She's Only Eight Years Old

I was definitely a tomboy when I was growing up. In fact, I broke my collar bone in second grade playing soccer with the boys. I loved riding dirt bikes around the neighborhood and ending up in “the pit” or exploring in the forbidden construction sites of new houses being built.

It was there that we found all sorts of treasures amidst the trash of construction workers’ leftover fast food and coffee cups. We especially loved it when construction workers gifted us with cigarettes and alcohol. All the cool kids dared each other to try smoking and drinking. It never occurred to any of us that something more dangerous than a pack of Marlboros or a can of Coors would enter our lives one day. As we played the seemingly harmless childhood game of “truth and dare,” the stakes were elevated to a higher level after our first pornographic magazine appeared.

I was only eight years old when I saw my first Playboy. My parents definitely never prepared me for this. And yet, without any form of consent, those images and their related messages were invited and permanently seared into my brain that day.

The excitement of normal sexual desire and wonder. The shame of not knowing what this was all about.

It was inevitable for me to find ways back to what I saw that day. Hidden beneath the debris in my heart, my mind, and my construction site, I’d dig for those images that taught me what it meant to be a sexual being.

The excitement of normal sexual desire and wonder. The shame of not knowing what this was all about.

It was inevitable for me to find ways back to what I saw that day. Hidden beneath the debris in my heart, my mind, and my construction site, I’d dig for those images that taught me what it meant to be a sexual being.

“I guess this is what women really look like.” “It’s obvious this is what the boys like.” “If I want to fit in, this is what I need to do.” 

It was that day I learned. This is how I was supposed to look and act.

Porn sealed the deal that day. Because I grew up in a less than ideal, broken, and abusive home environment, there was no way I could talk to either of my parents about what I saw. In fact, when I was forced to act out some of what I saw in the form of a strip show for the neighbor boys, I was grounded.

For the entire summer.

Message received loud and clear. Adults don’t understand and can’t be trusted. Girls get in trouble. Boys don’t.

She’s Only 8 Years Old

I learned about my worth from porn. That led to years of sexual exploitation, shame, sexual violence, suicidal ideations….I almost died because of porn.

One magazine. 

You caught that. A magazine. A Playboy magazine at that. Seemingly harmless to many, Hugh Hefner famously said “The notion that Playboy makes women into sex objects is ridiculous. Women ARE sex objects.” (emphasis mine).

If you’ve been hiding under a rock, I’ll let you in on a little secret. The Playboy I saw that day was benign compared to today’s porn. The imagery I saw that day is on mainstream television today. The still pictures of a magazine are not even remotely in the same category as today’s porn. That Playboy was long before we had internet where the Pandora’s Box of accessible, affordable, anonymous, aggressive, and addictive porn is almost impossible to avoid. More on that later.

At the time, my little heart and my tiny brain didn’t realize how the great porn experiment would change my life in ways that only trauma can. We know a lot more now about “adverse childhood experiences” and how they influence a child’s chances for success in adulthood. Suffice it to say, not one single mind of a child is fully prepared to process what we see when we view pornographic images at such an early age.

Sex is beautiful and amazing and powerful and wonderful…in the right context. When there is no context other than being thrust into porn without permission, it changes people.

Now, we know that there is a plethora of data related to how pornographic imagery affects our brains. Neural pathways imprint on what we see and our sexual scripts are written to follow the tracks laid by porn. What starts out as curiosity over naked bodies ends up with content that leads to body image disorders, impaired cognitive function, erectile dysfunction, etc. And, these are just a few of the damaging results of viewing pornography. There are countless significant studies (including meta-analyses — aka studies of studies to confirm the results of what the studies are studying — FYI that’s scientific goodness), showing more damaging effects in how porn influences adults.

But, remember I was just a kid. And, the average age of exposure to porn is consistently during elementary school, so we know there are children like me who saw porn way before our brains knew what hit us.

