We had just cleaned a virus off our home computer. Again. In the process of doing so, I noticed the virus was one of those that automatically redirects to obscene sites and popups. I followed the checklist for cleaning it off, but I’m no tech-queen, and I worried that I hadn’t gotten it all.
Not long after, my (then) kindergartener asked if he could play a learning game online while I worked on dinner. It should be fine, I told myself. Should be. But was it?
I would be only a few steps away, but I knew I couldn’t protect my son alone. I had to get him in the huddle.
So I explained to him that our computer had had a bug and that I thought it was fixed, but if it wasn’t it might start acting weird and I needed him to tell me as soon as he thought that might be happening. It might start changing the screen to different places. Most importantly, I told him, it might show women who aren’t dressed very modestly. I explained again, what I’ve told him over and over: “If you see anything that makes you feel uncomfortable or worried you need to tell me right away.”
I hadn’t been working on dinner for more than a few minutes when I heard, “Mo-o-om”, in that famously escalating pitch. I dropped everything and ran to the computer.
It looked normal.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“She’s not very modest,” he said, pointing to the buxom model in the sidebar advertising mortgage refinancing in a tank top and jeans.
Oh, may he always think a low cut tank top is immodest. Please, let this be as close as he ever gets to pornography.
That kindergartener is now nine. I’m not quite sure how that happened, but I do know that in less than two years he’ll be the average age that men in the US begin habitually consuming “adult material”.
Two years. I don’t even want to think about it.
According to pornography statistics, kids in America begin their exposure to explicit adult material at an average age of 11. By 16, four out of five teens are accessing internet porn on a regular basis. While this threat is relevant to both boys and girls, boys still account for a much larger share of pornography’s viewership.
As I outlined the topics for the Building Strong Boys series, I knew pornography would have to be a topic, but it wasn’t one I wanted to address. I kept shuffling it to the bottom of the pile. But it kept coming up in conversations with other moms. Moms of boys. Young boys.
Years ago I would not have thought of pornography as a child development topic, but times have changed. When the average age of the beginner is 11, then we have to start laying the ground work years ahead of that, helping kids to understand what’s really at stake. *This post will cover the dangers of pornography, tomorrow’s will offer suggestions for teaching and protecting our kids.*
There’s an amazing amount of information out there about this topic, and I’ll link to several resources at the bottom, but I can only cover so much here. Perhaps that’s one of the positive insights I’ve gained as I’ve researched a topic that is full of so many disturbing statistics. There seems to be an awakening of sorts. A new awareness that this is not just harmless fun or a rite of passage.
Growing up, I learned about the dangers of pornography, largely from a religious standpoint, and I still value those perspectives. But today, science is jumping on the bandwagon, and sounding the alarm.
What Are the Dangers?
Brain Changes and Addiction
Decades ago, serial killer Ted Bundy said in an interview that his twisted thinking was fueled by violent pornography, and that his pornography consumption began at a very young age. He referred to it as an addiction. Some criticized this addiction perspective, saying that the term was overstretched and that Bundy was just trying to take on a victim role. There was certainly more than one factor at play in Ted Bundy’s case, but the way he described his addiction to pornography in the 80s is substantiated by science today.
One of the best findings from current brain research is that the brain is plastic, meaning it can change throughout life. This is what makes resiliency possible. Our brains can change, repair, and improve.
The downside is that we can also rewire the brain in negative ways.
As with other addictions, pornography washes the brain with an excess of its reward chemical, dopamine. With repeated binges, the brain evolves to accommodate this chemical change. As the brain craves more dopamine, ironically, the “hit” becomes harder to come by. This is the same pattern that other addictions follow. Just as drug addicts seek out increased amounts of harder drugs, porn addicts seek out an increase of more novel porn. Often this means the material is increasingly deviant or violent.
We’re not talking about the Playboys and other skin mags of fifty years ago. In this age of high-speed internet access, novelty is easy to find and seemingly unending. Dopamine binges can have a bigger impact both in potency and duration.
Additionally, pornography wires this stimulus into the reward system of the brain. The brain that was once wired to send reward signals for healthy sexual activity, rewards only for increasingly tawdry pornography, often at the expense of actual human relationships.
As is the case with other addictions, the consequential brain restructuring happens in the frontal lobes, the same area responsible for making logical decisions and providing sound judgement.
Some argue that these changes can lead to side-effects we aren’t yet recognizing as having connections with pornography use. As Gary Wilson argues in his presentation, The Great Porn Experiment, common ailments of the twenty-something male (ADHD, OCD, depression, social anxiety, performance anxiety, etc.) often accompany addictions. In many cases, these problem are being chemically treated as independent ailments, all the while the actual chemistry problem is the chemical imbalance caused by pornography use.
