Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 148 posts

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#31

Post by kemayo »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #22
_m8fo wrote: post #6

The insistence of parents to control their children via censorship and other means, as well as view them as some perfect child is more harmful than any porn. The fact that the article itself and comments to the article talk about kids learning about such things from other kids and websites instead of their parents is pretty much case and point. There is no downside to talking to your kid about sexuality and other thi…

"Censorship" here is a big scary word for very basic common sense parenting: recognizing that kids of different ages, personalities, and emotional maturity are not ready to be exposed to some things. I agree with your assessment that parents should talk to their kids more about difficult topics at all ages, in an age-appropriate way, of course. But you can take this too far and end up with the idea that parents shoul…

> "Censorship" here is a big scary word for very basic common sense parenting: recognizing that kids of different ages, personalities, and emotional maturity are not ready to be exposed to some things.

Though there's the other common-sense side to this, which is recognizing that there are things your kid is going to be exposed to regardless of whether you think they're ready for it (in this case, hearing about sex from their agemates at school). At which point it becomes a choice between introducing it yourself and doing the best you can, or hoping it all works out when you're not involved.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#32

Post by xj9 »

mandazi wrote: post #4

The availability and ease for this type of content is scary especially when children are more connected than ever. Pornography kills love (Edit: https://fightthenewdrug.org/how-porn-kills-love/ ). Love is extremely important for human beings and civilizations. It drives art, philosophy, faith, religion, etc. It is love that produced great works throughout history. I read some where there was going to be a TLD for por…

how does calling it a drug make it bad? people take drugs all the damn time. i'm drinking a stimulant that my work bought for me right now! almost everyone at the office drinks one or more a day.

i actually used to live down the street from one of the "fight the new drug" offices in SLC. the problem in Utah, imo, is the seriously weak sex ed that they provide in schools here and the shit cultural attitudes towards sex.

the problem isn't porn, the problem is that parents are allowing porn to replace them as educators in this space. obviously that's going to lead to fucked up attitudes unless the young person happens upon some of the more healthy sexy spots on the internet.

if you want censorship, go ahead, but nobody has to make it easy for you. education is going to do a lot more for you tho. my parents tried to censor my access to porn when i was a teenager so i made an isolinux disk (ubuntu + tor) and used it to avoid their keylogging and filtering software.

i was/am mostly into erotic literature and sex positive forums vs other types of pornographic content, but that isn't thanks to my parents. i value intimacy, but finding sexual online places that share my values is difficult. i suppose the economics don't work out for that type of content. i know people who have had issues with porn interfering with their ability to be intimate, but it has never been a problem for me personally.

TL;DR don't be a fucking baby and talk to your kids about sex and physical intimacy. you can't "protect" anyone from pornography, but you can influence your children's attitudes towards these important topics.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#33

Post by ryanwaggoner »

cloverich wrote: post #30
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Censorship" here is a big scary word for very basic common sense parenting: recognizing that kids of different ages, personalities, and emotional maturity are not ready to be exposed to some things. I agree with your assessment that parents should talk to their kids more about difficult topics at all ages, in an age-appropriate way, of course. But you can take this too far and end up with the idea that parents shoul…

But why is that too far to assume a child can be exposed to the same things as an adult, ask the same questions, etc? There's this concept that if a child is exposed to something too early it will corrupt their morality or sensibilities and I just don't see it.

I'm not a child psychologist or mental health professional, so I'm not sure what to tell you, except that it seems reasonable to me to think that just maybe exposing kids to certain types of materials before they have the experience, emotional maturity, etc, to process those things can be incredibly damaging. And I really doubt that trying to avoid my 3 year old daughter watching violent pornography is going to harm her, but yeah, I don't have the data. Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#34

Post by lloydde »

> The clips tend to be short, low on production value, free and, though Pornhub

True as opened with “tend to be” but such a poor description of Pornhub in an article meant to help parents understand pornography. For example, the company behind Pornhub owns many production companies and paid sites. High production value clips promote those sites as do does the advertising.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Thylmann

http://www.jonronson.com/butterfly.html

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#35

Post by bhnmmhmd »

sexoffender wrote: post #25
gameswithgo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Pornography kills love. Can you expound on this further? What exactly does it mean and what evidence is there to support it?

Love is the wanting good for another person even if it costs you personally. Porn teaches you to want pleasure for yourself, even if it costs someone else. That's not love, that's lust. The chemicals released in your body and especially brain during orgasm build a closer connection and bond within you to the concepts and people you focused on during it. Pornography trains you to be selfish. Whereas having sex and bot…

One might argue that the good sense of joy followed by love is evidence that when one loves someone, one is acting selfish [0], even though he/she might think otherwise.

