Decoding Boys by Cara Natterson

Author:Cara Natterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

THE KID/PARENT DIVIDE

After my exposure to Gail and my conversations with tweens, teens, and college kids, I felt like an idiot given the major boat I had missed. To spare other parents the same sense of inadequacy, I started to share my intel with them. All but a few looked at me sideways.

Parents don’t entirely believe this story of easy-access porn, because we are online all day and night too, and we aren’t swimming in a sea of nakedness. So how is it possible that’s the online universe our kids occupy? But I told them what I (now) knew and passed on this advice: Pay attention to the ads popping up on your screens; slow your scroll and look at the clickbait in your feeds; search a phrase you might have searched when you were younger if there were such an option. We might not click on this stuff—we might not even register that it exists—because we know where it will take us. But our kids? With their surging hormones and newfound feelings of sexual curiosity and famously imbalanced processing of risk versus reward, they’re bound to take the bait (which, incidentally, leads them to being baited more often; search engines know what you’re looking for and offer it up unsolicited). They’re not thinking consequentially. Frankly, even if they are, they may not know where those bread crumbs lead. So they click and land on porn. And then—as many kids have described it to me, at least—they watch. Maybe just for a moment, maybe longer. Maybe a few of them, particularly the boys, go back again and then again, because it’s titillating. It’s porn, for god’s sake! It’s a multi-billion dollar online industry (some estimate as much as $97 billion) for a reason.

And therein lies the conundrum: they watch even though they know they aren’t supposed to, and it turns them on (particularly the boys) even if it’s a little bit aggressive or scary or gross or too much too soon. Here are born feelings of embarrassment quickly morphing to shame, and as most of the boys I queried explained, they didn’t know how they could possibly talk to a parent or even a friend about any of this when they stumbled across it…and they all stumble across some form of it.

I can no longer count the number of calls I have received over the years that start with Oh my God, you were right.

The more I learned, the more it fueled my anger. Because none of this is accidental. The collective porn industry isn’t targeting middle-aged men and accidentally picking up a few straggler teenage boys along the way. No. There exists a highly lucrative long-term play to engage young viewers. As most everyone knows by now—including the creators and distributors of porn—the developing brains of tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings are more susceptible to stimulation of all sorts. In the most simplistic terms, this is why kids are more likely to become addicted to just about anything (nicotine,

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