22 Responses to “The Knights Of The Wee Bairns”

1. Just An Australian said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 6:46 am)

   I have an eleven year old daughter. What I would really like would be to have confidence that she can surf without having this stuff that she is not interested in thrust upon her. Once that problem is solved, we can worry about how much we try to stop her finding things she is interested in that someone thinks she shouldn’t. So, spam hurts. And since we can’t stop spam, the rest is somewhat academic. And a mighty big congrats to hotmail – they know how old she is, but keep showing her advertising that, while not technically illegal, is sure inappropriate to my way of thinking for an eleven year old.

2. S0meguy said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 7:56 am)

   I think you ought to have the right to control what your children are exposed to, and I believe this for the selfish reason that I want that right. Thus I disagree with your premise to the contrary. I, for instance, wouldn’t want my kids getting involved with a white supremacist online forum.

   However, I feel this can be achieved without limiting the freedoms of those around you. Personal filtering programs on the computer work well enough to prevent anything but a dedicated and purposeful search for . Monitoring your kid’s usage is at least as effective.

   I agree with your conclusion but disagree with your premises.

3. Peter Noris said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 9:16 am)

   Even though children have access to the Net at many places besides home, simply keeping net connected computers in a common area and forbidding children to close screens when parents walk by will stop most viewing parents don’t want, or at least provide a chance to discuss why they disapprove.
   Believe me, by the time they go to college, they will look at porn…or religious sites…or white supremacist sites…or whatever their parents have been all cranked up about.
   Didn’t you?

4. Passerby said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 10:29 am)

   Ah. Uncivil.

   Here goes, take two:

   Faustus completely misread my initial comment. As a result his post above is full of strawman arguments. All of which miss my point. By a mile.

   Since Bacchus referenced straw and “bales of straw” as examples of incivility – here’s the definition of a strawman argument:

   A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “set up a straw man,” one describes a position that superficially resembles an opponent’s actual view, yet is easier to refute. Then, one attributes that position to the opponent. For example, someone might deliberately overstate the opponent’s position. While a straw man argument may work as a rhetorical technique–and succeed in persuading people–it carries little or no real evidential weight, since the opponent’s actual argument has not been refuted. source: Wikipedia

   Which was my point.

   Given that Faustus included J.S. Mill’s “Harm Principle” in his argument, I didn’t think that pointing out that Faustus’s argument involved many, many strawmen was an overreach.

   And, oh, Faustus made his argument in an uncivil ad hominem manner. From a sneering height. Unless you consider his adjectives appropriate and use of exceedingly inapt analogies (WWII orphans turned out fine?) worthy of rebuttal.

   There. Civil enough, Bacchus?

   Lastly, Bacchus’s characterization of my comment being non-responsive to Faustus’s post is inapt. But it is for Bacchus to judge – which I’m okay with, not that it matters as this is his blog and, unlike Faustus, I can make the distinction between “censorship” and a host with certain arbitarily applied policies.

   Which isn’t being uncivil, just accurate.

   Now, as Dr. House has said, this internet porn isn’t going to go download itself.

   –

   note: The tone of my apparently uncivil “comment in moderation” was based in large measure on Faustus’s title, Knights of the Bairn. Tit for tat, as it were.

5. Bacchus said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 9:52 am)

   I think it only fair to point out that the “at least a little bit perturbed” commenter referenced at the beginning of this post — the one who already got admonished for pushing the limits of ErosBlog’s civility policy — has a response to this one languishing in moderation. Unfortunately, the comment does an even worse job than previously of meeting ErosBlog’s civility standards.

   Just to give you all a bit of the flavor, Passerby accuses Faustus of having “a demonstrably poor ability to read”. There is also much talk of straw men and bales of straw. Sorry, Passerby, but that’s not how we roll here. I’d be willing to cut you a little bit of slack given the implication here that Faustus was responding, in some sense, to your previous comments; but if you can’t write a comment that seems more engaged with the argument at hand than with sneering down from a height, you won’t be able to post in these comment threads.

6. Bacchus said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 12:03 pm)

   I passed the above through moderation because it seems to represent an honest, if ultimately failed, attempt to come closer to civility.

   Unfortunately, Passerby seems not to understand that in civil debate, it’s necessary to address the opponent’s arguments, rather than merely attempting to classify them by bald assertion as unworthy of response. One cannot fairly complain of straw men arguments if one isn’t willing to identify them specifically and explain how they misrepresent your position. Likewise, stating that someone has missed your point requires explanation; unsupported, it’s just an attack on your interlocutor.

   And then there’s this:

   “And, oh, Faustus made his argument in an uncivil ad hominem manner. From a sneering height. Unless you consider his adjectives appropriate and use of exceedingly inapt analogies (WWII orphans turned out fine?) worthy of rebuttal.

   There. Civil enough, Bacchus?”

   In a word, no. Intimating that an argument is “unworthy of rebuttal” is the very essence of sneering from a height, and you’re still doing it.

   Civility is not just formal politeness, and it’s not just a matter of tone. There’s a substantive component that is not reachable if one is trying to score “tit for tat” points rather than to discuss — and to seek truth regarding — the underlying points.

7. Mitsquana said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 3:18 pm)

   Children always find the porn, whether it’s in dad’s closet or on the internet. If you want your children protected, its up to you. As Peter Noris said above, don’t allow them unsupervised access to a computer. Simple. And how much of this stuff is really “thrust” upon children? I manage to surf for information on many different topics and rarely if ever encounter anything “inappropriate” i haven’t sought out, and if you do, no one makes you click on it. (especially if the fear of a parent looking over your shoulder is an issue). In any event, kids will always find porn, no matter what their parents do, and few of them grow up to be rapists and murderers, and for those that do, how much evidence is there that it was because of porn?

