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Comment by sexoffender | Hacker News Reader

My oldest son recently developed a porn habit in secret, and the things we saw in his search history showed a clear progression from googling "boobs" and "nudity" to "pissing" and "bondage".

Pornography isn't even close to what it was 30 years ago when you for the most part only saw it in nudie mags that your dad had (or friend had who stole it from his dad). Today, kids have easy access to a wealth of horrifying and bastardized hard-core pornography.

But not only that, the ads and search results and images that show up for the more innocent things will lead them to the more awful things, because they're just readily visible and accessible right there.

To be honest the only solution we have found is twofold: to change our wifi password to disable internet on all devices (he was sneaking his Nintendo 3DS into the bathroom for 2 months to look at porn on it) and to proactively start teaching them that life is more than a constant quest for more and more intense pleasure, and that if you allow yourself to give into that base mentality, you are throwing away a good portion of your future that could be filled with meaningful real relationships and legitimately joyful times, in exchange for maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain until you die.

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I'm sure it's a difficult position as a parent, although I have no experience in that department.

That said, have you wondered why you find those things "horrifying"? I might be a bit concerned if it was rape porn, but besides that I am unconvinced that there'such harm to come from children seeing porn, either at an individual or social level.

As I've noted before, if a child is looking at porn, that means they have a desire for it, which I think is difficult for parents to come to terms with. I certainly wouldn't want porn foisted on children, but if they are seeking it out through their own volition, there really isn't much you can do about it; a parent's treatment of a child viewing porn probably has more potential for a negative outcome than the porn itself since it is ultimately blaming human beings for their innate instinct. As if there is something wrong with naked adults having consentual sex, or practicing paraphilias.

I discovered porn when I was 10 through AltaVista image search. Just type in a female name and presto! By this time, there wasn't a whole lot my parents could do because I was going to look at porn one way or another. As with violent video games, parents have no governance over what their kids have access to at their friends' houses. In that case, establishing trust with your children will go a lot further than making them fear something that they innately understand to be practically harmless.

By the way, parents could actually talk to their kids about sex and, yes, even porn. If you're a good parent, your words will likely have an impact even if your kids continue to get their hands on porn.

Here's what we tell our kids:

You watch an action movie because it's exciting, it's thrilling, and things explode. Basically, everything is carefully managed or faked to give you the feeling that everything is amazingly awesome.

Porn is just like an action movie, only it's about sex instead of guns and martial arts. It's fun, but it usually has very little to do with real sex.

> Porn is just like an action movie, only it's about sex instead of guns and martial arts. It's fun, but it usually has very little to do with real sex.

Except in action movies, people don't take real ideas back to the bedroom and end up wanting to act them out. Porn modifies brain chemistry[0] to alter how we think about sex. Porn is a common thread in serial murderers[1].

In my own life, I've had to reprogram myself to get away from ideas that haunted me for 10+ years that hurt myself and others.

Pornography is a plague.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/26/brain-...

[1]: https://www.netnanny.com/blog/what-serial-killers-and-murder...

> Porn is a common thread in serial murderers.

So's oxygen and water intake.

Citing NetNanny on this is pretty silly. Serial killers existed long before pornography was around, and I suspect you're getting correlation and causation mixed up there. Your average porn consumer manages not to cut heads off.

Well, don't take their word for it. Go find the research: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shadow-boxing/201704/er...

You also assume that people lead relatively normal lives with porn, but what about the subtle effects?

Don't you think that the objectification of women as sexual objects or the demeaning of marriage to something that gets in the way of people's sexual pleasure has any sort of effect in a civilized society?

> Go find the research

As with the NetNanny piece, I can't find any peer-reviewed research in that article. Just a bunch of anecdotes.

I'm not sure how porn "demeans marriage".

Pornography goes back to at least Greek times, and probably is roughly contemporaneous with the invention of art.

There have been, perhaps, a few hundred serial killers? Even if all of them had seen porn, that's a few billion people who saw porn, enjoyed it, and then didn't kill anyone else.

