Have you talked with your teenagers about net-porn lately? You should!

Danish daily newspaper Politiken writes today on 15-19 years olds use of net-porn. Findings shows that nearly every third 15-19 years old Dane visited one or more hardcore porn site during the month of June 2009. The 15-19 years olds who did visit a porn-site, spend a little more than one hour on the porn-sites during that month.

I helped Politiken dig up the facts conducting a special analysis on the available (though slightly hidden) figures from the FDIM/gemiusAudience study. And while looking into the gender and age composition and affinity-indexes on the eight most popular porn-sites, I couldn’t help asking myself: do we really want our kids to learn what sex is all about from watching gang-bang-videos and com-shots in close-up (and yes, this is what we are talking about)?

I myself would prefer this not to be the case. I’d prefer the kids to view sex as equally a matter of intimacy, appreciation and emotional exploration.

The question is how teenagers (leaving the rest of us aside for a moment) could obtain a multi-facetted and nuanced view on sex, in a world where all it takes to get yourself exposed to only all-to-explicit penises and vaginas is a single google-search (although noting the Politiken-study shows net-porn only takes up half a percent of the time the kids spend surfing the net – that is: the problem is not that porn is all they do online, the problem is that most they know about sex comes from porn-sites).

I think there’s really only one way to deal with these issues: talk to your teenagers. It’s not an easy thing to do. But there’s really not a lot of alternatives. Forbidding it is not the way forward I think. It’s both highly impractical (bordering to the impossible) – and restricting the freedom of expression for the sake of your own convinience is really a messy thing to start dealing with. Then there’s the monitoring path (like installing software that tries to block porn whenever the software thinks it sees it). This might work for smaller kids, but when they reach adolescence, they’ll be able to find away around it. Both because they’ll outsmart you – and because they suddenly find themselves much more motivated.

So: have you talked with your teenagers about net-porn lately? You should!