In 1997, I was hired at a start-up named WebTV that brought the Internet to your couch. I worked in Customer Service with a gaggle of recent college grads who landed in Silicon Valley during the beginning of the tech boom, troubleshooting connection problems, and other user questions. Prior to being hired, I had used email 10 times and never searched the web. There I was taking calls from all across America – remember, this was before high-speed internet – so these callers were using dial-up to connect and using a box to access and use email. More context: Google did not exist! Yahoo!, MSN, & AOL dominated. The folks who called me were having connection problems and many were experiencing the World Wide Web for the first time.
Some of my favorite moments were Sunday evenings because the people who called Sunday night really needed help or were really out to lunch. I was informed one night that the WebTV set top box was preventing this particular user from seeing “sensitive” Area 51 documents and therefore, was part of the conspiracy (after all we were owned by Microsoft and it was the 90’s). I attempted to educate this caller that the lack of access was actually because WebTV was incapable of downloading hundreds of government documents. Bill Gates and Bill Clinton were not in cahoots. In fact, WebTV was not a computer but essentially a very fancy modem.
Because it was a new technology, WebTV logged the top viewed sites. They wanted to ensure that those pages were displayed correctly and that the end-user actually saw what they had searched for. Over time, I was able to see some of the top websites our users were seeing & lo and behold, Grandma and Area 51 researchers were always looking for porn, and then they were searching for recipes, LL Bean or the weather in Orlando. The founders of WebTV had created a wild new technology and America had porn on their couch, but this time not in a magazine!
Being a recent grad and strong feminist I was appalled! And clearly naive that this was what people were looking at and looking for on this new-er world wide web.
Fast forward to 2000 and a hip startup called Google was making Search a much more user-friendly activity. Google was growing like a weed and at that time, were known locally for hiring the Grateful Dead former chef, Charlie Ayers. My friend and coworker had a good friend from college over at Google and so we drove over, to try out some groovy grub. Upon entry into the foyer of Google, we saw a huge screen displaying all the current searches. It was wild to see – an amazing live demo. We were quickly informed by her friend, “This is scrubbed. A lot.” Again, I was reminded, the Internet is for Porn (one of the best songs from the musical Avenue Q).
And now I live in Utah, which in 2009 ranked the highest per capita for porn subscriptions. This past fall, Salt Lake City started a pilot project to teach teens about porn and address the addiction to porn that is a problem in Utah (and across the nation). It is a rather innovative idea for a state that is known for being extremely traditional in its values.
Gone are the days of the older sibling or friend or the Playboy magazine hidden in the backyard tree. Today, adolescents stream porn. The internet is the easiest, most accessible place to generate their understanding of social and sexual relationships, their body and others’ bodies are shaped into beliefs that are biased and WAY outside of the social norms. The adolescent brain is changing and evolving and when an adolescent watches porn compulsively it shapes their thinking about sex and relationships. I saw how prolific porn was on the web from the mid 90’s onward and that was before wireless and streaming videos and adolescents had smartphones in their bedrooms. It is hard to stop your teen from watching, so your best bet is to demystify what is porn vs. intimacy. It is incredibly important that not just sex education, but sorry, you must add porn education to the discussions in the home. Because if you are not teaching your son or daughter about porn and sex education, then Google will.
About the Author
Jenney Wilder M.S.Ed launched All Kinds of Therapy in 2015, as the only independent online directory for the Family Choice Behavioral Healthcare Industry. With an impressive case of ADHD and her starter career in the ’90s in Silicon Valley, the dream for creating a website with features like side-by-side comparison and an integrated newsletter was born. Jenney stopped counting treatment centers and all types of schools that she has visited when she hit 500 many years ago. Jenney has a Masters in Special Education from Bank Street College (NY) and a Bachelors of Arts focused on History from Wheaton College (MA).