Pornography always leads people down this path where they ignore all the things that don't support demonizing it. I can't think of many things besides drugs and music that get a similar armchair evaluation from people who are always insistent they have the moral high ground. My family was never the type to stray from talking about sex (very European sensibility about it) so it was always "You're going to see porn. If any of it confuses you, ask me about it." Why can't most people be like that? It's always gotta be "Porn, movies, and video games create serial killers" while completely ignoring that there are literally millions of people that enjoy all those things and continue to be just fine, productive and mentally healthy members of society.

People do definitely take real ideas from martial arts movies and try to act them out (although not necessarily in the bedroom). Action movies probably also modify brain chemistry if you watch them excessively, since almost everything does.

And your second link? "Do serial killers or murderers exhibit common behaviors? Based on the hundreds of crime dramas I've watched, I believe they do." Seriously?

This should be more prevalent too. The difference between children and adults is typically that children can process what's happening just as well as adults. They can't process the why behind it, though, so they take it at face value. That's where parents and, in general, adults have to come in and help them explain or find the resources that explain what's going on. Without that, you end up with sheltered children that have to come up with their own reasons for why things exist and are the way they are. When that happens with fictional/sensationalized materials, they become the norm for them.

If I was a kid who's parents were actively monitoring my search activity, cutting off my access to the internet as a whole because of porn, and were trying to equate me watching porn because I'm going through puberty (presumably) with throwing away meaningful relationships in my future. . .what that teaches me is to never, ever go to my parents for any problems I have remotely related to sex, because their draconian. And that's bad. If I'm not going to my parents with those, who am I going to?

There's merit to what you're saying, yes, there's an unhealthy push for hardcore stuff in the modern porn landscape. Yes, in excess it's bad (as is everything else, by definition, but this more than many other things). But mostly I just feel bad for your kid. I get if he's like 13 or whatever you don't want him immersing himself in violent rape porn, but I feel like there's better ways to solve that than "no internet for you, and internet you do have is Being Watched".

Also unimportant, but does anyone develop a porn habit not in secret?

Yes, not wanting your children to develop sexual relationships with computer screens is draconian.

It's the outright ban on wifi that feels draconian. How would you handle it?

I read an article a while ago about how a lot of silicon valley people disallow their kids internet access. It makes sense to me.

Does it? These kids are going into a world saturated by the Internet. Does it make sense to disallow Internet access and prevent them from participating in culture, education, entertainment, and pretty much everything else in life while their peers are getting ahead and they're left behind? This is one way to prepare kids for almost certain failure in our increasingly technology-based society.

Neither of us have any data here, but I really doubt this is true. I suspect that any deficiency in technical skills at, say, age 12, can quickly be overcome. But the downsides in terms of problems with social, emotional, and behavioral development from being exposed to technology 24/7 from a young age seems like it might be much more difficult to overcome.

My position is that moderate and supervised technology use from a young age probably is the best path, but if the choice was between two extremes of “unrestricted access from 0-10 years old” and “no access from 0-10”, I think the latter is the choice that I’d make. I highly doubt my kids would be at a long-term disadvantage.

All of this stuff is accessible in real life, and in a fuller way. I don't think missing out on 1000s of hours of Instagram consumption is a particular disadvantage, especially if those 1000s of hours were spent actually hanging out with friends or playing sports etc.

Not quite what I was saying. Not wanting anyone you care about to "develop sexual relationships with computer screens" is normal, I'd think.

Mandating all levels of access to computer screens because of that desire is what's draconian, not the intent behind the mandate.

It's clearly not a response to the desire but a response to the action.

I was responding to reader5000, who said ". . .not wanting your children. . ." (emphasis mine)

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I feel like there's better ways to solve that than "no internet for you, and internet you do have is Being Watched".

What are those ways?

That's a good question, and I'm not sure. I think the. . .popular mentality is that you model proper behavior/approaches, but I don't think that really works here as well. The idea is that you have someone wiser than you who you can compare experiences with, and they can help guide you away from damaging choices - e.g. violent rape porn is probably a bad choice because X, Y, and Z. But I don't know what to generically recommend for reaching that place.

How about slip him a Playboy?

