Almost naturally, most men would have a taste of porn back in their younger days but a new study has suggested that no thanks to the accessibility of pornographic materials via the Internet, exposure to graphic contents now come at a surprisingly early age.

According to Professor Raj Sitharthan of the University of Sydney's Department of Psychology Medicine, his research, which was conducted with his wife, Dr Gomathi Sitharthan, returned a disturbing trend among Australians who admitted they were in pornography in varying degrees.

The research findings, according to Mr Sitharthan, highlighted the shocking reality that many men started watching porn materials at age 11, suggesting that availability of inappropriate materials through the Internet has reached alarming proportions.

"The starting age to view porn was between 11-13 years, which actually surprised us, given that at such an early age people do seem to have some form of access to sort of look at porn material," the Sydney professor told ABC in an interview on Friday.

He noted that of the 800 people who agreed to participate in the study, 80 percent were males, suggesting too that porn watching was more prevalent among men but not discounting that problems associated with porn materials do not bother women at all.

For men, porn materials have become part of their rites of passage, which when mishandled could morph into serious problems, the research suggested.

Glaring manifestation, according to Ms Sitharthan, are the twisted concepts espoused by those who were unable to wean away from what was once a segment of their teenage experiments.

The eventual emergence of clear social deficiencies of those watching too much porn also underscored the disturbing impacts of the habit.

"They actually skip education and also we have found they have social skills deficits where they have difficulty speaking to members of the opposite sex," Ms Sitharthan said in the report.

She added "they have all these false assumptions about what is right and proper in a relationship," which can be directly attributed on how excessive dose of porn shaped their views of the opposite sex.

Men who connect women to the images that rubbed in to their minds via porn watching could reduce the opposite sex into nothing short of a sex object, which Mr Sitharthan said "the kind of false impressions that we need to correct."

And corrective measures must be applied early in the habit, the professor added.

"When we ask people about their porn-viewing history, it has always started with something very small but then escalated into something more and more and deeper and deeper disturbing," Mr Sitharthan explained.

The biggest challenge at this point, his wife added, is to effectively stave off the flow of porn materials that have been attracting youngsters' attention, most of which can be accessed by the simple click of a mouse on a computer or a tap in a mobile handset.

"Porn is readily available, you don't have to actually go into a shop and buy the material," Ms Sitharthan reported.

"You can be sitting anywhere at any time and access porn even via your telephone, mobile phone," she added, the latter owned by hundreds of millions of possible teenagers around the world.