Nearly two in five of the 16- to 17-year-old boys (38 per cent), but
only 2 per cent of girls, had deliberately searched the internet for
sex sites.

A survey commissioned by the the Australia Institute, a public interest
think tank, and conducted by Newspoll, found 84 per cent of boys and 60
per cent of girls aged between 16 and 17 had been accidentally exposed
to sex sites on the internet.

How internet porn is changing your sex life
"Porn is many boys' first form of sex education," says Dr Flood. "And
the problem with this is that most heterosexual porn offers narrow
stereotypes of women as big-breasted nymphomaniacs and men as well-hung
studs always ready for sex. Porn rarely connects sex to intimacy and
loving affection."

http://blogs.smh.com.au/allmenareliars/archives/2006/09/how_internet_po.html



How internet porn is changing your sex life


Twenty years ago there were two ways of acquiring pornography. The
first was you stole it, either from your parents, older brother or the
newsagent. Stealing porn from your father was the perfect crime,
because if your dad had a dozen issues of Hustler Shaved tucked away in
a cupboard, he wasn't likely to come screaming into the kitchen and
demand to know if you'd filched issue 8? Stealing from older brothers
was far more dangerous because they knew exactly who was to blame and
they'd just straight beat your arse. The newsagent option was forced on
us as teens because no kid under the age of 18 could walk into a XXX
book store, so we were reduced to sticking mags such as Penthouse or
Playboy under our school jumpers and hoping like hell we wouldn't get
pinged* ...

The second option for acquiring porn was you borrowed it.

This was a time-honoured tradition and because, as teens, we had no
real access to hardcore pornography, when a friend did stumble across a
publication that showed actual penetration it was protected like flame
in ancient times; it was passed from one boy to the next and, if the
owner of the mag seriously thought he was ever getting it back, they
were soon pacified by a new item entering the grand food chain of porn.


If you've been following closely, you'll realise that these two methods
for the acquisition of porn required some human interaction. Even the
most fervent masturbator had to either put himself in some kind of
danger by stealing the stuff or, in the path of humiliation by
constantly badgering his friends for fresh imagery.

Then came the internet and now all bets are off.

On the net, even your most free-wheeling fantasies can be tracked down
and flogged over if you have the time and bandwidth. You don't have to
sneak around dirty book stores or beg to friends ... you don't even
need friends. In fact, you don't even need to be looking.

In a speech to the Sexual Integrity Forum at Federal Parliament last
year, Dr Michael Flood, a postdoctoral fellow with the Australian
Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at Melbourne's La Trobe
University revealed some pretty startling figures.

A survey commissioned by the the Australia Institute, a public interest
think tank, and conducted by Newspoll, found 84 per cent of boys and 60
per cent of girls aged between 16 and 17 had been accidentally exposed
to sex sites on the internet.

Nearly two in five of the 16- to 17-year-old boys (38 per cent), but
only 2 per cent of girls, had deliberately searched the internet for
sex sites.

"Porn is many boys' first form of sex education," says Dr Flood. "And
the problem with this is that most heterosexual porn offers narrow
stereotypes of women as big-breasted nymphomaniacs and men as well-hung
studs always ready for sex. Porn rarely connects sex to intimacy and
loving affection."

Unfortunately, because of ethical constraints, the Australia Institute
was not able to question children younger than 16 in their survey, so
their exposure to pornography can only be guessed at.

What it's fair to say is that there is a significant number of young
Australian males whose first glimpse of the sexualised female is her
engaging in graphic, maybe even violent, hard-core sex.

The director Francis Ford Coppola once quipped that if the James Bond
classic Octopussy was made today, it would be named Octo-anal such is
the pervasive influence of pornography and its pushing of conventions,
fetishes and orifices.

In a Sydney Morning Herald article published last year, Professor James
Ogloff, a clinical and forensic psychologist at Monash University, said
he believed between 10 and 20 per cent of internet porn users accessed
"not just pictures of women or men having sex" but "images that we
would have been surprised at just a few years ago".

"If you'd asked me two years ago how many people are interested in
serious S and M, or who are bisexual or interested in children, we all
would have grossly underestimated the numbers. It's almost like we're
seeing a virtual sexual revolution," said Ogloff.

Dr Flood says: "Pornography is attractive to heterosexual men in part
because in the porn universe, women are always ready for sex and eager
to please, there is no criticism of men's performance, and there's no
need to do that hard work of building trust and intimacy."

You have to wonder what that means when a kid's first taste of
sexuality is anal or group sex, re-enacted gang rapes or the sort of
degradation all too common on some websites that sees male performers
spit in the mouths of females.

In his essay "Big Red Son", an American writer, David Foster Wallace,
says: "In-your-face vileness is part of the schizoid direction porn's
been moving in all decade. For just as adult entertainment has become
more 'mainstream' ... it has also become more extreme and not just on
the Bizarro margins.

"In nearly all hetero porn now, there is an emphasis on anal sex,
painful penetrations, degrading tableaux, and the (at least)
psychological abuse of women.

"In certain respects this extremism may simply be porn's tracing [of]
Hollywood's own entertainment arc: it's hardly news that TV and legit
film have also gotten more violent and explicit and raw."

It's a sobering thought that many young men may now consider these sort
of extreme sexual acts as "normal" and young women, exposed to the
demands of these men, consider compliance with them reasonable.

With the genre-bending that goes on in pornography nowadays it is also
possible that some viewers' expectations of reality will be similarly
affected. In his essay, Wallace also tackles the phenomena of 'gonzo'
porn, which "has become one of this decade's most popular and
profitable genres of adult video".

"It's more or less a cross between an MTV documentary and hell panel
from Bocsh's Garden of Earthly Delights," that involves pornographers
appearing to pick up innocents (usually paid actors) off the street and
within minutes having them engaged in sex acts.

"Whereas traditional 'dramatic' porn videos simulate the 100 per cent
sexualisation of real life (by creating a kind of alternative real
world in which every one from secretaries to firemen to dental
hygienists is always just one prompt away from frantic intercourse),
'gonzo' videos push the envelope by offering the apparent sexualisation
of actual life ... the porn equivalent of the mainstream trend in
docu-dramas like ..." RPA, Border Security and The Biggest Loser.

Pornography and masturbation are subjects that tend to be sniggered
about and are only intermittently discussed in the media. However, with
internet pornography imprinting itself on the sexual expectations of so
many men, it may be time to drag them from behind the school toilet
block to join other, mainstream male sex and health issues.

This is a huge topic and one I intend to discuss further in the future,
so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Let me finish by saying that 40 years ago, the advent of the birth
control pill changed sexual dynamics across the world. It's my sincere
belief that what's happening today with internet porn will shape male
female relationships just as profoundly.

*Pinged: caught.