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Has this happened to you whilst cleaning your teenage son's room?
It happened to a friend of a friend and I was shocked by how she handled it.
The porno in question was hardcore (intercourse and all the rest).
Happy polling!
This may be a little surprising to you, but 95%+ of adolescent males (and adult males for that matter) look at porn on a regular basis, if they have access to it. I'm shocked it was magazines though. That's so 90s. The porn industry has almost completely moved to the Internet.
I kinda agree with this ^ here sort of attitude. My main concern is that:
a.) They understand that reality isn't like that.
b.) They don't get sucked into some of the really twisted stuff out there.
c.) They don't actually start interacting with strangers online.
d.) They don't overindulge to the point of damaging their views of women and expectations of sex, let alone the capacity to form healthy, loving and respectful relationships with love interests.
I would really rather catch them looking at nude photography of models posing alone, than videos of people in various acts. I worry about the wide crazy world of what is "out there" online. Curiosity doesn't perturb me, but obsession does.
(emphasis added by me)
At first I completely disagreed with you. But actually there is PART of your stance that I completely sympathize and agree with, and I've discussed it with my sons. Keeping porn lying around in their rooms is disrespectful to me as their Mom. They know, that if I go in there to pick up laundry or something and I happen across something like that, I'm not gonna be thrilled. And frankly we often have guests, they have sleepovers...I don't want to be the house that my son's friend's Mom won't let little Bobby come over anymore because my kids have dirty magazines.
Yet...despite my discomfort with porn and yes, I think it can be exploitative and perhaps have some mental health ramifications for some guys... Would I rather have a teenager all hopped up on hormones and unable to um...exercise those demons, if you will...desperate to get girls in bed so he could satisfy himself? Would I rather have him handling his own needs or having actual sex, at age 13, 14, 15, even 18? My husband did for the first time at age TWELVE. I was thirteen. We both had multiple partners during our teen years. Both of us had parents that tried at some point to instill in us that sex was dirty and bad, a grown-up secret and you should wait until marriage. It didn't work.
So really, I'm far more interested in my son's relationship with his girlfriend, and most especially that nothing is going on that will end in her pregnant, thrown out of her Mom's house and trying to move into mine! Compared to that prospect, him enjoying naughty pictures doesn't bug me AT ALL.
They need to understand reality is NOT how its depicted in porn. I've found porn in my son's room, too, I just told him t keep it out of sight from friends, cleaning lady, etc. Then, he lost interest....or at least I didn't find anymore. Curiosity is normal at this age.
But, there are limits! A friend of mine was upset---and rightly so---over her nephew's exposure to porn, Her sister and BIL were the "old hippie" let it all hang out, that's natural, etc. Well, they were really into porn, filthy magazines all over the house, along with watching XXX movies all night long. Poor kid had to be exposed to this whether he was "curious" or not. He told his aunt, he never wanted to grow up and get married because then you had to do that "nasty stuff". He was about 9 years old at the time!They had the kid scarred for life, thinking sex was all gross, "nasty" stuff. His aunt did what she could to explain things to him, but the damage was probably already done with his initial exposure. I don't keep up with them, so I don't know how the child, who should be an adult by now, fared.
I explained to my DS that sexual feelings are normal, especially at his age. Much can stimulate sexual arousal, but some things are socially acceptable, and some aren't The body responds to all sexual stimuli, but its up to us to choose stimuli that doesn't demean, degrade, Sex is meant to be part of a relationship, not just for arousal. Then, I dropped the subject, sometimes you can talk too much. I think it worked out, I don't find evidence of porn in his room!
If it's just a couple Penthouse mags, no big deal. Therapy certainly isn't required unless you think natural "growth" is wrong. I voted to leave it alone and say nothing, but there wasn't a closer option to what I would do.
Leave it alone and then have "the talk" at some point in the near future. There isn't much point in making the kid feel awkward about normal curiosity and development. Embarrassing him will only prevent him from seeking the counsel of a parent.
this reminds me of that thread where the parents wanted to know what to do when their teen son stole their credit card and bought porn on the internet...
And we were all like, "well, first of all, teach him about free internet porn..."
A few years ago at a still too young age, my friend's son heard the "p" word on the bus and didn't know what it was. Rather than ask, he looked it up on the internet. You can imagine the pictures it took him to!!
