Online porn is easily available to kids, addictive and destructive, writes Isabel Hogben, a runner-up in The Free Press's high school essay contest. Now a16-year-old homeschooler, she was 10 when she stumbled across Pornhub.
"Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily," she writes.
Many call porn addiction “the new drug,” Hogben writes. It's a "disastrous replacement for intimacy among my sexless, anxiety-ridden generation."
I saw simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism, and unthinkable physical violence. The porn children view today makes Playboy look like an American Girl doll catalog.
Tweens and teens don't realize the images are fake. "A recent Cambridge University study shows that porn’s effects on the brain are neurochemically identical to drug addiction," she writes. "It’s as much a dangerous substance as illicit drugs."
Saturated with images of abusive sex before they have actual sexual experience, "most of my friends think this stuff is normal," Hogben writes.
Parents need help from age-verification laws to limit children's access to porn, she concludes. But kids "know how to get around web blockers and site filtration. I did, and so did my friends, even though our moms did everything they could to protect us."
Another runner-up, Caleb Silverberg, writes about why he traded his smartphone for an ax. A phone-free boarding school broke his addiction to social media.
I was less impressed by the winning essay, A Constitution for Teenage Happiness, by Ruby LaRocca, a homeschooled senior. She finds joy in studying ancient languages. Most teenagers will not.