Jesus, how does your society still function when underage people can see videos of people having sex?! It's one thing for minors to be having sex, but to watch others doing it? Reprehensible.
Jesus, how does your society still function when underage people can see videos of people having sex?! It's one thing for minors to be having sex, but to watch others doing it? Reprehensible.
I suppose you do not have children. I am open-minded, mid 40's. The level of violence in porn you can get access to with just one click, has no comparison with what I could get access to as a kid (basically nothing).
With the net, you get access in one click to the worse and the best. It is a lot of work as a parent to educate the kids about that.
As kids, teenager and even as 20 something, if we wanted to do some experience, we had to physically access the media or be physically present. This was not on-demand over a screen.
So, I filter the access at home while also trying my best to educate. This is not easy and I can understand that non tech savvy people request more laws, even so I am personally against.
The article is pretty well balanced, we have no silver bullet here.
Sure, but if the goal is to minimise access to violence, why did the GP say "they can access porn" instead of "they can access violence"? I doubt the two are synonymous.
They're not synonymous but a vast amount of pornography available online constitutes violence against women.
The commercial sex trade, including both porn and prostitution, is a multi-billion dollar industry that seeks to normalize extreme acts and promotes the dehumanisation of women and girls.
This framing trades nuance for moral panic. The assertion that pornography inherently constitutes violence against women is not an argument but a slogan. It is ideological posturing, not analysis. The so-called ‘commercial sex trade’ as you put it is complex, and your narrative is not intellectually serious.
So why would the solution to dehumanising women be "minors shouldn't be able see it"?
Perhaps because as an adult you understand we understand this can influence them when its not supervised?
Perhaps it would be a better solution to ban the dehumanising kind of porn for everyone.
Nice idea, but how? How could that actually be accomplished, without stacking SCOTUS with conservative and/or feminist justices? My other comment pointing out the 1A problem with proposals to ban porn was downvoted but nobody has been able to explain how I'm wrong.
Requiring porn businesses to check IDs would be, legally and politically, much easier.
The whole point here is to prevent impressionable children from growing up watching videos of women being treated like objects, so that they don't grow up to view women as objects
If the states banning porn weren’t generally the same states restricting medical care for women, I’d say you have a point, but that’s simply not the case.
“Protecting women” is the sales pitch, not the objective.
Noncentral fallacy. Nobody's against "medical care for women" except where they believe it overlaps with "legalized murder of children", and it's extremely disingenuous for you to ignore that and act like "medical care" is the part they're against.
I’m disputing your claim that I am invoking a logical fallacy here.
Revoking access to life-critical medical care that is specific to one’s sex is indisputably making the people of a given sex less safe.
Threatening to persecute people who wish to assist women in pursuing life-critical medical care is making women less safe.
If medical care specific to one’s sex cannot be considered protecting the safety of someone on the basis of their sex, what is?
Has there been some outbreak of this? Genuinely confused. My impression is that sort of behavior has been decreasing my entire life while access to porn has been increasing.
As a recovering porn addict that had issues with socializing with the opposite sex growing up... I don't think there's enough evidence to scientifically conclude anything either way.
As for me, I sought out a large amount of porn "too early". The porn was not violent and I was ashamed to talk about it with anyone. Then again this was before social media became mainstream. I wanted to talk to girls my age but had too much anxiety and depression from my upbringing. ..the real reason for my addiction. So I got called a teenage stalker and got punished so hard I stopped talking to women entirely. The porn was because I was so depressed in the following years. Nobody even realized I had a porn addiction to this day, because I didn't talk about it because... it was cringe.
Still a bachelor but I go to meetings and have worked on it for several years by now. When I worked on my issues enough the urges went away. To the point I wondered why this was such an issue for so long. I no longer feel the need to find a mate to feel complete anymore. Which ironically would make talking to women possible again. But that wasn't because of porn - it was because of depression/anxiety.
