Online porn: Warping young minds?

Billie Eilish believes porn “really warped her mind,” said Barbara Kay in the New York Post. The Grammy-winning singer told radio host Howard Stern her ideas about healthy sex and relationships were damaged by online porn, which she started watching at 11. Eilish’s experience “is not extraordinary.” With porn composing a third of all internet downloads in the U.S., habitual porn exposure “is a pandemic amongst young people.” Many, like Eilish, start with “entry-level” porn before sliding into more-violent content that has “had to get darker to arouse jaded appetites. And it is suffused with hatred for women.” The sex depicted on these sites is “terrifying. Dominant. Violent,” said Judith Woods in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). “There is choking and spitting and angry misogyny.” Women are “degraded, used,” and “discarded.” And it’s all freely available “at a few keystrokes on a phone.” What are parents supposed to do? Some say we should talk to our kids about porn when they’re as young as 8. “Eight! You first.”

Actually, those conversations are “a lot easier than you think,” said Cindy Gallop in Independent.co.uk. (U.K.) Parents should tell children that just as we watch movies, videos, and cartoons that aren’t real, “there are movies and videos about sex, and they’re not real, either.” Sex education needs to include porn literacy programs, said Patricia Grisafi in NBCNews.com. Porn is not “inherently bad or wrong,” but it’s “not created with preteens in mind.” When children learn about sex from pornography, “there’s a problem”—and they need to be ready to “critically engage with it so they don’t wind up feeling traumatized or pressured to mimic it.” After all, most kids won’t “feel comfortable having conversations about porn with their parents.”

That’s not entirely true, said Sophie McBain in the New Statesman (U.K.). Many young people “actually want their parents to broach difficult topics,” such as porn, sex, and consent, and these conversations must be had “before they are given social media accounts or smartphones.” A Dutch study showed that children who learn about porn in schools “are less likely to see women as sex objects.” Yes, it can be awkward at first to bring up these important topics with your kids, but it’ll be far more awkward for them to be “left to navigate the confusing, sometimes harmful, landscape of sex and consent with little guidance or support.”