It is highly likely that the men in your household (and not just the teenage ones) are aware of the ease with which hardcore pornography can be accessed on the internet. About three-quarters of males intentionally viewed it, compared with only 40% of women, in 2005. Among the young, by age 18 (on average first doing so between 14 and 17), 93% of boys had done so and 62% of girls. The new free websites will almost certainly mean even higher figures today.
What attitude should a parent take to their teenage children doing this or, for that matter, a mother of her partner or a teenage daughter of her boyfriend? For, in general, females report a lack of interest or actual disgust at such stuff.
Heavy users of internet pornography (estimates of full-blown addiction vary from 3%-7% of men) are almost all male and have been shown to be more likely to be single, socially isolated, depressed and lonely. Men with plenty of friends and a good current sexual relationship are less likely to ever watch – in any case, on average, most men stop viewing much or often within three months of first logging on.
The younger a person starts to view pornography, the earlier they have sex, but it's likely that early viewing and early sex are both consequences of problems in upbringing. Hence, parents today should assume that nearly all children will be exposed to hardcore pornography at some point between 14 and 17, but how they react depends enormously on their gender and childhood history. The main negative effects are to encourage men to see women as meat and replacing real love and face-to-face contact with fantasy.
A review of the evidence of pornography's impact on marriages paints a complex picture. The happily married are 61% less likely to view internet porn. Whether happily married or not, married women are more distressed than unmarried ones at a partner's viewing, feeling it to be more of a threat to their relationship. The heavier the porn use, the greater the wife's distress.
In the extreme case of a sample of 94 couples, where one was a sex addict, internet use was a problem in every case. Among a sample of 350 American divorce lawyers, 62% said that internet pornography or cybersex had played a significant role in the divorce. While not regarding it as a new cause of divorce, they believed that the internet makes it easier to get into the kind of lifestyles that increase the risk.
Common difficulties identified from porn use are that the user starts demanding different kinds of sex, is much less loving and uses the partner as a toy. There are often demands for activities that the partner feels are objectionable.
Internet porn is often experienced as infidelity by female partners and indeed, users are three times more likely to stray. This may be because the kind of person who uses porn a lot is also prone to infidelity.
Not all porn use is necessarily harmful to relationships. A high proportion of men use it as a distraction or to reduce stress, soon getting bored by it. It serves an antidepressant purpose for the unhappy. A proportion of both men and women claim that it inspires more fulfilling sex with existing partners, providing new ideas.
While hardly any parent can be at all happy about their 14-year-old watching hardcore porn, they should reassure themselves that the vast majority of their daughters will switch it off right away and the sons soon find it much less interesting than the real thing.
The impact of internet pornography on marriage: Manning, JC, 2006, Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, 13, 131-65. More Oliver James at selfishcapitalist.com
