Would you agree that there’s anything different between parents who only have to worry about their son looking at Cheryl Tiegs, vs. parents who have to worry that their kids will find (or be emailed) stuff like this?

To be sure, maybe what I’ve experienced is not just desensitization to violence, but desensitization to movies more generally — that is, I’ve seen so many more movies that it’s now a more detached experience in which one doesn’t feel quite so swept away by the story (“This is just a movie, after all”), but instead starts analyzing the camera technique or the orchestral score, etc.

It’s not even clear whether the intensity and ubiquity of extreme porn online creates a different kind of subjectivity or experience for the adolescent viewer, necessarily. There’s the old kid-in-a-candy-store issue here, namely, something which becomes ubiquitious becomes banal, and in becoming banal, may have less psychological and determinative power than otherwise. Saying “f***” when I was a kid was a huge, huge deal, and if you said it, you felt an enormous rush of transgressive power, a sense that something of consequence has just happened. Saying that something “sucked” when my mother was young inevitably meant that you were saying that it “sucked c***”–she can’t unhear the referent in it. Now saying that something sucks doesn’t carry that meaning, and I’m not even sure that f*** is that big a deal. (I’m asterixing the letters out of concern for the filters you mention, not because I’m sensitive to the word myself.) So you could say that Cheryl Tiegs’ visible nipples were vastly more pornographic in one way to the 13-year olds at my school than a parade of porn bodies might be now. It’s at least an issue to think about, and the kind of question that media panics typically elide.