Blocking children’s access to online hardcore porn
The Federalist has an article about a Louisiana’s Republican state representative Laurie Schlegel’s successful fight to block online porn from children in the state. The article makes several important points:
(1) Online porn today is mostly brutal and violent, far far different from the old Playboy centerfold type.
(2) Children have widespread access to it.
(3) It has an addictive quality for many people, but for young children and teens it has the added effect of helping to form their ideas about sex when they are young and vulnerable.
There’s one important thing the article doesn’t discuss, however, which is the role that child access to online porn plays in the escalation of the transgender phenomenon among young girls. I have been struck at how often this factor is mentioned among detransitioners, who are often consumers of online porn in their youth and are so troubled by it that they decide to retreat from womanhood, since being a woman and sexual contact in general is associated with being the recipient of violent abuse.
Online porn is not so great for young boys, either, as this article in Psychology Today (not a bastion of right-wing thought) describes:
When an adolescent boy compulsively views pornography, his brain chemistry can become shaped around the attitudes and situations that he is watching. Sadly, pornography paints an unrealistic picture of sexuality and relationships that can create an expectation for real-life experiences that will never be fulfilled. …
Pornography shows us a world where relationships mean nothing and immediate sexual gratification means everything. Therefore, the adolescent viewer’s brain is being wired to expect that sex and relationships are separate from one another, and that men and women’s bodies should be sexually exaggerated as they are in porn–which can lead to shame about one’s own body as well as failure to be aroused by the bodies of others.
Pornography on the Internet can be inexpensive, easy to access, and easy to hide. Many adolescents look at pornography when their parents think they are doing homework. While masturbating to porn, the adolescent brain is being shaped around a sexual experience that is isolating, visceral, and completely void of any love or compassion.
That was written in 2011, and since then the role of violence in these images has become dominant and even more destructive to normal functioning. For example, this was written in 2021 by the parent of a teen girl who suddenly announced a desire to become a boy. When she gave her parent (I’m assuming a mother, but it’s not clear) access to her devices, this is what the parent found:
The history on every device was filled with pornography, and the porn was mostly guy-on-guy. It was violent porn. It was anime porn with rape scenes, pregnant cartoon men being sodomized, gang bangs with cartoon children. There were internet sites that contained written porn, with beatings, followed by forgiveness and sex.
My daughter had been sucked into the dark web.
She was only 13.
There were searches for ball gags, hand-cuffs, whips and leather outfits. There were surveys to determine what deviant sex acts she would partake in. There were Discord and Instagram chatrooms where girls discussed whether they are bottoms or tops, givers or receivers, abusers or abused. There were discussions of turn-ons with weaponry. There were images of cartoon dogs giving oral sex. My daughter started drawing penises on her walls in her room, her shoes and her pants.
More at the link. It is very very disturbing and I suggest you read the whole thing.
The difference between the atmosphere in which children are raised today, and their possible exposure to hardcore porn, and the atmospher in which older adults were raised is enormous. I included the above excerpt as an illustration of the sort of thing we’re talking about. And even if a parent manages to block such things on a home computer or on a child’s phone, there are other friends with other phones and other computers.
A very serious problem.
It is a serious problem, but I’m skeptical it can be effectively blocked at the endpoint. The article mentions age verification technology, but I would imagine that’s easily surmounted. I’m not a techie, but I’ve long thought that some sort of filter could work, where purveyors are required to digitally “label” their sites, and parents could prevent those sites from being accessed from their kids’ devices. Televisions have some crude version of that. Yes, kids could probably find a way around that, but it seems to me that approach has more of chance than age verification.
The cited effects further reduce our reproductive rate. Other parts of the world could use those effects. Oh well…
I read Neil Postman’s 1982 book, The Disappearance of Childhood, when it was first published and still have my paperback copy. Postman– years before the Internet– argued that television was a major factor in children’s loss of the protection they had once had from overexposure to sex and violence because TV was, in his words, “the total disclosure medium.” It’s interesting that Postman concluded that little could be done to change the direction in which television programming was heading because the network executives catered to adult audiences for obvious reasons.
