Cyber sex and its real effect on society

Sex is the number one searched topic on the Internet. (Weiss 2000) Nine out of 10 children aged between eight and 16 have viewed pornography on the Internet. In most cases, the sex sites were accessed unintentionally when a child, often in the process of doing homework, used a seemingly innocent sounding word to search for information or pictures (London School of Economics 2002). It is believed that 26 popular children's characters, such as Pokemon, My Little Pony and Action Man, revealed thousands of links to porn sites. 30% were hard-core. (Envisional 2000). At least 200,000 Internet users are hooked on porn sites, X-rated chat rooms or other sexual materials online (MSNBC 2000).

After doing a bit of research into this issue / topic I found the above statistics and let me tell you I was shocked. 9 out of 10 children between the age of 8 to 16 have viewed pornography over the internet. WOW! That is ridiculous especially that in most cases it was accidently while doing homework, I mean why isn’t anything done about that? Why don’t these sites have warning entry pages or why aren’t they censored until full consent of the site viewer is given. All these questions immediately come to mind when the severity of the problem is obviously known but nothing is done to stop it.

The fact that these sites have easy accessibility and uncontrolled censorship disgusts me as it is inevitable for anyone to come across a sexual site, image or even just a form of sexually written text. Take for example when you go onto any site the adult commercial sites displaying free teaser porn images on the homepage ‘are you single and looking for love’ pop ups of course people who are sexually aroused will click onto these sites and partake in sexual activity but this is also widely open for children and teens who are just on a site for study purposes. These sites need to be controlled or else this is eventually going to be a matter which will completely get out of hand.

Another major issues which is linked with this phenomenon is that there is no way of knowing who you are talking too that just immediately screams out danger to me. These sites are the perfect opportunity for stalkers, rapists and paedophiles to find victims. And people are largely deceived. It is believed that one in five children who use computer chat rooms has been approached over the Internet by paedophiles. (Detective Chief Superintendent Keith Akerman, Telegraph.co.uk January 2002 ). Child abusers have also been known to seek out unsuspecting victims by posting seemingly innocuous messages in computer chat rooms." -- BBC News, June 16, 1999

I have been in the position of accidently going on an explicit site and I wasn’t happy about it: it would have been a few years ago now when the Simpsons movie was coming out anyway and my little brother who was about 5 or 6 at the time has this major obsession for the Simpsons and he wanted to go see the movie so naturally we went on google did a plain search on the “Simpsons” but I must have misspelt it or something and the next thing I know im on a completely graphic porn site, and my poor brother was standing right next to me, luckily he had no idea what it was except he managed to say “ewww that’s gross”, that in itself is just a small example of how unexpectedly any person is vulnerable to this material, and let me tell you that was not a good experience in one word AWKWARD.

But in my case for example this didn’t affect me as I was easily able to ignore it and move on with what I was doing. However, in contrast it may have completely had a major impact on someone else’s life, someone who was intrigued by the images and wanted to partake in this form of sexual satisfaction possibly leading to obsession.

Ryan Singel suggests that “Internet pornography is the new crack cocaine, leading to addiction, misogyny, pedophilia, and erectile dysfunction” and further Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy also suggests that “Pornography addicts have a more difficult time recovering from their addiction than cocaine addicts, since coke users can get the drug out of their system, but pornographic images stay in the brain forever”.

However although I disagree with the new cyber sex phenomenon I must admit there is a positive side to it. The fact that people are protected from the possibility of being infected with STI’s and women obviously do not have the possibility of falling pregnant this is seen as a physically safe way of partaking I sexual activity. It is also good in the sense that it is seen as a form of psychological treatment for people who are unable to have physical sex due to medical conditions.

To conclude, although cyber sex has its many negatives and small amount of positives it is a newly developing phenomenon which has greatly expanded over the past few years opening up new gateways to the availability of porn and in particular cyber sexual activity. If proper precautions are not taken into consideration cybersex might be the future form of prostitution.

London School of Economics January 2002
Dr. Robert Weiss, Sexual Recovery Institute, Washington Times 1/26/2000
MSNBC/Stanford/Duquesne Study, Associated Press Online, 2/29/2000
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/11/65772 http://www.horizonz.com/statistics.htm