No problem. I'm in my 50's. I didn't see my first porno until I was 19 at a drive-in. I didn't see my first super-gore picture until I was in my 30's. It seems very weird to me that kids see all this at a very young age. Now Hentai is another weird thing to me. I do know humans are adaptable, but don't know in what way kids have adapted to it. My poor father, he heard Jimmy Fallon mention 2 girls 1 cup so he looked it up. He was visibly shaken when he told me about it. I have managed to avoid that one.
Thank you. That was amazing. The dancing girls especially made me reminisce (of my 13 y/o days). My parents never knew that I installed some secret dancing-girl thinger on the home-computer. I constantly wonder, and struggle with, how the internet impacts my 14 y/o stepdaughter in ways of which I'm unaware.... and how to approach it.
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but I couldn't help but note that 16 year old me would have been utterly baffled (and intrigued) by that headline.
Read it out loud a few times and imagine yourself in the VHS era.
I know, as a child I was always chasing magazines blowing in the wind just in case they were pornographic. You just don't see kids doing that these days.
This made me realise that by the time my 2 year old son is old enough to watch adult movies, movies from the decade I was born will be entering the public domain.
Yeah, I spent years being frightened of stuff like Jurassic Park, Critters, X-Files, and even a MacGyver episode(!) That last one is where MacGyver gets lead poisoning and starts hallucinating; I must've seen that when I was, 4, 5, maybe? I remembered it when I saw it years later at the age of 12 or so (at which point it wasn't scary at all).
But around that age I did see Jurassic Park, and I spent months scared in bed – every time I heard some rumbling noise (usually just a car) I worried it might be some T-Rex or whatnot shrug. X-Files was also all the rage at the time and I always imagined aliens and whatnot peeking through my window.
It all seems profoundly silly even to me who lived through this to the point of mental illness, but kids can be really silly and have a kind of over-active imaginations that can make things scary that you or I have trouble imagining.
And all of that was before the internet. Even back in the 90s some more parental controls wouldn't be a bad idea, tailored to the personality of the child.
I could only have been about 6 or 7, and watched this between some cartoons. Scared the hell out of me. I didn't know how to "protect myself" from this menace so decided I'd just go and hide in the cupboard.
I don't know how much of this is really new. I spent my youth watching TV and playing Sega and computer games. By age 12 I had seen every episode of "All In The Family" at least twice. I stayed up watching TV on school nights until 1AM.
I also do believe I received bad parenting, but eventually I turned out OK.
As a kid in the 80's, there was a pretty big disconnect between the movie rating and what we would eventually watch on VHS at home. Over time I effectively saw every popular 80's movie, every martial arts movie, and a good chunk of horror movies before the age of 12 on home video.
reply