a lot of the negative effects are often tied to guilt and shame which is socially derived and possibly without basis
We really need to distinguish between porn that displays harmful attitudes towards women and everything else. There are libraries of porn available online that normalize coercive acts or people in positions of power taking advantage of others. Not ALL porn is like that but the questions are: what are adolescents watching and how would we expect that to impact their perception of a healthy sexual relationship?
I believe sex to be a spiritual experience (not tied to any one religion) that can absolutely involve kink and domination/submission play but ultimately should come from and maintain a state of balance with mutual satisfaction as the ultimate goal. There is absolutely porn that portrays this but I’d say a lot (perhaps the majority) does not.
That being said, as a millenial I did grow up with access to porn on Kazaa and what not. Saw some uncomfortable shit and my value system / attitudes towards sex remained relatively ok despite it. Ultimately, I had to read Indigineous thought and the philosophical aspects of the Kama Sutra (which emphasizes a woman’s autonomy and pleasure and is open to same sex relationships) to arrive at my current, very open, attitudes toward sex.
They have significantly less sex than previous generations did at comparable ages. It’s been well established by multiple sources at this point, although I don’t think causality is understood yet so it could be unrelated, or more likely porn accessibility is only one factor in the decline.
Shame really.
Sex is so much fun, and being open and comfortable with it and kink in general is incredibly freeing.
It’s a form of play that doesn’t get treated like a form of play by society.
That’s just how society is, most stuff just isn’t logical or ethical. As such, there are people that get aggressive over others asking questions, how is that socially acceptable?
But yes, acceptance by society doesn’t mean it’s right. Majority of the time morality is forcefully projected into others, and penalised if they dare to question that morality.
Are you talking about America or Europe? In America, sex is for the devil and casual sex sends you straight to the 9th circle. But in seriousness, youre right. Much of America is taught abstinence and shame, so its not as free and open as I wish it would be.
We may have been taught abstinence and shame, but, that didn’t stop us from having sex.
What it did do was make us stupid and have unprotected sex, which lead to all sorts of harm, simply because we didn’t know better.
They probably never had to beat it to scrambled softcore cable porn. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide if that’s better, worse, or neutral.
Well one thing is for sure, it impacted them in that they were less likely to get in trouble with the filth.
As a millennial my friends and I all had large collections of porn magazines and VHS tapes by the time we were 13 / 14 but they all had to be gained through theft or finding shit in the woods.
I haven’t seen a porn mag in the woods for like 20 years or more where as it used to be a regular occurrence in my youth!
How did all that porn get in the woods? Was there some kind of Horny Appleseed sprinkling porn mags across the country?
Kid steals magazine from dad/convenience store, shares the wealth with the homies, ditches the evidence.
Though I do still enjoy the legend of Horny Appleseed, doing god’s (?) work.
That is one of the great mystery’s of the 90s.
Married men. Lots of women think men looking at pornography is a form of unfaithfulness.
I guess that’s what Gibson meant about the future not being evenly distributed. As also a millennial (and an older one, at that) I got all my porn from the Internet when I was that age, albeit having to wait for individual images to load at 56kbps at first.
You can imagine how excited I was for my household to get DSL, LOL!
Oh yeh, we used the internet too at that age but like you say on a 56k dial up connection you’d literally be waiting for an image to load, line after line, so magazines were preferable. ADSL ushered in the age of more easily accessed videos for us, we are probably a similar age xD
And before the Internet, we were jacking it to the Sears catalog.
There was a time when people were beating it to this:
We’ve always had and used porn.
Same way as usual, pearl-clutchers latch onto it as a way to incite moral panic.
