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My social life is just like I'd want it to be. I got few close friends that I can trust and that's all I asked for. If someone only sees sexual relationships i

My social life is just like I'd want it to be. I got few close friends that I can trust and that's all I asked for. If someone only sees sexual relationships it's probably not caused by pornography at young age but some other mental problems. You mustn't mix up porn and relationships because frankly they don't have anything to do with eachother.

vertex-four 13y ago
And how do we give kids the mental tools to understand the difference between porn and real relationships/sex, and at roughly what stage of development? That's what I want to see research on, personally. Blocking porn isn't going to help; learning how to teach kids to successfully maintain a concrete barrier between porn and the real world is.
- throw-away4 13y ago
  They don't need any more mental capacity to diviate porn from real life than what they need with regular cartoons or other children's shows.
- aaronem 13y ago
  Every kid (ideally) learns the difference between "real" and "not real", and, more subtly, the difference between "valid example" and "don't trust this, it lies" (e.g., most television, which is exaggerated for effect). I've seen plenty of assertions that porn is a special case for which the general lesson doesn't suffice, but never yet run across a supporting argument which didn't reduce to "well, because genitals are involved." Which, I mean, I understand why that would seem to an ape like a sensible thing to say, if an ape could talk, which we can. But I'm curious to know whether anyone has a genuinely novel argument to make in defense of the proposition.
  - vertex-four 13y ago
    I'd disagree that most people can successfully differentiate between most TV and the real world. If they could, we wouldn't be in the mess we are where mainstream media gets to define political discourse, as people would take what the TV and newspapers say with a grain of salt. In any case, porn has the issue in that it's "secret", and not discussed with adults with experience in the subject like most things are. It's also usually discovered well before any experiences with actual sex. I posit that because it's not discussed with adults with a more experience mindset, kids do not have a framework to understand how it relates to the real world; they don't usually even know what sex in the real world is from an emotional standpoint (and usually not really from a technical standpoint either). That is, I posit that the way we understand things, and the way they affect us, depends heavily on how we discuss them, and past experience. If we don't discuss sex, and we have no past experience of sex, then how are we supposed to process something which appears to be a depiction of sex?
    - aaronem 13y ago
      News is a special case; it implicitly claims to be factual. That it often fails to live up to that claim doesn't put news in the same category as entertainment programming, which makes no such claim to begin with. > ...how are we supposed to process something which appears to be a depiction of sex? I grant the result of such processing isn't likely to be all that accurate to reality. I do not grant that the result of such processing is immutable even in the face of compelling new experience. Between lack of information and a natural tendency to confabulate, young children often form bizarre ideas about how copulation actually works, to the extent they think about it at all, which they rarely do because their glands aren't yet giving them a reason to take an interest. When, years later, copulation becomes a pressing concern, they seek out whatever information is available, on which basis they revise their understanding of the subject. The result is a gradually increasing congruence between the understanding and the reality, which in most cases culminates in a successful first sexual experience. Sure, in the intermediate, i.e., pre-experiential, stages of this investigation, porn probably does give a kid some bogus ideas about how things work. On the other hand, so could a kid's best friend who lives next door, who's picked up a farrago of half-understood bogosity from his older brother in college. In either case, once the matter proceeds from the theoretical stage to the practical, everything that's gone before tends to get revised in a hurry. I've yet to see anyone posit a way in which pornography is somehow magically exempt from that process.

vertex-four 13y ago

And how do we give kids the mental tools to understand the difference between porn and real relationships/sex, and at roughly what stage of development? That's what I want to see research on, personally. Blocking porn isn't going to help; learning how to teach kids to successfully maintain a concrete barrier between porn and the real world is.

throw-away4 13y ago
They don't need any more mental capacity to diviate porn from real life than what they need with regular cartoons or other children's shows.
aaronem 13y ago
Every kid (ideally) learns the difference between "real" and "not real", and, more subtly, the difference between "valid example" and "don't trust this, it lies" (e.g., most television, which is exaggerated for effect). I've seen plenty of assertions that porn is a special case for which the general lesson doesn't suffice, but never yet run across a supporting argument which didn't reduce to "well, because genitals are involved." Which, I mean, I understand why that would seem to an ape like a sensible thing to say, if an ape could talk, which we can. But I'm curious to know whether anyone has a genuinely novel argument to make in defense of the proposition.
- vertex-four 13y ago
  I'd disagree that most people can successfully differentiate between most TV and the real world. If they could, we wouldn't be in the mess we are where mainstream media gets to define political discourse, as people would take what the TV and newspapers say with a grain of salt. In any case, porn has the issue in that it's "secret", and not discussed with adults with experience in the subject like most things are. It's also usually discovered well before any experiences with actual sex. I posit that because it's not discussed with adults with a more experience mindset, kids do not have a framework to understand how it relates to the real world; they don't usually even know what sex in the real world is from an emotional standpoint (and usually not really from a technical standpoint either). That is, I posit that the way we understand things, and the way they affect us, depends heavily on how we discuss them, and past experience. If we don't discuss sex, and we have no past experience of sex, then how are we supposed to process something which appears to be a depiction of sex?
  - aaronem 13y ago
    News is a special case; it implicitly claims to be factual. That it often fails to live up to that claim doesn't put news in the same category as entertainment programming, which makes no such claim to begin with. > ...how are we supposed to process something which appears to be a depiction of sex? I grant the result of such processing isn't likely to be all that accurate to reality. I do not grant that the result of such processing is immutable even in the face of compelling new experience. Between lack of information and a natural tendency to confabulate, young children often form bizarre ideas about how copulation actually works, to the extent they think about it at all, which they rarely do because their glands aren't yet giving them a reason to take an interest. When, years later, copulation becomes a pressing concern, they seek out whatever information is available, on which basis they revise their understanding of the subject. The result is a gradually increasing congruence between the understanding and the reality, which in most cases culminates in a successful first sexual experience. Sure, in the intermediate, i.e., pre-experiential, stages of this investigation, porn probably does give a kid some bogus ideas about how things work. On the other hand, so could a kid's best friend who lives next door, who's picked up a farrago of half-understood bogosity from his older brother in college. In either case, once the matter proceeds from the theoretical stage to the practical, everything that's gone before tends to get revised in a hurry. I've yet to see anyone posit a way in which pornography is somehow magically exempt from that process.