Deviance and Criminality
If you’re wondering about connections between pornography use and criminal behavior (particularly sex-related crime), the best run-down of research can be found here at Fight the New Drug. Conclusions on the connection between the two seemed to bounce back and forth as I read different resources, and this article addresses why that is. It’s worth the eye-squinting read.
One confounding factor in establishing firm causational evidence to this topic is the fact that widespread pornography use makes it difficult to establish a true, scientific test with a control group and a test group. As Gary Wilson points out in his presentation, if it were typical for most boys to start smoking at age 10, it would be hard to prove that lung cancer was anything but normal.
Some researchers attempting to perform studies with true controls (such as Dr. Neil Malamuth of UCLA) have stopped on ethical grounds. In the process of establishing a causal link between pornography and sexual assault, they would be responsible then for creating violent criminals through their research. They can’t do that kind of research, so that type of proof can’t exist.
Certainly the logical leap is there. The brain is highly suggestible and prone to imitation. Albert Bandura established this tendency for imitation, particularly when the viewer is a child, in his landmark “Bobo” experiment in 1961. Children who watched adults act violently toward the Bobo doll were much more likely to act violently toward the doll when they themselves were allowed to play with it.
Applying this social learning theory to pornography, it seems at first that our only concern then would be with violent porn. But there are at least two problems with that line of thinking. First, following the pattern of addiction, a pornography habit often leads to an increase in harder, more violent images in order to get the same dopamine high. “Soft porn” simply becomes a gateway to hard core images.
Secondly, studies have found that even non-violent pornography is used by predators to entice and desensitize their victims and to normalize their abuse. Similarly, researchers claim pornography is also shared between children and teens to coerce and justify their own premature sexual advances and even normalize their own child-on-child sexual abuse. (Read this post from Rage Against the Minivan for more research on this trend.)
Anecdotally, my dad, a judge for several decades, mentioned to me that pornography came up in many of the cases he had seen, and almost always in child sex abuse cases. Information from the FBI corroborates this, showing that pornography is found either at the scene or home of the perpetrator in 80% of sexual crimes.
Relationships
Setting aside criminal behavior, how does pornography influence everyday personal relationships? Perhaps this is the most damaging impact pornography can have, and it’s the one even skeptics tend not to argue against.
Criminality seems to be something pornography can trigger in a predisposed brain. Much like the fact that not everyone who consumes alcohol becomes an alcoholic, not every person who views pornography becomes Ted Bundy. But it appears that repeated exposure to explicit images does create change in almost all brains, most drastically perhaps, the rapidly changing brains of our children.
As a result of the changes in the brain, pornography alters the way people think about other people. Pornography alters the viewer’s ability and desire to form and maintain healthy human relationships. Love lives become less about real human relationships and more about a mediated reality scripted by pornographers.
It’s developmentally normal for older children and teens to be curious about sex, but the means by which they find answers to their questions can determine the development of their attitudes and understandings about physical intimacy for the future.
As Kristen of Rage Against the Minivan states, “We don’t protect our kids from pornography because we think sex is bad or dirty. We protect them from pornography specifically because we want them to have healthy sex lives as adults.” She also quotes Dr. Lynn Margolies as further explaining the impact of porn on young minds:
“In the absence of any context, and without having learned about or known healthy sexuality, children may experience depictions of sex as confusing and take the images they see to be representative models of adult behavior. They are thereby introduced to sex before they are ready through images they do not understand, which often involve sexual deviations, and sex detached from relationship or meaning, responsibility, and intimacy.”
Pornography affects relationships. Profoundly.
Not only are romantic relationships affected by pornography, but the secrecy and dishonesty that often goes along with hiding a pornography addiction inevitably alters any relationship built on trust.
One of the most profound things I’ve discovered as a result of working on this Strong Boys series, is that each individual topic seems to come back in some way to the basic concept of connected relationships. And if there’s one influence that seems most directly designed to destroy healthy human relationships, or even the expectation of such, it’s the use of pornography. An isolating activity that trains the brain to see people as objects and intimate acts as devoid of any true connection.
Interestingly, it’s also relationships and connection that may prove most effective in preparing and protecting kids from pornography.
We’ll tackle that topic in Part 2, tomorrow.
More Resources:
Internet Safety 101 – Statistics
Protecting Kids from Pornography {Rage Against the Mini Van}
The Great Porn Experiment {Gary Wilson, TEDx}
The Experiment that Convince Me Online Porn is the Most Pernicious Threat Facing Children Today {Martin Daubney, Daily Mail}
thanks so much for covering this topic! With a 9 yr old and 6 yr old boy, its good to have some thoughtful, researched discussion about this. I have been puzzling over this for the last few weeks, actually, since I came into the living room and my sons were playing a video game on an internet site they are not usually on, and there were ads of anime girls in bikinis . . . I was reminded that these things are coming – fast!