I ascribed the causes incorrectly for a long time ("excess porn usage causes the tendency to sexually harass/assault people you're attracted to") which only contributed to my shame and depression for a long time. I think it's because people don't want to admit that they cannot help every person with major depressive disorder ("you need to want help to get help"), so they go after bigger fish that are open to litigation to make it seem like the problem is being addressed. And all this labeling of porn as a problem rubs off onto actual addicts who misjudge the real root of their issues like me.
I have a hypothesis that telling teenagers their minds will be permanently corrupted by too much pornography of any kind and they should be ashamed of themselves for having sexual urges is... not exactly the most productive decision. Especially when gore videos remain unregulated and legal. I think depression/anxiety has a greater chance to cause the behavior they're talking about - "hurt people hurt people" - and those people just so happen to be addicted to something to self-medicate. Shaming people is certainly one way to make them depressed.
But I was sorta glad I avoided talking to people I was attracted to for so long, in my depressed state not much good would have happened. I now have a healthier appreciation of the other sex without completely abstaining and in my view it had nothing do with porn. It was actually about seeing and accepting reality for what it is, not through a depressed filter.
My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists. Maybe that isn't happening and it's just a moral panic? Or maybe those boys watching lots of pornography and coming to believe that women are whores are two entirely unrelated phenomenons?
Media diet shapes what we are, and kids are more impressionable than most. It is therefore natural and reasonable for parents to want some control over what media gets fed to their kids.
> My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists
This seems more in line with the increase of mysoginist influencers (Andrew Tate and the like) and less to do with porn. The former of course being the type of content that social media companies are more than happy to proactively promote to children.
Why are they in a state of mind where people like Andrew Tate resonant with them in the first place?
Because they’re young and impressionable.
I'm not particularly familiar with Tate or his story, but wasn't he literally arrested for human trafficking in connection with a porn site that he ran? And that site was part of the start of his "Internet" career? And part of his shtick is bragging about being an "Internet pimp" and running said site?
He was but he’s more well known for his social media posting than for his cam site stuff
Andrew Tate is basically the core of the Manosphere [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere
Even the stuff that’s less extreme than Tate should be totally unacceptable for children and teens to access. Not just the “manosphere” but everything adjacent to it: the alt-right, Nazis and White Supremecists, Qanon, conspiracy sites, flat earthers, antivaxxers, cryptoscammers and so on. They are all in orbit of the same dark barycenter of toxicity.
I’d rather my kid accidentally run into porn than them accidentally run into this garbage. But guess which one I have to worry about all the algorithms steering my kid to? Hint: it’s not the porn.
I don't think that's quite what's happening, I think the phenomenon in question is occurring primarily within a specific age group, and I think it doesn't correlate with porn availability or consumption.
If X predates A by a long time then any attribution of A to X is going to need extensive evidence.
I think the phenomenon you refer to has to do with politics and culture. It's loosely related to the pendulum swinging back against DEI type stuff. Depending on your political persuasion you might replace "bitter misogynists" with something like "angry cynics".
Is porn a bigger problem than Andrew Tate in that regard?
The first ammendment, as presently interpreted, makes banning violent pornography virtually impossible. Restricting access to it is a far more tractable solution.
I keep hearing this argument, but I don’t come across any violent porn unless I explicitly look for it. What are the search terms you people are using?
My girl discovered self-pleasure at the age of 5, ironically during an exam from her doctor (she doesn't think it was intentional). I had an ex discover masturbation around the same age. I personally discovered it around 11 or 12. All of the above discovered porn accidentally as kids. I don't know about them but after that I intentionally sought it out.
Guess what! Both of us are perfectly fine!! (Well the ex is a bit psychotic but that's unrelated...)
This obsession with protecting kids from the realities of life is just fucking stupid. We as a species have the stupidest, most ridiculous views about something that is required to keep us alive!
The problem is that most porn depicts sex as somewhat violent and sets unreasonable expectations of what sex is like.
Not every woman is capable of deep-throating or going straight from vaginal to anal without adding some extra lube. Most women don't want their man to put his hands around her throat during sex. Almost none of them are okay with going from ass to mouth.
