"Although the law prohibits the sale of pornography to minors, most young men say that long before their parents spoke with them about sex, they got their real education on the curb with other nine- and ten-year-olds, or in a back room with a dog-eared copy of Playboy. What are the effects of this early exposure to pornography? . . . An important subject missing in the research on pornography is how it affects children. Not those who are depicted in pornography, but those who are consumers of pornography. People who sell and distribute pornography call it 'adults-only' material . . . It turns out, however, that pornography is not 'adults only' . . . a survey of eleven hundred children . . . found that about 39 percent of the children in the survey said that they watched pornography at least once a month . . . I conducted the survey again, with an even clearer questionnaire . . . nine out of ten boys (90 percent), and six out of ten girls (60 percent) had seen at least one pornographic movie. One-third of the boys, but only 2 percent of the girls, watched pornography at least once a month. Our data suggest the girls watched once because a boyfriend or somebody wanted them to, or because they were curious, and then didn't want to watch again. . . very few girls consume regularly."

-- James Check, "Teenage Training: The Effects of Pornography on Adolescent Males," in The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography, eds. Laura J. Lederer and Richard Delgado (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 89-91.