PATTY KRAWEC at Westonia Computer asks: >I am curious, on a home-school mailling list i subscribe to a >pornography debate has emerged. It is amazing to me how many parents >think that pornography should not be censored from their kids (as young >as 12) and that it can actually be helpful in learning about sexuality. >this baffles me completely. Does anybody here have experiences with >pornography that could either refute or defend that position? >All I have is my experience at 9 or 10 finding my brother's playboy >magazines ... [snip]

well, I was allowed to see pornography (of a mild sort, I don't know whether my parents had hard-core material around the house) at an early age, and whatever sexual kinks I have, I doubt it came from that. "Helpful" is a funny sort of word ... I don;t know whether it was helpful or not in learning about sexuality to actually see pornography, but it was helpful to be raised in an environment where I felt that sexuality was not something to be hidden because it is nasty.

- Mikel

After reading the above request for stories of how we were affected by pornography, I thought my 2 cents might be interesting. The thing is, my exposure to porn had nothing to do with any abuse of any kind (of me, anyway), and was basically an accident. And I wasn't really young - about 13 to 15. Yet I still regard it as a really bad influence on me, and I often have wished that never saw it - or saw it later, to be precise. After my sexual nature was more fully formed. Or, that I'd seen more "mild" porn at that age..........some details:

(of course it's long - I wrote it! :-) That's just who I am.....)

First time was when I was almost 14. My older sister was away at college, and I was browsing in her bookshelf when I saw the book "The Story of O" (absolutely no relation to a children's book with similar name!). This is one of the first "literary" porn books that was accepted by intellectuals (or so I believe), but although it may lack the rough edges of ordinary porn, it portrays a totally submissive woman in a violent and degrading bondage/SM-type relationship. Pretty heavy stuff for a kid's first exposure to sexual knowledge.

Now, my family was the opposite of Mikel's - no mention of sex whatsoever, in any context. Supposedly my mother told me the "facts of life" when was small, but I have no memory of that - as far as I know, sex was *not to be talked about* no matter what. (Example: when I was 8, I asked my mother if you could have a baby if you weren't married - I had this idea that marriage was a sort of physical operation, and only after it could you physically have children :-), but I was beginning to think this was mistaken - my mother told me that, yes, you could only have babies after you were married! - even though I kept trying to explain that I meant physically only. She never got it, and finally I asked my father who told me the straight truth.) So as an adolescent I was completely starved for any information or input about sex, and naturally read everything I saw about it. I had no access to Playboy or other mild sexual material. For a couple of months I read a few pages in "the Story of O" every night - even though it upset me a lot! I still don't know why I just had to keep reading, no matter how much it bothered me.......except that there are other things of that sort for me, too. Then I went away for a year, leaving the book hidden under my clothes in my dresser - and when I came back, it was gone! My mother (gasp!) must have found it and taken it away......I felt very ashamed.

Soon after I came back home, I started babysitting for a family that had just moved into the neighborhood. Most of their stuff was still in boxes or laying around in piles, including stacks of paperback books in their living room. They got divorced soon after moving in, so this stuff never got put away. As a bored babysitter and a voracious reader, naturally I looked through the piles for some interesting book to read - and discovered a large number of porn books. These people's kids were about 5 and 7, able to read (and some of these books had pictures), and this stuff was lying around! I think if I saw this now I would tell someone like my parents to talk to them, or talk to them myself - I don't think hard-core porn with pictures is appropriate for kids of that age to see.....at that age, I was too embarassed to admit that I'd looked at it to tell anyone. Just like with the other book, even though the stuff upset me, I was still starved for any information about sex, and sort of mesmerized, like an animal frozen in the headlights.

This stuff wasn't just any porn, nearly all of it was really gross violent and degrading stuff. (happens to be that it was all degrading to women, but I know that's not all porn. But it may have been worse for me because of that.) I know I can't really "blame" someone else for stuff I read without being forced to - but for years I wished I had never read it. All my subsequent sexual fantasies came from that garbage. Many of my attitudes about what sex is supposed to be were formed from it. can't tell you how many times I wished I could have not read it, that those images could magically vanish from my brain. Even today, more than 20 years later - I wish I had never seen that stuff :( :(.

Yet I can't blame that exposure for my leanings towards BDSM (which I am not comfortable with - not a criticism of anyone who's into it, it's just my own attitude for me, OK?) I had fantasies and "games" resembling BDSM from much earlier age. But, I do think that I would have benefitted from some other, more vanilla, sexual input - perhaps I could have developed fantasies that wouldn't be a problem for me. Maybe there would have been more balance.

The only conclusions I can draw from this is - don't try to hide sex from your kids completely. They will learn it exists, they will be curious about it. If you allow them access to some reasonable sexual material (whatever that may be to you), they will be less likely to devour anything sexual they find, and may have their ideas of sex formed by something who's attitudes are closer to yours - not just any old garbage available out there. Believe me, even Playboy or Penthouse would have been vastly preferable as a source of sexual information than those books.

Who-am-i