[0]: People are rational and they wouldn't do things that don't result in more benefit to them than their cost.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#36

Post by dqpb »

Santosh83 wrote: post #8

Honestly, like all addictions, it starts having an impact when you start depending upon it for pleasure and substitute parts of your life with it. That tends to happen when your life in general is not working well, or you're caught in situations of chronic stress and unhappiness. So the real long term strategy here would be to elevate the general quality of our lives and our interrelationships with each other, which…

The article is not about addiction

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#37

Post by sexoffender »

My oldest son recently developed a porn habit in secret, and the things we saw in his search history showed a clear progression from googling "boobs" and "nudity" to "pissing" and "bondage".

Pornography isn't even close to what it was 30 years ago when you for the most part only saw it in nudie mags that your dad had (or friend had who stole it from his dad). Today, kids have easy access to a wealth of horrifying and bastardized hard-core pornography.

But not only that, the ads and search results and images that show up for the more innocent things will lead them to the more awful things, because they're just readily visible and accessible right there.

To be honest the only solution we have found is twofold: to change our wifi password to disable internet on all devices (he was sneaking his Nintendo 3DS into the bathroom for 2 months to look at porn on it) and to proactively start teaching them that life is more than a constant quest for more and more intense pleasure, and that if you allow yourself to give into that base mentality, you are throwing away a good portion of your future that could be filled with meaningful real relationships and legitimately joyful times, in exchange for maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain until you die.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#38

Post by Altimos »

bhnmmhmd wrote: post #20
jurassic wrote: post #15

I am on day 81 of a 90 day porn reset. It’s been hard at times but my real life sexual experiences seem greatly improved and I plan to continue abstinence from porn after the reset period ends. Seeing that I can modify behavior by setting attainable medium term goals has made me excited to tackle some other personal challenges too. The site https://www.yourbrainonporn.com is what got me interested in trying to quit.…

I wonder which one is better: 1) Quit Porn 2) Stop Masturbation Any ideas?

In the case of #1, you start to lose your association of fake or staged sex acts with real sex acts, and hopefully are able to re-educate yourself on what real sex is actually like.

In the case of #2, you deprive yourself of a completely natural pleasure.

I would put my bets behind quitting porn over stopping masturbation if the goal is to develop a healthy outlook on sex. I'd love to hear someone on the other side's thoughts though.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#39

Post by sexoffender »

bhnmmhmd wrote: post #35
sexoffender wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love is the wanting good for another person even if it costs you personally. Porn teaches you to want pleasure for yourself, even if it costs someone else. That's not love, that's lust. The chemicals released in your body and especially brain during orgasm build a closer connection and bond within you to the concepts and people you focused on during it. Pornography trains you to be selfish. Whereas having sex and bot…

One might argue that the good sense of joy followed by love is evidence that when one loves someone, one is acting selfish [0], even though he/she might think otherwise. [0]: People are rational and they wouldn't do things that don't result in more benefit to them than their cost.

I made that same exact argument in college to someone who was just trying to help me see how insane I was. Yes, it's slightly self-serving to love and find joy in love. But of all the forms of selfishness in existence, it's the most acceptable and least blamable one.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#40

Post by nemo44x »

peatfreak wrote: post #11

Thank you for posting this. This is a topic that I've long been fascinated by but never knew anything about. I'm way in the older end of the bell curve of age distribution of Hacker News readers, so I've personally experienced how pornography has evolved over the past thirty (or so) years, i.e., ever since I became curious about sex and turned on by naked women. And without a doubt the "hardness" and easy availabilit…

David Foster Wallace had some interesting thoughts on this. From my interpretation he came to the conclusion that you can't blame the pornographers. They're just responding to market demand and the market is demanding more and more deviant and salacious content.

His thoughts on why the market is demanding more demeaning content has to do with the social acceptance of pornography - or at least of porno of the time you're talking about. One of the big allures of pornography is that it is "naughty" and deviant. As it becomes accepted the quest to find content that is not socially OK pushes pornographers to create it. A market gets created. To the point we are an asymptote of snuff films more or less.

So that although groups that would traditionally balk at porn and forced what we'd consider even mild porn into the underground are annoying, they may be providing a service in social health in limiting progression into a darker and darker realm of pure humiliation films, faux rape films, etc.

The article was titled "Big Red Son". Worth reading.

Post reply on HN