8. Passerby said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 4:59 pm)

   Okey-doke.

   Snark-free response:

   When I blogged up what I thought was a fairly harmless and charming little remark from Steve Landsburg earlier this week, at least one of ErosBlog’s readers got at least a little bit perturbed. How dare I, or perhaps more accurately how dare Professor Landsburg, suggest that it’s okay for a minor to go surfing freely around the Internet, wherein she might encounter not just sexually explicit images, but {shudder} evil nasty porn?

   I said nothing of the sort. Nor did I imply any “how dare you” rhetoric in my response.

   A fair enough question, and one worthy of another one of my Sunday sermons.

   This would be the strawman argument. Having mischaracterized my argument, Faustus will now deliver a sermon. I will leave it to you, gentle readers, to decide if a person “delivering a sermon” in response is somehow civil or non-sneering.

   Whenever someone gets up to defend the application of J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle – the view that the coercion of others can only be justified by self-defense and that we’re not allowed to force others to do or refrain from doing things for their own good – someone else will invariably hop up and ask, in plangent tones, “won’t anyone please think about the children?” (“Who will save the wee bairns?”)

   This argument presupposes that J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle is axiomatic. It’s not. Also, the characterization of my tone as “plangent”, while subject to the viccisitudes of interpretation, a bit sneering, in my opinion.

   What they mean by this is that if we allow adults full liberty to enjoy certain things like erotic materials, then Poor Innocent Children will also get exposed to them, and that this will be some sort of Very Bad Thing. So maybe we need to restrict the liberty of adults, at least to the extent of building high walls (real or virtual) around the Very Bad (if Poor Innocent Children will see it) Thing.

   Again, not part of my “plangent” argument. Given that Faustus is now Randomly Capitalizing Adjectives and Nouns, I think the “plangent” tone can be safely ascribed to him. Unless Faustus chooses to invoke the defense of “I was being ironic.” In which case he is sneering.

   Hmm. Sounds like the putative well-being of children provides a very handy pretext for action by those who are not so much concerned to protect the well-being of children, as to extinguish the liberty of adults. And I don’t doubt that it is used exactly as such a pretext, much of the time. But let’s grant that those who would defend children – the Knights of the Wee Bairns, shall we call them? – are, in this instance, acting in good faith. Is there a harm here that merits our attention? Is Professor Landsburg’s daughter in some terrible danger from the Internet?

   Okay, there are three arguments that Faustus puts forth after the opportunistic, and sneering, antecedent ascribing motive not in evidence.

   The motive that’s not in evidence is a desire by the “Knights of the Wee Bairns” to proscribe adult behavior

   The three arguments that are answered, but not posited are these:

   1. Are the “Knights of the Wee Bairns” acting in good faith
   2. Is there harm that merits our attention
   3. Is Professor Landsburg daughter in some terrible danger from the internet.

   The Knights of the Wee Bairns, at the very least, want paywalls and adult filtering around “bad” content; some of the more maximalist among them want this content to disappear entirely, of course, and not just from the Internet.

   M’okay. Sure. Not part of my argument – the one that caused Faustus to his self-described this sermon – but he’s on a roll.

   People who fret about the danger that Internet porn supposedly represents to children most likely fear that free access to it will endanger their own ability to transmit their values and worldview to their children. This possibility is the “harm” that they fear. Perhaps their fears aren’t entirely unfounded. Maybe something children see on the Internet will affect their values or worldview in ways their parents won’t like. Too bad. In a free society, children are not robots to be programmed by their parents. You’re not entitled to demand that anyone else build a wall around anything just because of the worldview you want to transmit to your children.

   The first half of this paragraph relies on Faustus’s ability to intuit motive to people accurately. A leap I’m not prepared to make less for reasons of civility but for reasons that his argumentation so far is flawed.

   Also, “supposedly represents” and “likely fear” are too generalized to address specifically. Should Faustus deign to sharpen his focus and concern, I can address it. In the meantime, I’ll move on.

   I’ll sharpen this claim with an example, pointed right at myself. I am a religious nonbeliever. I am robust in my non-belief, and apologize for it to no one. It would be grounds for substantial disappointment, no, actually it would be grounds for considerable soul-searching and condign self-reproach, if either of my own daughters were to end up as some sort of evangelical Christian, because for my money that means they ended up believing something that is almost certainly false and probably pernicious as well. But I do not, not for one minute, think that this means that someone who runs a website devoted to Christian apologetics should be required to put up an age-determining wall, or require a valid credit card before visiting his site, or put some sort of objectionable content flag in his HTML code so that Atheist Net Nanny can filter out his content, with its explicit promotion of a worldview and values I’d rather my own children not end up subscribing to.

   I’ll embrace the paradoxical nature of the self-described religious non-believer, the evangelical atheist, that is Faustus. Which proves nothing as Faustus just made Every. Damn. Point. I made in my comment about the “free to be you and me” nature of the internet.

   What I pointed out was that this is a parent-side equation, not a government-side one.

   If we must censor content based on its potential to change some child’s values or worldview to something her parents won’t like, then there will be precious little liberty for anyone.

   This argument, having not been made by others, is the creation of Faustus.

   “Oh, but that’s not what we mean,” say the Knights of the Wee Bairns. “We’re only against porn, which is bad. We don’t mean to stifle vigorous debate in a free society. We don’t want to extinguish the liberty of adults. We think that children will be harmed if they see certain images or read certain stories. We insist only that there be some walls across the Internet, so the kids can’t get access to this sort of material.”

   Again, not so much my argument.

