The
Power Of Deviant Sex Depictions On
Teens
"Even
if you're not looking for it, you
could be
innocent," said 15-year-old Zach.
"If you go on the computer, on the
Internet, and you're looking for
something
good, it will find you." That
"it" is pornography, and it's
hardcore. "It is graphic," Ernie
Allen, president of the National
Center for
Missing and Exploited Children,
emphasized.
"It is explicit. It is deviant. It's
aberrant. Kids are seeing content that
no 12
or 13-year-old is mentally,
psychologically,
or emotionally prepared to deal with."
Child psychiatrist Dr. W. Dean Belnap
said
pornography actually shuts down a part
of the
brain. "There is a loss of free agency
because it demands a repetition of the
experience over and over again," he
explained. "Pornography shaped my want
for sex and what I wanted to do
whenever I
started having sex, big time,"
16-year-old Justin confessed. "It
wasn't
just like, 'Oh, I want to have a
relationship
with this girl and have sex with her.'
I just
want to have sex with as many as I can
and
then sex was pretty meaningless, you
know what
I mean. I just wanted to do what they
did on
the porn." It's not just boys becoming
addicts. "It pretty much kind of
destroyed our lives because we
depended on it
and it just broke friendships...
relationships," Courtney, 18,
admitted.
"It broke, like, our respect for
ourselves and our respect for others."