I grew up a believer that porn wasn't that bad. I grew up with Playboy, Playgirl, Hustler, and the dirty books my father hid. I didn't think porn was necessarily nasty.
But it was very vanilla in retrospect.
And then the internet came.
I questioned allowing access to porn to everyone with a computer, particularly kids.
Now, I hate the idea. Not because porn is ubiquitous, per say. But the porn kids have access to now is particularly graphic and often disturbing.
Adults usually understand that porn is a pure fantasy. But not all younger people do. And the younger the consumer, the less they tend to understand.
And today porn is not only available, but stuff that most of us didn't learn about until our later years is now front and center. Gay stuff that is best unknown, even to me. Straight porn that shows simulated rape and degradation. And, to give a male adolescent's point of view, you are learning about everything sexual and think that is what people like.
A simple, and not too yucky, example is simulated strangulation during sex. It happens in straight and gay porn, and I have seen enough advice columns to know this is both disturbing and widespread. Men and women have grown beyond immune to it and right into expecting it. Women ask if it is normal, as "all my friends do it."
Well, it wasn't normal. Now maybe it is - and that can be laid right at the doorstep of porn.
I don't know how to regulate it, and stopping it is the epitome of closing the barn door after the horse has left.
*sigh*
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