Comment by noduerme
1 year ago
I don't think your comment should be downvoted. Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem. The other problem is that adults should not be forced to share their identity to view content - particularly that which might be used to blackmail them. I don't have children. And I don't think your children outweigh my right to privacy.
It’s really not though.
It’s not like the internet was censored when I was coming up, and I don’t think less of kids today than I do of myself.
Kids stumbling across something when browsing innocently isn’t really a major issue, and if they seek it out: they will find it, you won’t stop them, kids are smarter than you think (just, immature and unwise).
The best method, honestly, is for parents to be forethcoming..
however you have now successfully reframed the discussion into “what about the kids”, when in reality it’s about getting everyone’s ID so that they can better enforce their draconian internet comment laws… the government even outright said this. https://archive.is/3pave
if the government really cared about protecting children, they would’ve made a freely available child protection software that anyone can install in their home network, or subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
Honest question - when were you "coming up" and are you sure it didn't do anyone any harm then?
I'm mid-late 40s and the internet was not really there when I was growing up. Someone ten years younger than me would have much more porn available to them, easily, in the home during their formative years. But even since then it's likely become more pervasive and present by an order of magnitude, and people have connected devices with them all the time in a way they wouldn't have back then.
We also have lots of academics saying that porn is changing attitudes to sex and what is acceptable behaviour (the rise of choking, for instance).
So it seems reasonable to ask the question, not whether today's kids are vulnerable to harms we weren't vulnerable to, but have things changed significantly in the intervening years?
Note - I'm not defending the clusterfuck that is the OSA. But the world is not always as it was.
No, thats totally fair.
I’m 35 now, so in the 00’s I had my entire pre-teen and teenage years.
My brother and sisters are 26, 28 and 33- we aren’t worse than our parents (we have 3 different mothers between us) or grandparents from a mental health or moral perspective; and we were all exposed to liveleak and 4chan in various ways.
I’m not sure how else to measure to he honest with you.
> subsidised its deployment at ISPs as an advertised opt-in.
The thing is, the tech and infra for this is already out there. For example DNS services that offer adult-website filtering. The cost to implement this at the ISP level really wouldn't cost much (at at technological level).
Just because we don't want children to do something doesn't mean the state should impose upon all of its population a norm to control their actions, and I don't think anyone pretending otherwise has a valid or respectable opinion.
> Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem
Is it? Children viewing porn has been a thing ever since the invention of the printing press, or at the very least, ever since the first Playboy got printed.
Were those videos? No. Did they depict sex acts? No. It's qualitatively different. I was raised in an extremely liberal household full of Playboy mags, looking at photos of naked women since I was 5 years old. The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe, and probably impossible to find outside an underground video group for sadists. I have no real problem with kids looking at nudes. That is not this. Porn has pushed itself into dementia chasing shock value. Seeing a blowjob photo was something a child could encounter in the early 90s, maybe a very sophisticated child with very early access to all the dark shit on the early internet. If you spent hours figuring out how to find one. But maybe you'd see one or two. Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem. It is a real problem, and it doesn't matter whether it's shown to a child on a website or on a home VCR, it's enormously corrupting and there absolutely is a societal harm in allowing it to happen. The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
> Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem.
That is not that new either, BDSM has been a thing for decades. "Histoire d'O" for example came out in 1975, the literary work it's based on is even older. And the panic back then about these books is exactly the same kind of bullshit we're seeing today.
> The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.
Teach your kids about sexuality from early age. That also helps cutting down on cases of sexual abuse - think of all the clergy and sports trainer scandals. A lot of these failed prosecution or went on far too long because the kids lacked the vocabulary to describe what happened to them, or didn't recognize that what they went through was wrong.
The problem is, anything veering into this direction is immediately attacked by Conservatives, religious extremists and the likes.
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I want to push back against some of this comment. I would argue that for non-boomers, today's mainstream porn is most likely OnlyFans, where women have greater control than ever over adult content being created.
This is a tiny, tiny fraction of adult content. The rest of your comment reads like "clutching your pearls" to me.
> I don't think your comment should be downvoted. Children viewing porn is a legitimate problem.
The thing is, in the UK, porn websites are already blocked by default by most ISPs and mobile networks. Only the account owner can unblock that content, either by calling the provider or by changing something in their account settings. And yes, you'll need to verify that you're an adult if you signed up to the service without providing them with details (possible with some mobile providers).
This has been the case for the past 10 or so years, so why exactly do we need this age verification stuff?