   I would begin by noting that there really is no such thing a harmless wall across the Internet. The wall will never be truly voluntary. It will invariably be enforced by legal and social sanctions, which means that some content will disappear, simply because it isn’t worth the trouble or the risk of the provider to deal with the compliance burden. Other content, which should be available to all, will end up behind such a wall. To site [sic] just one prominent example, it’s been clear for years that Net Nanny and the censors keep material having to do with sexual health away from the teenagers who could really benefit from it.

   There are two issues – the legal sanctions and the social ones.

   I’ll deal with the social ones first – tough darts. Social mores evolve and they are part and parcel of the human experience. While Faustus may be comfortable substituting his judgment for that of the actual parents and – judging from the paragraph above, he is – I think as a social issue parents can be forgiven for raising their own children as best they see fit. Given that the actual parent deals with the consequences.

   If we are discussing the theoretical child or, more precisely, “the children”, then Faustus’s point is moot.

   As for the legal issues, Faustus is not making a distinction between “censorship” by the government versus accurate categorization of material by a service.

   So there’s a real cost to building walls across the Internet. Is there a corresponding benefit, in the form of harms avoided to minors who happen to view porn?

   No.

   I disagree with the argument regarding the “real cost” – in the social sense – to building walls across the internett.

   I’ll also point out that Faustus’s theoretical child is one who “happens to view porn.” The clear implication is that this is an “oopsie, porn” occurence and not a specific action or series of actions by the child.

   There are many reasons why I think there is a strong prima facie case why there is no such benefit, no avoided harm to minors. Among the two strongest are the relative resilience of minors and the fact that things on the Internet don’t really change the incentives associated with real-world behavior.

   The two strongest proofs of Faustus’s argument are 1) that minors are resilent and 2) “things” on the internet, porn, whatever – don’t really change incentives associated with real-world behavior.

   First, sitting in front of a computer looking for teh porn *is* a real-world behavior. Can we agree on that? Time spent by minors in the pursuit of porn, in its many splendored forms, is time that could have been spent in other real-world activities. To use Faustus’s language, that’s an opportunity cost to the minor.

   Secondly, resilient? Really? Hmmmm, I hadn’t considered it a good child-raising strategy to test my kid’s – or any kid’s – resilience. It seems kind-of dicey.

   Does viewing stuff – even nasty stuff – make children into nasty adults? Where is the evidence? Let’s look at some history. About two generations ago there was, you might recall, a huge conflict called the Second World War. Children living in the United States experienced this conflict largely as a series of deprivations. But tens of millions of children living the vast zones between the North Sea and the Volga, between Hokkaido and Java, experienced the war as terror – bombings and shellings and occupations and persecutions. Nothing anywhere on the Internet is as obscene as what happens in the real world when a war sweeps through. And what became of this generation of children? Some were psychically scarred for life, sadly. But most of those tens of millions grew up in the postwar world to have pretty normal lives, no more prone to criminality or dysfunction than human beings generally. Children can be, and are, pretty resilient. And keep in mind that Internet surfing, unlike having your country bombed or invaded, is voluntary. Anyone, children included, who encounters a distressing image can always just surf away.

   Okay, this paragraph is chock-a-block with naked assertions. The problem with the Second World War analogy, and the children and their normalcy, has a staggering number of problems, because on its face it’s a ludicris proposition.

   For starters, the children in the Soviet Union grew up in a Stalinist nation. So questions about criminality, normalcy, and such I’ll leave to Faustus to decide.

   Secondly, what effect there is of “normalcy” can direclty be attributed to the parenting techniques and societal mores of the late 40s and through the 1950s.

   Faustus just invalidated his entire point.

   Oops.

   Meanwhile, the real world continues to impose its set of costs and benefits, and these will be more powerful shapers of human behavior than what children or teenagers see on the internet. Out in meatspace, aggressive sexual conduct toward non-consenting others can lose you your job, ruin your reputation, and even land you in jail. Poorly-timed pregnancies can derail your life. HIV infection can kill you. None of these hard facts change, no matter what you’ve seen on the Internet, and people, including underage people, know this. Costs are real. People’s behavior is highly sensitive to cost. Homo economicus might be a crude approximation of actual human beings, but he’s a hell of a lot better than the “monkey see, monkey do” psychology that seemingly can be attributed to many fear mongers about porn.

   Again, the “fear mongers” is a creation of Faustus’s not me. Also, paradoxically, Faustus seems to have a rather parochial, almost quaint, view of what constitutes Internet Porn. Sort of like pointing out that in the 1950s a Dad’s erotic playing cards and Super-8 reels are No.Big.Deal.

   On that we agree. But I would counter-argue that the act of finding Dad’s stash of porn, of cruising the book stands looking for Teh Porn, out in meat-space had value.

   “But you still might be wrong!” cry the Knights of the Wee Bairns.

   Sure. Anything might be wrong. But if the mere theoretical possibility of harm is enough to forbid someone from doing something, then there really will be no liberty for anyone. That much should be too obvious even to require exposition.

   Agreed, which is why I didn’t exposit on that point.

   All the same, I have no desire to be a dogmatist or an armchair theorist. I’ll respect anyone who civilly disagrees with me. And I’ll go one better than that. I’ll even agree to change my mind, provided that someone can honestly meet the following challenge:

   Civility is in the eye of the beholder. Umbrage taken isn’t necessarily umbrage given.

   Begin by defining a Bad Life Outcome as something that is uncontroversially bad to happen to someone. I mean bad in a thin sense. It has to be an outcome that pretty much everyone would agree would be bad. In defining bad you don’t get to cheat and load into the concept of “bad” something distinctive about your own worldview. I know that if you’re a die-hard Democrat you might think turning into a Republican or if you’re a Christian you might think becoming an atheist is a bad life outcome, but these don’t count: these outcomes are only bad relative to your specific worldview. Spending your life in prison, or dying of some terrible disease at 25, are Bad Life Outcomes as defined here.