Play a little good cop / bad cop: you know mom is sensitive to stuff like that, but guys can have a little fun. And it's better when you don't have to see the naked dude.

Maybe in a week reinforce healthy arousal: this one's my favorite, look at this curve.

Talk about how you'll "know what to do" when the time comes, but it's important to work on just noticing details, women like that, and to be in control of your emotions and the situation.

We've never let them have free reign to screens, whether computer or TV or phone, because there's a whole host of other problems that come from that. So it's not like we're taking internet away from them and that they're used to it. We've been teaching each one, the other they get, how to use computers and the internet responsibly, and we've always supervised to make sure they're not accidentally running into something. But a search for some Magic the Gathering cards on eBay is what started this, when he accidentally saw an image of a nude woman in the results, and decided to google it behind our backs on the family computer (while my wife and the younger were in the same room!) and since he broke that level of trust with us, and showed a complete lack of understanding of the gravity of his actions, we had to take stronger measures against this disease in his mind that led him to put his younger siblings in danger of seeing something far more confusing and graphic than they're ready to at their ages.

No one knows how to better parent your kids than childless millenial software developers :)

Haha! I mean, fair. Obviously OP has the most information, so ultimately is probably best placed to make appropriate choices. I don't dispute that.

Childless millennial software developers (or otherwise generally technical) are in a better position to understand puberty in the modern internet driven landscape than someone who went through it 30 years ago, though. That's a relevant perspective here. . .no? The whole idea is to provide alternative perspectives, so that we can have the most information and thus (in theory) make the best choices, right?

> Childless millennial software developers (or otherwise generally technical) are in a better position to understand puberty in the modern internet driven landscape than someone who went through it 30 years ago, though. That's a relevant perspective here. . .no?

I'm a millennial software developer who went through this exact thing 15 years ago. So we're in the same boat, the only difference being I have kids. And poker is a whole different game when you're not playing for keeps.

Thank you for explaining further, that helps narrow down the situation.

"we had to take stronger measures against this disease in his mind that led him to put his younger siblings in danger of seeing something far more confusing and graphic than they're ready to at their ages."

This is what leaves me unconvinced (and I don't have expectation of changing your mind either - you operate with the most information here so that's probably a good thing). Certainly, what he did was inappropriate, but. . .a boy in puberty looking for porn on the internet is not a "disease". Even offensive porn. There's not something wrong with your boy. He did a bad thing (or a few bad things). He's a teen. Doesn't mean he should be let off the hook, but. . .diseased? Nah.

It does sound like you're having some conversations about this (and importantly, providing the idea that there's something better out there), though, so that's good.

Why do you think you need to prevent your son from watching porn, especially to the point that you need to completely remove his access to the Internet?

Once he started doing it, everything in his life declined. He stopped having healthy relationships with his siblings and his friends at school. He started to be much more angry and even sometimes violent, and when we examine the situations in detail, we see that none of it is justified, and he's always the one saying everyone is out to get him when he is actually the one doing wrong. He's become a lot more arrogant and a lot more reserved at school and obnoxious at home. His grades at school declined sharply. He's developing a narcissistic personality, and won't participate in things that he doesn't personally see any value or benefit in, even when everyone around him tries to convince him it's a good or worthwhile activity. Overall he's declining in mental and emotional health.

It's possible you're mixing up cause and effect here.

The hormonal changes that tend to cause kids to become interested in porn can cause those other elements as well. It's not unusual for even a teenager with no interest in porn to be quick to anger, feel persecuted, be arrogant, etc.

"Won't participate in things that he doesn't personally see any value or benefit in" probably describes 98% of high school students.

Teenage boys get more angry and introverted at the same time that they become interested in porn? It must be the porn I tell you!!

First, how are you sure it's correlation and not causation? Perhaps he's being driven to porn/developing the habit as self-medication?

Also, as to your previous point that it will lead to "harder" stuff, a recent study says no. Yes, there will be more opportunity and exploration of the topic, but that's something that will happen eventually to all individuals. It isn't studied very well, but at least this initial one says we don't naturally become more tolerant and require "harder" pornography over time. https://www.lehmiller.com/blog/2018/2/5/can-you-build-up-a-t...

