Harm Reduction: Not Just For Needle Exchanges Any More · 11:08am Dec 12th, 2016
Warning: this is a serious blogpost about stuff that could be called political, rather than my usual fap fuel fare. Content notice for discussions of rape and other things of that nature.
The first porn I ever saw was a picture of a woman fellating a dog. I was eleven years old, and two older friends from down the street took advantage of the lack of blocking software on my parents' computer to look at some really weird shit. I started looking at porn on my own the next day, and some kind of cyber-nanny ended up on the machine by the end of the week. It wasn't very good. I spent my initial porn-consuming years testing its limits, and though it probably blocked 90% of the smut I could look at... lets say there was an awful lot left in that 10% that it didn't.
Now, that wasn't my sexual awakening, that happened earlier, when I was maybe... seven? I got obsessed with dicks, sucking dicks, and submission. Spent all of math class daydreaming that I was a submissive abra owned by a sinister Alakazam. Nothing triggered it, I never got abused as a kid thank God, but yeah, it happened.
But still, I started watching porn when I was eleven, and by Jove it was some messed-up shit. I found weird, foreign sites that didn't get picked up by the net nanny. Lots of bestiality, lots of hentai, no amateur/'normal' porn except the shiny, plastic LA stuff. The first decent hentai comic I found was about an eighteen-year old student being coerced into sex by two of his teachers because he had a twelve-inch dick. The old usenet archives of porn stories also escaped the watchful eye of the software, which... I mean, there were a lot of stories on there about adults having sex with minors. The first of these stories I ever read was about a twenty-five year old stepmother being raped by her husband and his eighteen-year old son.
I jerked it a lot back then.
I really hated all the snooping around, and when they first put the web-blocker on (after a week of me looking at some of the less-weird stuff) I felt like something valuable had been taken away. I told my parents that it was my personal business and why shouldn't I be allowed to look at it, and being good, responsible parents, they replied that firstly it was totally fucking illegal to let a child look at smut willy-nilly, and second I was a kid, it wasn't age appropriate. That was the responsible, sensible thing to do, and I don't fault them for it.
Thing is tho, it totally didn't stop me looking at porn. Stopping me looking at porn would have required much more surveillance and monitoring, and ratcheting up that shit is genuinely bad for child development. Is it worth giving your kid an anxiety disorder and changing their mental image of you from 'responsible, loving person who can always be trusted' to 'my personal live-in secret policeman' just so they won't look at porn? I'm gonna say no, no it's not.
But... the porn I ended up looking at was exactly the kind of porn you don't want to form a kid's initial worldview of sex. You probably don't want a kid associating the initial rush of learning to jerk it with the rush of adrenaline from doing something taboo, while also looking at pictures of women guzzling horse jizz. And porn, even the legitmate, legal stuff, involves a lot of stuff that you probably don't want a wide-eyed, hormone-addled kid absorbing passively. Like 'look up women by ethnicity,' 'stand on her head while you fuck her,' 'spit works as lube for anal sex' 'women are hottest the day after they stop legally being children,' 'buttholes stretch like that' and other such wonders.
I don't think most of that stuff is bad so much (apart from the racist bullshit you see in porn, and calling trans women slurs all the time, and things of that nature), but like... it should be optional? Like if degradation, pissing, slapping, choke-fucking and all that are your kinks, then sure, you'll end up naturally gravitating towards them, but they probably shouldn't be literally the first thing a curious kid sees when they click onto xvideos or something.
In a lot of places, there's now reasonable, sensible sex ed for kids that acknowledges that by the time they start having the first 'social and safety considerations' sex ed lessons at thirteen, some will already be sexually active. We've stopped trying to supress that because it doesn't work and in a lot of cases it makes it much worse, not just in terms of safety and health, but also in terms of 'kids not knowing what constitutes a fucked-up sexual relationship to be in, because they've been told that all sexual relationships at their age are bad.'
Personally, I think kids should have access to porn. Shit, they already have access to porn, I just think they should also be given porn. Normal porn of normal people doing vanilla sex stuff, straight, gay, lesbian and trans, no emphasis on the weird kayfabe of porn, just... regular, standard fucking. Porn so they can get used to the idea of having easy access to erotica while all the hormones in their bodies go haywire, and then they can go and hunt for their own stuff when they're legally adults and can consume what they damn well please.
It's a serious proposal that won't be taken seriously, not for a long time. Partly for good reasons - there are groups that suggest things similar to this which usually are actually about 'make it harder to prosecute men for having sex with minors,' and, well, I write porn about fillies getting gangraped, which makes me kinda abhorrent in the eyes of normal people (and I can see where they're coming from). But it is a serious idea. If you think modern pornography can cause harms - and I do! not enough harm to justify banning it, but I still think it can - then you should get serious about harm reduction.