   Dying cold and alone.
   How’s that for a Bad Life Outcome?

   Now suppose further a hypothetical experiment.

   These goal posts, they move.

   Take 200,000 nine year-olds. Assign 100,000 of them at random to a Control Group and 100,000 to a Test Group. The Control Group has to spend their time on the Internet until age 18 with Net Nanny filtering out most (surely not all) of the bad old porn on the Internet (along with quite a lot of other stuff, probably). The Test Group gets uncensored access to the Internet until the age 18.

   If you can tell me what the number of Bad Life Outcomes will be in the Control Group and the Test Group, and give me a convincing explanation as to why a skeptical and competent social scientist – someone like, oh, Steve Landsburg, say – should credit your numbers;

   My hunch, which I am trying to verify, is that competent social scientist Steve Landsburg would have his child in the first group.

   oh, and furthermore, if the rate of Bad Life Outcomes in the Test Group really is materially larger than in the Control Group, then I will cheerfully change my mind.

   This would, hopefully, take about 60-80 years to figure out – given that we’re dealing with nine year olds.

   If I had to guess – and, frankly, that’s all you’re doing as well – the group of nine year olds that didn’t have unlimited access to free porn on teh internets will have developed other meat-space interests – soccer, basketball, chess – during time that the 100,000 kids with unlimited, unsupervised access to porn spend porn, in all its many splendored glory.

   But, hey, my point as-argued, is that internet advice from 1997 was dated -that the technology was much more expensive, and that many of competent social scientist Steve Landsburg’s arguments about porn and kids, when updated to reflect 2009 issues, don’t apply. (c.f. sexting)

   Landing you and your friends in jail as a 12yo for sending naked pictures of yourself … Bad Life Outcome.

   Respectfully yours, &c

   .

   ps. This has gone well beyond the point of diminishing returns.

   pps. Bacchus, I perfectly understand if you choose not to post this comment/response. I think you’ve mischaracterizing my responses, but I’ve been online long enough to recognize that good blogs moderate on the side of caution. That said, if you find this response inappropriate, please forward it to Faustus.

   If need be, I would continue any further discussion about this elsewhere as time (and interest) allow. Otherwise, thanks for your blogging efforts.

9. S said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 5:58 pm)

   Faustus, you presumably already read my response to your previous post, but here I go again.

   Okay, so firstly: I absolutely do not try to claim pornography as a source of only good things in the world. I think porn can be problematic, unethical, and yes, even have negative effects on the viewer.

   Of course, this depends on the person and it depends on the porn and on other such (genuinely!) wonderful individual details. I certainly don’t think seeing porn automatically turns people ‘nasty’ and causes them to do things otherwise against their moral compass. But equally I don’t all porn is entirely awesome and made of fluffy bunnies ejaculating rainbows.

   I personally see some of the problems that stereotypical ‘porn’ causes in the online sex and relationship help forums that I run that are frequented mostly by teenagers, and sometimes it damn near breaks my heart. And yet? I still think people should have access to it. Yes, even the stuff I disapprove of that is bland and plastic and casually misogynist. Because it’s not the porn that’s the problem, it’s the entire culture in which the misconceptions demonstrated so admirably clearly in porn are allowed to flourish and can pass under the radar of the viewer. It’s not like porn is the only place they exist. It’s not that special. They’re just more obvious there.

   Sometimes I run across porn that makes me feel sick inside. It makes me want to protect the insecure and really surprisingly impressionable teenagers I talk to from seeing it and getting miserable. (Which they do). But that is simply not a workable solution. Instead I want people to be able to look at porn and understand it in context, and have the self esteem and cultural awareness to not get too downed by it but to get angry/laugh about it/ignore the troublesome aspects and enjoy the rest/just click elsewhere as appropriate. Whatever works, you know?

   And I absolutely want them to be able to find stuff that turns them on and makes them feel good about themselves and their bodies and their turn ons and heck maybe even makes them think, if they’re into that.

   Sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I do think reality is a little bit more nuanced than ‘no porn could possibly ever be harmful in any way’. I get that it’s a reaction to ‘porn is omg harmful and must be locked away’, but in my opinion it’s unreasonable to believe that porn has absolutely no effect on people’s behaviours. Sure the facts of HIV and pregnancy don’t change, but people’s views around them, risk perceptions, expectations of behaviour and indeed social sanctions are entirely variable. And I find it difficult to believe that porn has no effect on them. Again, I also believe that the effect porn has cannot be untangled from the rest of our culture and should not be separated out as a convenient scapegoat. But it’s no more innocent than anything else.

   In fact it would be quite insulting to porn to insist that it can never change the way we see the world or have any effect on us whatsoever. Otherwise, why this blog to celebrate it?

10. Bacchus said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 5:14 pm)

    Naw, that was pretty good. I don’t agree with much of it, but it’s not my debate, so not my problem.

    I still think you’re personalizing the debate a bit more than is necessary or desirable, but it’s clear you took the entire post as a direct response to your comment, so that’s perhaps understandable. I saw the post as more broadly aimed, with your post perhaps serving as a trigger; but it didn’t strike me that all of viewpoints Faustus was criticizing were being attributed to you. But I do understand it might have looked different from your corner.

    Thanks for coming back and engaging on substance, I do appreciate it.

11. Cand86 said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 5:27 pm)

    I guess I’ll weigh in here with my own personal anecdote from my experiences with porn as a child/teen.