There is more to it, and it's hard to pinpoint cause and effect. He did have issues that existed before the pornography habit. But they worsened significantly since the month he started looking at pornography regularly. I do believe that his pornography habit has lowered his mental and emotional intelligence by a noticeable factor. I also look back at when I was his same age, and see my own struggles as very similar to his. So I could be mistaken with some of the internal presumptions I've made about him, but the external ones match up almost exactly.

OK, fair enough. Hope you guys figure out an appropriate intervention plan then. Is going to a therapist on the table? Sounds like there's something deeper going on and just cutting off the porn doesn't usually solve it in my experience.

This is probably honestly just be puberty, and porn may actually be a release that helps with this stage in his life and all of the unseen anxieties he has right now.

There may be a correlation but you really have no idea what the cause is. You shouldn't assume it's this one thing. It may prevent you from being able to offer more meaningful help.

Sounds more like he's becoming a teenager.

How do you know that this isn't correlation as opposed to causation? Addictive practices are common avoidance strategies.

Is he anywhere between 13 and 17? Because that behavior sounds like about 60% of boys between those ages. Testosterone makes people quick to anger, often unjustifiably, and until they learn to control it they aren't fun to be around.

Teenagers are also famously self-absorbed, and this age is also marked with a shift from reliance on parents for guidance to outside sources like peers.

This was all the case before the internet, before video, before printed media. Porn isn't the cause.

It's illegal. But yeah I personally don't understand this reaction.

Most of the time, I see the puritanical christians going the route of "sex is evil". It's the unsaid thing as well, but they are also the ones pushing for "abstinence-only training". This is literally dumbing down discourse to students at an age who sorely needs it.

I'd also be willing to bet that this family has no compunctions about letting the son watch extreme violent TV shows and movies. People being tortured, maimed, and killed is usually OK. Show a nipple, and people lose their shit.

EDIT: In the end, this article is flagged for what amounts to Christian Moralization vs Non-Christian Moralization. I need only read "traditional morality", "psalms chaper#:verse# one of", or citing netnanny as an authoritative source to understand what the real problem is here.

This is what would be classified as a straight up religious conflict, and "teenagers, online porn, sexuality" are one of the major battlegrounds in this culture war.

It's ugly indeed.

The puritanical attitude is wrong. Sex is an amazing and great part of life, just like roller coasters or having 3 beers. Life is meant to be enjoyed. But over-doing it, or using something in a way it wasn't meant to be used, can ruin that joy. Nothing is wrong with sex within a healthy relationship. But nobody who goes to a hooker really believes afterwards that they found true happiness there.

We also avoid movies like Saw not only for our older children but even ourselves. Why fill out bellies with filthy water when there's plenty of fresh water all around us, free for the taking? Only people who convince themselves that there's no fresh water, or that it's not good enough for their belly, will look for filthy polluted water and convince themselves it's their only hope.

> The puritanical attitude is wrong. Sex is an amazing and great part of life, just like roller coasters or having 3 beers. Life is meant to be enjoyed. But over-doing it, or using something in a way it wasn't meant to be used, can ruin that joy. Nothing is wrong with sex within a healthy relationship. But nobody who goes to a hooker really believes afterwards that they found true happiness there.

But that's what I'm taking about. There's no (supernatural, physical, legal) law that states for everything fun and good, I have to suffer equal amounts. That's just moralization in the puritanical strain, which I reject.

And I would also like to call out the sentence: " Nothing is wrong with sex within a healthy relationship."

Nothing is wrong with consensual sex, period. I needen't be in a marriage or relationship with them. I don't care if it's vanilla, scat, bdsm, cuckolding, or whatever. We have more than enough science and technology that people can have sex with little fear. It's only when governments want to inflict their "morals" on people do people really start to hurt. They do this by keeping drugs, devices, and techniques away. Thankfully, The Satanic Temple has been challenging these "moral precepts" as the religious laws enshrined into to state laws. (Seriously, who'd have thought that TST would fight for peoples' rights?!)

