Sunday Times contributor advocates for 'porn for children'

A Sunday Times contributors has called for the creation of "porn for children." Her reasoning is that children see porn anyway, so there should be some "entry level porn." Flora Gill suggest "A soft core site where everyone asks for consent and no one gets choked etc."

"Someone needs to create porn for children. Hear me out," wrote Gill, who has written for a variety of outlets, from The Sunday Times Magazine, Daily Mail, The Standard, GQ, and others.

The tweet was deleted, but not before many on Twitter noticed, archived, screenshotted, and shared the tweet.

There has been an increase in the sexualization of children in recent years as outlets like the Washington Post have advocated for children's exposure to "kink" culture, Drag Queen story hour has taken hold across the Anglosphere, and even a "rainbow dildo butt monkey" has been enlisted to help with literacy initiatives.

Gill's comment that children, who are already exposed to pornography, should have porn created by adults just to suit their pubescent interests, is a new one on the landscape of sexualizing children and grooming them to be part of the adult sexual world.

Children have been brought up on stage at drag shows where they've been applauded, and Nickelodeon cartoon shows, like "Blues Clues," have employed drag queens to teach kids about the supposed gender and sexuality spectrum.

Gill noted that she deleted the tweet because she was "Absolutely not going to get swept up into another twitter cesspool," but also said that she thinks "if someone quickly deleted a tweet, it shouldn't be screenshotted and shared like... just let it die," she said.

Gill said that her idea for "porn for children" is "obviously not an actual solution," but that children and points out that "it is a real problem."

She added comments as Twitter threads on her account blew up.

As to the definition of children, she said that these are "under 18 year olds but obviously not actual children."

Children's exposure to pornography often begins about age 11. Social Worker Amy Steele has noted that porn tends to target kids, saying that it is "programmed to find them."

Steele says that "Today's porn content is drastically more graphic, violent, deviant and destructive than anything ever seen before."

There are risks to children in viewing pornography, however, and can lead to a porn addiction, especially in young men. Looking at porn has been found to "deform the pleasure centers" in adolescent brains. It creates a neuro-chemical release and a high.

One result of porn exposure is that children who look at porn for many hours in a week are shown to have "less gray matter in their brain than those who did not view it."

In terms of how many children have watched porn, statistics show that about 90 percent of children have watched pornography at least once between the ages of 8 and 16.

The largest consumers of porn online are boys aged 12-17. These numbers are only rising. Most proposed solutions involve removing technology from children so that they do not have the space to access it on their own, and talking to kids about the dangers of pornography, and it's distinct lack of realistic portrayals of sex, relationships, and average human bodies.

Gill has written a great deal about relationships, sex and women's issues.