Читать книгу Your Child Is One Click Away From Pornography - Elena Laguarda Ruiz - Страница 10

When the topic of pornography arises, everyone imagines something different based on their own experiences. In past conferences we’ve attended, some families don’t see the problem with their children watching it. In talking to them, we realize that this happens because they have in mind the Playboy magazine that they perhaps read as teenagers themselves, and not necessarily the type of pornography that exists today. Therefore, it is crucial to discuss the different ways in which pornography can be classified and analyze the type of material that can be found in each one.

If we start with the means of dissemination, we can consider the next classification:

Adult magazines.They are marketed mainly, but not exclusively, to a male, adult audience. They are legally distributed as they typically only display naked bodies in erotic positions and are sold everywhere. This is why many of us may share the experience of walking down the street with a minor who ends up staring at the covers of these magazines while passing a newspaper stand. However, there are also magazines which feature more explicit sex scenes which adults can acquire at more specific places.

If you are over thirty you will surely know that this type of pornography, like Playboy, was easily accessible. A brief parental absence was enough to run to the newsstand or exchange among friends “Miss June” for “Miss May” and hide it under the bed to explore the world of pornography.

Adolescents who read this type of magazine, when it contains merely nude content, are protected, since it invites them to imagine and fantasize; thus, they go only as far as their psychosexual development allows without being invaded by images that they are not ready to understand. On the contrary, if the magazines show explicit sexual practices, they are not protected, because these images can be extremely graphic.

The second type of pornography is movies. These are sold in sex shops, an industry in decline since the appearance of the internet. In general, they exhibit a high degree of explicit pornography and, in some cases, illegal acts, available only on the black market.

A third type of pornography is erotic movies and series that are produced for pay television. These will never appear on broadcast television. However, on broadcast television it is now possible to find material that previously could have been considered pornography. The rules for content have become more flexible. Certainly, the exposure of the body has changed; what used to be a bathing suit at the time of our great-grandmothers could today be worn as a dress for a night out. That is to say, nudity has become normalized in everyday life. Let’s simply observe billboards in the streets advertising underwear, or let’s take a look at the mid-afternoon soap operas where before only a kiss was seen as an erotic expression and now a sexual relationship may be portrayed, although not explicitly.

A fourth type of pornography is the one found on the web. Images and movies of explicit pornography, online chats, and even real-time sex acts can be viewed by virtually anyone on the internet. Sexually explicit images can be found on web pages that are easily accessible to people of any age. Although in some pages there is an access button that asks if the viewer is of legal age, it is easy for a child to answer yes. What was only available to a small number of people can now be viewed at any time in the privacy of one’s own home, even by minors.

The different types of explicit sexual content in the virtual world include:

Websites. Most of them showcase images of explicit sexual acts - between individuals of the same or different gender - such as: oral sex, anal sex or group sex, fetishes, and any experience that may be in the minds of adults. Some of these pages may be clandestine and show illegal material such as pedophilia (sex with children), zoophilia (sex with animals) and necrophilia (sex with corpses), rape and other acts of violence. The problem is that these pages are one click away from legal pornography and, although these illegal pages are fewer in number, there is a risk that one will appear instead of the other. According to researcher Carmen Orte, from the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), the most viewed pornographic video currently on the internet depicts a very violent group rape.

Hot lines, which in past decades were phone calls with sexual content, today have become cybersex. In other words, what used to be a fantasy held through telephone conversations has turned into sexual activities shared through a camera. This carries a high risk of the participants being recorded and the material being shared massively without consent.

Forums or chats. These are groups of people who connect with others to spread and exchange pornographic messages, photos and videos, many of them in real time. Some are illegal, such as those that exist among pedophiles to share child pornography.

In conclusion, the real problem is that now children and adolescents can watch pornography before being cognitively or emotionally ready to understand and assimilate the scenes they witness, coupled with the fact that they can put themselves at risk by coming into contact with strangers.

After our experience working with children and adolescents, we set to classify the pornography they reported seeing. To analyze the implications of minors watching porn, we established the following classifications that combine existing categories in the literature with others that we named.

Softcore, mild or conventional pornography. Sex scenes are not shown explicitly. That is, the models show the whole body in provocative positions, but no sexual practices of any kind are shown in detail.

Hard, hardcore or explicit porn. As its name implies, it shows genital and explicit sexual acts whether vaginal, anal or oral. It includes relations between two or more people, whether they are heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, and may include the use of sex toys.

Pornography with direct violence. Although much of the existing pornography may contain violence in its implied discourse by establishing relationships of submission and/or humiliation of one of the actors by the other —the submissive role generally being played by the woman, in this section we refer only to violence that is explicitly manifested: hitting, slapping or rape simulation, for example.

