Lovely quote, that.

I also don’t think porn should be a big worry in giving kids internet access any more than it is with letting them into newsagents with porn on the shelf. And I should say now that I’m young enough to have been a kid with internet access. If anyone wants to hear stories from my 12 year old self I’ve got them, although they’re basically non-stories. When I got online, I searched and I found what I was looking for, which was mostly newsgroup discussions of Lord of the Rings and Terry Pratchett and other stuff I was into at the time. If something appeared on my screen that I wasn’t interested in, whether it was porn or insurance, I closed it without any thought. If it crashed netscape, I cursed and kicked the reset button. When I started to get curious about sex, I started looking around, and I found things that were more or less appropriate to what I was after, but were enough to set me on my way. I don’t remember feeling threatened or traumatised at any point. Even when I ran across a page about forced lactation in BDSM (by the kind of innocent Googling accident you describe, actually), all I got out of it was a sense of relief that any weird desires of mine would be considered normal by the world too. And I firmly believe my non-story to be the statistical norm.

There’s also a distinction to be made between ‘restricting access’ and the kind of scenario you mention of looking up words that have a double meaning. Personally, I’d be happy if most of the time people only found porn if they were looking for it (note ‘most’ not ‘only’ – some leakage/accident is inevitable, and even desirable. If people only ever encountered exactly what they were looking for it would be a dull, flat world). I want looking for and finding porn to be as effortless as it is any other kind of information or entertainment, even if the person looking is younger than our culture is usually comfortable with. I’d rather trust their judgment than some monolith that wants to make the decision for everyone, whether that’s Google or filtering software or whatever. What counts as porn and what kind of porn is appropriate when is way too knotty an issue for someone to decide for everyone else.

Having random popups of genitals shoved in your face when you’re looking at something unrelated is an entirely different matter which I am of course totally against. But thankfully that seems to be more or less a thing of the past (or maybe that’s just my Firefox + Noscript + adblock setup of joy).

My apologies for the essay, Bacchus!

A far greater threat to my development was the lack of a father (divorced parents), I would donate money to any organisation that is devoted to finding ways to keep two parents (of either gender, one’s usually a bit more butch anyway) in charge of each group of kids. A few playboys is no real threat to the vast majority of young kids, but the lack of a proper role models Is. Where’s the outcry against that? And having enough parenting usually leads (hopefully?) to having guidance about porn, sex and masturbation.

I’d read the FAQ prior to posting and wasn’t trying to go for incivility so much as enthusiastic argumentation.

My point, as such,was less about what is or isn’t “porn” – to each his or her own – but the circumstances under which the advice, “Surf the net for porn!” was given.

There’s also a tendency for people to pull parts of arguments out that suit their purposes (c.f. the Bible and nearly everybody who uses Scripture to justify their personal bias).

A dad telling his actual seven year old “surf for porn” strikes me as irresponsible. The same advice given to a theoretical seven year old is understandable. But then, my experience as a parent is that theoretical children are much more easily raised.

Sorry for any agita I’ve caused about sarcasm.

-

ps. also, I realized I was off by ten years with my computer example.

I should warn you, also, that your sarcastic tone is treading perilously close to the sort of incivility that’s not permitted in the ErosBlog comments. Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between derisive sarcasm (not welcome here) and enthusiastic argumentation (quite welcome!), so I admit the possibility of misunderstanding; but still, I’d much appreciate it if you’d have a look at the ErosBlog FAQ (see prominant sidebar link) before commenting further. Thanks!

I remember it well.

An archive search on Google of Newsgroups reveal that there were a total of 6,940 instances of the word “blowjob” across all newsgroups during the sixteen years from 1981 through 1997. My hunch is that there are 7,000+ instances of the word “blowjob” on single blogs for the year 2008.

Also, in the excerpt, Economist and Father-of-a-then-7-to-8 year old daughter Landsburg does not share whether he installed Net Nanny (released 1994) or similiar product on the computer his daughter was using to access the interwebs. Or if he supervised her use of a computer that may have cost more than the car. Oh, and internet access was, in some cases, charged by the minute. So the act of looking at porn had a direct economic consequence.

Though, maybe not. Maybe his thinking was that it was okay for Cayley to sit down at the computer by her seven year old self, do a search for some information about “teabags” for a school paper, and turn in a dot-matrix printed report about Sir Lipton and lemon parties. Because “free exchange of information” trumps everything, including, apparently sanity.

Sorry, I don’t agree. I don’t think a society which limits exposure to pornographic information – using a fairly strict limited definition of “pornographic” – to preteenaged children is wrong. (e.g. same sex couple naked and kissing, not porn. Same sex couple naked, one or both penetrated, displayed on black latex covered in oil, porn.)

What’s left out of Dr. Landsburg excerpt is the self-nullifying part of his argument. If pron is widely available, but only accessible through a several thousand dollar computer that requires a high degree of techical expertise to run in order to find information that requires a fair degree of research skill to locate, and generates its own costs to retrieve, then it’s not generally available.

Fast forward to nowadays – it’s different. I think we’d agree the porn is different. One effect of lowering the threshold to put porn “out there” is that the amount of bad, crappy porn has increased exponentially while the amount of “good porn” has remained consistent.

There’s probably a Freakonomics article on that, too.