A Twelve-Year-Old Is Watching Porn

A Twelve-Year-Old Is Watching Porn

With young people, we need to discuss and contextualise porn


>“I’d be surprised if most 12-year-old boys aren’t watching online porn at least occasionally and some of them will be watching porn a lot. Remember, Dexter’s a boy trying to work out how to be a man, what’s expected of men. He’s bound to be interested in how men behave, in what men do, in how men treat other people.”

>“But I can’t just ask him if he watches porn,” says Will. “That would sound weird. He might get the wrong idea!”

It’s a fair point. How could he ask about something like that without sounding weird and, more importantly, why would he ask a 12-year-old boy about porn?

>Of course there’s nothing new in people of all ages looking atpornographybut what is new is the availability and range of online porn, if not in Dexter’s house, then on phones or round at his friends’ houses or via the older boys he hangs out with. He’s only twelve.Pubertyis just beginning to kick in. >Thesexeducationcurriculum at his school will be concentrating on how babies are made and online safety. It won’t be deconstructing and trying to help boys like Dexter understand what they’re watching when they watch porn; it won’t be putting theirfantasiesof masculinity into context or explaining the practical and emotional realities of physical sex. Desperate not to be ignorant, he and his friends may well be watching porn formasturbationbut they’ll also be watching it as a kind of sex education. ‘Hanging out with older boys’ means absorbing older boys’ versions of masculinity, listening to their boasts about sexual experience and prowess: boasts based on pornographic narratives.

>Rightly or wrongly, pornography has become a lens through which young people see themselves. “How do I compare with the men and the women online? Do I behave in the same way? Do I excite other people and, if not, why not? Will I ever be good at sex? And if I’m no good, how can I hide that from other people?” There’s an urgent need for pornography to be discussed and contextualized.

>“Imagine a boy like Dexter who’s not yet physically developed watching that stuff,” I say to Will. “Imagine him thinking that this is what the world expects of men. Imagine him watching the way the men and women act in heterosexual porn: the way their bodies look, the way they treat each other: the men in control and the women submissive, apparently happy to tolerate anything. Imagine Dexter thinking about his mother with her boyfriends…. Am I being prudish?”

>“I don’t know,” he says. “I can’t say I watch much pornography.”

>“Well watch some!” I implore him. >“You can think of it as research into what Dexter and his friends are watching! I think we need to be proactive and ask about young people’s porn consumption because you can bet they won’t mention the subject, even though it’ll have become an important factor in their attempts to work out how they’re supposed to be in the world. Some 12-year-olds won’t be ready to discuss anything like this and that’s fair enough: no one wants to sexualize children or take away their innocence. But for some that innocence has long since been taken away. What we’re trying to do is to limit the damage by helping young people make better sense of what they’re watching. If you ask him, Dexter can always lie and say no, absolutely no way - he never watches porn. But if you ask in a matter-of-fact way, like it’s no big deal, like it’s nothing to be ashamed of, then in my experience most young people will admit to watching at least a bit of porn and that’s your opportunity!”

>“For what?”

>“For talking about how unrealistic porn might be, for explaining the differences between pornographic sex and everyday sex, the differences between pornographic bodies and everyday bodies…. It’s an opportunity to think together about what people might really need from each other, for putting the relationship back into the sex, if you like. Assuming that Dexter’s never had sex, he’s got no experience to compare with the porn he’s watching. I think you have to become an unofficial sex education teacher, Will, explaining to him in appropriate detail the differences between porn sex and everyday sex. You have to tell him about the importance of understanding other people’s feelings and you have to explain about consent, because in porn there’s no concept of consent, no negotiation: everyone just appears to be up for anything. And if you’re a 12-year-old boy watching, that’s what you’ll end up thinking must be normal unless someone tells you different. In porn, women don’t have periods and men don’t ejaculate prematurely. In porn, condoms are apparently unnecessary because STIs don’t exist and women never get pregnant. Oral sex is obligatory and anal sex is straightforward. In porn, no one’s ever distracted, the phone never rings and children haven’t been invented. No one farts, smells or needs a pee!”

>Will looks taken aback.

>“But more importantly, no one ever feels anxious, has mixed feelings or wants to stop. And no one ever mentions love. And that’s another task – helping Dexter think about the feelings that might be involved in sex, the feelings men have that are not necessarily brave and confident but that are manly in more tentative, sensitive, generous ways, miles away from a narrow little stereotype that reduces manliness to fighting and drinking and predatory sex!”

I was watching porn when I was 12 long before the internet.

This isn't terrible off point.
I found beastiality porn at the age of 12 by googling a joke some friend told me about a dog.
Add a decade and it's grown into one of the only things I get off to. That fetish is still deeply engrained and even if I do the work to push it away in favor of less degenerate content it'll likely always be there, albeit dulled.

That's obviously a more fringe case but the point of "porn impacts a young brain more severely than we may like to admit" is an important one. I really hate to think of the result of a child finding say, cuckold porn.

Is this (((Luxmoore))) watching him watch porn?

Nevermind I just realized this is in favor of having children watch porn, not against it.
wew

Honestly though, I don't have a solution. I just know it's a problem.

I know that feel, man. I wish I could just wake up one day and not know it exists.

>pornographic bodies

What an interesting term.

>Imagine Dexter thinking about his mother with her boyfriends

>start watching porn at 13 on peer to peer sites like kazzaa
>look for girls my age because lol thats normal right
>fastforward 10 years later and have not moved on from that age group


100% fact children accessing porn has created people who are attracted to girls younger than age of consent

>mother with her boyfriends
Cuckery at it's finest

I discovered masturbation at 11 and I had been watching porn since I found my 11 brother watching it when I was 10

I found cuckold porn in penthouse letters when I was real young.

And. Yeah...its a thing that pops up during my masturbation habits...I don't care for it

I did that when I was 13-15 as well. But, I don't anymore. Haven't since then really.

You guys are just degenerates. Not an insult, and it's not your fault. You were just genetically predisposed to liking that shit. A normal young kid with normal hormone levels that just "happenstances" by some fucked up genre of porn will literally just ignore it. Not "ingrain the fetish".

I'm obsessed with titties. Probably the porn I saw years ago.

Yeah, I think that it isn't completely genetics, but that has a big impact on it.

That's probably entirely true. I found the magazine's in my dad's closet with the pages marked. Turns out he had them because he was the one that wrote the stories...I found the original manuscripts later on...

>HEY you watching porn boy.
>No why.
>Good, be a nice christian lad son.
Thats all you have to do really.

Dunno man far as I know for as long as I know I like tits and its been that why since I saw a pair at a pool when I was really young.
Your first is the best for a reason.

he looks like the type of guy that keeps a bag of children's underwear under his bed

Age of consent is a social construction like gender. The whole concept of "teenage " being an separate consideration between child and adult was created by marketing strategies to profit in post WW2 America.

Genetics just feels like a copout. Admittedly, I can't fault it because we don't understand the brain enough for me to call it bullshit. But it still feels cheap.