Porn also sets an unrealistic standard for penis size. When the average is 5.2 inches with a standard deviation of about an inch, it becomes clear that the 7+ inch penises used in porn are like the top 5%.
I don't think parents are having these conversations with their kids about this.
I would be interested in a discussion here about what sex acts people find demeaning to women. You cherry-picked from a narrow band of agreeable examples. Are blow jobs themselves demeaning to women? I suspect that many (perhaps here but certainly elsewhere) would say so.
I would also welcome a discussion about how porn might be disadvantageous to boys (and the very medicated male performers) and how all this contrasts with tolerance towards non-sexual violence depicted on screen.
it is recommended not to employ sarcasm when counterpoints are easily available
Unfortunately, when counterpoints are easily available, I expect the person to have already thought of them, hence the sarcasm.
Edited to delete my comment. I was mistaken about who was replying to who. As such my comment was entirely wrong.
What? There's zero suggestion in ndriscoll's comment that he's talking about "extremely violent porn".
The most specific he gets is "furry porn", which might be a kink you don't approve of but is not obviously more objectionable than "people having sex".
I made a mistake about who stavros was replying to. I edited my comment.
I was being somewhat flippant while also using a group that's known as a gateway to more deviant behaviors (e.g. libertarianism). I think though that you'll likely not find much success in litigating whether children ought to be able to access porn (and whether porn has anything close to a healthy depiction of relationships/sex. Yes, some healthy material exists. It's extremely rare, especially with commercial websites). e.g. no one thinks children should be able to shop at physical adult stores. It's probably more productive to participate in the "what to do about it" discussion.
Please point me to where the original comment mentioned anything about violence.
Thought the comment in question was a reply to loic. The mistake is mine.
Ah, fair enough, that's an easy mistake to make, I've replied to the wrong comment many times too.
> Jesus, how does your society still function when underage people can see videos of people having sex?!
It kind of isn't anymore. But not just because of porn, obviously.
Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence. Seen women constantly railed and treated like meat when that young probably does do something.
"Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos. It's clear you'd rather be snide than correct.
> Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence
There's really no evidence of this. I find it much more plausible that the boom in misogynistic radicalism is caused by the flourishing of radically far-right niche content online. Our society has become more politically extreme in a number of ways over the past couple decades, and there's no porn equivalent for anti-immigrant or anti-trans sentiment. Andrew Tate, however, is very much of a kind with figures like Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones.
That's not to say porn viewership doesn't have an effect on kids, but I expect it would be much more modest. Unrealistic ideas about sex, anxieties about penis size. I'm in my mid-20s; internet porn was highly accessible to me & my peers when we were young, and while it did have an effect on youth culture, it was quite modest—nothing like the hard pivot to misogyny which I've heard teachers describe when their students become interested in (again) Andrew Tate.
> "Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos.
Implying the opposite is deliberately misleading too. "Modern porn" is not entirely 1 thing or another. Much of it's sensible, a lot of it is extreme. Much like any area in life, I think, the real solution is to teach our children what's wrong with the more extreme stuff.
People are scared of porn causing their children to "objectify women"? Then teach them to respect women from a young age and when they see the extreme side of things they'll be like "That's wrong"
It's probably easier to blame the Internet though and to try to neuter it instead - rather than teach your kid the values you want them to have, just make sure they're never faced with values other than those!
> "Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading
it literally isn't. porn is mostly people having normal sex or just nude images of a woman. the existence of fringe fetish stuff doesn't affect that in any practical way. but your confusion seems to be thinking this discussion was about feminism or something when it's really just a decrepit boomer who is against sex being even legal lying through his teeth to justify completely pointless and harmful legislation (see 2 posts up)
You can map the availability of pornography to a rise in risky sex practices like choking. This isn't a problem inherent to pornography itself—rather, it's a factor of inadequate sex ed combined with the commonplace irresponsible presentation of certain sex acts in porn. Still, it'd be misleading to present porn as an entirely neutral depiction of sex. Mainstream pornography demonstrably does spread some harmful ideas. This is also true of Hollywood cinema, though; all media works this way, to a greater or lesser extent.