And I also have no issue with prostitutes. I've never procured the services of any, but I see no shame in doing so either. It's no more a temporary feel-good similar to that of a roller coaster or a concert. It's just "bad" because of the puritanical beliefs that all sex is bad, outside a marriage (later turned to relationship).

And regarding SAW, the show was meh. It's a slasher for slasher's sake.

>Nothing is wrong with consensual sex, period.

Is that entirely true? If I say "nothing is wrong with eating Big Macs, period" that's right in one sense. But you and I can see with our own eyes what an unrestrained diet of Big Macs might do, and it's bad, if not legally wrong.

You might say the problem with unrestrained eating is the desire or relationship with food, not the object (the Big Mac), but in that case traditional morality is also saying something about the focus of 'healthy' desire, not the sex act.

Even if you strip away the "wrong," the way people incorporate sex into their relationships and ethics will make lives better or worse.

> But nobody who goes to a hooker really believes afterwards that they found true happiness there.

There are a lot of assumptions rolled up in that sentence.

Rather than try and unpack them all here myself, I'd encourage you to talk to actual sex workers. Not people who engage the services of sex workers, but the people actually doing the sex work themselves. Ask them about the work they do, why they do it, what their customers are looking for, and what role they think they're playing in their customers' lives.

I think you'd be surprised by some of what you hear.

A few months ago one posted here on HN, explaining how most of her clients were men who threw away their actual families to chase after fast-paced careers (like start-ups), and often wanted to just talk and have her role-play being a wife (including sex). I have no idea how many people here on HN fall into that category, but her clients didn't sound like they were finding that fulfillment in her services that they seem to ultimately be seeking after in life.

> A few months ago one posted here on HN, explaining how...

Yeah, to clarify, when I say "talk to actual sex workers", I'm not referring to reading comments posted on Hacker News.

the puritanical value isnt 'sex is evil'

the puritanical value is 'sex should be enjoyed in marriage, monogamously'

pornography is harmful to our brains, many studies have shown this.

plenty of studies also show that people who have fewer sexual partners are ultimately happier in their sex life.

and it doesnt take much thought to see that STDs would spread much more slowly if people were monogamous.

lots of good things come from that value. on the inverse, the 'have sex as much as you want' mentality leads to unplanned pregnancies/killing unborn babies, devaluation of the gift of sex, and spread of disease. but hey, you get to have 'lots of fun' so is it worth it?

sex and money are the greatest idols in our society, and the worship of either does not yield good things.

The truth is the puritans enjoyed sex, just within the confines of marriage. Here is a brief article dispelling some of the myths, https://nypost.com/2016/10/21/the-puritans-really-loved-havi...

I wouldn't say it's necessarily the thing to do, but there is a chance that it forms an addiction and/or bad habits which life might be more enjoyable without. I don't prescribe to the "porn is evil" mantra, but that doesn't mean it can't do harm.

There are whole comminutes of people who are trying to recover from porn addiction because of the way it had negatively affected their lives. See /r/nofap and yourbrainonporn.com.

If you've never been negatively affected by it, good for you. I can see why you be skeptical that it could do harm to anyone. Most people rely on their own anecdotal experience to form their opinions. But keep an open mind, not everyone responds the same way to these things.

I don't blame parents for trying to look out for their children. They just need to make sure they're doing it in a sane, reasonable way.

plenty of recent studies show that pornography use is manifestly harmful to our brains, especially developing brains. Cursory searching yielded these articles, but there are many studies to be found.

http://yournewswire.com/this-is-how-pornography-addiction-is...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2642712/Does-...

https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/porn-debate/

Pornography is a harmful drug and can have many of the same psychological and physiological effects as other addictive substances.

plenty of recent studies show that pornography use is manifestly good to our brains

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/201601/ev...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sunny-side-of...

Pornography is a useful tool to manage testosterone and other hormones in the adolescent and reduces sexual crimes across the board.

The issue is complex, but those 3 sources are not reputable at all.

How does masturbating to a bondage video throw away a good portion of your future?

>life is more than a constant quest for more and more intense pleasure

for many, it's not. We are designed to seek pleasure, so many make that their highest goal.

But nothing in this world can provide true and lasting pleasure, only God can.

You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

psalm 16:11

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