“So here was fetishism turned on its head, made empowerment” — Nick Compton, on Alexander McQueen’s Autumn-Winter 2002 line

Sex on the internet is not a problem. Hear me out. Through the internet, young girls and boys are exposed to things they would eventually have to deal with anyway– but from the safety of their own homes, with the ever-present option to shut the page. Sex solicitations online are never pleasant, but they’re not as unpleasant as IRL solicitations where you either have to run away, make an awkward joke, or call the police.

I actually believe that sexual content online is a positive thing for young people. Not because I’m a perv. The world we live in is hyper-sexualized. Exposure to sexual content online allows teenagers to explore sex and sexuality in a safe environment. I am ignoring the “innocense loss” lamentation that parents seem to feel in favor of the realistic view that you can be innocent, yet informed. That’s where the internet comes in.

The internet provides a network for young people to learn about how they are viewed by adults and strangers in the real world. This knowledge creates power, and kids can do with that power what they will.

The online world is harmful in that it provides a network of enabling peers for much more harmful practices than sex, practices that parents don’t see occuring on the internet. One of the most potent of these is the Pro-Anorexia / Depression communities online. Many teenagers experience depression on a low level (either real or courtesy of a massive amount of hormones and the confusing barrage of emotion that comes with that). Without the internet, people would be more prompted to surpress these emotions (HOWEVER, surpressing clinical depression should never occur. I’m speking of the people who experience fleeting depression or intense sadness mislabeled as depression). With the existence of these communities, people revel in their negative emotions, strengthening them or making them the norm.

The same goes for the Pro-Ana community online. Many teenage girls are self concious of their changing bodies. Blogs which glorify intense weightloss regimes provide a network for people who might otherwise hide their body insecurity, reinforcing the pros of forgoing food for thinness. Blogs who post “bones-po” pictures, unrealistic diet regimes and weight loss goals, make vulnerable girls think that that is how they too should look and how they should be behaving in order to get that look. This was especially apparent with the “thigh gap” craze of 2014, the fetishization of some arbitrary body feature, the thigh gap being made the defining feature of a “good” body.

I feel that parents are all too aware of stranger danger online and the “loss of innocense” in a sexual form, rather than the mental and physical issues caused by depression and thinspo blogs that normalize and romanticize mental health issues, which have much longer lasting mental effects than, say, unwanted exposure to a dick pic.