Porn is bad

And it's really, really bad for children:

Boys exposed to porn are more likely to indulge in casual sex and less likely to form successful relationships when they grow older, according to research carried out in a dozen countries.

The report, Harms of Pornography Exposure Among Children and Young People, also found that young boys who see pornography are more inclined to believe there is nothing wrong with pinning down or sexually harassing a girl.

Michael Flood, who carried out the study at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, said: “There is compelling evidence from around the world that pornography has negative effects on individuals and communities.

“We know it is shaping sexual knowledge. Some people may think that is good. But porn is a very poor sex educator because it shows sex in unrealistic ways and fails to address intimacy, love, connection or romance. Often it is quite callous and hostile in its depictions of women.

I haven't seen the study, but it makes a heckuva lot more sense than this one, which found that porn was perfectly benign.

We don't really need a study to tell us that tender, developing minds and souls are bound to be malformed and damaged by exposure to pornography. How could they not be? Even less noxious sexual content, in the form of "grown-up" television, can mess our kids up.

By way of anecdotal backup, here's an article (actually a lengthy excerpt from a book) by Natasha Walter. The first part tells the story of a man who has been consuming pornography since kindergarten.

From How teenage access to pornography is killing intimacy in sex:

“I was unable to think of women except as potential pornography. I looked at them in a purely sexual way. I remember one day I was walking to school, I was about 15, and I got talking to a girl who must have been about 18. I immediately said I wanted to grope her breasts. I had no idea how to interact with women as people.”

The porn he viewed was dad's. The man's former girlfriend worries about her own son, and his entire generation:

“I was first aware that he [her son] was looking at pornography when he was 14. But how can boys not see it? Unless they make a concerted decision not to look at it, to delete it from their mobiles when it’s sent to them, or from their emails. You’d be making a singular, probably a unique decision.

Ah, there's the key. Unless they make a concerted decision not to look at it. I'm reminded of the old-fashioned concept of custody of the eyes, one way Christian parents help their sons exercise some control over the encroachment of our hyper-sexualized culture into their psyches. To this end many parents go to great lengths to sanitize the media consumed by their kids, monitoring their internet activity, choosing movies and TV carefully, previewing and editing out that one scene, skipping the commercials.

And as parents make these moral judgments, for that's what they are, the children learn that there's a line between what's okay and what isn't. Eventually they draw their own line for themselves. What seems to be happening now is that many kids are growing up without understanding that a line exists.

All this editing and vigilance is a lot of work and is wildly out-of-step with the world. It may invite ridicule or worse. But with the state of our culture, serious counter-culturalism may be called for. The idea is to protect children while they're still forming; they'll have plenty of time for the "real world" of meat-market dating and relationships based on mutual physical utility when they move out. At that point, if they haven't been immersed in porn, they'll have a fighting chance to love and be loved. I'm not sure how secular parents handle this but would be interested to learn.

If this strikes you as an overreaction read Walter's article in its entirety. She notes a trend in which girls alter themselves physically to conform to a norm inspired by porn films:

“That is definitely tied into porn,” said another. “We know what men will have seen and what they will expect.”

Where the rise of expectations from pornography result just in depilation, that is one thing, but the rise of interest in surgery to change the appearance of the labia is another, far more worrying development. The number of operations carried out in the UK to cut women’s labia to a preconceived norm is currently rising steeply. [. . .]

In an episode of Embarrassing Teenage Bodies, screened on Channel 4 in 2008, a young woman consulted a doctor about the fact that her labia minora extended slightly beyond her labia majora and that this caused her embarrassment. Instead of reassuring her that this was entirely normal, the doctor recommended, and carried out, surgery on her labia.

Oremus.

*Update: RS McCain has a tip on some family entertainment just perfect for your tween daughters.
**Update: Mr. McCain has written his own post (in his own way -- content warning) on this subject.

Related:
Lookin' for love in all the wrong places
What's it all about, Alfie?

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