If you are a parent of a 10-year-old or over, talk to your child about the dangers of porn. Pronto. Any later than this might be too late.
I lost my first (signed) copy of Caitlin Moran’s book “What about men?” while travelling and reluctantly bought another one, unsure whether the book was worth paying for twice. That was until I read the chapter titled “The Pornography of Men”, which made my head explode while breaking my heart. For someone who is neither a porn connoisseur nor was raised in a fully digital era, the chapter was both truly revelatory and utterly shattering. I cried after reading it while making a next-steps list in my head with regards to my teenage sons (I lamented gen-z’s brutal immersion into the world of pornography that robs them of the romantic notion of love and sex that many gen xers took for granted growing up). Honestly, these 20 pages alone made buying the two copies of the book indisputably worthwhile.
“The Pornography of Men” is anchored in the candid reflections of a 21-year-old man, Sam, who, following much therapy, had recovered from an addiction to porn that started when he was 10 with the following google search: “Bug bum sexy woman naked”. Watching porn had become the normal thing to do, while having real sex had become weird for him and a swathe of boys of his generation (an observation that floored me).
At the end of the chapter, he concludes that schools need to be speaking to kids, as young as possible, about the damaging impact of early discovery and consumption of porn.
A few insights stood out for me:
- Our sex imagination is literal and is shaped by the images we feed it. It starts as a blank slate… until it isn’t. We cannot unsee what we have once seen. Images involuntarily wire our brain and impact our sexual preferences.
- Our children’s imagination about what sex should be like develops off the back of the images they absorb.
- At any point in time, a child is only ever 30 seconds away from discovering the most brutal examples of porn. Also, kids are great at bypassing wi-fi parental control settings.
- It’s much harder to find intimate porn that depicts loving sex between two people than it is to find extreme porn of all kinds on the internet.
- The social media feeds of men/boys and women/girls are completely different. The algorithms feed them different worlds. According to Sam, a boy must have lived in a cave not to have come across and consumed porn.
“Basically, watching porn pretty much destroyed my dopamine-release mechanism and it’s taken the last few years and a lot of work to get myself right again…My generation are the first to get this crazy access to a lot of sh*t, online, and it’s really noticeable that there is never really a chilled option to pornography”, reflects Sam at 21. “…I just want to go to schools and say, “Porn. Ask me all about it. Sex education in this country [UK] is all wrong. It’s too late…”
As for Moran, she illuminates heart-wrenchingly who the sole beneficiary of this calamitous situation is (and what the consequences are for the consumer): the porn industry that robs millions of children of healthy future sex lives. “…Now you need this multinational porn company in your sex life. Now, some millionaire tech guy is in bed with you…”
So what should we do as parents? I think first and foremost we should have honest conversations with our tweens, teens and with ourselves… and keep having them over and over again. We should watch high quality romantic comedies (yaaay!) with our kids to offer a world of intimacy that feeds their imaginations (especially if they complain that these films are boring). And/or, worst case, we should mention ethical porn sites (some are mentioned in Moran’s book) to our teenagers in the hope that it is there that they click first to satisfy their natural curiosity about sex.
