Growing Up, “Generation XXX”
Over at ErosBlog, Faustus has started a discussion about the way porn – Internet porn in particular – can influence children’s lives and development. I doubt there are any really easy answers. Children mature at vastly different rates, in vastly different ways. They encounter different kinds of porn and respond to different pressures.
Some of the commenters are taking the opportunity to share their experiences growing up, and the ways porn affected their lives (good and bad alike). I’d like to share my take on it, and I’d like to hear yours as well.
I discovered hormones in the age of really easy digital pornography. I downloaded my first JPGs in early 1998 (guesstimating) and had a few hundred megabytes worth by 2000. Both of my parents worked and didn’t get back until 6 PM, so I had plenty of time to get all the afterschool porn I wanted.
For a hormonal teenage boy, this is a lot of porn. I didn’t go looking every day, but Passerby‘s “same sex couple naked, one or both penetrated, displayed on black latex covered in oil” was small fries.[1] I remember reading a few bestiality stories, trying to figure out the attraction, and I accidentally wandered into a Dolcett archive once. I didn’t like those, but I certainly looked. I got Goatse’d and didn’t like that either. People are weird. Fantasy and reality are very different things. Kids can be much better about understanding that than adults would like to give them credit for.
Like any other activity, I think porn is what you make of it. It has precious little inherent morality. Tulsa mixed fantasy and reality together, and it started affecting her sense of self-worth. I liked Anthony Brown’s posts on Alt.Sex.Stories and started writing my own, hoping that maybe one day someone would enjoy something I wrote as much as I enjoyed Wulf. Tulsa let cybersex become part of her reality. I just took it as writing practice. By the time she was seventeen, she’d lied her way into a tremendously bad situation. By the time I was seventeen, I was… well, surprisingly good at writing. Some people see those seductive black-and-white dungeon photos and get into BDSM; I got into photography. Popups took control of Cand86‘s computer and scared her away; I learned how to lock the computer down and take it back (it helps that I was and remain a technical kind of dork).
In my case, at least, I think porn was a lot better for me than soccer or basketball might have been.
Porn is like alcohol, guns, or credit cards. Their value is in what you make of them. And, like alcohol, guns, and credit, I think that it’s far better to teach people how to deal with them responsibly than simply to hide them away behind some forbidden mystique and expect that maturity later, without benefit of experience.
[1] Incidentally, even at 14, I knew that “latex covered in oil” was bad juju. Give the kids some credit. You’ll ruin your latex. Use something water- or silicone- based.