Hear, hear. That pretty much aligns with my view on the matter. It’s not images of people fucking that screw kids up; it’s telling kids that those images are horrible and looking at them is horrible (until they reach 18 years of age, then it’s magically not-horrible). Kids are natural masters at the Streisand Effect; what better way to guarantee that they’ll pursue something than to tell them that they shouldn’t?
At any rate, porn alone doesn’t teach anything morality-wise; it’s the adults who do. They are where the majority part of the blame should rest when their teachings result in kids with screwed up morals and views. If parents actually bother parenting, it doesn’t matter as much what a child is exposed to (within reason, of course), because the adults they trust can set them straight and teach them right.
’Course, I also agree with the notion that, all that said, a child’s first experience with porn probably shouldn’t be images, video or literature of women gulping down donkey piss, or a six-year-old getting raped by a pack of dogs, or herms*, and so on. Though, even then, the devil’s advocate in me would question – in part based on personal experience – how much damage that, in itself, would really inflict upon a child if that kid nonetheless has a good support structure around them (a happy and nurturing home life, friends, etc.).
*Kiddin’. Herms were actually my first exposure to furry smut, which later led me to MLP, so I really can’t talk.
I have to wonder if some of the fetishes I've ended up with stem from growing up in a household that was quite religious. My entire life I've been taught over and over again that sex is bad and wrong and evil, even that it's wrong to even consider looking at a CLOTHED female with any kind of desire. I discovered my sexuality a bit later than most because of this, but after getting confronted by my parents for looking at naked women having sex on the computer (and just know this was during the time of dial up internet and a shared computer) I moved on to other things. Shamed for what should have been a natural response to my growing body and hitting puberty I moved on to more unconventional things. My young mind basically said that I wasn't looking at naked PEOPLE having sex so it was ok. I don't think it's right to shame someone for having that curiosity, even if they might be too young to fully understand what sex is and how it works. I will say, though, that trying to stifle a natural urge like that can do more harm than having a healthy relationship with your children and not shaming them for things that come naturally.
Of course, it seems to be consensus that younger people shouldn't be exposed to the more extreme things that could be found, and I also agree with that.
I can relate with you on this shit really well my dude. Pretty much the same thing happened to me; my first ever fap was some hardcore furry porn on newgrounds. My family wasn't religious like yours, but they practically never let me talk about sex, private parts, or anything slightly inappropriate. Even talking about kissing was unnaceptable. They were also totally lacking in empathy and emotional connection, which adds to the "fuel in the fire" by letting you normalize morally depleted fetishes that people would normally get squicked by. I'm assuming that along with your family's religious background and authoritative style, they didn't give you too many hugs or kisses either.
As a result of it all, normal people have never been attractive to me and I've never had a BF/GF. I've been fapping to deviant and arcane furry/MLP fetishes(+++) ever since.
If you feel just as concerned about this kind of stuff IRL as you do in this post, you could try to talk about it with a therapist. They'll help you realize how okay your fetishes are (even bestiality) and break down why you like the fetish and what you find so hot about it. It helps you realize that it's not as bad as you think it is. If they're good therapists, they won't even make you stop writing or change your fetishes because they know that it's your choice to like what you like.
After a few months or so, you start getting less ashamed as your understanding of it all grows. The confusing and frustrating life of being attracted to all of this weird shit gets a whole lot easier when you can make sense of it.
Kinda makes me wonder if my less wholesome fetishes are something I was born with, or evolved because the easiest way to find nude pics of women when I was that age was to check out books on the SALEM WITCH TRIALS IN THE LIBRARY. ><
As the kid who grew up with sexual horror stories told to me (African women having their tits flattened before they fully matured, with hot clothing irons on top of genital mutilation to make sex as horrible as possible before then being brutally raped), as well as my own conception, I can relate. My household wasn't religious (what little of that religious was came from maternal grandparents, but never long enough to let it actually sink in), nor did my folks monitor what I watched that much even as I hit puberty. I was molested at 9, when I first saw the male nads, but it did not extend beyond 'what is this?' and a curious poke. Playtime with dollies and stuffed animals? Well... at 12, it gravitated to vanilla sex and then rape... and from there I delved into horror stories online (see above). However, I didn't look-look at porn of any illustrated sort until after I hit 18, when I discovered TiaraWhy.
Next thing I know? I'm down a rabbit hole writing my own fucked up shit, and sometimes for money. I think I had nightmares of... er-hem, fates worse than death in the original definition around 12 or so, and I just sort of thought, 'okay, that's messed up, but...' Then my dreams got more vivid and, again, sort of fed into my works if I let them.
I think I can say I was one of those fucked-up kids from the get-go, it just didn't solidify until after the fact. I'm not sure many folks can say likewise.