Kids are going to get exposed to porn no matter what. I do think it has the potential to have some pretty harmful effects on them, but I don’t think the answer to that is the Online Safety Act. I don’t think this will actually stop kids from stumbling across porn, and I think that putting our heads in the sand and pretending it will is just dumb.
I don’t know what would be the best thing to do about this problem, but I do know that the rhetoric around protecting kids is just going to make it less likely that we actually do things that could be useful for supporting kids to have healthy attitudes towards sex.
For instance, I remember that one of the most impactful sites I ever stumbled across as a teenager was an educational website that had loads of pictures of human genitals. Especially as a girl who had already been exposed to porn, it was super useful to see the wide variety of what vulvas can look like.
A depressing number of my peers expressed insecurity over the appearance of their vulvas, and I remember one girl was convinced that she would need to get a labioplasty as an adult because she had more prominent labia minora than she had seen in porn, and didn’t realise that her vulva was well within what is normal.
One of my friends expressed anxiety over having sex, because she had been masturbating using cylindrical objects of various sizes, attempting to work up to what she perceived as the average girth of a penis, based on what she’d seen in porn. She was practicing because she was terrified of the size of penises she had seen in porn, and didn’t realise that wasn’t representative of the average penis size.
As a young adult, once I started having sex, there were a few times when it was abundantly clear that the young man I was with had been heavily influenced by porn, in terms of how they felt they were expected to act.
So many of my peers had their sexual development affected by seeing porn, and better sex education in school could have potentially mitigated some of these harms. However, we won’t get productive change in this area as long as we’re operating under the prudish “won’t someone think of the children” mentality that led to the Online Safety Act. It would be good if we could shield kids from exposure to this stuff, but I don’t think that’s viable. We need to be more realistic if we actually want to protect kids from harm
I’m alright with making the doors to the local porn shop stickier (no pun intended), but in addition I agree that we need a better understanding of intimacy and sexuality as a society. For some reason its an incredibly taboo subject in western society, and that leaves the extreme religious folks as the only ones talking about it.
I wish this type of discussion was happening in our local government town halls rather than in a corner of the internet most won’t ever see.
Kids are going to get exposed to porn no matter what. I do think it has the potential to have some pretty harmful effects on them, but I don’t think the answer to that is the Online Safety Act. I don’t think this will actually stop kids from stumbling across porn, and I think that putting our heads in the sand and pretending it will is just dumb.
I don’t know what would be the best thing to do about this problem, but I do know that the rhetoric around protecting kids is just going to make it less likely that we actually do things that could be useful for supporting kids to have healthy attitudes towards sex.
For instance, I remember that one of the most impactful sites I ever stumbled across as a teenager was an educational website that had loads of pictures of human genitals. Especially as a girl who had already been exposed to porn, it was super useful to see the wide variety of what vulvas can look like.
A depressing number of my peers expressed insecurity over the appearance of their vulvas, and I remember one girl was convinced that she would need to get a labioplasty as an adult because she had more prominent labia minora than she had seen in porn, and didn’t realise that her vulva was well within what is normal.
One of my friends expressed anxiety over having sex, because she had been masturbating using cylindrical objects of various sizes, attempting to work up to what she perceived as the average girth of a penis, based on what she’d seen in porn. She was practicing because she was terrified of the size of penises she had seen in porn, and didn’t realise that wasn’t representative of the average penis size.
As a young adult, once I started having sex, there were a few times when it was abundantly clear that the young man I was with had been heavily influenced by porn, in terms of how they felt they were expected to act.
So many of my peers had their sexual development affected by seeing porn, and better sex education in school could have potentially mitigated some of these harms. However, we won’t get productive change in this area as long as we’re operating under the prudish “won’t someone think of the children” mentality that led to the Online Safety Act. It would be good if we could shield kids from exposure to this stuff, but I don’t think that’s viable. We need to be more realistic if we actually want to protect kids from harm
I’m alright with making the doors to the local porn shop stickier (no pun intended), but in addition I agree that we need a better understanding of intimacy and sexuality as a society. For some reason its an incredibly taboo subject in western society, and that leaves the extreme religious folks as the only ones talking about it.
I wish this type of discussion was happening in our local government town halls rather than in a corner of the internet most won’t ever see.