The consensus is don’t ask, don’t tell. It’s the only media consumption (among movies, tv, books, sports, videos, music, games etc.) that’s not openly discussed around the water cooler or in polite society. A disservice, in my opinion.
It appears to be harmful to children because it takes time away from other activities and creates false impressions of sex/relationships. Especially if porn is their only reference for adult relationships. Children younger than 16 should be educated on media (including porn) but probably shouldn’t have free reign to explore porn content as it may consume their whole life.
There’s also an escalation effect where users will seek out increasingly hardcore content and become so desensitized to pornographic content that they have no physical reaction to real world relations (I assume the 2019 pubmed article that was linked discusses this effect). How harmful it is, and how we know, are open questions which are hard to study because it’s a taboo subject and because it’s difficult to decouple porn from other screen based consumption. For example, we may have strong data with proper testing methods that definitively proves the harms of porn and then still wonder is it necessarily more harmful than YouTube or Netflix?
The consensus is don’t ask, don’t tell. It’s the only media consumption (among movies, tv, books, sports, videos, music, games etc.) that’s not openly discussed around the water cooler or in polite society. A disservice, in my opinion.
It appears to be harmful to children because it takes time away from other activities and creates false impressions of sex/relationships. Especially if porn is their only reference for adult relationships. Children younger than 16 should be educated on media (including porn) but probably shouldn’t have free reign to explore porn content as it may consume their whole life.
There’s also an escalation effect where users will seek out increasingly hardcore content and become so desensitized to pornographic content that they have no physical reaction to real world relations (I assume the 2019 pubmed article that was linked discusses this effect). How harmful it is, and how we know, are open questions which are hard to study because it’s a taboo subject and because it’s difficult to decouple porn from other screen based consumption. For example, we may have strong data with proper testing methods that definitively proves the harms of porn and then still wonder is it necessarily more harmful than YouTube or Netflix?