Our beautiful brains — they aren’t even fully developed until our twenties, so how could we make sense of what we are supposed to process when we see porn as a child? Neuroscience tells us that viewing pornography mirrors drug addiction in terms of how intensely it changes our brains and forces us to crave more intense and extreme content. Starting with seemingly innocent searches for “boobs” or “sex,” young minds are thrust into a bottomless pit of content that research overwhelmingly confirms to be harmful to individuals, relationships, and society. Even porn producers and those who’ve left porn tell us they don’t know what could be more extreme than the content that’s available NOW — on every smartphone, gaming system, tablet, laptop, home or work computer on earth. (And if you want to fact check, let’s talk. There’s TONS of data and personal stories to share).

Global trends reveal themes of child abuse, incest, racism, dehumanization, violence, exploitation of marginalized populations, etc. And, right here in the US, we are leading the way in producing and consuming pornographic content by a landslide. Adult Video News (AVN) award winning adult film director, Joe Gallant said ten+ years ago, “I hate to say, but I think the future of American porn is violence.” And he was spot on. Content became more extreme in the last ten years as evidenced by the internet. 

Take the simple fact that in 2018 alone, over 45 million images of child sexual abuse imagery were shared online...Just in the US…On a handful of websites. 

Yes, you read that right.

Child. Sexual. Abuse. Imagery. Shared. Online.

Over 45 million images. And, oh by the way, over 60% of those were of children under the age of 12.

There are straight up communities all over the internet, even on popular websites you and I use every day. Ever hear of YouTube Kids? There too. Despite federal obscenity laws, the internet is crawling with and many are promoting this type of content. *Shameless plug for you to contact your elected officials and have a little chat about enforcing federal obscenity laws and holding tech companies accountable for the content that’s illegally shared online every day and night in every part of our lonely planet.

So, what’s the point? This is not harmless entertainment.

People of all ages, races, sexes, religions, etc. are struggling with porn on both ends of the spectrum. When we understand how our brains work, it makes sense that the more we see something, the more it becomes engrained in our thoughts, which ultimately result in our actions/behaviors. The more we view content that normalizes abuse, degradation, racism, violence, and hatred of any particular population (and believe me, there is a genre of porn for EVERY population), the more likely we are to either act on what we are seeing or get bored with that content and move on to something more extreme.

For example: Why would a man who had one lunch date with a woman get the idea that that the first time he kisses her, he is entitled to choke her? Why would an elementary school boy rape his classmate and say “girls always cry when you have sex with them.” How could someone wake up one day and decide that a child, a toddler, and even an infant “wants” to be raped? Why would young women believe the abusive content in Fifty Shades of Grey is a “love story?” In the #MeToo era, where everyone is standing up for the rights of those who are sexually exploited, why do we not ask where we are getting these ideas? In the liberation of women and people of color and marginalized populations all over the globe, the content in porn is doing the exact opposite of liberating…It’s glamorizing the abuse, humiliation, and degradation of all these communities who are being exploited.

Jules Jordan, gonzo porn actor, director, and producer famously said “One of the things about today’s porn is so many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff.” You see, the porn industry has an extremely intricate business model that uses technology to determine what viewers are watching so they can create more of that particular content, hence driving the demand for things like choking, gang rape, name calling, hitting, and other genres that involve bodily fluids, animals, and permanent physical, psychological, and other forms of damage to actors and actresses. In fact, a lot of the technology porn uses to track the habits of the global community of porn watchers came from the idea that people wanted and needed to watch more porn. Smart phones, webcams, virtual reality, etc. were designed to allow the anonymity of watching porn at work, on the airplane, or even at church.

So, next time you hear the story about child on child sexual abuse, campus rape, military sexual assault, domestic minor sex trafficking, sextortion, revenge porn, deep fake, sex robots, etc., I challenge you to dig a little deeper and ask I wonder how much porn that person was watching and if they were only eight years old when they started.