YouTube Was the Gateway to Pornography for My Kids
And your kids are in danger, too…
The sense of shame I felt at not realizing how foolish and naive I’d been was heavy and cloying. It was like quicksand and I was sinking under the weight of my own damned guilt.
“How the fuck could you have been so damn stupid,” I asked myself incredulously over and over again over days and weeks. I am still asking myself that question now because I’m a glutton for mental self-immolation. My brother who has openly admitted to struggling with pornography addiction — like most Americans and those living in the United States — has begged me to keep my kids from becoming a slave to this racist, sexist, white supremacist, hypercapitalist medium that incentivizes rutting over deeper connections that just don’t look quite as commodified.
I thought we were doing the right thing. We monitored them. We kept them off the internet. We had deeper discussions and even created more safety protocols for our children watching YouTube… And still we failed. We failed because we didn’t want to believe that our children could struggle this early with this bullshit, to be honest. We failed because we thought, foolishly, that we could somehow trust YouTube and Google/Alphabet at all.
I’m here to tell you that you cannot and you should not. Keep your kids away from YouTube and the adult predators lurking in kid-friendly, pop culture content. If you love and care for your children and their mental well-being, make YouTube a thing of the past, because it’s the gateway to prurient desperation and your kids deserve better than that.
In an upcoming piece for Peace! Bread! Movies!, I’ll detail every instance where YouTube should have been permanently put down by us, how we missed the obvious, and include words from the mouths of babes themselves, so to speak. We’ll also include how we’re trying to move on and what ultimately drives your kids to the smut peddling lechers making a buck off racist and sexist baseness.