Unusual pornography or pornography with bodily risk. It portrays unusual sexual behaviors that may even entail a risk to physical integrity, such as the eroticization of eschatological acts (urinating or defecating on the other), fisting (inserting the fist through the anus or vagina), or even rosebud pornography - where extreme anal sex is intended to cause rectal prolapse. This type of pornographic content, increasingly extreme, is growing. The reason for this is that, while the porn industry is lucrative, it is becoming atomized. In other words, as a result of the new technology, it is a highly competitive business. Anyone can make a video very cheaply. This has prompted many production companies to try to attract the attention of users by creating increasingly unusual and grotesque content so that they stand out from the rest and generate more profit. The disturbing thing about this type of material is that it sets a trend towards what one “should like” since “everyone likes it” and it is a fashion that “you have to try”, generating a niche of people who consume it more and more on a regular basis.

Illegal. This includes zoophilia, child abuse, rape, torture, mutilation and necrophilia. Most of the victims of these degrading crimes are women and children.

As we can see, our society’s relationship with pornography has transformed overtime. Much of the pornography that can be found today did not exist a few years ago or was difficult to access, and when it was accessed it was not at such an early age. It is likely that if our grandparents observed pornography it consisted, for the most part, of photos of half-naked women. During our youth, videos with explicit pornography could already be found, although they were not easily accessible. After making the decision to watch them, one had to travel to a center where they were sold, hide them from the parents and, mainly, accept that the experience would last as long as the tape to finish. If you wanted to see more, you had to settle for watching the same video over and over again or going through the whole process to get another, knowing that it would cost money to rent it or buy it. Due to its low accessibility, it was difficult to generate a greater need to see increasingly harsh content. Today, from an early age, one has the possibility of coming into contact with pornography, without even having considered the decision to watch it. The contents have also been diversified and, above all, it has become an endless experience; pornographic pages can be refreshed continuously, one by one on the computer screen, for hours. We also observe that as time passes, children come into contact with pornography at a younger and younger age and the years that lie ahead for them to be watching this type of material are increasing. This, in many cases, generates the need to look for more explicit or unusual content and desensitizes viewers to violent or illegal materials.

Due to all these changes, several specialists are talking about the New Pornography, which has very specific characteristics, as portrayed in the study coordinated by the pedagogue Lluís Ballester, the professors Carmen Orte and Rosario Pozo from the UIB GIFES group. These characteristics are:

1. The massive distribution it currently enjoys. Before, it was distributed in a certain number of magazines that limited its reach to a far smaller population. There are those who maintain that it is not necessary to look for it today, because pornography finds you. The new pornography is distributed on the internet for free, which makes it available to anyone.

2. Due to its low cost, thousands of new productions are continually added to material from more than 30 years ago. This makes it endless and impacts the addiction processes. On one porn portal alone, Pornhub, 4.79 million videos are uploaded daily, creating more than 1 million hours of new content for the site.

3. There is no limit to the type of sexual practices that can be observed, from those considered conventional, to those that may include risk or be illegal.

4. The interactivity that exists between the user and pornography. This interaction can range from observing images on the computer, participating in direct virtual contact with a person to carry out directives, to actively participating in a cyber sexual practice.

5. As we have mentioned, pornography breaks existing boundaries. There have been times when it has questioned racism, female pleasure, and reproduced gender stereotypes. If we ask ourselves what society is like today, to find out what boundaries pornography is currently pushing, we would answer it is that of violence. Yes, the limit that is being pushed is this, there is more and more violent, degrading and humiliating material, especially against women. The transgression that it establishes also brings it closer to death. More and more contents are found that imply a real and severe risk for those actors who practice it, strangulations, blows or rectal prolapses which can be observed more frequently.

BEFORE	NOW
Less exposure time.	More exposure time.
More availability and capacity to access soft porn and less hard porn.	More diversity with the possibility to access explicit, unusual and high-risk porn.
Low interactivity; it was a matter of passively watching.	More interactivity, remote sexual contact with another person is possible.
Boundaries broken in regards to the body parts that could be observed; male pleasure was worth more but female pleasure still existed.	Boundaries broken in terms of violence. Increasing numbers of humiliating and degrading images, especially against women.
More control by parents.	Less control by parents.
Less accessibility and at a cost.	More accessible and much of it is free.

We have to rethink the notion we have about pornography in order to address the issue with our sons and daughters. Above all, because there is less control on our part over the contact they can establish with it. Before, there was the fear that parents might find the material that had been acquired; today, it is enough to simply close out the page so that parents don’t find out that, despite being in the safety of their own home, children are at risk.