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Comment by elcritch

4 days ago

How is that different than pervasive pornography though? Many young boys now think it’s normal to ask girls for sexual acts before having ever kissed a girl.

12 comments

elcritch

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tsimionescu  4 days ago

It is, as pornography is about sexual acts, while the manosphere is discussing the role they believe men and women should play in all aspects of life, not just sex and romance. They believe and teach that women shouldn't be managers, knowledge workers, professors, politicians, shouldn't have a right to vote (at least not differently from the man who essentially owns them) etc.

Pornography may give some people some wrong ideas about sex and romantic relationships, might even instill some level of implicit misoginy in certain straight men, but I'm pretty sure you won't get the idea that women should be allowed in Parliament from watching too much porn.

squidbeak  4 days ago

> Many young boys now think it’s normal to ask girls for sexual acts before having ever kissed a girl.

This is a common media talking point, but are there any hard figures for this 'many'? The type you're describing existed when I was young, long before the internet. My impression of boys and young men today is that they are generally just as decent, cautious, respectful and idealistic as they ever were - but that a small crude and unpleasant minority taints the reputation of the whole generation.

  • elcritch  4 days ago

    I don't think it's a "reputation" issue, more of a what they're being exposed to and what it's normalizing. From studies I've seen it's a significant percentage (from a random Google search [1]):

    The review talked to young people aged 13 to 19 and surveyed 1,000 young people aged 16 to 21. Over 6 in 10 (64%) said they had seen online pornography. Of these:

        1 in 10 (10%) of nine-year-olds had seen pornography
    3 in 10 (27%) of children had seen pornography by age 11
    Half (50%) of children had seen it by age 13
    4 in 5 (79%) had seen violent pornography before the age of 18, with the report stating “young people are frequently exposed to violent pornography, depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sex acts”.

    1: https://www.fpa.org.uk/rshe-for-teachers/uk-online-child-sex...

    • squidbeak  3 days ago

      It definitely is a reputation issue: unless I'm misunderstanding something, you are using this data to suggest a greater incidence of violent sexual behavior among young men as a result to their exposure to ugly types of pornography.

      You don't seem to have any data putting your figures into any context over time: run the same study in the 80s and I would wager you'd see similar even worse results. Wank mags and grainy VHS were passed around schools from the moment they appeared, including BDSM and torture porn - often in the form of sleazy B-movies. Sure, pornography is far easier to access today. But the material is the same, and this notion that somehow, today's boys and young men are worse for this exposure than their predecessors is insidious and deeply ignorant.

      It is significantly more difficult to find young men today who think it's acceptable for husbands to beat their wives - or that rape is never rape in marriage. Or who think they can get a woman drunk to seduce her. Campaigners had to work damn hard to raise public consciousness out of the traditionalist inertia around these blights. Frankly, to anyone like me, old enough to compare several different eras and their male representatives, comments like yours and the inferences you'd have people draw from them, are utterly ridiculous - and yes, hugely unjust to the overwhelming majority of young men who flinch from the idea of hurting a woman in bed or out of it, regardless of what type of pornography they've been exposed to.

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scott_w  4 days ago

Huge gap between producing material that depicts (presumably) consensual sexual activities between adults and telling young boys to commit rape.

  • elcritch  4 days ago

    Practically speaking there's not much difference since there's a large amount of violent or extreme pornography which also teaches boys that directly or indirectly. It also teaches girls that it's "ok" cause they see it online.

    There's many studies and organizations who publish warnings about violent pornography and young adults:

    Dr Ruth Weir of City St George's, University of London, said extreme porn had been "normalised online" and was now "playing out in young people's relationships". [1]

    1: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e82pwyg33o

    • jplusequalt  4 days ago

      Unless I'm missing somethiny, that article has no data that backs up Dr. Ruth Weir's claim.

      It first posits that adult content has been normalized online, then cites unrelated statistics about abuse victims who had watched adult content. There's nothing that convincingly links that that first statement to the latter data.

      2 replies →

aussieguy1234  4 days ago

The Manosphere is going to convince the impressionable young boys and men they are entitled to be treated in the same way as the men in the porn videos, consent be dammed. This is the main problem.