Whisper
June 25th, 2008, 08:41 PM
These days it's kids as young as eight or 10. As boys get hooked ever earlier, Net porn is reshaping youth sexuality.
Marc first looked at Internet porn when he was in Grade 4. "We were at a Pokémon birthday party," he recalled. His 10-year-old host had something better than Pokémon cards to show his guests: a website full of naked busty blonds. Now 19, and a recent graduate of a Montreal college, Marc checks out Internet porn sites about as often as he brushes his teeth. "I look at least twice a day," he says.
Marc and his friend Christian, 18, visit sites with names like Bookworm Bitches, My Sister's Best Friend and My First Sex Teacher. Having a girlfriend with whom he regularly has sex doesn't deter Marc from visiting porn websites. "I have a girlfriend, but hey, we've been together three years," he says. "Besides, this is good quality HD. It's fun and it helps you sleep."
The pornification of culture is something that we encounter at every turn: it's in Snoop Dogg and Pussycat Dolls videos; it keeps the Girls Gone Wild franchise going strong; it guides the fashion trends of females six to 60; and it's behind prime-time reality shows, like the E! Network's The Girls Next Door chronicling the life of Hugh Hefner. But when it comes to explicit materials, nothing compares to the Wild West of cyberporn. There's been an explosion of pornographic websites in the last decade, with tens of millions of sites literally a click away, according to Frederick S. Lane, author of Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age. Lane estimates the North American cyperporn industry brings in about $2 billion dollars a year.
More than just big business, this wave of easy-to-access online images, videos and chat rooms is shaping the way young people indulge their sexual curiosity. Back when parents of today's teens were growing up, porn meant girlie magazines like Playboy or Hustler. And accessing porn took effort — and courage. Magazine stands weren't supposed to sell pornography to minors. Curious teens had to sneak into their older brothers' bedrooms — or their dads' tool sheds — to find their secret stashes.
Today, airbrushed Playboy playmates are tame compared to what's out there: oral sex, anal sex, same-sex sex, sex with animals and vegetables, ménages Ã* trois, quatre and many more — all of this going on right under the parental roof. Although it's hard to quantify exactly what and how much online porn kids are looking at, a report from the London School of Economics found that nine out of 10 children between the ages of eight and 16 have viewed at least something that qualifies. According to a 2004 Columbia University study, 25 per cent of 12- and 13-year-old girls, and 37 per cent of boys the same age, say they have friends who regularly view and download Internet pornography.
And these are only approximations — probably lowball ones. "I don't think we know anywhere near as much as we need to know," says Gary Brooks, a professor of psychology at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who studies the effects of pornography on men. "In my writing, I say that we knew a little bit about the amount of usage and the amount of damage before cyberspace — and now we have no clue."
In the majority of cases, the London School of Economics report says, children's exposure to online pornography is inadvertent — the result of misspelled words and Web addresses, or confusing a .com suffix for a .net. In her book Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families, journalist Pamela Paul reports that 94 per cent of the porn images children ages 10 to 17 encountered accidentally were of naked people, 38 per cent were of people having sex, and eight per cent involved sexual violence. Forty-five per cent of kids who stumble upon porn in this way report being upset by what they saw.
But a great many others, at ever-younger ages, are far from upset about it. In fact, a 2001 Kaiser Family Foundation Study found that almost one-third of kids in Grades 7 through 12 have lied about their ages in order to access adult-only websites.
CONTINUED....http://www.macleans.ca/culture/lifestyle/article.jsp?content=20080618_9719_9719&page=2
Marc first looked at Internet porn when he was in Grade 4. "We were at a Pokémon birthday party," he recalled. His 10-year-old host had something better than Pokémon cards to show his guests: a website full of naked busty blonds. Now 19, and a recent graduate of a Montreal college, Marc checks out Internet porn sites about as often as he brushes his teeth. "I look at least twice a day," he says.
Marc and his friend Christian, 18, visit sites with names like Bookworm Bitches, My Sister's Best Friend and My First Sex Teacher. Having a girlfriend with whom he regularly has sex doesn't deter Marc from visiting porn websites. "I have a girlfriend, but hey, we've been together three years," he says. "Besides, this is good quality HD. It's fun and it helps you sleep."
The pornification of culture is something that we encounter at every turn: it's in Snoop Dogg and Pussycat Dolls videos; it keeps the Girls Gone Wild franchise going strong; it guides the fashion trends of females six to 60; and it's behind prime-time reality shows, like the E! Network's The Girls Next Door chronicling the life of Hugh Hefner. But when it comes to explicit materials, nothing compares to the Wild West of cyberporn. There's been an explosion of pornographic websites in the last decade, with tens of millions of sites literally a click away, according to Frederick S. Lane, author of Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age. Lane estimates the North American cyperporn industry brings in about $2 billion dollars a year.
More than just big business, this wave of easy-to-access online images, videos and chat rooms is shaping the way young people indulge their sexual curiosity. Back when parents of today's teens were growing up, porn meant girlie magazines like Playboy or Hustler. And accessing porn took effort — and courage. Magazine stands weren't supposed to sell pornography to minors. Curious teens had to sneak into their older brothers' bedrooms — or their dads' tool sheds — to find their secret stashes.
Today, airbrushed Playboy playmates are tame compared to what's out there: oral sex, anal sex, same-sex sex, sex with animals and vegetables, ménages Ã* trois, quatre and many more — all of this going on right under the parental roof. Although it's hard to quantify exactly what and how much online porn kids are looking at, a report from the London School of Economics found that nine out of 10 children between the ages of eight and 16 have viewed at least something that qualifies. According to a 2004 Columbia University study, 25 per cent of 12- and 13-year-old girls, and 37 per cent of boys the same age, say they have friends who regularly view and download Internet pornography.
And these are only approximations — probably lowball ones. "I don't think we know anywhere near as much as we need to know," says Gary Brooks, a professor of psychology at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who studies the effects of pornography on men. "In my writing, I say that we knew a little bit about the amount of usage and the amount of damage before cyberspace — and now we have no clue."
In the majority of cases, the London School of Economics report says, children's exposure to online pornography is inadvertent — the result of misspelled words and Web addresses, or confusing a .com suffix for a .net. In her book Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families, journalist Pamela Paul reports that 94 per cent of the porn images children ages 10 to 17 encountered accidentally were of naked people, 38 per cent were of people having sex, and eight per cent involved sexual violence. Forty-five per cent of kids who stumble upon porn in this way report being upset by what they saw.
But a great many others, at ever-younger ages, are far from upset about it. In fact, a 2001 Kaiser Family Foundation Study found that almost one-third of kids in Grades 7 through 12 have lied about their ages in order to access adult-only websites.
CONTINUED....http://www.macleans.ca/culture/lifestyle/article.jsp?content=20080618_9719_9719&page=2