Image by: Artist Von Brandis
Well, she did until I found out today.
I have to say, it was a shock when I saw her web browser history and discovered some quite adult content. Violent, hardcore, straight, gay, animated.
This is not what I wanted to be talking to my ten year old daughter about. What the hell happened to fairies?
She plays Minecraft, plays with dolls, enjoys reading Harry Potter.
She also has precocious puberty – a condition that means that her body has already gone into puberty before eight years old (the early but also normal time it can start). Although she is having some treatment, clearly it doesn’t stop those teenage feelings of exploring sex and sexuality.
My first encounter with porn was about 16 when a friend was showing it to my younger brother – Debbie Does Dallas. I watched about ten minutes of it with them and then left because it was a little uncomfortable.
The worst thing about it was that now instead of my romantic little innocent fantasies all I could see in my head was penis/vagina, penis/vagina, penis/vagina. Ad infinitum.
I would call myself highly sexually curious at that age, but zero experience – I didn’t even get kissed until after I was 16. But I certainly checked out my parent’s Karma Sutra copy whenever I could. Other friends were sexually active but I didn’t really get going until 17. Even then, due to my trying to work out if I was lesbian or bisexual, it was confused and I was also pretty controlled.
I’ve watched porn since then, in various situations. With partners and alone. Porn in itself is not a problem unless you don’t know how to interpret it and realise it isn’t real sex.
My ex and I have always been open about sex and answered any questions that have come up. We believe it’s better to be honest and frank about sex. It’s the same here with the lovely.
So with a household full of teenagers and lots of wifi hooked up devices, it was bound to happen. I didn’t think it would happen to her so soon however.
While it’s not something I like to think that she has seen, the ex and I spoke with her calmly about what pornography is, and is not. We spoke to her about having sexual feelings and that they are perfectly normal and fine.
But watching porn is not.
There is no punishment being meted out. She didn’t get into trouble. Instead we wanted her to know that although we don’t want her to watch porn, her feelings are OK and if she needs to talk about them then she can talk to us any time.
Hopefully, with some stricter device time at night (and we already had no devices in the room on school nights) and the support from us and a counsellor, she can move past this and get back to a more normal idea of what relationships, sexual or otherwise, might be.
Wishing you all the happiness the Universe can bring
Tanya
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