IT WAS THE kid’s quicksilver fingers tapping across the keyboard that gave him away.

Dad didn’t usually come home this early, and the minute he confronted the boy, now doe-eyed in front of an incriminatingly blank screen, everything about him screamed guilty. Sure enough, a glance at the browser history revealed the misspelled name of a celebrity hottie, followed by the word nakkid.

“I told him if I couldn’t look for pictures of naked women on the Internet, I sure wasn’t going to let him do it,” the dad told a bunch of us later. Gathered over beers in his kitchen, we laughed sympathetically. “I said if I caught him at it again he’d have to take it up with his… mother!”

More laughter, as we all recalled that familiar threat, only gender-bent for the new millennium. “Well you did the right thing,” said another mom, adjusting bifocals across a deep blush. “Because porn… ugh. Parents have to stop that in its tracks.” Murmurs of concurrence all around.

“Wait a second,” blurted the boy’s uncle. (The boy’s brave uncle.) “When I was that age, I was taking babysitting jobs at the house next door because the dad had a stash of Playboys. Boys have been looking at pictures of naked women forever. Where’s the harm?”

Before our eyes Ms. Blush reared up to about twice her normal height. “Have you seen what’s out there today? No more airbrushed beauties half naked on tropical beaches—not that that was so great. But now it’s hard-core, violent stuff, turning up in searches from kids who might just be curious.”

“Or kids who aren’t even that!” another dad declared. “When our daughter was five, she innocently misspelled the American Girl web address and got…well, they were girls all right.”

“Trust me, a lot of this stuff is perverse,” Ms. Blush went on. “Stuff like, oh I don’t know…vegetables!” she sputtered. “ Barnyards!”


As I tried to conjure erotic images of vegetables in barnyards, which wasn’t proving effortless, Ms. Blush made her point: That 13-year-olds have no business looking at today’s level of smut.


“Well, the thing about his age—” started Dad. “He’s very likely older than that.” He’d been adopted as a young man from a country with unreliable birth records. “He may be 15 or 16.”


Ms. Blush was about to insist that didn’t matter—you could see the argument boiling behind her glasses—when Uncle Brave chimed in again. “Guys… really? If my nephew is 16, even if he’s 15, he’s got adult sexual desires. According to Dan Savage"—Stranger editor and sex-positivity columnist—“that’s the average age people now lose their virginity. Shouldn’t we be glad he’s finding ways to satisfy himself, rather than pursuing a classmate for sex? Surfing for raunchy photos may be gross…but actual sex can be dangerous—emotionally, legally, physically, even mortally. Especially at his age. Uh, whatever that is.”


“So you’re saying porn isn’t dangerous?” rang a quiet voice from the doorway. It was the boy’s mother, a feminist attorney whose wisdom and fierce devotion to women’s rights add up to a mighty maternal force—a force no teenage son in his right mind would want to take on re: “nakkid” women, let alone barnyard vegetables.