People Magazine has a dead-tree article on porn exposure of today’s children. This is something I’ve talked about before, the internet has resulted in the initiation of a vast social experiment.
Where in generations past young teenage boys would scheme, plan and quest for porn, or barring that, a racy edition of National Geographic, kids today are bombarded by grotesque pornography of a nature that I was not even aware of until I was told about it in a church youth group (I am speaking of bestiality). I am always confused when I walk by my 10 year old brother deleting his hotmail “donkey lovin'” spam in the living room. One of the kids in the article notes that not only does he see men & women having sex, he gets a regular stream of inter-species menage a trois in his inbox (thankfully I only seem to be the target of hentai porn).
The statistics of porn exposure, on the order of 70-80%, are specified in the article. But the negative results are always presented as anecdote, which suggests to me that individuals who have psychological weak-points are fingering pornography as a causative agent, rather than their own failings (my Christian evangelical friends who had porn or drug problems tended to pin it on the devil). The article concludes with a father’s tale of how brazen and bold his sons have gotten about porn viewing, looking up their bookmarked sites when their mom is cooking, or when their parents go out dinner. Strange days.
Posted by razib at 04:32 PM