Michael asked:

Why is it not good for teenagers or people under 18 to view or get involved in anything related to
pornography?

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A good question. Now tell me, what is pornography? Is it explicit depiction of sex? Then we can't have
sex education, can we, if we don't want pornography, if that's what pornography is. Is it depiction of
sex as pleasurable? Same problem. Is it the depiction of sex in a "non-educational" context? Well,
first, you can see that since I'm putting that in scare quotes I'm having some problems with that
concept... what about looking up stuff in libraries, for example? But let's say, for the sake of argument,
that an "educational context" is one which is "supervised" by a "qualified adult", ok? Leaving aside the
question of the meanings of the latter quoted phrases.

So, then, why is it not good for those under 18 to view, say, explicit depictions of sex in an
unsupervised setting? Well, here's the answer I'd give. A child ("person under 18") is very actively
engaged in learning about the world, and does not have much experience in evaluating, i.e., in
distinguishing good from bad. That's what a child is.Certainly, there are people who are adults at the
age of 18, but by-and-large 16-18 seems a good lower boundary for the above abilities.

Depictions of sex are very culturally determined, and unfortunately many of those depictions are
violent, degrading, and portray sex as shameful, "dirty", and so forth. Do we want children to learn
that sex is some or all of those things? Well, I don't; I want children to understand sex as good,
life-fulfilling, pleasurable, interactions between fairly equal adults... etc... and in addition realize the
problems that may ensue through sex: jealousy, depression, STDs, and so forth. So I wouldn't want a
child to see what I've termed "pornography" above, not because I think explicit depictions of sex are
necessarily bad, but because I think that in our culturethey definitely tend to be. And I truly don't
know a culture in which this is not the case, at least to the extent that there are enough depictions of
sex from the above negative viewpoints that a person who could not discriminate, who is still learning,
would have a very good chance of learning what I would most definitely feel are the wrong attitudes.

So unless there are clear individual cases in which one knows that a person under 18 is nota child,
or until we consistently portray sex as positive (in roughly the manner I outlined above) I will agree —
not happily — with those who want to restrict the unsupervised access of children to sexual materials.

Steven Ravett Brown