Porn and the Age of Innocence

From the AP comes news of an ongoing assault on the nation's precious children:

More children and teens are being exposed to online pornography, mostly by accidentally viewing sexually explicit websites while surfing the internet, researchers say. Forty-two per cent of internet users aged 10 to 17 surveyed said they had seen online pornography in a recent 12-month span. Of those, 66 per cent said they did not want to view the images and had not sought them out.

In my fourteen years online, I've certainly seen dirty digital pictures, but never inadvertently. This pisses me off. Thousands upon thousands of hours of websurfing — sans nanny filter, even — and not so much as one wayward nipple, one naughty-cam surprise, one unexpected murky shot of Pam Anderson receiving Tommy Lee's manmeat. What am I doing wrong? Where the hell is my free porn?

The researchers quizzed 1,500 children by telephone after obtaining the parents' permission, so everything was by the book. Presumably, mom or dad were more often than not within earshot during the interview. What's a 14-year-old to do — say he's never seen pictures of naked people? What teenager hasn't? But he can still escape culpability for viewing the dastardly images by claiming that the stuff was foisted upon him and that he really didn't want to see it. No, not every kid would respond that way. But I'd wager enough of them might that it could pretty dramatically skew the survey results.

Incidentally, when I say "pictures of naked people," that's what I mean. Or rather, that's what the researchers mean.

Online pornography was defined in the study as images of naked people or people having sex.

So for the study's authors, there's no appreciable difference between closeups of sexual penetration and shots of women sunbathing topless. That certainly runs the gamut, doesn't it?

Now, who is behind the unsolicited flood of filth that's poisoning our kids' minds, and causing them to be "traumatized" and "victimized," in the words of University of Chicago psychiatrist Sharon Hirsh? Why, it would have to be evil porn lords and their satanic marketing forces. Because we all know that the best way to get people to love something that they absolutely don't want is to forcibly show them a picture of it, and bam, they're hooked.

In other words, it's a helluva lot easier on closed minds to imagine that anonymous pornographers and (better yet) "sexual predators" are gleefully plying our children with dirty pictures, than to face the likelihood that

(a) Johnny knows his way around Google, and he knows how to type the letter X three times;
(b) with or without Johnny's approval, his adolescent schoolmates are e-mailing him pornography;
(c) Johnny sometimes likes to dip into the veritable treasure trove of porn on daddy's hard drive.

As far as I can tell, the researchers inquired after none of that (not that they probably wouldv'e gotten honest answers if they had). So they're free to offer this conclusion:

Better methods are needed "to restrict the use of aggressive and deceptive tactics to market pornography online."

Boy, sure didn't see that one coming!

Incidentally, Sharon 'Mrs. Lovejoy' Hirsh's opinion aside, what do we really know that's scientifically sound about teenagers viewing sexual images? What spine-weakening, retina-burning, brain-rotting effects might such pictures have on young psyches? Funny thing. Not even the researchers profess to know. Here's the last sentence from the AP report:

[M]any survey participants said they were not disturbed by what they saw, and [the study's lead author Janis] Wolak said research is needed to determine how exposure to online pornography affects kids.

So, more studies are needed, Wolak says. (Have you ever heard a researcher conclude anything else? Like others in her racket, Wolak concedes her lack of knowledge only when that admission translates into "Please keep the grants coming.") Anyway, if and when those studies arrive, what do you reckon the chances are that they support the common-sense notion that by and large, teenagers suffer no ill effects from occasionally viewing a picture of nekkid people?

Comments

[ben]

"[M]any survey participants said they were not disturbed by what they saw .."

That has to be changed radically: we need to teach those children that naked bodies are dirty, dirty, dirty. Or maybe send them to Saudi Arabia for a good lashing?

[Hon T.]

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[Timothy]

I've accidentally seen some pr0n by mistyping a URL or two and ending up where I didn't want to be at the moment, but I'd say that's happened maybe three or four times in the decade plus I've been on the intertron (I was an IRC kid at 13, I think I've been online 12 years now). I spent basically every day at work online, a ton of time at home, and the only nudity I see is on purpose.

[Phelps]

I've inadvertantly seen a few dodgy banner ads that I didn't expect on things like video game websites, but other than that, I meant to look at all the porn I've seen on the internet. Even the things that in retrospect I really didn't want to see.

And I've seen a lot.