The psychology of sexual development: is action against porn necessary?

Last week, it was announced that the UK's long
promised internet filters would begin with new customers to BT. With British public  opinion split on the necessity and practicality of opt-out censorship, its impact is yet to be
seen. But what do we know about child development and the effects
of pornography on the brain?


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Janice Hiller is a clinical
psychologist who has specialised in psychosexual issues for the
past 15 years. Neurologically, she says, teenagers and pre-teens
are significantly more likely to have their world views and
attitudes shaped by surrounding stimuli: "At age 10 they have more
neural connections than adults and if there's sexualised images and
languages around them, that's what they'll absorb," she tells me.
"If they're looking at pornography on the internet, their brains
are going to be highly sexualised and that predisposes towards some
kind of problematic maladaptive behaviour in adult life".

Though a predisposition is far from a guarantee, she points out.
"The neural pathways set up by exposure to sexual material may
become embedded, although this does vary from person to person of
course. There is a certain amount of neural plasticity so one
cannot say that sexual images will be 'hard wired', but avoiding
the risk to children by protecting them does seem to be very
important."

Paula Hall, a therapist specialising in porn addiction and
current chair of ATSAC
agrees: "Psychologically they're more susceptible, they're not as
set in their ways, but adolescent brains are much easier to
programme and to learn things. They're pruning neural
pathways
, which is why their sexual tastes can be much more
hard wired into their brains by looking at porn than an older
guy."

There's evidence that sexual attitudes can be altered later than
this too. In a 1981 experiment by Malamuth
and Check
, a group of undergraduates were shown a cinematic
film tangentially featuring violence against women and later
administered a survey seemingly unconnected to the movie. The men
(but not the women) shown the film had markedly higher scores in
acceptance of the use of aggression against women in both sexual
and non-sexual encounters than the control groups. These results
were replicated in a similar 1995 study by Weisz and
Earls
where men (but again, not women) shown a similar film
were more likely to accept rape myths and be less sympathetic
towards the accuser in re-enacted rape trials.

One important thing to note here is that the evidence gathered
on children is in the form of surveys and anecdotes, separate from
the more empirical research carried out on adults: the reasoning
for that is the huge number of ethical alarm bells testing porn on
children would set off. But hidden away in that observation is
something slightly more concerning for those worried by porn's
impact: free streaming pornography really exploded in 2006 with the
launch of
YouPorn
, meaning that seven years of fast broadband and
all-you-can-eat porn is culminating in the first generation of
teenagers weaned on an incredibly varied smorgasbord of sexually
explicit content entering the adult world.

It remains difficult to unpick the sticky world of correlation
and causation, of course. Wired.co.uk heard many anecdotes from
teachers about noticeable increases in overt sex talk and
objectification in recent years, but there are a wide range of
other factors that are or could be at play. These include parenting
techniques, the quality of sex education and, potentially, hormones
present in meat, dairy and drinking water.


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Whether or not these limitations are
valid, the government has announced it will act. "They're getting
distorted ideas about sex and being pressurised in a way that we've
never seen before, and as a father I am extremely concerned about
this," David Cameron said in a speech earlier this year. There's plenty of scepticism in the tech community that these filters can work at
all, and more concern about the fine detail. If a filter is too
lax, it negates the point in having them in the first place, but if
it's too severe then it will lock out porn but do a lot of
collateral damage too. Context is everything, and legitimate
searches for sexual health questions could be blocked by an
overly-puritanical filter. The chilling anti-child porn warning ads
Google served in relation to researching this article proves that
even the world's most sophisticated search engine struggles with
contextual meaning.

There is also a risk that parents could assume that the
government has taken action to protect their children, so they
don't have to. Singer and Singer in 1986, and Peterson, Moore and
Furstenberg in 1991 found that parental supervision and discussion
can negate the effects of media influence by aiding with critical
thinking, but as porn is a secretive, solo activity, there's no
other voices to critique the realism on display. And should
children discuss it amongst themselves, they're less likely to find
dissenting voices through peer pressure and
inexperience.

Perhaps most importantly, the porn industry is a pretty easy
target, and there are questions about how much impact targeting a
single area like this will have when sexualised imagery -- away
from the cognitively separate fantasy land of porn -- is
everywhere. Magazines, tabloids, advertising, TV shows, movies,
music videos and many other areas shape our world view and these
are much more deeply ingrained than a porn habit. In the case of
music videos, the evidence of their influence on sexual attitudes
goes back over two decades: a 1987 study of 457 college students by
Strouse and Buerkel-Rothfuss found that among females,
consumption of MTV was the single most powerful predictor of
attitudes towards sex and relationships, as well as the number of
sexual partners, and obviously the likes of White
Snake's 'Here I Go Again'
video from the year of the
study are positively tame compared to current favourites. Studies
suggest TV can have a similar influence, and social media is another
factor. As one teacher put it to me: "Facebook, Youtube and Twitter
do more to distort our youth's perception of sexuality than
internet porn ever will. Porn is still seen as taboo, but 'sexy
selfies' of teens and preteens are commonplace."

Is this a case of changing attitudes, or just new technology
making personal expression easier? Hall notes that for some,
technology makes extreme behaviour that much easier: "Once there
were a few small ads for prostitutes and you'd have to go to a
payphone with your 10p, now you can get 5 minutes free chat, book
online and find the nearest one with your SatNav." This is a clear
generational shift: "I had a young guy on a treatment programme in
stitches about the idea of older guys going to shops and buying
porn magazines."

Like everything in society, sexual attitudes aren't static. Lest
we forget in the past 200
years novels, telephones, dancing, rock music and many other things
have been accused of having a corrupting influence upon youth
.
In 1816, The Times of London said of the waltz "we feel it
a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so
fatal a contagion". Nearly 200 years separate that and the earlier
quote from David Cameron, but the concerned father motif remains.
Internet pornography has the advantage of coming in a more
scientifically enlightened time where there is enough evidence for
some, but just as it's possible that books and the waltz influenced
some for the worse it's hard to know exactly how widespread the
problem is. Hall notes "If you watch violent porn and have a
history of violence there is much more chance of you committing a
violent sex crime", but emphasises that "It doesn't automatically
lead to that though, and scaremongering about porn isn't helping
address the serious issues."

Even if we imagine that the solutions to all these
philosophical, technical and practical problems have been outlined
in a paper in Whitehall somewhere, success in a field as nebulous
as this is pretty much impossible to measure in any meaningful,
non-anecdotal way. There is enough research to suggest that
pornography in teens still undergoing neural pruning can lead to
issues later in life for some, but just as prohibition in alcohol
and cigarettes has never been effective, it's going to need more
than an opt-out filter to solve. Hall is sure that a filter, though
welcome, will not work for those determined to break it and
education is required: "I'm absolutely not anti-porn. I wouldn't
want to go back to the Victorian era: I think it's important that
we educate young people that sex is fun, sex is enjoyable, sex is
okay -- but it's vital they realise it's not necessarily harmless
fun."

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