    I was just hitting junior high when the Internet came to our household. I can even remember it vividly, on Thanksgiving night, as my dad set up the connection, showed me how to dial on, and I stumbled on the first thing on the homepage, a Cathy comic. I was astounded and delighted, and started searching out my various interests, most notably my favorite band of the moment, No Doubt and its lead singer Gwen Stefani. I was collecting and printing pictures when I found a topless of picture of Miss Stefani (real or photoshopped besides the point) and clicked on it.

    After that, my memory is rather blurry, but I know that I was inundated by porn, simultaneously terrified and thrilled by it. I don’t think the content frightened me half as much as the way the sites gave it to me: in lots and lots of pop-up ads. The adult sector of the Internet has gotten better since then, I think, or maybe browsers have gotten smarter and I’ve become more savvy in my searching. But at that point in time, I was a victim to every shady technique out there- looping and mousetrapping being the worst. Being able to “surf away” simply wasn’t an option, and I distinctly remember the panic as I hit the “X” buttons up in the corner, or the “Back” button to no avail, and ads spiraled and filled the computer. I know more than once I would hear someone coming into the house, and, heart thudding, would shut down the computer, hoping to God that the machine would be off by the time the door opened. I had no control over the images, and for a kid, that’s pretty scary.

    Later, my dad would find out about it, and, looking back in retrospect, handle it all wrong. He wasn’t mean, actually- he calmly told me that he knew I had been “looking at nasty stuff online”, and told me not to, and asked me why I was (my response was to cry and repeat over and over again “I don’t know.”). He followed it up with “You don’t want me to tell mom, do you?”. I was a changed girl after the confrontation, probably a shell of myself in some ways. I probably didn’t make eye contact with my father for years after that. I became stiff with fear whenever sex was mentioned in our presence, especially in terms of the Internet. I was worried to death that he would tell my mother. It didn’t help that he would occasionally make smirky references to it in her presence, that would send me into devastating bouts of fear and desperate attempts to change the subject.

    Some time afterwards, I would be trying to look something up on my dad’s office computer, when porn would come flooding onto the screen. It was probably simply the result of some virus, but at the time, I was horrified, as I desperately tried to shut it down, fearing somebody would catch me and blame me for it. I struggled with the hypocrisy. I was at a loss.

    It was some time mid-high school that I discovered Nancy Friday’s two incredible books on female fantasies in the back of my mom’s closet (and some 80’s Penthouse forums on my dad’s shelves), and it made all the difference in the world. It was the perfect combination to soothe my wearied soul, in fact. Nancy Friday analyzed fantasies in a non-judgmental way, and her overriding message was one that sex was normal and healthy. I spent countless hours soaking in the bathtub, reading and rereading the books and Penthouses, perusing them at my leisure and growing more confident in myself and my sexuality. Of course, a big part of that was the sudden protection it gave me- I was well-prepared to use it as a defense if I was ever called on my porn-viewing (“Oh yeah? What’s back in your closet, huh?”). But it was also the content itself that made me the person I am today. If not for Nancy Friday, actually, I think I’d be completely different- guilty, ashamed, sex-negative, both scared of but obsessed with sex in an unhealthy manner.

    I tell this story mostly because I think it illustrates the fact that what we need far more than Internet filters is education and discussion. If both of my parents had sat me down together and had a healthy talk with me about how they knew it wasn’t my fault, but I shouldn’t do this anymore, why they thought it might not be good for me and they didn’t want me doing it, if they had communicated how natural and special sex is, and if they had then shown me how to avoid such things on the Internet, I think a lot of my pain and suffering could have been avoided. Instead, I was left bewildered. “Bad stuff” appeared on the Internet, unbidden, as though I conjured it up myself through my perversion. I was made to feel dirty and scared of the repercussions. When you’re a teen already struggling with sexual desire and masturbation and everything else, adding Internet porn in was probably the worst thing that could ever have happened to me, in a way that the self-contained porn in, say, a Playboy, would have been a lot easier an introduction to all things adult.

    I don’t condone censorship, and I completely agree with “there really is no such thing a harmless wall across the Internet”. I think filters do a poor job, keeping out the information we most need when we’re curious about sex. So I agree- I am against most, if not all, attempts to regulate sex on the Internet. But at the same time, I’m very sympathetic to the voices of concerned parents, too. They may be misguided in thinking the answer lies in censorship, but I don’t think their fears of how to deal with sex on the Internet is alarmist or extreme.

    Of course, things have changed a lot since when I was young. I was a complete novice to the Internet, whereas today’s kids are raised up on it, familiar with everything it has to offer. And today’s media is more sexual than ever . . . I’d wager to say that kids today are a lot more sexually aware and knowledgeable than I was at the same age. Maybe they can handle it. All I know is that the Internet is like a freeway- safe and even fun when you’re an experienced driver, but scary, confusing, and possibly dangerous when you’re just getting started. And when there’s nobody in the passenger’s seat to help you along, it gets even worse.

    That’s my two cents.

12. Petr Grimm said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 5:57 pm)

    I believe I personally have been harmed by content on the internet. By that I mean I have viewed images which I found disturbing, that upset me in an ongoing way, since once seen, an image can not easily be deleted from the mind. Months later I still occasionally remember and suffer (abeit mildly) for it.

    What were these terrible images? Naked women sucking big cocks, or some man buggering another? Hell no – it was a series of pictures someone collected of the destruction of his own hand and arm due to a snakebite and the various stages of a prolonged recovery through multiple surgeries up to an eventual partial reconstruction.

    I would not want my children to have seen that.

    So what to do? One could become a Knight of the Bairns and insist all searches for snakebite redirect to Sesamee Street. One could, I am sure get some software that would only allow the kids to access Erosblog (where content considered disturbing or beyond the norms of the site is usually offered with a warning in the text of what to expect behind the link)

    Of the two approaches, the latter has merit because of those warnings – Hey! you want to go see severely stretched assholes, the link is there but one does not get dropped directly into the orffice so to speak.

