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What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

nytimes.com

81–90 of 148 posts

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#81

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…

Why do you think you need to prevent your son from watching porn, especially to the point that you need to completely remove his access to the Internet?

plenty of recent studies show that pornography use is manifestly harmful to our brains, especially developing brains. Cursory searching yielded these articles, but there are many studies to be found.

http://yournewswire.com/this-is-how-pornography-addiction-is...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2642712/Does-...

https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/porn-debate/

Pornography is a harmful drug and can have many of the same psychological and physiological effects as other addictive substances.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've tried quitting either for years, very much addicted. Or at least a very strong coping mechanism. If you're anything like me, it's more or less impossible to quit one and have the other. Watching porn will eventually lead to masturbation and vice versa. I've recently tried taking the half-measure of exclusively audio pornography (/r/gonewildaudio) - in an effort to see if I notice any changes in my perception of…

I am curious, having recently found out I am not able to visualize in my head, "see with my mind's eye", are you similarly unable to see pictures in your head?

When reading about Aphantasia[1], one of the questions people with Aphantasia get is "how do you masturbate?".

My main motivation has been because of doing the course Learning How to Learn and Barbara Oakley talking about visualization being an effective study tool and I finally realized other people can really summon flying donkeys in their head with air sounds, which I cannot. That they really picture these moving scenes in their heads.

But it occurs to me this might drive some people to use more porn than others.

[1] which I don't have, I can very, very occasionally summon extremely brief pictures and with some practice I seem to be starting to get somewhere.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#83

> Fewer teenagers have early sex than in the past (in a recent study, 24 percent of American ninth graders had sex; in 1995 about 37 percent had), and arrests of teenagers for sexual assault are also down. But you don’t have to believe that porn leads to sexual assault or that it’s creating a generation of brutal men to wonder how it helps shape how teenagers talk and think about sex and, by extension, their ideas ab…

So the men you meet on a hookup site (and particularly, a hookup site for people you’re unlikely to choose to build a life with) are less romantic than the men you met organically? Color me shocked!

Moreover, people with a very specific fetish. What she did is that she gathered some personal experiences with men who are into older women and compared it with what she remembers happening 30 years ago. This is actually more a study about her rather than online porn.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once he started doing it, everything in his life declined. He stopped having healthy relationships with his siblings and his friends at school. He started to be much more angry and even sometimes violent, and when we examine the situations in detail, we see that none of it is justified, and he's always the one saying everyone is out to get him when he is actually the one doing wrong. He's become a lot more arrogant a…

First, how are you sure it's correlation and not causation? Perhaps he's being driven to porn/developing the habit as self-medication? Also, as to your previous point that it will lead to "harder" stuff, a recent study says no. Yes, there will be more opportunity and exploration of the topic, but that's something that will happen eventually to all individuals. It isn't studied very well, but at least this initial one…

There is more to it, and it's hard to pinpoint cause and effect. He did have issues that existed before the pornography habit. But they worsened significantly since the month he started looking at pornography regularly. I do believe that his pornography habit has lowered his mental and emotional intelligence by a noticeable factor. I also look back at when I was his same age, and see my own struggles as very similar to his. So I could be mistaken with some of the internal presumptions I've made about him, but the external ones match up almost exactly.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#85
post #50

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…

Here's what we tell our kids: You watch an action movie because it's exciting, it's thrilling, and things explode. Basically, everything is carefully managed or faked to give you the feeling that everything is amazingly awesome. Porn is just like an action movie, only it's about sex instead of guns and martial arts. It's fun, but it usually has very little to do with real sex.

> Porn is just like an action movie, only it's about sex instead of guns and martial arts. It's fun, but it usually has very little to do with real sex.

Except in action movies, people don't take real ideas back to the bedroom and end up wanting to act them out. Porn modifies brain chemistry[0] to alter how we think about sex. Porn is a common thread in serial murderers[1].

In my own life, I've had to reprogram myself to get away from ideas that haunted me for 10+ years that hurt myself and others.

Pornography is a plague.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/26/brain-...

[1]: https://www.netnanny.com/blog/what-serial-killers-and-murder...

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why not both? Let your SO be the only one who pleases you on this level, physically, mentally and emotionally. Ignore those voices that try to tell you that you can't be happy without these old ways of pleasing yourself. Your relationship will improve 100x, I speak from experience.

That only works if you have a SO, which isn't even necessarily what everyone wants.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think you need to prevent your son from watching porn, especially to the point that you need to completely remove his access to the Internet?

