Porn has been around, in various forms, for centuries. Yet, the porn of today is an entirely new phenomenon. It’s more explicit than ever before, more deviant than ever before, and more accessible than ever before. That accessibility is creating a public health crisis for our kids.
We’ve seen the studies. Explicit adult content affects the brains of our adolescents, releasing neurochemicals in a way similar to that of hard drugs. It creates extremely unhealthy standards and perceptions of relationships that affect our kids’ early notions of intimacy. It’s a problem.
It doesn’t matter what race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or sexual preferences we have–this is an issue that affects all of us people who have young ones in our lives that we care for. And I say ‘people’ for a reason: whether we’re parents, aunts, teachers, or anything else in between.
Porn is negatively impacting our young people, and we need to do something about it. It’s nonpartisan, it’s neutral, it cuts across all demographics and beliefs. And for that, we need all hands on deck.
We need a movement.
We need a movement where we can come together and ‘de-taboo’ this taboo topic. Because as long as we keep it taboo, as long as ‘big bad porn’ lurks in the shadows, unnamed and unaddressed, this issue will continue to negatively impact our kids. And this isn’t just an issue that will impact them today: porn has the potential to affect our kids’ brains and our kids’ relationship to relationships for life.
So let’s gather our ranks, gather our tribes, gather our teams, and get to work.
It all starts with acknowledgement. Acknowledgement that in this generation of technology, porn has entered the societal scene as a topic to be reckoned with. It takes guts. Guts to have awkward conversations, perhaps first with those closest to you, with your child having access to porn and how to talk about it with them and with others; like other parents. From there, we can build out. Bring those conversations to mom’s groups, to PTA meetings, to whole communities. Learn, from the ground up, what our strategies can look like. How to best protect our kids and augment their understanding of this new phenomenon in order to avoid exposure and harm.
And we’re here to help. At The Third Talk, we’re creating visibility around the issues kids face regarding porn, and working with everyone from State agencies to individual parents to do the necessary work of unraveling what makes this topic taboo; and what has kept us from having this conversation so far. We’re doing it because we care, because we know it’s important, and because we know it’s imperative to create the best outcome for our kids and for our community.
We’re creating a movement. Please join us.
