Porn as a Silent Epidemic: How It Affects Teenagers

Porn could be considered a silent epidemic that, unfortunately, we’re still not aware of. The extent of its impact on the next generations is starting to emerge, but it remains unknown. The most vulnerable are teenagers and children, even if we think the latter have practically no contact with that world (which is completely untrue). The effects of porn at these ages are far more harmful than in adults.

Are these claims alarmist? Not at all. In fact, society is closer to downplaying the problem than to alarmism. The main reasons are:

• First contact with porn happens at around 8 years old.
• It leaves a permanent mark on behavior and on the mind that lasts into adulthood.

Exploring the reasons behind early access to pornographic content

Let’s start by clarifying at what age our children first come into contact with porn, and why. Well, the main causes are the sheer amount of pornographic material on the internet, how easy it is to access, its promotion in media that seem suitable for minors, and the invisibility of the problem, which leads parents not to take any monitoring or prevention measures. Picture a situation where a child is given a mobile phone or a tablet to play games, watch songs online, cartoons, or anything else. At some point, an ad might show up for cartoons featuring a sexualized girl. Once they click on it, the next suggested ads will be more and more erotic, and can end up linking to purely pornographic sites. And of course, if they’re browsing websites directly, ads with erotic or pornographic content can appear without the child doing anything at all. The result is that children have their first contact with porn basically as soon as they’ve been able to use a phone unsupervised for a while.

Consequences of early access

As they get older, curiosity and actively searching for this content come into play, especially when they reach puberty and masturbation begins. So, however much you trust your children, the realistic thing is to assume that the vast majority of minors have had access to pornographic content. This isn’t a subjective claim; there’s data on it, but the aim of this article isn’t to bombard you with statistics and charts.

The distortion of sex and its effects

You might think it’s not that serious, and that sex is something natural. Well, that’s where the second big problem begins: the type of content and the consequences it has on the individual. Porn doesn’t show sex the way it happens in real life. There are no hugs, no kisses, and an extremely high percentage of violence (choking, hitting, forced sex, etc.). Remember that we’re talking about children and teenagers: they know nothing about sex, and what little they know, they’re learning from there. A 16-year-old boy, in his first sexual relationship, may be very surprised not to receive oral sex, or that the encounter lasted 5-10 minutes instead of 40. And a girl may feel obliged to perform oral sex because that’s what’s expected of her, or consider it normal to have her hair pulled during that encounter.

Addiction and extremism

What’s more, all of that would be the best-case scenario. The reality is that, driven by morbid curiosity, they usually consume much more shocking content than adults, since they keep needing stronger content to feel anything. Porn has an addictive component, and falling into it reduces the pleasure of real sexual relationships. As adults, they’ll find it hard to have healthy and satisfying relationships, besides normalizing and downplaying behaviors that are plain sexual assault. It’s common for them to send each other short videos of themselves masturbating, nudes, rapes or group assaults that even get filmed (which reinforces the idea that they aren’t even aware of how serious it is), etc.

Challenges in the digital age

The big argument used against putting a stop to this is how hard it is to control content on the internet, which is false. The tools exist. It’s much harder to rent a car or bet at an online casino than to access porn on the internet. All it takes is the will to do it.

Parental responsibility and solutions

For now, the only tool available is in parents’ hands. Don’t leave internet-connected devices without at least a minimum of safety settings.

I hope you found this topic interesting. I think it ties in with the dangers of technology, which I hope to write more about.