Parents, religious leaders, and educators decry the potential effects of the “pervasiveness” of pornography on today’s youth, but are kids actually suffering negative effects from what has been called the “smut glut?” Ask them, as a recent conference in Irvine, Calif., did, and the majority will say they hardly notice it.
Despite a plethora of recent polls indicating widespread exposure of teens to adult material, the Irvine teens said pornography “is just part of the culture now.” Both girls and boys 15- to 17-years old admitted to being confused by the mixed messages they receive about sexuality from all sorts of media: television, the Internet, video games, even advertising. Coupled with moralistic messages from their parents and a good deal of parental fear to which the teens are not oblivious, it makes for a difficult transition from childhood to adulthood, they indicated.
Girls worry that they need to measure up to some standard of beauty that is only attainable artificially. Boys worry that they must divorce sex from emotion. Both genders complain that their parents worry too much about porn, often accusing them of downloading it from the Net when all they really are doing is indulging their passion for engaging in violent online games. What their parents really should worry about, they say, is not that they are having the kinds of sex they see around them in the everyday landscape, but that they may become so inured to sexual intimacy that it will hold no lure for them at all. Shock value, after all, isn’t what it used to be.
“I mean, porn is really easy to get now,” an unnamed University of California, Irvine, freshman told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s like, who cares?”
That’s not exactly what parents, educators, and religious leaders want to hear. A recent study by the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation determined that 70 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds in the U.S. have viewed pornography online. That concerns people like Dr. Lynn Ponton, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of The Sex Lives of Teenagers. The types and amounts of imagery to which adolescents are exposed whether they want to be or not have changed over the years. An average adult website, for example, can throw more sexually charged images at a viewer in a minute than an entire issue of Hustler magazine, which used to be the bellwether by which hardcore adult entertainment was judged.
"If you see images of women being tied up and degraded, and you're seeing them year after year and by the thousands, it desensitizes you," Ponton told the Times. "And this has not yet been looked at developmentally."
Others worry that, because perception often is reality, sexually curious adolescents will be shaped by the sometimes extreme nature of online adult content in ways that will inform their interactions for the rest of their lives.
"Young people don't have a lot of reference points," Ralph DiClemente, professor of public health and medicine at Atlanta's Emory University, told the Times. He is midway through a five-year study of kids and the Internet sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. "For [kids], the media is reality. So you're a young person, you're curious, you haven't had sex, but you don't want to appear to be a neophyte. What do you do? You go on the Internet to see, how should I behave? And a lot of what they're getting is a stilted perception of reality."
Teens, however, are far less worried about the effects of nearly constant exposure to eroticism. In fact, what parents and others often view as an illicit bombardment may be shaping children’s attitudes in positive ways. According to a 2002 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the vast majority of adolescents remain virgins at 15, and the majority has been increasing steadily since 1995. A recent poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates found that 95 percent of 13- and 14-year-olds denied having intercourse, and nine out of 10 of them said they disapprove of sexual activity among kids their age.
"Adults always think kids today are worse, or more sexual or more promiscuous," Mike Males, a lecturer in sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of Framing Youth: Ten Myths About the Next Generation, told the Times. "But most of the measures of that are at all-time lows. So then we get into these weird assertions that their attitudes are just worse somehow, and when it comes to attitudes, I'm very suspicious of adult perception and motives. It's as if adults were trying to say, we're better, we're more moral, we're superior."