    And that’s what I believe is needed – a way to get a little more info before the cowpie meets the face – Not walls to stop access but speed bumps to warn one is entering the cowpie flinging arena.

    Most porn sites have these already and are way ahead of the curve. But what I would like to see is a line of text associated with a web page that would show in search engines. This would be written by the creator of the web page, and would have a dual function, to attract appropriate traffic, and deter those not interested in the specific content of the page. Search engines do this now in part by pulling lines of text from the page which contain the search terms, but this is often less than clear what the actual web page is about.

    Re kids and the Net – I believe it is 1) totally impossible to shield them from anything on the Net they CHOOSE to want to find and view. 2) attempts to ban, censor or hide anything from a kid is open invitation to seek it out, while if it is there and available, little they seek out will actually harm them, and most of it does actual good, and 3) they are even lazier than adults and don’t waste time with what does not interest them if it is easy to avoid.

13. S said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 6:09 pm)

    Cand86 – thank you for your really excellent comment. I hope the very valid and interesting points you made don’t get lost in the shuffle. Faustus, for what it’s worth I for one would find your engaging with the kind of points she (and I) made to be much more interesting than a traditional e-battle.

    PS Passerby I think it’s best to accept that Faustus’ post was provoked by your comment but fundamentally about a whole larger debate rather than exactly what you said.

14. Tulsa said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 10:27 pm)

    I really enjoyed reading this, mostly because it actually got me to stop and think more than most of the things that I run across on a daily basis.

    Here’s the thing. I’m not a parent, I probably won’t be for another 5-15 years. Thinking about it now, I don’t want them to have free for all access to the net, but until I read this, I couldn’t exactly describe why, especially because I grew up having that access. As Faustus says, there isn’t really anything on the net that I believe will cause them direct serious harm (death, disease, federal pound-them-in-the-ass-prison) to children (although the recent “sexting” business makes me worry. I don’t think I’d want my kid charged for child porn for emailing naked pictures of themselves, something I did it as a teenager and which is becoming much more in vogue).

    But what I think most people are talking about when it comes to this debate aren’t the extremes, it’s the degrees of harm that are the big issue.

    Obviously, all kids are hurt at points growing up, and a lot of the time, the growing that they do is directly proportionate to how they’re hurt. Humans tend to learn pretty well from pain, but I think most parents are still hurt when their children are, and they want to try and avoid this. They’ll see things that maybe they, as individuals, aren’t ready for. Especially at this point in time, and even when I was a little girl lots of playground equipment was banned because we might hurt ourselves using it. There was a perfectly good slide, we couldn’t use it because of potential injury, so we ran and played around it instead of on it at recess. I think this is excessive, but it’s a “road to hell paved with good intentions thing,” and it’s more and more common. Which is part of the reason why I think it should stop with the internet. There shouldn’t be public blocks on content when it comes to porn, but parents need to monitor their children.

    I’m part of the first generation who really grew up with computers and the internet. By the fourth grade (I’m 21 now) only 2 kids in my class didn’t have a computer with internet access in their home. Teachers were used to hearing “but why do we have to take spelling tests when we have spell check?” and in college I never used a physical book in research. As a child, I knew more about our computer than my parents, could hack any password to any netnanny type of thing they came up with, would call the phone company and act as my parents if they tried to cancel the internet. Controlling kids and the internet is nearly impossible, yet I guess I feel like parents should still try. And I believe that it’s the parents responsibility to teach them about sex, to teach them about things like porn before they experience it. I’d much rather my kid read scarleteen before they run into hardcore porn. I think that it’s a parental responsibility than a societal one, AKA, trying to monitor a child’s individual internet access as much as they can.

    Life, for me and many of my peers, is experienced virtually rather than in reality, which is changing things, and having good and bad affects both ways. I think it’s hard for parents who didn’t grow up like this to understand that sex, like everything else, is going to be experienced like this, for better and worse. I actually agree with the

    I learned about porn and sex from the internet, in a way not to different from the above commenter, by looking up my favorite bands. I learned about BDSM. I found myself dirty old men to cyber with online while experimenting with oral sex with my boyfriend at 13 because I thought that it would make me more valuable to him. Not true, but I believed it, firmly, mostly because of what I was learning online. Men are supposed to love sex, and I made the mistake of believing that he would love me because I could give him that.

    The thing is that the virtual world and the real world inevitably converge. One thing led to another, to another, to the point that at 16, I had created a fake profile on adult friend finder and met a man three times my age purposely for the reason of losing my virginity. He had a handgun in the center console of his car. Although that afternoon went fine, a year later, at 17, he raped and tried to kill me. I genuinely believed, because of the things that I saw on the internet and because of how I interpreted it, that I was actually was nothing more than a cum receptacle for men. My grades, my volunteer work, my extracurricular activities? They all paled in comparison to my cunt in what I had to offer the world. The most important purpose in life was for me to be attractive to the opposite sex. I believe that because of the things I encountered on the internet at the age that I did, I was more vulnerable to societal messages within it, than if I had come across them when I was older. Sure, it’s just a theory. Maybe everything would have been the same if I had started looking at porn tomorrow instead of nine years ago. Maybe the internet only played a small role, because all things considered, I’m happy, healthy, successful for my age and I’m finally finding a sex life that is satisfying.

    But it doesn’t change the fact that I dread having a daughter who ever, ever has to experience those feelings.

