Quote of note:
"What we once called porn is just mainstream sex now, and what we now think of as pornography has shrunk to a tiny, tiny area," Herdt said. "We've expanded the envelope of normative sex so much that there's not much room for 'porn' anymore."
Just the Facts of Life Now
Pornography is so common in the Digital Age that teens see it as 'part of the culture.' But if it's corrupting them, the data don't show it.
By Shawn Hubler
Times Staff Writer
April 23, 2005
Mike Clark figures he was just a little kid when he saw his first sexy pop-up ad on the Internet, and somewhat older when he saw his first sexy pop-up that he understood. First X-rated spam? Let's see when did he first learn to use e-mail? First videogame with sexy images? Probably the first time he played Grand Theft Auto. First glimpse of an online porn site?
"Right after my first sex ed class in seventh grade," the peach-fuzzed Orange County 16-year-old confessed one recent Saturday as his buddies burst out laughing.
"I mean, the minute they tell you that stuff is out there, you're like, 'Really? It is?' "
And it is, his peers confirmed, shouting over music during a lunch break at a conference of a teen service organization in Irvine. It's online, on cable, on cellphone cameras, in chat rooms, in instant messages from freaks who go online and trawl children's Web journals, on cam-to-cam Web hookups, on TV screens at parties where teens walk past it as if it were wallpaper, in lectures about abstinence in Sunday school and in health class, in movies, in hip-hop lyrics like the one blaring from the loudspeaker as they lined up for pizza and burritos.
"Pornography," shrugged Scott Timsit, a dark-haired 16-year-old in wire-rimmed glasses, "is just part of the culture now. It's almost like it's not even, like, porn."
The first generation to grow up with the Internet and all it has wrought in the cultural mainstream is beginning to come of age. It is a generation for whom 900 numbers and scrambled scraps of flesh on the Spice channel have given way, in a few short years, to bulk e-mail ads for the Paris Hilton sex tapes and porn subplots on "The O.C." It is a generation in which sexual frankness has become a permanent feature of the landscape, with uncertain long-term implications.
By definition, pornography is sexual material that is so beyond the pale as to be offensive for most people, said Gilbert Herdt, director of the National Sexuality Resource Center, a Ford Foundation-funded project in San Francisco. But as the Internet has made more extreme images more accessible to more people at younger ages, standards have shifted in other media outlets.
