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.
