Comment by qwe----3
6 hours ago
These rulings are stupid and if generalized would make doing business impossible. Parents should parent their kids. That law is so board - "public morals"? Should every porn site be taken down?
6 hours ago
These rulings are stupid and if generalized would make doing business impossible. Parents should parent their kids. That law is so board - "public morals"? Should every porn site be taken down?
The world would almost assuredly be a better place if 14 year olds were looking at playboy magazines instead of having easy access to every fetish under the sun. It has distorted many a young man’s ideas of intimacy and sexual relations.
One third of porn consumers are women. They are hardly immune.
This didn't pass the sniff test for me, and I think this [1] goes some way to explaining why it's misleading. They get into the issue of frequency - women very rarely, men - goons locked and loaded. So if you look at a monthly survey, about 1 in 3 women say yes even though it was probably just 1 'experience' for that month as opposed to many for an average man.
In other words we intuit that figure as meaning female_views/total_views = 33% when in reality that number would likely be low single digits. If you count men who identify as women, as men, then the number's going to go even lower. And I expect a significant chunk of the small remaining group are going to be from couples experimenting together, at the man's behest.
[1] - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5180/are-one-in...
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In what aspect is Playboy magazines superior?
it contained significantly less extreme content. There's studies on kids as young as 12 routinely being exposed to sexual violence, practices such as choking or degrading activity in porn and viewing it as so normal that young women report being expected to take part in it. Fetishes and kinks that were reserved for adults are now normalized among teens.
"In an essay published in The Free Press in August, 16-year-old Isabel Hogben described how, by the time she was in 4th grade, she had seen internet porn featuring “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism and unthinkable physical violence.” This is not an isolated case: A French government task force on equality recently reported that as much as 90% of online pornography features “verbal, physical and sexual violence toward women.”
Playboy wasn't necessarily a beacon of feminism (although sometimes surprisingly it was) but what young people are exposed to is in an entirely different category.
https://archive.ph/CPeNz
"Playboy magazines" are part of the problem.
Fetishes aren't what has distorted mens' ideas of intimacy and sexual relations. Fetishes can be a perfectly healthy and consensual form of sexual expression. The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.
Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids, and any site about womens' health issues, because "public morals" tends to consider all of it obscene, inherently pornographic or just "icky."
> The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy
The UK has a lot of sex education, no such taboos, and is the home of OnlyFans. Are any of the problems you mention better in the UK than the US?
> Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids,
There is no reason this has to be true.
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Sex education is, outside of some places in Europe, very rare. You'll certainly find such things far and few between in Asia. So not only is it absent in non-Christian nations, but the places where it is present, like Scandiland for ex, tend to be Christian.
Porn, let alone fetish porn, has a big problem because all the actors, including "amateur", are not only 'heavily used' and completely desensitized, but also the sort of people willing to publicly share video of themselves having sex. And so anybody taking any sort of que from there, whatsoever, has no clue what normal sex or normal relations look like.
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“ we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.”
Holy…what the actual…get out of my head. Where can I read more about this idea/how to recover from this type of upbringing? Please?
Lol I have never met someone in my adult life in the usa who was strictly for abstinence before marriage. You are extremely overstating the taboo of it here.
The first two videos listed on PornHub.com are "FUCK THE CONDOM! Skinny Blonde Girl Opens HER LITTLE ASSHOLE FOR MY BIG COCK" and "2 Friends Want to Try an African Dick in the Ass for the First Time While They're Pissed On and Humiliated."
The First Amendment makes this kind of stuff borderline impossible to regulate in the US, but it's pretty obvious that this stuff is harmful to people's brains and that society would be better off it was not available to people (especially minors).
“Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender “*kids*”
What?
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Why are sites about women's health issues posting porn, exactly?
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Huge blind spot to think that content only affects men’s view of intimacy and sexual relations
Explain that one for the class
Its a common conception but today is your lucky day to articulate it
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> The world would almost assuredly be a better place if 14 year olds were looking at playboy magazines instead of having easy access to every fetish under the sun.
That was the world I grew up in. It was not better, it was just less open.
How can I parent my kids when every child in the school is a social media addict?
If heroin were commonplace and available in every kid’s pockets would parents be to blame then too?
Yes, actually.
I regularly discuss with my son what he watches and views online. I also share with him what I view. I'm sure that he hides some things from me, but we have a very open channel and he most certainly know what his father approves of and does not approve of.
Furthermore, I fully expect him to cross boundaries and view content that he knows I would not approve of. That's perfectly natural. But while doing so he knows very well that he is overstepping boundaries. That is a critical nuance.
That's why phone are banned in school in France.
And you can still regulate what your kid does when he's not at school.
I know many parents who manage this fine, I don't see why you can't:
1. You control whether your child has a phone and how much they are allowed to use it (Apple provides all sorts of controls for parents).
2. Every child in the school is not an addict. This is (for lack of a better term) a boomer view of the world.
Sure you can argue the nuances, however this is missing the forest for the trees.
Children don’t grow up in a vacuum. They see how their peers operate, what they talk about, what they are playing with.
