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Comment by whiddershins | Hacker News Reader

I did not share or look at porn at 10 years old, and I don’t think that it was common to do so pre-puberty, pre-internet.

I’m not sure there is gain in normalizing this.

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We definitely should not be normalizing this, but we also should not be building a panopticon just to try to stop it.

Agree. Both can be true at once.

Me neither - I was 8.

One friend's dad had playboy magazines. Another had videos. And another had games where if you knew the password (we did) it would show some 8 bit graphics with nudity.

It wasn't about sexual arousal. It was just about curiosity. Hell, my 6 year old tries to see my butt all the time. Because it's my butt and it's usually covered.

Those examples are nudity as far as I can tell. I think we’re talking about porn, which is quite another thing for an 8 year old to experience.

I grew up pre internet.

We, as neighborshood kids, had a stash in the woods of pornos we stole from family.

To be fair, I think a lot of modern internet porn is probably way more depraved than porn that existed pre-internet, and there is a virtually infinite supply of it available for free. One consequence of this is that there are a lot of people, especially young people, who are addicted to porn.

Personally, I think it’s best to avoid porn completely.

Not even the lingerie section in mail-order catalogues? Kids use what they have. And yes, sexual content is a normal thing. just talk to kids about it, and why they are too young watching that stuff. You cannot prevent anyways.

How is the lingerie section anything like porn? Nudity != porn

For a 10 year old, pre internet, it was the closest thing. a and easy to come by. I don't have problem with either, so.

>I don’t think that it was common to do so pre-puberty, pre-internet.

Pre-puberty, probably not, no interest for obvious reasons. Pre-internet, absolutely. Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, etc were prevalent. BBS's existed too.

Gotta ask how old are you?

I do remember a Playboy when it came out in 1971. The Willy Rey issue (girl on the stock certificate). Nice looking.

Not only were Playboys pretty rare, but they were a different kettle of fish than any modern adult images/video.

Are times better or worse? I couldn't tell you. Lots of differences. Many women never have children. Divorce is common. People aren't raised on farms with all the attendant physical realities of life. Slavery was common in most societies. People got married at young ages. Sex has been secretive or not depending on the era.

Probably the worst thing about porn is a scarring of the mind, sex as non-participatory act, exotica as normal, staring at screens, addictive behavior, the internet as a net negative.

BBS’s are the internet.

Anyway, what I was trying to say was, pre-internet it kinda required post-puberty hormones to be motivated enough to clear the hurdles to accessing porn.

Also, to another commenter’s point, the porn I was able to access was amazingly innocent by comparison to what is probably commonly available now.

>BBS’s are the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

They kinda melded a little at the end of the BBS era and the beginning of the public internet era with integrated email and whatnot and you can still get to some via telnet, but they were distinct entities / networks / protocols from the internet.

BBS's are most certainly not the internet. They were most often stand-alone and independent, with offline networking in the form of FidoNet ("offline" in that FidoNet boards would dial up at regular times to transmit and receive messages from other nodes).

BBS's entirely predate the Internet's general availability (although of course the Internet is older than most people realize).

Plenty of porn in the woods pre-internet.

Well, as long as you are the person who is normal, we can finally all set our sails in the right direction.

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