Comment by cgriswald
2 days ago
The older kids are often the easy source for the younger kids. At 8 I had already seen a Playboy and knew kids who had seen harder stuff. I could have easily gotten a teenager to get me cigarettes (and drugs, but I didn’t know what those were really). I had also already tasted alcohol. Any of this I could have stolen from any number of places.
At 16 it was easier, but at 8 it wasn’t hard.
There’s a difference between “saw a playboy once” and having regular or semi regular access to it.
Same goes for alcohol and cigarettes.
If you had regular access to those things you had parents who didn’t care.
It’s also not about kids on the margin. The vast majority of 8 year olds have not tried alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes.
There’s also a difference between “saw my first” and “saw a playboy once.” I need you to understand I was a good kid whose parents cared until they divorced some years later. And yet I had multiple sources of access to this stuff without looking for it. Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
Again, if you occasionally caught a glimpse of a playboy, that’s not a significant problem.
If you were regularly smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and reading porn magazines at 8 yeas, your parents fell down on the job. An 8 year old doesn’t have the wherewithal to hide that from parents who are paying attention.
> Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.
Yeah a kid with the mind of an adult could access all kinds of illegal material.
Making it illegal to rob a bank doesn’t mean that’s it’s literally impossible. It’s about stopping enough people from trying that society functions.
The state of the world before the internet was that it was hard to keep a kid from ever glimpsing a titty, but it was relatively easy to keep a kid from having regular access to hard core porn-much, much easier than it is now. My take is that as a society we need to figure out some way to make this easy enough for parents to do that it becomes the default. Just like drugs, alcohol, and porno mags.
Another issue is that online porn and algorithmic brain rot is free (at least enough of it is). With IRL contraband, lack of money is a big limiting factor for kids. The IRL equivalent would be if the local liberal let 8 year olds checkout hard core porn DVDs.
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