April 29, 2005 | Sex & Society

Youth see more porn: but does it matter?

The first generation to grow up with the Internet is now beginning to come of age. Pornography, which is widely available for free on the Net, has helped to hasten an era of unprecedented sexual frankness. Sexuality is also much more "in your face" in the mainstream media, from television and movies to advertising and marketing in all their forms.  

"Protecting" minors from seeing porn on the Net has been an ongoing theme since the Internet became widely accessible to the public a decade ago. The assumption has been that young people will be somehow permanently damaged if they are overexposed to porn, particularly of the more demeaning types.

At a recent youth conference in Irvine, California, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times spoke to a group of 15 to 17 year-olds about how they felt they had been affected by exposure to porn.

Both girls and boys admitted to being confused by the mixed messages they receive about sexuality from the Internet, television, video games and advertising. While some of the girls worry that they need to measure up to an impossible standard of beauty, boys think they are being told that sex should be divorced from emotion.

But all the young people seemed to be able to distinguish the negative messages that they receive from porn from their own values. In other words, they are capable of applying "media literacy" to porn just as they do to television, news journalism and advertising.

As one teen put it, "Porn is just another form of entertainment now."
[Los Angeles Times]