Not being able to do that marks you as an outsider.
And when the “toys” we are talking about are phones, video games, and social media, it isn’t just a question of a one off argument or rule.
I have seen a 1 year old, whose parents keep him away from screens and tech, get hypnotized by swiping the screen of an Apple Watch on his aunt’s hand.
SV and Tech had the most money, most people, and the ability to test and scale every idea to figure out what would enrapture adult human brains.
This is not any sort of fair fight. A competition where the old approaches to family and child rearing win against the Tech that has been created.
Meta (née Facebook) hired addiction medicine specialists to work on their platform engagement. It wasn't to make teens use their platforms less.
But, to be fair, many companies hire organizational psychologists and other such people to make their products addictive and to understand exactly how to make the most money on you and get the most time from you. Even the rewards program at the grocery store near you is tailored in such a way to maximally please you and keep you shopping there
Many companies got regulated to hell and back, as a result.
There are no meth companies, the cigarette industry is regulated as far as we can take it, opiates and medication is regulated with punitive damages levied (once evidence passes a threshold). Gambling is highly regulated (and prediction markets will be as well, eventually)
I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I believe even reward programs will have regulations surrounding them.
Above all else: What we did with social media, lootboxes and phones, was unprecedented.
The safety people brought up the issues in the firms, and the final decision that had to be taken was to ensure shareholder returns.
This assumes parents aren’t doing their job. As a young kid you don’t have a choice. Social pressure to participate in social media is intense. Either you’re constantly online or you’re out. Though luck being a parent policing this, you’ll only make things worse for your kid and your own. Only a mandated curfew can help.
Maybe this business should be impossible. Why should it be possible?
Every porn site that makes money off harm to minors? Yes, and sometimes they are taken down.
Yes they should, but guess what they’re doing instead? Scrolling.
Engagement algorithm needs to be made illegal.
I think this is a general misunderstanding of how common law legal systems work.
The extent to which these are or are not generalized is decided by judges based on the merits of individual cases, and while a written law might sound broad the way it's interpreted is up to the accepted precedence.
I suspect a porn site would be ok because it's clearly labelled, and isn't trying to entice kids to engage with it. However if you're social platform deliberately trying to increase engagement with under 18s, and then promoting sexual content to them...
Ah yes, the good old "cigarettes and alcohol should be freely available to kids" lobby logic, like it's the 60s and 70s again.
Cigarettes and alcohol are freely available to kids
Not really
Some number of people might make these available to kids, but it's certainly nowhere near "freely"
> Should every porn site be taken down?
I mean, I like porn as much as the next guy, but probably yes?
I’m curious the moral basis for which you have appointed yourself more qualified than the adult viewers themselves about what adults should be able to view in their web browser.
I find it amusing that you think that anyone trying to declare themselves an authority does so on a moral basis.
Yes. It's ok to say no to porn and gore. I'm tired of acting like we need it to survive otherwise some dystopian genie will be unleashed. Get rid of that shit.
I think a lot of us probably would agree that pornographic content is generally bad for society. I think the hard part here is actually getting rid of it. I think what will end up happening is it moves to a darker part of the web and is completely unregulated. Just look at what happened in the US with illegal drugs. They didn’t just go away, and now we have less safe drugs pretty much freely available laced with fentanyl and other harmful or deadly substances. I know this isn’t exactly the same situation but we should consider what might happen when making something “illegal”.
> I think a lot of us probably would agree that pornographic content is generally bad for society.
Speak for yourself. The science of it seems to be a mixed bag with definite pros and cons.
You're talking about something that is also intrinsic to humanity. It takes no resources. Good luck with that.
You are of course free to not view it. Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view? How do you know better than they do, what they should or should not be viewing?
As I got older I began to recognize that some things are just bad for society at large.
My refraining from a thing doesn't fix the societal ill the thing causes.
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> Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view?
Why not? Some people decide for others on abortion, some driving, some alcohol and drugs. Some people decide how much the government is allowed to steal from us.
Why wouldn’t I think I should decide for others?
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They actively spent hundreds of millions of dollars deliberately creating chatbots that would engage in sex acts with minors. It was known to Zuckerberg and approved by him explicitly. That isn't a parenting issue, that is predation at scale.
However you put it, the parent (if around) is the closest and most frequent point of contact for any child. A parent doing an OK job would be a reliable resource whom the child can approach with any questions arising from weird "discoveries" online or even in the community. A parent doing a splendid job would proactively educate their child about the world and it's messiness so said child is equipped to confidently handle much of what pops up. A child should be able to recognize and avoid predation when they encounter it.
you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
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No, society is allowed to decide what is acceptable and what isn't. Acting like trillion dollar corporations do not have a massive influence on American society is borderline mush for brains here.
You basically don't want to punish American corporations, which is just frankly odd. American corporations are some of the most destructive and anti-human organizations on the planet. Being pro-corporation means you have anti-human sentiments, and frankly what are yours? That you think people with poor constitutions or mental acuity deserve to feel mental anguish? Like what is it, just say it and save us time.
Anyone that fights back against a corporation is always seen as a hero for good reason.