I can only imagine what Postman would say about the baleful influence of the Internet; he died in 2003, when the WWW was relatively new. For those who are interested, though– and I recommend Postman’s book highly– The Disappearance of Childhood is available online in full in PDF format at
https://interesi.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/disappearance.pdf
Chapters 6 through 8 are the most relevant to our current concerns, though the earlier chapters about the history of childhood in Western culture are important too and can be read fairly quickly. The entire PDF, including the book’s front matter, is only 151 pages long.
The Left’s March Through the Institutions has resulted in a majority of the West’s citizens embracing a nihilistic, post-modernist ‘standard’ of morality. If there is no objective truth, there can only be an individual, subjective morality. Societal cohesion is lost.
Thus, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Edmund Burke
Who owns and profits from pornhub? Why is there no campaign to put them out of business, or even boycott ala Bud Light/Disney? This post being immediately after the one about reeducation camps and FBI targeting mine is obviously a rhetorical question.
Well the Libertarians say you can’t legislate morality and the Left is all in on redefining and normalizing perversity, so there are some tensions in asking who profits.
Very disheartening. TV and the internet have such promise for connecting, educating, and uniting people. Both mediums have become vast wastelands with a few redeeming features, but mostly the location of societal rot, divisiveness, and degradation.
I feel great pity for the young of today. Looking back at 67 years of marriage to a woman that is still my best friend, I cannot imagine how much poorer my life would have been without her. To have a good sexual and psychological bonding with a wife or husband and to have children who become successful citizens, is such a fulfilling experience. (Not an easy one, but worth all the effort and difficulty.)
How awful it is that young people today are being warped by porn and weird sexual deviation.
Vivek says no social media for children under 16. I agree. How to make it happen is the problem. I hope it’s one that can be solved because society at large demands that it be solved.
Apparently age verification laws have dramatically reduced porn site traffic in states which have instituted it. Sites don’t want to be responsible for verification, so they just decline. However, as more states require age verification, the sites will surely find a way around it.
The details of what children are looking at are nauseating.
I read many years ago that even the porn industry wanted a porn specific url tag but it was denied. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But it would really help — just block all sites that are “.xxx” or whatever.
I also read that hotels — normal hotels that we wouldn’t mind staying in — make a bundle of money off of porn streaming to the rooms.
I thank God I am to old for kids. But I’m terrified that I’m also too young to not end up Soylent Green.
Parents should keep smart phones away from their children. I do not know what age is a cut off, but I would think at least 16. This will probably involve huge battles, but it is worth the fight.
Bob Wilson:
They can’t keep other children’s smart phones away from them.
Neo, big difference between looking at another kid’s phone and having one with you 24/7.
Bob Wilson:
Obviously. But does the difference make enough difference? I contend that as long as a child is with other kids and has access to their phones which have access to porn (as in that third article I linked), there is no way to protect the child from this sort of thing.
Neo, of course you cannot keep a child perfectly insulated from porn. But I think it is repeated exposure that does the most harm. You seem to say, if we can’t keep our children perfectly away from porn let’s throw in the towel. Let’s give a child a smart phone so they can access anything on the Internet without you having any say. There is a middle ground. You can provide your child with a dumb phone. Then you can communicate with them and they can communicate with others.
Bob Wilson:
At no point did I say or indicate or imply anything of the sort, and I have no idea why you would think I did. Throw in the towel? Hardly. I am all for many different approaches, including not giving a child a smartphone, but my point is that even that is not enough to protect a child from porn. More is needed, not less.
Bob Wilson…
I think Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt have done some fascinating work around teenagers (especially females) and smartphones. I have not yet read their book, but the snippets I have read on-line are gripping.
There IS a HUGE difference in outcomes among those who are given smartphone access at early ages…and it’s all bad.
My daughter just went on an extended high school excursion that was deliberately phone-free for the children. Some varied pushback from parents & a few “smuggled in burners” by a couple of teens. After the fact…there was near universal approval of the 4-day phone-free experience. Even those who pushed back early…have offered to come back next year and testify to their changed mind.
My wife & I can’t control other parents…but we can parent our daughter(s). It’s good when we get some help along with that.