My friend found the information in the computer's history and asked her husband about it who said it wasn't him. When she found out it was their son who had been looking at these pictures, she panicked and got her husband who panicked and told him that those people were all dead now because of the things they had done in those pictures.
You have to understand, these weren't just pictures of intercourse or oral sex. These were hardcore, holy crap I didn't know about that stuff until I was much older than him kind of stuff!
They later came clean and had a real conversation with him about it, but to this day, the two of them and my husband and I can't help but get a giggle out of how badly they panicked. We told them before they talked to him that they'd better set the story straight before the poor kid was scarred for life at the thought of ANY form of intimacy.
The boy is 14. The mother found Hustler mags from the 1980s. She took them, confronted him with them in front of the whole family (including grandparents), and sentenced him to weekly therapy for 3 months.
I am told he is in therapy because she is convinced he is a sex addict just because a few of the pages were stuck together. And yet, the mags are nearly 30 years old! How does she know they weren't in that condition before he got a hold of them?
I feel sorry for the chap...and I am happy to report I have heard he has been uncooperative with his therapist.
Bad decision. Tell a 14 year old he's a sex addict and he will become one. It could actually push him to more extreme forms of porn if the softcore porn of 30 years ago was taken away.
She should have done what my dad did when he found my collection: he took the ones he felt were too adult for me and left that old book "everything you wanted to know about sex but didn't know who to ask" or whatever it's name was. Remember that movie with Woody Allen? Funny movie. I knew I was busted and was a little worried about what came next, but I admit I enjoyed having the book for reference and was glad I didn't have to talk to him about most of it. The book answered a lot of questions. It made me feel normal. I don't think there's any permanent damage to my easily deranged and distracted mind from reading either the book or looking at softcore porn. When he felt it was appropriate, the conversation my dad had with me was more about respecting women and not thinking what I saw in those magazines represented real women or their only purpose in life. I don't remember feeling like I was being punished, he was just giving me data.
I kinda agree with this ^ here sort of attitude. My main concern is that:
a.) They understand that reality isn't like that.
b.) They don't get sucked into some of the really twisted stuff out there.
c.) They don't actually start interacting with strangers online.
d.) They don't overindulge to the point of damaging their views of women and expectations of sex, let alone the capacity to form healthy, loving and respectful relationships with love interests.
I would really rather catch them looking at nude photography of models posing alone, than videos of people in various acts. I worry about the wide crazy world of what is "out there" online. Curiosity doesn't perturb me, but obsession does.
(emphasis added by me)
At first I completely disagreed with you. But actually there is PART of your stance that I completely sympathize and agree with, and I've discussed it with my sons. Keeping porn lying around in their rooms is disrespectful to me as their Mom. They know, that if I go in there to pick up laundry or something and I happen across something like that, I'm not gonna be thrilled. And frankly we often have guests, they have sleepovers...I don't want to be the house that my son's friend's Mom won't let little Bobby come over anymore because my kids have dirty magazines.
Yet...despite my discomfort with porn and yes, I think it can be exploitative and perhaps have some mental health ramifications for some guys... Would I rather have a teenager all hopped up on hormones and unable to um...exercise those demons, if you will...desperate to get girls in bed so he could satisfy himself? Would I rather have him handling his own needs or having actual sex, at age 13, 14, 15, even 18? My husband did for the first time at age TWELVE. I was thirteen. We both had multiple partners during our teen years. Both of us had parents that tried at some point to instill in us that sex was dirty and bad, a grown-up secret and you should wait until marriage. It didn't work.
So really, I'm far more interested in my son's relationship with his girlfriend, and most especially that nothing is going on that will end in her pregnant, thrown out of her Mom's house and trying to move into mine! Compared to that prospect, him enjoying naughty pictures doesn't bug me AT ALL.
LOL I got this vision of demons being forced to do pushups and twenty laps around the bedroom.
That's the funniest and most unintentionally Freudian (?) explanation of that particular experience.
I think you probably meant exorcise - but your word is so much more descriptive and actually pertinent to the discussion. Thanks for the belly laugh. Exercising demons. What a delightfully descriptive turn of phrase
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Compared to that prospect, him enjoying naughty pictures doesn't bug me AT ALL.
