Plus, there’s this thing about pubic hair. “Nobody knows anymore what an average human penis is supposed to look like,” Langford says. In this follow-up article, Jo Langford and Amy Lang share advice for helping kids safely explore sexuality. That disconnect can lead to any number of issues, including concerns about body image. Adults can typically tell the difference between the two, but kids often can’t.
“Kids think they know how to do sex because they’ve seen sex.” That’s bad, because porn isn’t sex, it’s sexual, says Langford. “Porn gives our kids a script,” Lang explains. They also present a portrayal of sex often stripped of such necessary elements as intimacy, mutual pleasure and tenderness, to say nothing of lacking variations in body type or sexual orientation. “Those are pretty desensitizing and kind of scary.”
“These are graphic, moving, images,” says sex educator and therapist Jo Langford. What they find, whether accidentally or purposely, isn’t your friend’s older brother’s crumpled Playboy, either.
“Before, we had to work to find it,” Lang says. It is also highly convenient a 2010 American Psychological Association (APA) report estimates 12 percent of all websites are pornography sites, and a quarter of all search-engine requests are for pornography. It is predominantly amateur (whether produced to look that way by porn studios or actually so). Porn today means something very different than the porn of even five or 10 years ago, let alone decades back. The average age of exposure, experts say? Nine years old. The numbers were even higher in another UNH study: 93 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls said they saw online porn sometime during their adolescence. Nearly half of online users ages 10–17 had seen porn (two-thirds of whom had done so on accident), according to one study by the University of New Hampshire (UNH). She would never.ĭon’t kid yourself, says Lang. Lang is one of the few professionals to whom parents can turn when they learn their child did what Mary did: stumbled upon online pornography. “It’s like picking a scab,” says Amy Lang, a Seattle-based sexuality educator who runs Birds + Bees + Kids. Each time was accompanied by the thoughts: This makes me feel different. Whatever the case, she found herself watching people do things she had never, ever seen before. She was on her mom’s iPad, as she so often was, and Googled a word she’d overheard or hit a link she wasn’t supposed to or clicked an ad she didn’t understand.