I was a kid before the Internet was used by ordinary people. I didn't know pornography existed until I was around adolescence. I never saw the show Baywatch, but I saw commercials and knew a few kids who watched it. It was just an excuse to watch attractive women in bikinis run on the beach. It was a pin-up calendar in motion.
The first porn I saw was on HBO. There was a show where women danced by a pool. We didn't get HBO, but if you turned to the channel you would see static. If you watched at the right time, you might see a distorted glimpse of a breast for a slip second. I felt really guilty about this, and pathetic for wasting an hour in front of TV static waiting to see a breast. I remember hearing jokes about people who did this.
My friend said he found a playboy magazine by the garbage, and we tried to look for it but couldn't find it.
So the stuff up until this point was tame and hard to get compared to what we have now. People would make jokes about porn stores and the guys who went there. People saw them as pathetic creeps.
When the Internet came out, there were a few porn sites and you could download still images of naked women. It would take 10 minutes to download one picture. Then there were animated gifs that would take about as long. Then video but it would take an hour to download a 3 second, tiny clip, and your connection might disconnect during the process making you have to start over. The company also limited the amount of time you could use the Internet in a month. I remember the videos being naked women or straight forward sex, as opposed to the weirder stuff. There was gay stuff, though. There wasn't as much choice. I remember visiting sites and seeing the same stuff again and again.
It was bad, but you still had to be somewhat dedicated. There were no smart phones and often computers were in a family room. I learned about a group of guys, probably around 15 or so, we would watch pornography together. I guess there was a time when the parents weren't home. I thought that was really gross.
In high school, before smart phones, some girls took photographs of themselves nude or kissing other girls (being lesbians for shock value I think), and they got passed around.
Then the videos got faster to download, and suddenly there were countless sites. I think more people had their own computers, but laptops still were expensive. When the smart phones came out, I think that's when things got worse really fast.
Fortunately I stopped pornography use. I really hope I never go back to it. I feel sorry for these boys and girls who stumble across this unlimited hard core, high definition pornography on their personal phones at such young ages when they don't have role models to warm them, or help guiding them toward marriage.
...Masturbation in grown men used to be considered pathetic. A man who was an adult was expected to have a sexual relationship with a woman instead of beating off. It was considered abnormal for man of 25 to masturbate, he was expected to be in a sexual relationship.
This is true. I personally think it's far worse to be unmarried and in a sexual relationship than to be single and masturbate occasionally not to pornography. So I don't think the values were right. I think it would be best to be married, but our society stopped raising children in preparation for marriage. Girls aren't taught to be feminine and men aren't taught to be masculine. Sex is just something people think you do for fun with someone else until you get bored of them. Feminism has led women to think they don't need men. Neither men or women are taught how to approach or behave in a marriage.
We need to return to helping guide young people toward marriage. I'm not saying we 100% arranged marriages, but I think it should be a primary concern of families and communities. We should know our young people, and help them find another person of the opposite sex whom they would be comparable with.
