Yes, parents, you can fight porn alone
You can be a two-front porn-fighting army if you want, it's so easy
I wrote last month about how it is actually remarkably easy to stop your children from watching porn—e.g., you just don’t give them a smartphone, and you otherwise strictly control their access to the Internet—and yet how firmly committed so many people are at pretending it’s more complicated than this. This should not be overstated: The porn consumption crisis among children is a very debilitating problem that nevertheless has an extremely simple solution—just don’t give your kid a supercomputer with unfettered access to the global pornography network!—and yet almost anyone you talk to at this point is convinced that the crisis is almost insurmountable and requires complex solutions of extreme logistical magnitude.
For a prime entry in this genre you can read this essay at First Things by Clare Morell and Brad Littlejohn, “Parents Can’t Fight Porn Alone.” In it they describe this “quarter-century-long experiment on the most vulnerable members of society” which has seen “portals to pornography multiplying through smartphones, school-issued Chromebooks, and social media apps” and which they describe as an “unmitigated disaster:”
[A]fter 2000, the changes came fast: broadband internet, cheap laptops, smartphones, tablets, social media. “Everybody’s getting one,” children told their parents, in the self-fulfilling logic of every consumer fad. But the smartphone fad was here to stay, and with it, a wholly different regime of political economy. The average age of first smartphone ownership is now ten years.
There is no need to dance around this: The entire essay spends almost all of its time discussing parental rights, the ineffectiveness of “parental controls” and filters on smartphone devices, the political philosophy of collective action, Supreme Court rulings, the need for complex legal mandates to protect against child consumption of porn—this is a rather long essay, and at absolutely no point in this essay about children accessing pornography en masse on smartphones does it suggest that perhaps children should not be given smartphones. The authors never even seem to consider it! The thought never seems to occur to them; they are almost entirely focused on “maximal legislative discretion in fighting the porn hydra” and entirely unconcerned with taking away the porn delivery devices from the children.
Why is this? Why are so many people who claim they want to prevent children from watching pornography nevertheless uninterested in removing the one thing that is giving them obvious and direct access to it? What is it that motivates so many parents to give their children smartphones even as their children are watching sick sex videos on them? What is the tradeoff that makes this equation so vital in so many people’s minds?
As before, I think a lot of parents have sort of worked out a rough, untested conjecture in their minds that looks something like this: “Children have to have smartphones today. If they don’t have this vital piece of technology from the time they’re 10 years old onwards, they won’t be able to compete in the modern economy. Plus, if they're the only one of their friends not to have this ubiquitous consumer device, they’ll be seen as weird and uncool. Plus, I need a way to call them and check up on them.” The first one is just false. Seriously try to imagine a scenario in which a young person is crippled in the professional world because he wasn’t allowed to get a smartphone until he turned 18. That’s just silly. The second objection is craven and cowardly: If your child’s friend groups are such that they mock him if he doesn’t have an iPhone, get your child some new friends, immediately. (I’m serious about this. Don’t let your children have friends who ridicule and bully them over stupid consumer electronics. Be a better and more proactive parent who isn’t setting your child up for a lifetime of bad friends and bad choices.) As to the third, there is actually an extremely useful device that allows you to stay in touch with your child if you need to while denying him access to pornography. It’s called a flip phone!
It simply cannot be said enough: This is doable, maximally, for pretty much every parent on the planet. You do not have to give your child a smartphone! And beyond that you can closely monitor their access to the Internet to ensure they’re not consuming pornography on home computers. If necessary you can consult with the parents of your child’s friends to ensure that they, too, are implementing these controls so that you don’t have to worry that your children will find a porn conduit via their friend groups.
This is all readily achievable for parents. It might take a little work in some cases; in other cases it might take a lot of work. But it is not difficult in the heuristic sense. You can just do it, do the sometimes-difficult but easily attainable work of preventing your children from accessing pornography. Yes, it’s possible. And the good news is you can seek those other worthy goals while you’re doing it—you can, say, demand lawmakers enact protections for children on the Internet so that it’s harder for them to access porn etc. You can do both, the immediate readily attainable solution and the long-term one that could bear good fruit in the future. Both are possible!
The only reasonable conclusion one can draw from this failure to do it the easy way—from the failure, as with the essay above, to even consider that this is a workable possibility—is that, in the main, most parents who claim to care about this problem do not actually care about it. Look: If you have a crisis of growing magnitude before you, and your options are (a) to solve it very simply and immediately, or (b) to opt instead for a considerably more complex, unworkable, inefficient solution that will probably not solve the problem at all and certainly won’t solve it in a timeframe that will benefit your child before the damage is done—if you have those two options, and you pick the second one, it is not unreasonable to conclude that you actually don’t care about the crisis at all, not in a way that means anything. If you profess to be worried about your child becoming addicted to porn but you continue to give him the unnecessary consumer device that enables him to watch pretty much all the porn he wants at any time, I gotta say I don’t think I’m going to take you seriously on this one. Parents: Don’t be fooled! You can fight porn on your own. Just don’t give your kid a smartphone. That’s like 75% of the battle! Done!