Comment by tw04
5 hours ago
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.
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
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...
Nobody is surprised by the misogyny of your reply or early 2010s stackexchange.
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"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.
>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?
I don't know, probably.
>There is no reason this has to be true.
The incessant need of moralists and God-botherers to purge society of anything they deem immoral is the reason. You give these people an inch and and a legal pretext and they take a mile.
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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.
It doesn't require porn. Most movies, tv shows, rom-coms or dramas, have "unrealistic" depictions of "normal" relationships.
>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.
Maybe, but none of that is germane to the subject at hand.
It's the responsibility of parents and other adults to keep children away from porn, and to teach them about sex and normal relations. Removing porn doesn't solve that problem because again the problem isn't the porn, it's the fact that porn is serving a role in educating people that society refuses to.
“ 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?
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).
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.
“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?
Read all the words. I know it's Hacker News and that's asking for a lot of emotional maturity in a thread like this but I believe in you.
Why are sites about women's health issues posting porn, exactly?
They aren't, I never said they were.
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
To be clear, you want me to articulate a point that you fabricated and then attributed to me? I think I’m going to pass, but feel free to continue the discussion with yourself about things I didn’t say.
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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.