SAN FRANCISCO – The pornography industry has taken over children’s sense of self and sexuality and warped their concept of what sex and a sexual identity is, said Gail Dines, PhD.
She challenged pediatricians to shape policy and help parents in wrangling back that control in a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
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The culprit, Dr. Dines charged, is the multibillion-dollar porn industry that exploded around the year 2000 with the Internet. Then, in 2011, the business model shifted to free pornography to hook young boys in their adolescence and hopefully maintain them as customers after age 18 when they could get their own credit cards.
The average age of a boy’s first encounter with pornography is age 11, explained Dr. Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Chestnut Hill, Mass.
Instead of a father’s Playboy featuring a naked woman in a cornfield, as many male pediatricians in the room might have been introduced to pornography or sexuality, today’s youth are introduced via the brutalization and dehumanization of women, she said. Such experiences traumatize the children viewing them, who become confused about who they are if they are masturbating to images and video of sexual violence, and then they enter a cycle of retraumatization that engenders shame while bringing children back to those sites again and again.
“Hence, in the business model of free porn, you are building in trauma, which is building in addiction,” Dr. Dines said. The effects of this exposure and addiction, based on decades of research, include limited capacity for intimacy, a greater likelihood of using coercive tactics for sex, decreased empathy for rape victims, increased depression and anxiety, and, most recently, rates of erectile dysfunction in males aged 15-27 that mirror the rates in those aged 27-35.
“We have never brought up boys with access to hard core pornography 24-7,” Dr. Dines said. The best way to tackle hard-core pornography is a public health model that educates parents and pediatricians who can band together to raise awareness. Her organization, Culture Reframed, is attempting to do precisely that.
Dr. Dines founded the nonprofit Culture Reframed, which attempts to counter the effects of the pornography industry and media sexuality. Her presentation used no external funding.