Your kids will see internet porn - Deal with it

WIRED: Are all the kids watching it?

[Peggy Orenstein, the author of Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter is currently working on a book about boys, masculinity, sex, love - and yes, porn:] The first thing I recognized when I started working on the new book was that the question to ask boys is not whether or if they watch porn. The question is, when was the first time they saw it? The most typical answer I get is 11, sometimes 13, sometimes younger. [...]

[WIRED:] ... what do I tell my sons?

The biggest surprise for me as a parent has been how hard we now have to work to protect our kids' imaginations from predatory, addictive websites that want to sell things to them - or sell them to advertisers. So you have to lay the groundwork, to have conversations about what's real and what's not. Talk about how, when you see a movie, there's violence, but that violence is totally unrealistic. Porn is really only the extreme end of an issue. We know these things are fake, that’s not the way the two people really interact. Kids have to be able to contextualize, to deconstruct it. Just like they need to do with other forms of media. Because yes, everyone is upset about porn, but the messages they get from garden-variety media are just as influential - maybe more so.

source: Article 'Your kids will see internet porn. Deal with it. A conversation with Peggy Orenstein' by Sarah Fallon; www.wired.com/2017/08/kids-and-porn/; WIRED; September 2017