WINNIPEG, Canada – Delegates attending a Monday symposium called the mammoth “social experiment” known as online pornography “an abject failure.”
Hosted by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, “Generation XXX: the Pornification of Our Children” attempted to shock the public into doing something about the demon of internet porn.
The symposium is “really a call to alarm for the public,” Rosalind Prober, co-founder of children’s rights advocate Beyond Borders, told the assembly. “Enough is enough. We have to address it.”
Gabe Deem, a 26-year-old Texan who calls himself a “recovered porn addict,” told the Toronto Sun porn is pervasive, destructive and too easily accessed.
Porn is “more accessible than it’s ever been, it’s free, it’s anonymous and it’s right there in their pocket if they have a smartphone,” he said. “Porn is clearly influencing boys’ and girls’ expectations of what they need to do and what they need to look like. Porn is morphing teens’ tastes.”
A common theme runs through symposium speakers’ prepared remarks: Online porn warps expectations and distances youth from real-life relationships by presenting a skewed view of sexuality. Young females are taught to accept objectification, and young males are encouraged to abuse.
“The message to girls is that the way to show they’re liberated is to just take [the kinds of sexual behavior portrayed in adult material],” Cordelia Anderson, a Minneapolis-based advocate who calls adult content “exploitative material,” told the Sun. “Whether someone feels any pleasure is irrelevant in a pornified context.
“We don’t see any kind of caring, we don’t see intimate conversations, there’s no sense of relationships,” she continued. “It’s almost always women being a set of orifices for men to penetrate or a group of men to penetrate. This isn’t helping our sexuality; this is hijacking our sexuality.”
