I like to point out in these threads that my first exposure to "pornography" was a cunnilingus scene in Al Franken's political tirade Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I was eleven.

I don't think my parents had realized that scene was in the book. But I don't think it matters that much. Kids are going to encounter sex. In a pre-industrial society, it's pretty likely that children would catch adults having sex at some point during their childhood -- even assuming they didn't see their own parents doing it at a very young age. Privacy used to be more difficult. Houses often had one bedroom.

I don't mean to say that content controls are useless. I think it was probably for the better that I wasn't watching tons of porn in middle school. But I don't think that content controls need to be perfect; we don't need to ensure that the kids are never exposed to any pornographic content. As long as it isn't so accessible that the kid is viewing it regularly, it probably isn't the end of the world. Like in the one story, PornHub didn't even have a checkbox to ask if you were eighteen. Just don't do that. I didn't end up downloading porn intentionally myself until about five years after reading that book.