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Telandria22 karma

It lines up roughly with my own experiences, albeit I was maybe ~10. In my own case, I was exposed to a number of times via my slightly older friends — kids who had parents who weren’t as careful as they should have been talking about movies like Showgirls, kids whose parents had gotten them a computer w/ dialup but didn’t monitor their use, or even just kids a few years older than me who’d stolen stuff off the rack at convenience stores or found mags in their parents/sibs bedrooms. That sort of stuff.

Then you start hanging out with friends’ older siblings playing various games like Magic The Gathering or various RPGs, watching anime etc… and you start hearing the jokes or seeing the lewd gestures and get curious about this whole masturbation thing, etc etc.

And this was in the early 90’s, when it was a fair bit harder to get easy access to porn because search engines weren’t well-established and porn magazines were generally behind-the-counter only stuff. Nowadays it’s vastly easier to get access to, whether it’s having a friend who’s family doesn’t use parental controls, or just knowing (or being) someone who’s tech-savvy enough to do an end-run around that stuff, which is hardly uncommon.

Likewise, online gaming has vastly expanded the age range of… I guess you’d call it networking. By that I mean, to use a personal example, like how I play ARK fairly regularly with a group of people who currently range from age ~40 all the way down to seven, because one of our players is often babysitting his niece and she absolutely adores dinosaurs, so we let her play with us despite how disruptive her presence is (not in small part because from a parenting perspective, it’s a great teaching opportunity for various social skills like patience, respect for ownership, responsibility, risk vs reward, etc).

And while we are personally careful what we say and do around her, we are playing a relatively chill game with just friends on a privately-owned server. Which is, well, nothing at all like the potential for just hoping onto WoW or Destiny or whatever at age 10 and interacting with thousands of people of all ages.

So yeah, I can easily see eight years old being the average first-time exposure. Unfortunately.

Telandria18 karma

I’m curious about this idea, too. Not to minimize what she went through or anything, it’s fucked up and horrible no mistake, but all the responses I’m reading seem… a lot less about specifically being young and inexperienced and a lot more the sort of thing that results from religious indoctrination and general patterns of spousal abuse alongside community peer pressure than anything strictly related to getting married so early.

Telandria2 karma

I read a lot of online-hosted original webfiction from authors who use things like Patreon as well as self-publish portions of their using platforms like Kickstarter.

Did you ever consider taking that route or tried it in the past? Why or why not?

Telandria2 karma

I wanted to chime in alongside our OP, here — I live in Texas, and we definitely see a lot of the same kinds of news stories. It’s just that they don’t hit national news airings — typically, they only get brought up via local stations or papers, or even just radio or social media. But it definitely happens with fair frequency, especially in our more metropolitan cities.