    I like porn. I think porn does great things, but it does have a bad side to it. And while kids not may end up in jail at 25 because of porn, their relationships, their view of sex is going to be affected. I think it’s easier for people to want to control the source, because you can’t control how your child will actually react to it when they see it. So I see why some parents believe “why risk that?” My friends and I have tried to be better mentors, to try and keep younger sisters from being raped, from saying yes from peer pressure when they want to say no… but it really isn’t working that well. According to my best friends little sister, at 13, more than half of the kids in her class are having some kind of sex. When we were in the exact same middle school, it was more like 25%. Those numbers are approximations, obviously. I don’t fulfill Faustus’ request to overturn the cost/benefit ratio that he’s described. I’m okay with that. I can’t say that I’m really trying to change his mind, I believe that there shouldn’t be walls across the internet. But that doesn’t change the fact that I believe that there should be concern about children and how the internet, and especially internet porn, affects children.

    When I read this article (http://nymag.co...9437/) for the first time, I was saddened by how much I agree with it, how true it is of my peers. I hope that I can even have a chance at raising kids who are turned on by the opposite sex, pores and all, who have sex when it’s a good decision for them. I hope that after awkward fumbling, they feel a little bit of mystery, that they can feel intimacy and happiness related to sex. I want them to learn about sex at appropriate age levels. I don’t believe that children always know what is good for them, and I think parents are there to help guide that process. Sometimes they are overzealous, yes. And freedom of information shouldn’t suffer, first and foremost. But neither should our kids.

15. james said (on February 23rd, 2009 at 10:30 pm)

    I can’t comment too much from the child’s point of view, as I’m of the generation of where, as an example, the parent would say “I have this software to prevent you from seeing everything you shouldn’t see — Can you install it for me?” What I can comment on is from a parent’s perspective. My ex wife caught our stepson one day in his room, on his computer looking at some explicit pictures that he had accessed through the home network. He was 13 at the time.

    This, at the time, was not a concern, or as great a concern as was the actual pictures he happened to be looking through. It seemed he had stumbled across a few photos that had been taken for one of those public, voyeuristic websites. Needless to say, I was quickly informed to go “talk” to him.

    So, fatherly duty called, and I went in and talked to him concerning those photos. I explained as best I could about why those photos should not be looked, in that way, and even offered to give him access to other photos that would be more, not to say appropriate, but moralistically (and I hate that word) sound. I actually embarrassed him, because I actually offered other pictures that he didn’t look at anymore again (at least he was careful not to get caught).

    His mother and I have since split, though he still keeps in touch. He is a junior in high school now, has a steady girlfriend, has excellent grades, and rarely gets into trouble, the one exception to this was when he had his cell taken away for sneaking back in the house after being with his girl. He has been honest with me, concerning his relationships, with his pursuits.

    Was I wrong in the way I handled it? Probably and probably not, depending on who you ask. Do I think that either the initial discovery, or the subsequent conversation did any harm? No. I think it was enough that it actually did some good. He could freely talk to me about something, without “sneaking it under the mattress”. I feel I opened up a level of trust, that is sometimes poorly lacking. Not because I “protected against” but because I “educated with”.

16. Faustus said (on February 24th, 2009 at 4:45 am)

    Many thanks to the commenters so far, many of who have clearly put a great deal of thoughtful work into their remarks. I learn a great deal from them even, indeed especially, when they disagree with me civilly.

    In Philosopher’s Heaven, John Stuart Mill smiles.

17. Adrian M. said (on February 25th, 2009 at 8:12 pm)

    Sorry for being a bit late to the party here…

    Like some of the other commenters here, I discovered hormones in the age of really easy digital pornography. I downloaded my first JPGs in early 1998 (guesstimating) and had a few hundred megabytes worth by 2000. Both of my parents worked and didn’t get back until 6 PM, so I had plenty of time to get all the afterschool porn I wanted.

    For a hormonal teenage boy, this is a lot of porn. I didn’t go looking every day, but Passerby‘s “same sex couple naked, one or both penetrated, displayed on black latex covered in oil” was small fries.[1] I remember reading a few bestiality stories, trying to figure out the attraction, and I accidentally wandered into a Dolcett archive once. I didn’t like those, but I certainly looked. I got Goatse’d and didn’t like that either. People are weird. Fantasy and reality are very different things. Kids can be much better about understanding that than adults would like to give them credit for.

    Like any other activity, I think porn is what you make of it. It has precious little inherent morality. Tulsa mixed fantasy and reality together, and it started affecting her sense of self-worth. I liked Anthony Brown’s posts on Alt.Sex.Stories and started writing my own, hoping that maybe one day someone would enjoy something I wrote as much as I enjoyed Wulf. Tulsa let cybersex become part of her reality. I just took it as writing practice. By the time she was seventeen, she’d lied her way into a tremendously bad situation. By the time I was seventeen, I was… well, surprisingly good at writing. Some people see those seductive black-and-white dungeon photos and get into BDSM; I got into photography. Popups took control of Cand86‘s computer and scared her away; I learned how to lock the computer down and take it back (it helps that I was and remain a technical kind of dork).

    In my case, at least, I think porn was a lot better for me than soccer or basketball might have been.

    Porn is like alcohol, guns, or credit cards. Their value is in what you make of them. And, like alcohol, guns, and credit, I think that it’s far better to teach people how to deal with them responsibly than simply to hide them away behind some forbidden mystique and expect that maturity later, without benefit of experience.

    [1] Incidentally, even at 14, I knew that “latex covered in oil” was bad juju. Give the kids some credit. You’ll ruin your latex. Use something water- or silicone- based.

18. Beard said (on February 27th, 2009 at 10:33 pm)

    When my son was in middle school, a decade or so ago, he came home and started displaying his abilities with profanity. I sat him down and said, “You attend a public middle school. I know perfectly well that you know all the words. I know the words too. You don’t have to prove to me that you know the words. That isn’t how we talk in our home. I can’t stop you from talking any way you want when you are with your friends, but that isn’t how we talk in our home.”

