Twenty-two-year-old Tom* was in the fourth grade when he first googled “sex” on his family computer. It took him to one of the big free porn sites that account for the bulk of adult content consumed online – and a decent chunk of all internet traffic.

“It was very visceral, kind of shocking,” Tom tells Guardian Australia. As a young boy with a broadband connection, he had already been exposed to a “nauseating” variety of violent and confronting material, but this discovery brought a kind of “hyper-excitement”. “I just didn’t quite know how to make sense of it,” he recalls.

According to a study released by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner in September, Tom’s experience is similar to many young people: 36% of male respondents were first exposed to porn before hitting their teens, while 13 was the average age for all young people surveyed. Only 22%, however, admitted to intentionally seeking it out, with more accidentally stumbling upon X-rated material via social media or pop-ups on other parts of the internet.

Tom became a “habitual” user of those sites a few years later at 13 – one of millions around the world tapping into the same ad-driven pipeline of free porn.

When Tom started having sex years later, he found it difficult to connect to his real-life partner. “Functionally, I almost couldn’t have sex with her. Like the real thing almost didn’t turn me on enough – the stimulation just wasn’t quite right. Even now if I go through a phase of watching porn, closing my eyes during sex is much worse. I sort of need that visual stimulation.”

Looking back, Tom thinks how he consumed porn as a teenager created a kind of filter. “It presented a view of sex as almost a checkbox; always women who looked similar, the camera focusing on similar parts of their bodies, similar sex acts being performed. It was always like a very sort of pornified view of sex, that was homogenous.

“Instead of looking at what’s in front of you, these concepts go over it like some augmented reality that’s cut up and categorised into these pornographic concepts. Your appreciation is through this lens.”

The first generation raised on porn

When Dr Samuel Shpall, a University of Sydney senior lecturer, teaches his course, Philosophy of Sex, he isn’t surprised to hear young men like Tom critique their own experience of porn.

“The internet has completely changed not only the nature and accessibility of pornography, but also the nature and accessibility of ideas about pornography,” he says, calling the ubiquity of digital sex “an astonishing historical departure”.

“They’re experts about this topic in a way that nobody else is because they’re kind of like the first generation that was literally raised on internet pornography. Their generation [is] in a completely different kind of moral development, in terms of how their sexual psyche is mediated by the awesome availability of pornographic material.

“When a guy in a class says things like, ‘The vision of male sexuality that we grew up on is just toxic, right?’ … there’s a lot of nods,” Shpall says.

Outside the classroom, conversations around porn remain complicated, particularly where young people are involved. Hyperbolic warnings of a “porndemic” sit alongside concerns that porn has brought once-niche practices like choking into the mainstream among young people – echoing decades-old critiques that porn normalises violent behaviour towards women.

In other corners of the internet, message boards and dubious online services encourage young men to reject “big porn” and go cold turkey during “no nut November”. But the tenor of these conversations don’t exactly reject misogyny or toxic masculinity; some critics say they can instead funnel young men towards far-right fringes.

Dr Michael Flood, a Queensland University of Technology researcher, says porn has become the primary source of sex education for young men, and the effects aren’t good. “It’s a hymn to toxic masculinity, it’s a bible for toxic masculinity, patriarchal masculinity,” Flood says.

“I think, you know, there’s really clear evidence that porn use is shaping boys and young men’s sexual desires, you know, how they want to have sex and how they actually do try to have sex.

His colleague Maree Crabbe, an academic, film-maker and the director of porn education platform It’s Time We Talked, has interviewed hundreds of young men about the “almost universal” normalisation of porn in their peer groups.

“It’s just part of their world,” she says. “I think there’s a sense of loneliness in navigating what this content is, and what it means for them and the expectations on them.

“They talk about comparing their bodies with what they see in porn. They talk about performance, and the model of masculinity that is often portrayed in pornography – which is dominant, aggressive, controlling.”

Tom says he briefly experimented with practices like choking before losing interest. “It’s not your desire moving your body, it’s what you’ve seen men do, and added to your sexual toolkit,” he says. “But it takes you further away from yourself in those sexual moments, and can be intimacy-breaking.”

