My Nightmare

I had a dream last night.  A nightmare, really.

The neighbor boy had been watching porn.  Young kid, just a few years older than my girls. It changed how he thought about girls, thought about boys, and how they should act together.  One of my daughter's ended up being molested by him.  It was one the worst dreams I've had in a long time.  I woke up in tears.  What scared me most, was just how possible it all is. 

Never before have a generation of boys been raised so surrounded by smut and filth and the degradation of women that is so easily accessible to them.  Twelve, thirteen, fourteen year old boys are coming across things that hard core porn users two decades ago would've had to search for in back rooms of seedy shops.  How can we expect young adolescent minds, still developing, to process what they're seeing and feeling and not have it affect how they view the thirteen year old girls walking down the halls of their middle school.  How can they reverence their sweet wife one day when their teen years left them exposed to degrading, filthy acts seen on screens at their friends houses or on their smart phone or on their own home computer.  The filthiest of ideas are just a click way -- not even a purposeful click in a lot of cases -- in one motion of the mouse, a young boy can find himself confronted with ideas and images so horrendous that how could we ever expect it not to affect him. 

I've told my husband, that even if we didn't believe it was wrong, even if there was no God, porn would still be wrong.  It's degrading (to everyone involved) and changes how people think about other people.  Turning human beings in to objects to be selfishly used or observed for nothing more than the pleasure of the user.  It creates and breeds selfishness.  It diminishes the worth of partners, spouses and women in general. 

How, oh how, do I teach my kids about this?  What age do we start talking about it?  How do I explain how imperative it is that they avoid it, even when their friends laugh and joke about what comes up on the screen?  How do I explain that the reaction their bodies and minds have to it are normal, even when it's bad for them?  How do I avoid the shame and guilt of those first initial incidents, so that they don't clamp down, locking it inside a deep vault inside that allows it to grow and fester and become something so ugly?  How do we take away it's power?