How did easy access to Porn while growing up impacted Gen-Z ?

Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Ziggurat@jlai.lu⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

Multiple countries are trying to force porn sites to have an efficient age verification. With frightening numbers like half of 12 year old boys go monthly to porn sites.

Sure for an adult who remember the time where at best one kid would have brought a magazine to school, it feels concerning. However, it’s been easily 20 years that every household has high speed internet which is full of porn. So the kids under 30 (let’s call them Gen-Z) had a massive access to porn while growing up.

Is there any “sociologicial” studies about how it impacted these young adults ? Are they sexually more fucked-up than the millennials ?

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

Pat_Riot@lemmy.today ⁨34⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
Dad had lots of porn, mags, movies, stories, not especially hidden. I turned out healthy enough, and I don’t particularly have any hangups. I will say that at least mainstream porn was much friendlier than a lot of the new stuff. I’m late Gen X, btw.

source
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
It didn’t. We always had easy access to porn. Sounds like if anything kids today are having less hook ups and generally are more respectful of each other.

source
- LadyButterfly@reddthat.com ⁨40⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  I was a teen in the 90s. Can confirm there was a lot of foreplay with a lot of people, and then full sex
  
  source
- Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  I remember when the media discovered there was a web browser on the original PSP and dubbed it the Playstation Pornable.
  
  source
TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’m not sure about gen z, but I worry about gen alpha. My wife works in a hospital for behavioral health and she sees an alarming number of kids (as young as 6 or 7) who are acting out sexually, and most of them consume a considerable amount of online porn. Many of them are there because they’ve sexually abused a sibling.

This is anecdotal, and of course in a behavioral health hospital my wife is going to see only the children who are acting out the most, and those children are by no means representative of the average child. It is also likely that some children have always acted out sexually, for various reasons, long before Internet porn. But the number of children they see for sexual predation is very concerning.

source
- groet@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  Isn’t a child acting sexually often a sign they were sexually abused? Maybe the problem isn’t gen alpha watching porn, but either more sexual abuse by their parents, or simply more awareness. Sometimes a problem appears new/rising when it was always there, just invisible.
  
  source
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Most of it is in line with what you’d think: not that terrible unless you’re repressed and think that sex is bad or you have the religious hang ups that dictate sex should be sacred in some way

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27105446/ - higher consumption of pornography in adolescence leads to more permissive sexual attitudes (eg casual sex)

ovid.com/…/26318318231153984~pornography-and-its-… - association (not necessarily causal) of pornography use and earlier loss of virginity as well as greater risk taking in sex (such as inconsistent use of condoms, which could perhaps be addressed by the industry using them more)

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30919052/ longitudinal studies find weak or no links between increased use of pornography and decreased psychological well being

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35294070/ while there are longitudinal studies that show correlation between pornography use and sexual harassment/assault there are studies to suggest that this may not be causal and other confounding variables such as peer environment, family attitudes, or personality traits may be more causal in nature)

Lots more but a lot of the negative effects are often tied to guilt and shame which is socially derived and possibly without basis

source
ultranaut@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
They have significantly less sex than previous generations did at comparable ages. It’s been well established by multiple sources at this point, although I don’t think causality is understood yet so it could be unrelated, or more likely porn accessibility is only one factor in the decline.

source
- douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Shame really.
  
  Sex is so much fun, and being open and comfortable with it and kink in general is incredibly freeing.
  
  source
  - sleen@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That’s just how society is, most stuff just isn’t logical or ethical. As such, there are people that get aggressive over others asking questions, how is that socially acceptable?
    
    But yes, acceptance by society doesn’t mean it’s right. Majority of the time morality is forcefully projected into others, and penalised if they dare to question that morality.
    
    source
  - Bbbbbbbbbbb@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Are you talking about America or Europe? In America, sex is for the devil and casual sex sends you straight to the 9th circle. But in seriousness, youre right. Much of America is taught abstinence and shame, so its not as free and open as I wish it would be.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Well one thing is for sure, it impacted them in that they were less likely to get in trouble with the filth.

As a millennial my friends and I all had large collections of porn magazines and VHS tapes by the time we were 13 / 14 but they all had to be gained through theft or finding shit in the woods.

I haven’t seen a porn mag in the woods for like 20 years or more where as it used to be a regular occurrence in my youth!

source
- Steve@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  How did all that porn get in the woods? Was there some kind of Horny Appleseed sprinkling porn mags across the country?
  
  source
  - Horsecook@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    Married men. Lots of women think men looking at pornography is a form of unfaithfulness.
    
    source
  - Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    Kid steals magazine from dad/convenience store, shares the wealth with the homies, ditches the evidence.
    
    Though I do still enjoy the legend of Horny Appleseed, doing god’s (?) work.
    
    source
  - theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    That is one of the great mystery’s of the 90s.
    
    source
- grue@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I guess that’s what Gibson meant about the future not being evenly distributed. As also a millennial (and an older one, at that) I got all my porn from the Internet when I was that age, albeit having to wait for individual images to load at 56kbps at first.
  
  You can imagine how excited I was for my household to get DSL, LOL!
  
  source
  - SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    And before the Internet, we were jacking it to the Sears catalog.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Oh yeh, we used the internet too at that age but like you say on a 56k dial up connection you’d literally be waiting for an image to load, line after line, so magazines were preferable. ADSL ushered in the age of more easily accessed videos for us, we are probably a similar age xD
    
    source
betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Same way as usual, pearl-clutchers latch onto it as a way to incite moral panic.

source
edgemaster72@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
They probably never had to beat it to scrambled softcore cable porn. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide if that’s better, worse, or neutral.

source
sexy_peach@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Generations before had the same access, no?

source
- Horsecook@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  IMO, there was a pretty big shift starting around 2005-2007, when it became possible to watch video pornography on common pocket-sized electronic devices. Before then, porn was accessible to varying degrees. It became ubiquitous.
  
  source
- Bbbbbbbbbbb@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Im a late millennial and yes, it was easily accessible and available
  
  source
  - Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That’s hardly a generation before
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- AmidFuror@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  When young? No. Unless you count the Sears catalog.
  
  source