Most of the time, I see the puritanical christians going the route of "sex is evil". It's the unsaid thing as well, but they are also the ones pushing for "abstinence-only training". This is literally dumbing down discourse to students at an age who sorely needs it. I'd also be willing to bet that this family has no compunctions about letting the son watch extreme violent TV shows and movies. People being tortured, m…

the puritanical value isnt 'sex is evil'

the puritanical value is 'sex should be enjoyed in marriage, monogamously'

pornography is harmful to our brains, many studies have shown this.

plenty of studies also show that people who have fewer sexual partners are ultimately happier in their sex life.

and it doesnt take much thought to see that STDs would spread much more slowly if people were monogamous.

lots of good things come from that value. on the inverse, the 'have sex as much as you want' mentality leads to unplanned pregnancies/killing unborn babies, devaluation of the gift of sex, and spread of disease. but hey, you get to have 'lots of fun' so is it worth it?

sex and money are the greatest idols in our society, and the worship of either does not yield good things.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time, I see the puritanical christians going the route of "sex is evil". It's the unsaid thing as well, but they are also the ones pushing for "abstinence-only training". This is literally dumbing down discourse to students at an age who sorely needs it. I'd also be willing to bet that this family has no compunctions about letting the son watch extreme violent TV shows and movies. People being tortured, m…

The puritanical attitude is wrong. Sex is an amazing and great part of life, just like roller coasters or having 3 beers. Life is meant to be enjoyed. But over-doing it, or using something in a way it wasn't meant to be used, can ruin that joy. Nothing is wrong with sex within a healthy relationship. But nobody who goes to a hooker really believes afterwards that they found true happiness there. We also avoid movies…

> The puritanical attitude is wrong. Sex is an amazing and great part of life, just like roller coasters or having 3 beers. Life is meant to be enjoyed. But over-doing it, or using something in a way it wasn't meant to be used, can ruin that joy. Nothing is wrong with sex within a healthy relationship. But nobody who goes to a hooker really believes afterwards that they found true happiness there.

But that's what I'm taking about. There's no (supernatural, physical, legal) law that states for everything fun and good, I have to suffer equal amounts. That's just moralization in the puritanical strain, which I reject.

And I would also like to call out the sentence: " Nothing is wrong with sex within a healthy relationship."

Nothing is wrong with consensual sex, period. I needen't be in a marriage or relationship with them. I don't care if it's vanilla, scat, bdsm, cuckolding, or whatever. We have more than enough science and technology that people can have sex with little fear. It's only when governments want to inflict their "morals" on people do people really start to hurt. They do this by keeping drugs, devices, and techniques away. Thankfully, The Satanic Temple has been challenging these "moral precepts" as the religious laws enshrined into to state laws. (Seriously, who'd have thought that TST would fight for peoples' rights?!)

And I also have no issue with prostitutes. I've never procured the services of any, but I see no shame in doing so either. It's no more a temporary feel-good similar to that of a roller coaster or a concert. It's just "bad" because of the puritanical beliefs that all sex is bad, outside a marriage (later turned to relationship).

And regarding SAW, the show was meh. It's a slasher for slasher's sake.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#89
post #74

I told my wife that our 3rd grader had most likely seen porn at school. It turns out I was right. She had several friends in the 5th grade, and about 90% of the fifth graders have smart phones. My math was simple: if you give 10 twelve-year-olds unfettered internet access, at least one of them will find porn, and that one will show it to their friends. If any of them have an older sibling, the odds just go up.

This is a great reason to avoid giving smartphones to kids, and a big reason we haven't. It's important for them to not have to deal with things they aren't mentally, physically, or emotionally ready for yet. They need to be kids right now.

Re: What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn

#90
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what we tell our kids: You watch an action movie because it's exciting, it's thrilling, and things explode. Basically, everything is carefully managed or faked to give you the feeling that everything is amazingly awesome. Porn is just like an action movie, only it's about sex instead of guns and martial arts. It's fun, but it usually has very little to do with real sex.

> Porn is just like an action movie, only it's about sex instead of guns and martial arts. It's fun, but it usually has very little to do with real sex. Except in action movies, people don't take real ideas back to the bedroom and end up wanting to act them out. Porn modifies brain chemistry[0] to alter how we think about sex. Porn is a common thread in serial murderers[1]. In my own life, I've had to reprogram mysel…

> Porn is a common thread in serial murderers.

So's oxygen and water intake.

Citing NetNanny on this is pretty silly. Serial killers existed long before pornography was around, and I suspect you're getting correlation and causation mixed up there. Your average porn consumer manages not to cut heads off.

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