“The gateway drugs” really are everywhere! My boys are similar in age to yours, and doing the research has helped me be more aware of what we need to be doing NOW.
My husband and I were talking about this and how the little bit of inappropriate access we had as kids were a dirty magazine and we both remember what it was that we saw. Thankfully those magazines were tame because the images stuck. Kids are gaining access to images far worse than anything we can imagine and all it takes is natural curiosity and access to the web. My 6 year old recently searched for something that if he’d searched for it on google he would have been bombarded with pornographic images.It was an innocent curious search and thankfully he was on youtube and our filter worked. More thankfully I was checking the history and after that search we decided that his curiosity and access to the web was a bad idea and we removed youtube from the iPad completely. Even when you think you are monitoring them it only takes one second to expose them to something so damaging. I know my kids will be exposed to this at some point, I just want to keep them safe from it until they have developed enough to see if for what it is. Until then I will be getting stricter and stricter with online access .
Thank you for sharing your experience, Allison! I think you’re right on — unfortunately the truth is our kids will see it in some form at some point, and it’s our job to help them to be able to see it for what it really is, just like you said. Your kids are lucky to have such conscientious parents! Thanks so much for taking the time to read and comment here!
Thank you for this. My oldest son is 5 and is just starting to navigate the computer on his own. Starfall and Pbs.kids because I have the buttons there for them. But sometimes I feel like I need a good wake up call! It isn’t something I’ve worried about because he a)doesn’t spend much time on electronics and b)he couldn’t do much on his own. But now he is starting to figure out electronics and is probably not too far away from doing his own exploring. This was a great, well written and researched article that helped me realize that there are some things I need to start talking to him about right NOW. Also, need to look into filters and such for the computer.
Thank you so much, Andrea. You’re always such a good boost for my self-esteem! I’m glad the article was useful to you. Just doing the research was so eye-opening to me. I know I don’t have all the answers, but if getting just some of that information out there prompts a parent to be more proactive, I feel like it was well-worth the late nights!
Excellent post! Had to share on Facebook. Looking forward to the rest of the series.
My older child was only 9 when he came to me fully in distress saying: “what my friends are telling me to do is really, really bad, mom”. I got so worried, I couldn´t find the right words to ask him what had happened. I typed a word on the internet and I saw something… the word starts with P, he added.
We went together to the computer and I checked the history. I had set a safe search but for some reason it didn´t work. Sure enough, there it was: less than a minute in the porno.com page. I opened it being alone, to see what he had seen. In just one glimpse, over 12 explicit images. I felt confussed and completely distressed. But I had to react and support my child. First of all, I thank him for trusting and searching me immediately asking for help. I reassured him he was not getting scold for that, I insisted on the importance of him always counting on his father and me FIRST when facing such experiences. We are the people that love him the most in the world I said and I wanted to make sure if anything else happened he would ask for our help. Then the long talk came. He asked me many things. The toughest and best one was: Did dad and you do it too? Sex between two adults that love and respect each other is an intimate fulfilling experience full of care and respect and that is what dad and mom do. Porn has nothing to do with that. It is empty and false… How I wish this talk would not have been necessary so early. Not that I dont want to talk about sex with my children, but the porn issue is really tough…
Now, regarding the safe search, I found a few interesting things after that experience. Some free software downloads set Bing as the predetermined search tool on the web. As soon as you type the letter “p” in the Bing search bar a dropdown menu appears offering all kinds of porn links.
I also noticed some children safety search services detect specific words such as “porn” but not misspelled words such as “pron”. And no surprise, under pron you find lots of porn results… Finally, some other safe search programs such as K9 resutled to be quite effective until it changed and it would not even allow us to open our gmail account… I am still searching for a safe way to let my growing children surf the internet safely. In the meanwhile I activated safe search block at google and my kids are not allowed to surf the internet alone.
I believe it would be very useful to share effective web safety search tools for parents. Do you know any that really works?
I also would like to ask for your permission to translate this post into Spanish and share it with Spanish speaking communities. I believe pornography is deffinitely not been enough addressed as what it is: an alarming drug every parent should be aware of.
Thank you so much for your late nights researching this. Love, Fernanda
Amanda, thank you so much for covering this topic with two boys and girl it is a worry for me both because I want my boys to grow up with healthy and satisfying relationships and because I want my daughter to grow up with respect for her body and a feeling of worth and dignity, and of course I want all of them to be able to have healthy sex lives as adults. I am starting now while they are young on maintaining open pathways of communication, and I hope with the help of resources like yours I will be able to navigate this tricky territory.
Thank you so much, Alissa! You bring up a good point that while this is part of a Strong Boys series, this is a topic that affects boys and girls alike and certainly the relationships between them. It’s not the funnest topic to cover, read about, or address in our families, but the alternative is far worse. We simply can’t afford the price of ignorance on this topic. Thanks so much for your support!