Shpall says more nuanced debates about the impact of porn on men’s experience and expectations of sex, intimacy and body image often take a backseat to how women are acutely impacted by men reared on pornography – and justifiably so. “It can, pragmatically, imply that you take the harms to men to be as serious, or more serious, than the harms to women, and you don’t want to do that.”

Nonetheless, he thinks it’s worth unpacking the “outsourcing of desire”. British philosopher Amia Srinivasan, whose 2021 book The Right To Sex is used by Shpall in class, highlights how “sophisticated algorithms” akin to YouTube and Amazon “learn and then shape users’ preferences” and “teaches users to think about sex itself in prescribed categories”.

“Even if the algorithms were a bit better, whatever ‘better’ would mean, there might still be a problem in the hegemony of pornography,” Shpall says. “It might still be presenting us with a vision of sex that makes us lazy and not creative, and just isn’t good for sexual health.”

Crabbe agrees: “I don’t think that it’s defensible for us as a society to just give up on young people having a kind of better and safer world to be sexually socialised in. Why would we just accept that a global multibillion-dollar industry can freely and easily beam their content into children’s and young people’s devices with no regulatory kind of limits in place?”

Literacy or legislation?

Naomi Hutchings, a Brisbane-based clinical sexologist, has taught porn literacy and sex education as a university lecturer, community health worker and relationship counsellor, with clients ranging from their late teens to their 70s.

“When I’ve worked in schools, I think a lot of young men were really open to having conversations and discussions, and wanting to know how to navigate relationships,” she says. “Some of them felt bad about their bodies.”

Hutchings doesn’t think there’s a “porndemic” but says there is “a bit of a porn panic”. Today’s attention economy might differ from earlier generations’ videotapes and magazines under mattresses, but Hutchings says taboos associated with porn can work against efforts to address any negative impacts.

“There’s often shaming and judgment in the sexual space,” she says.

“I think that there are some spaces where a [young] person wouldn’t come and have a conversation about what they saw because they’ll get in trouble, the dialogue’s not there. They’ve got nobody to have a conversation with in a healthy way and unpack what they saw.”

And not all porn users have the same experience. Twenty-two-year-old Joseph* now lives in Sydney, but grew up behind the firewall in China. As a young gay man without access to sex education, skirting censorship via VPN allowed him to delve beyond the heteronormative main feed of porn sites and mainstream culture. Through porn, he could explore not only his own preferences, but the different kinds of male identity and sexuality that were possible.

“I think that’s one of the positive aspects of it for me, and how I could gain a positive affirmation of my own body and my partners’ bodies,” he says.

Joseph does have concerns about the free sites young people are most likely to access. When feeds are full of pirated content, or short teasers posted by creators who charge elsewhere, viewers miss important context seen in the full productions – such as consent, preferences and safety.

“They’re the things that make you realise that the person you watch in that 10 minutes is a person, who has feelings, who has their own desires just like yourself,” Joseph says.

Like many experts, Hutchings thinks it’s essential that young men are equipped with the skills to recognise that bigger picture, and can access “good conversations” and “comprehensive” education about respect, consent and how porn portrays sex.

“I do think we need literacy about it, just like we need media literacy, right? If you grow up with Instagram, you think everybody looks like that – it’s the same thing. I definitely think it’s important to teach people to have some framework where they can look at it and go, ‘Hey, OK, this is porn’.”

That includes being able to recognise the “unrealistic stuff”: “If you watch porn, just know that not everyone looks like that – penises don’t always stand up that long.”

The September eSafety commission report also tested the waters for introducing compulsory age limits on online porn sites. But many young people surveyed were unconvinced, from concerns about privacy to the futility of trying to restrict a generation of digital natives. As Joseph’s experience attests, even China’s firewall can be scaled by curious teens.

Over a decade after that first, prepubescent foray into online porn, Tom also thinks literacy is a better solution than legislation.

“It’s like a drug,” he says. “In order to use it mindfully, you need to be aware of its impact, and its impact is to change how you view sex and how you meaningfully engage with people.”

*names have been changed