    I would use the same line when his friends would swear at our house. “It doesn’t matter what the rules are in your family. These are the rules in our house.”

    When it came to porn, it was clear that he was surfing, and we had a talk about the differences between fantasy and reality, and not believing everything he read. But the most important part was a line I had seen somewhere: “Be very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.” We discussed the fact that there are some very disturbing images on the Internet, and even discussed a few that had grossed each of us out, and that we would like to scrub from our minds.

    He has now grown into a fine young man. He speaks very well and courteously around our house, though I know his language gets saltier in other contexts. He has a very nice and attractive girlfriend, and I expect a good and healthy sex life.

    There are bad and scary things on the Internet. But there are bad and scary things in the world. To protect kids from the bad and scary things, it is not enough for the parents to keep them away. The parents have to teach the kids to protect themselves from the bad and scary stuff. Which requires a certain amount of exposure to it, with good parental judgment and good parental supervision, so they can learn to give themselves the protection they need.

19. K said (on February 28th, 2009 at 9:24 pm)

    So, here’s a really funny juxtaposition. I read this post, scrolled down, and what’s looking me in the face? A clip from “Catholic School Girls in Trouble”, which I first saw with my dad when I was maybe 14. Nothing funny… we had just rented the movie because it sounded funny in a Monty Python kind of way, and hey! suddenly boobies! I remember laughing kind of nervously and at the same time feeling very curious. In retrospect, the thing that strikes me the most about the whole is: Who the heck lets their young children watch Monty Python and its like?! We had a family tradition of watching “Life of Brian” at Easter, which was the first place I ever saw a fully nude man… at the age of 5.

    I wasn’t overly exposed to sex and/or porn as a child, but it wasn’t a taboo topic, either, and my dad especially has a racy sense of humor that didn’t magically disappear when he had kids. I did get in trouble once when my mother caught me reading NC-17 slash fanfiction at 16 (and it really irked me that I could legally have sex at 16 but I couldn’t read about it!), but even then her words were “You can read as much of that crap as you want when you’re 18, but not under my roof and as a minor!” It didn’t stop me, just made me a lot more careful. And, as Adrian above got into photography because of porn, my fiction writing really improved by reading and writing slash.

    Now? Well, I’m not in jail, I don’t have any STDs, I’m about to graduate college with a high GPA, and I know how to buy and use condoms and birth control. I’m a blatantly bi, kinky, sex positive pervert, which is probably on the “Bad” side of things for conservatives, but eh *shrug*. I am also able to be somewhat out to my parents about my proclivities, which I see as a real privilege when so many are shamed for doing what I do. I really think that porn should be treated like sex, in that the more knowledge the better. If you don’t like the misogynistic roles in porn and don’t want your kids being impacted by that, TALK TO THEM ABOUT SEX. If you catch your child looking at porn you don’t approve of, use that to start a discussion. “You know, a lot of movies like that portray women in roles that aren’t very realistic in real life. What do you think about that?” It’ll pave the way for them to approach sex realistically, but without stigma, as adults. /soapbox

20. Earl said (on April 30th, 2009 at 9:12 am)

    I don’t have kids, but several good friends of mine do. They aint shielded from the world, like I was, but they’re all happy, polite, well-adjusted kids.

    This argument sounds like the “sportsmen are role models” debate, wherein parents decry a footballer in rehab for ruining their attempt to raise a responsible child. Even my conservative Catholic dad says “If they think they have to rely on a footballer to present a good example, they’re not doing their job properly.”

21. GWNDad said (on October 20th, 2009 at 3:42 pm)

    Having just stumbled on this blog, which is excellent by the way, and working my way through the archives, I came across this rather long, but to my mind valuable discussion. This would be my first ever response to a blog thread, so that should give you an idea of how much I valued this discussion. (self editorial: If Bacchus chooses to moderate this out, so be it as reading it again before submission, it does tend to ramble) I agree with a number of people that both Faustus and Passerby perhaps became too involved in the perceived ‘personal-ness’ of the discussion (if that makes sense) – but can understand that the discussion is one that can polarize opinion. All that intro to get to my Canadian 2 cents worth.

    As one of them ‘sent to a Catholic school’ lads – although given that it was Jesuits and therefore perhaps not the most dogmatic of educations, I can relate to the whole ‘S**t happens, and I should feel guilty about it” school of thought around Catholic doctrine and sex education. However, my wife and I (also a good Catholic girl) have a very healthy and occassionally non-vanilla sex life (so I guess that would make her a very good Catholic girl) and now have 2 wonderful kids (one of each).

    All that intro to say that I agree with Earl, Beard, Adrian, James, et al. As a parent, I want something that will at least provide some warning of objectionable material (porn, violence or otherwise – after 2 overseas deployments with both the UN and Task Force Afghanistan, I have seen enough to know that there are worse things than what can occur between consenting adults) but understand that, as a parent, I have to take responsibility for how my kids grow up. I know that there is little I can do to stop their exposure to objectionable content and my goal will be to put it in an appropriate context and have a frank discussion with them about it. And at the end of the day, that is what it is about – personal responsibility as a parent, doing the best you can and hoping it turns out well.

    P.S. Since I have noted an appreciation for history amongst the regulars on this blog, I would offer the following interesting tidbit: Jesuit doctrine and educational practices were considered so dangerous that Thomas Jefferson wanted to make being a Jesuit a capital crime.

22. donny said (on December 6th, 2010 at 8:21 am)

    ‘Knights of the Wee Bairns’? Sounds Scottish, probably found in the Fife region.

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