A government commissioned study says that 84% of boys aged 16-17 have seen internet porn, but most claim it’s accidental. What horseshit. Here’s a much more accurate view of the situation: 100% of teenage boys are horny little bastards who’ll lie about their porn viewing habits to government researchers because they don’t want to seem like horny little bastards.
The research, which will almost certainly be used by Conroy and his pals to try and reinforce their argument for mandatory internet filtering, also states that two thirds of teenage girls surveyed have viewed porn online as well.
Even though the internet wasn’t anywhere near as prevalent when I was a teenage boy, I can say without a trace of doubt that any teenage boy saying they’d only seen porn online accidentally is lying. Because it’s completely natural for teenagers to be curious about the physical and hormonal changes in their body, and porn offers a fairly easy way to explore and understand those changes, even if it isn’t necessarily the best way.
I can’t speak for women here—never having been one—but I imagine it’s the same across the estrogen fence.
Let’s just hope that somehow the end result of this study is better parenting, rather than the government deciding they’ll try and “fix” the problem themselves…
MDolley
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 1:45 PM“A government commissioned study says that 84 per cent of boys aged 16-17 have seen internet porn, but most claim it’s accidental.”
Replace the word accidental with awesome. Research fixed.
Adam
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 2:01 PMhahahahaha ur awesome man ur f’in hilarious
Charles
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 7:10 PMAhhh… so awesome.
krnageskillz
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 1:54 PM“Let’s just hope that somehow the end result of this study is better parenting, rather than the government deciding they’ll try and “fix” the problem themselves…”
Too right! Some parents seem to blame other things for their lack of parenting like saying “schools should teach that”. A filtered internet is a snail slow internet.
James Mac
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 2:07 PMThe estrogen fence?
That’s a brilliant term.
Did the other 16 percent find it on purpose?
Anonymous
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 2:51 PM100% of them would have visited /b/ or /s/ at one time or another
Anon
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 4:06 PMrules 1 and 2
We don’t want to attract anymore cancer than we already have.
TomG
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 3:13 PMI guess 84% of 16-17 year old boys also suffer from ‘accidental wanking syndrome’…
Derek Harperhorn
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 6:00 PMYup!
So true.
The very moment i got an internet connection when i was thirteen, i was looking at the pr0n within couple of hours.
Ed Robertson
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 6:38 PMactually its a medical fact that the more u slap the sausage, the less chance u will get prostate cancer.
hahahaha accidental? pfft every guy deliberately searches porn…u hardly ever just stumble upon it when your reading the news or reading about gadgets.
Charles
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 7:12 PMBut yeah, frankly who cares? Boys look at porn. I’m a boy, I look at porn. Lots of girls do too. Either out of curiousity or horniness, most kids look at porn no matter what.
Paul C
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 7:36 PMIt’s funny, because in another study 84% of kids between 16-17 say they lie on surveys.
Lid
Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 4:07 AMAlthough you jest, and I can see your point of vies, I can see how this could happen.
I’d shown my little girl (8yo at the time) how to watch Hannah Montana on YouTube.
A couple of weeks later, she called me over and showed me a porn site. How did she get there?
Ever tried typing http://www.youtube.com into the address bar without the ‘y’
She did, accidentally. Guess where it goes?
How pissed was I?
Richard
Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 8:45 AMYour fault really, for not supervising your child on the internet. Plenty of good software that controls what your kids see on the net…
cleverclogs
Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 9:09 AMLOL they had to survey kids to find they looked at porn? Come on, it should be an assumption.
Teens are horny!
It’s probably better they stay in and watch porn than go and shag anyone, everyone and everything.
Stilgherrian
Monday, September 14, 2009 at 7:10 AMIt’s also worth putting the report into context. It was not original research, but a “literature reviews” — that is, it reported on what other research had already been done.
That 84% figure comes from a 2003 study by Michael Flood and Clive Hamilton which used a very small sample size, was of suspect methodology and was commissioned by Hamilton himself who is personally one of the key drivers of the “we must filter the internet” campaign.
The full text of the report itself provides all the warnings about the reliability of the numbers. Those warnings do not make it into the headlines.
I wrote more on this over at Crikey but it’ll sit behind their paywall for another 11 days unless you grab a free trial subscription.