It’s every parent’s worst nightmare – talking to their kids about the “birds and the bees.” Much like a person’s first sexual encounter, the conversation is usually short, awkward, and difficult to maneuver through.
But there is hope. It comes in the form of a story told by Adam Savage from Mythbusters. In a podcast on The Moth, he explains the way he told his two boys about sex and the way he handled finding out about their first internet searches for porn.
For Savage’s kids, the sex talk came in the fourth grade after a phone call home from the school. “There’s no reason not to be technical,” Savage said, “so I go into some fairly great detail about their private parts, how they work, what they do, where they go.”
He says throughout the podcast that he believes his kids are like two bunches of code; like computers, they need huge amounts of information to understand something and to function. You may not want to talk to your kids about porn, but you probably don’t want the Internet to be their first teacher, either.
Savage, on the other hand, enjoys the process.
“I look up and I see the look on their face and – that look – it’s one of undivided attention. So we have a bunch more sex talks over the next few years, and they go fine! I say some funny things. I say some real things. I think I’m really getting to them. But the whole time, all I’m really thinking about is how to approach this aspect of their lives that I didn’t have to deal with when I was a kid. They had the internet. We didn’t have the 24/7 delivery of porn to every device strapped to our bodies.”
The way Savage talks with his kids about sex is similar to the approach the Oscar-nominated movie Captain Fantastic takes. Viggo Mortensen, in his Oscar-nominated role, explains sex to his kids like a fed-up high-school health teacher. It isn’t awkward, it’s informative.
But talking about porn can certainly be more difficult. The first time Savage found out one of his sons was searching for porn he says he took the “bad cop” route. Though when he realized it wasn’t working, and when he found out his second son was searching for porn, he took a different approach.
He says he talked about it during a car ride with his sons to Sunday morning breakfast.
“Listen, what you did was totally reasonable. Being curious about what people look like naked is rational and a normal response to the world and it is a reasonable curiosity for you to have. No one’s in trouble and I’m not mad. Now, is there something you want to tell me?”
“But again, all I’m thinking about really is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, not what he saw, but what he’s gonna see. So I tell him, you’ve gotta be careful out there.”
“The thing you gotta understand bud is, the internet hates women. And I recognize there’s probably those out there who are thinking that’s an incredibly broad brush to paint the internet with but let me put it this way. If you could look into someone’s brain the way you search the internet, and the internet was a dude, that dude has a problem with women.”
Thirty percent of all the data transferred online is porn, and studies say that 70 percent of child sex trafficking is facilitated through the Internet. There are 40 million US adults that regularly visit pornography website, and that number doesn’t include teens, those that access pornography less regularly, or Savage’s fourth graders.
The severity of pornography’s effects is still hotly debated. Some Virginia lawmakers want porn declared a “public health hazard,” while others think the information is still too unclear.
Dr. William Struthers, a psychology professor at Wheaton College, said “any kind of pornography research is incredibly muddy water.”
“The talk” about porn should be happening much more often, and it doesn’t have to be awkward, Savage says there are perks along the way.
“As a side note, I have my children’s first porn search terms. It’s like almost better than their first steps.”
His son’s first search term: nudies.
Featured Image by Genevieve on Flickr
Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
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