John Guilfoyle thanks for the reference to Jonathan Haidt. I did a search and found this article by him from May of this year.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-report
“Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health
For parents who resisted, or who plan to resist, a new report may encourage many more parents to join you: Sapien Labs, which runs an ongoing global survey of mental health with nearly a million participants so far, released a “Rapid Report” today on a question they added in January asking young adults (those between ages 18 and 24): “At what age did you get your own smartphone or tablet (e.g. iPad) with Internet access that you could carry with you?” When they plot the age of first smartphone on the X axis against their extensive set of questions about mental health on the Y axis, they find a consistent pattern: the younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health that the young adult reports today. This is true in all the regions studied (the survey is offered in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili), and the relationships are consistently stronger for women.”
But if you want to keep this stuff out of elementary schools you’re a book-burning Nazi …
There used to be widespread understanding that children are not mature enough to differentiate between irrational and potentially disruptive, and destructive, actions and as such, not permitted to engage in them which required some degree of adult – meaning “parental” – monitoring and involvement, which involved some parental regulation of with whom one’s child was allowed to associate.
Things like chaperoned dances, adult supervision, responsible parenting, punishment fitting the offense, used to be “the standard.” Were smartphones to have been created in all their present glory in 1955 I don’t think 1 in 50 parents would have allowed their children to have one, and quite probably would not have allowed their children to associate with a child who had one.
Oh, how we have progressed.
The arguments for homeschooling get stronger and more numerous everyday.
My kids participated in a once a week homeschool coop that required a statement of faith.
If we were homeschooling today I’d be looking for a coop that required a no smart phone policy.
And what is it about drag queens that they insist they must perform in front of school kids?
How is it that the schools, teachers and parents of these kids allow this?
What on earth are the parents thinking?
Let me take real wild guess; the parents, teachers and school board personnel are all liberal progressives
In the 50s on Sunday morning the local TV station (WGN Channel 9) aired the Flash Gordon serials. My brother and I would come home from Sunday school and turn on the TV and try to watch Flash Gordon. My dad turned the TV off. He forbade us from watching the serial. He said it was too “racy” and trashy. You know, Dale Arden and Princess Aura running around in their metal bikini tops . . .
I got around the ban (sometimes)by going over to a friend’s apartment. His parents let him Flash Gordon.
If there’s a way, kids will find it.
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From Flash Gordon to kids and hardcore online porn: America’s trajectory in a nutshell. By the way, MAD Magazine’s 1954 parody of Flash Gordon was entitled “Flesh Garden”:
https://whatwoodwallydo.blogspot.com/2009/02/flesh-garden_03.html
So yes, racy.
I blame Friends.
The one about Chandler and Joey’s favorite porn site.
Sounds more like we have an epidemic issue of parents being BAD PARENTS, and not properly supervising children’s — and teens — access to the internet.
:-/
}}} I got around the ban (sometimes)by going over to a friend’s apartment. His parents let him Flash Gordon.
If there’s a way, kids will find it.
Not if parents discuss their wishes with other parents. Most parents will agree to constraints other parents wish for their children. And if they don’t, you’ll eventually find out about it and not accept it.
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P.S., sorry, Neo, I used to read PT, but I’ve seen WAAAAY too many BS articles from them to trust them any longer. They’re right out there with 60 Minutes. Whenever they discuss anything I actually know about, I find them to be woefully ignorant of almost every aspect of the story they are promoting.
Reading this shook me, I knew it was bad but reading the linked story from the mother of a young woman who “suddenly” decided that she was a boy was sickening.
But then, of COURSE saturated exposure to this material, which is designed to link into some of the most powerful body/mind neural connections that we have, is going to distort anyone’s mind—let alone a young person’s mind and developing pubescent body. What was especially shocking was the fact that there is this enormous mostly on-line “community” for lack of a better word, that personally interfaces with young people through every platform imaginable, relentlessly encouraging kids to go further and to adopt an entire new perception of the world. Then the child gets hooked into real-life connections, as friend-groups get pulled into this bizarre-O depraved universe. And the mother who wrote this essay concludes, rightly, that in no way can her daughter be deemed to have “naturally” discovered her “true” trans and sexualized self. Instead her poor daughter was groomed and brain-washed with deeply traumatizing and powerful psychological and social manipulations.