As a kid, I was able to figure out limewire, Emule, torrents and I'm sure kids today will be able to download a free vpn or use similar tools I used as a preteen to figure out how to circumvent these pointless blocks. I started with free video samples and only moved onto methods by high school to get access to premium websites. As a human, our strength is not only the ability to do these things but to also teach others to do it. I was able to help my friends to get access as well. If one ape discovered fire it would die with them, but our ability to spread information, like a virus is what gives humanity intelligence. One kid like me at school is all it takes to make this stupid law useless.
Adult websites want brownie points and also don't like nonpayers, but mess with their revenue and you'll get a push back.
A mistake many people do. Maybe there are people now wary of children being subjected to certain content on the net. They are forgetting at least three things:
They also were exposed and survived just fine
Their kids are probably going to be better with tech at some point.
The vast majority of pornographic content is available without being on the market which makes regulation nearly impossible. Yes, you can maybe attack the platforms hosting it, but I don't see this going anywhere. You would punish commercial distribution on push other content underground. Many in porn are already directly financed by their viewers.
Wasn't the Australia block circumvented within 24h by a ~14-year old kid?
Some people suggested to make brushing teeth illegal so that kids do it in secret in a dark corner.
I agree - for many of people(including teens) circumventing restrictions is part of the thrill.
That said I do think there has been an escalation of porn over the years. It's really apparent when you look at things from the 70s. Though apparently banning porn from cinemas shifted content to more "trashy" VHS/DVD/Online videos
I feel data-driven analytics has probably accelerated this, like a race to the bottom (pun unintended). Extremity probably drives engagement so the porn kids are exposed to today is much more extreme than what we may have been as up and coming internet users.
There has been an escalation of porn compared to the 70s, but so has also every from of consumption and consumerism. What is not clear is if peoples ability to adapt and filter out the extreme aspects has also increased.
Violence in movies are also more extreme. As is violence in music, violence in news flows, and violence in the messages of peoples social communities.
I am also always aware that here in Sweden there was a significant difference in cultural values around both violence and sex compared to the US during the 70s-90s. Casual nudity and minor sexual references were seen as something funny and embarrassing rather than taboo, while violence was seen as twisting the mind of children. In the US it was the opposite, with violence being perfectly fine but anything hinting towards sex was something that would corrupt children. At the later part of the 90s the culture in Sweden copied that of the US, with English became in practice a second language, so I am always a bit weary of claims that images of sex and nudity will corrupt people, teens and even children, while illustrations and reference to violence are given a wide acceptances as innocent to anyone until studies has proven it guilty.
> There has been an escalation of porn compared to the 70s, but so has also every from of consumption and consumerism. What is not clear is if peoples ability to adapt and filter out the extreme aspects has also increased.
Violence in movies are also more extreme. As is violence in music, violence in news flows, and violence in the messages of peoples social communities.
And yet, all across the OECD since ~1990 violent crime is down, teen pregnancy is down, and on and on and on. For all of the pearl clutching about the morality and decency of this stuff it doesn't seem to be ruining society.
You can't really conclude that "this stuff" is harmless just looking at the tendencies. I agree though that I my pick for what is ruining society would be something else...
I agree America looks that way, but how different are reality and news? For good and ill. I get the impression that the ratings-grabbing parts of news alternate between chest-thumping tribalism and nut-picking.
America is going to have by far the worst handling of the pandemic compared to similar western democracies. We had a real world test as a society and we failed. That isn't just the news fudging things to grab viewers.
Like with certain drugs, I think it's perfectly possible to acknowledge the potential issues with excessive porn consumption (or with certain kinds of porn) while still thinking that it's not uniformly bad if consumed in moderation.
Yeah you're right. Just because I would never touch crystal meth doesn't mean I should therefore stand in the way of people using cannabis recreationally (or even medically).
So yeah I guess it comes back to education rather than prohibition...
I would challenge even this framing. Amphetamines were widely used and abused between the 1940s and 1960s without social stigma. They are for sure a problematic class of chemicals, but I think the perception that they are uniquely dangerous is tied up in their present association with societal out groups, classism, and disdain for the rural poor, whereas cannabis has become accepted among the upper class.
You could make some arguments about relative health effects, but those just as easily apply to alcohol which we readily accept and consume in polite company.
In addition to classism, one of the consequences of the war on drugs is there's not much trustworthy data on drugs' relative impact. Nobody wants to teach high schoolers there are any safe drugs.
So I know people who smoke and drink without obviously destroying their lives. But if you asked me to rank those alongside meth, cocaine and chainsaw juggling for danger I've got nothing but guesswork.
OK I'm gonna challenge you on that. Amphetamine causes (even at low and occasional doses) insomnia, mania, extreme loss of appetite. When used for longer periods, it can cause disordered thinking, delusions, paranoia, invasion of Russia..
We already does millions of people in America at least with Adderall which is an amphetamines not molecularly very different from Methamphetamine. It turns out to be mostly safe for most people, whether it good for you or me to use is a different question.
Also linking amphetamines to Nazis in order to demonize users is just ridiculous.
The primary mechanism for "meth mouth" and similar oral health issues are dry mouth and teeth clenching which can be caused by a number of stimulants including caffeine(at moderate to high doses of ~6 cups of coffee). The remedy for which seems to be drinking a lot of water.
That said, it's obviously bad to give children diet drugs but that has no real bearing on how we treat recreational drug users who are adults.
Part of the problem is that the education is left to less reputable corners of the web.
There is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence of the damage that can be done by abuse of internet porn. I could add to that.
But we have those with credentials who have made a good career out of attacking the very notion that porn can be harmful or can be abused. I'm not saying it's shilling, it could just be success by contrarianism, but it's still rather invalidating.
If you are in a position where you think porn is doing you harm, it probably is. But one of the first things you find if you go down that path is that information tends to be on the extremes.
But it is something like a person selling both weed and meth next to each other, without any communication or acknowledgement that one is significantly more likely to cause harm.
If pot were legal, maybe people would be happy to get high on that at stop there. I think there are two issues at play, both going in the same direction.
1. If buying pot is going to carry the same risk as buying meth, and I can get higher for the same quantity of meth (I assume meth is more potent per unit of volume) it would make some sense for me to try to get meth, or at the very least to be interested when someone offers, especially if I'm not 100% sure when I'll be able to buy more pot.
2. There is also a question of trust. If the government says pot is as bad as meth (both schedule 1, I hear about big police operations taking down pot dealers, etc) they I might believe them. After all, what do I know? I just want to get high. So when I get to try some pot, see that I like it, see many people smoking pot without much harm, I figure I might as well try some meth. Especially given point 1 above.
>Extremity probably drives engagement so the porn kids are exposed to today is much more extreme than what we may have been as up and coming internet users.
The front page of any given tube site these days is professionals pretending to be step siblings and content produced by the pornographic equivalent of YouTubers and Instagram influencers. I feel like the extremity peaked ~10yr ago.
Mulling on your comment, the latter might actually be the next wave.
After too much "polished" content from Brazzers/BangBros/RealityKings which is really your McDonald's megacorp productions of porn having a decentralised authentic "team of 1" indy authentic production via Porntubers is probably the parallel evolution that we saw in Youtube.
Not sure, I haven't really studied or thought about this issue very much. Although porn is quite fascinating in its universality and scale.
During the late 90’s and early 00’s, there was already plenty of weird, extreme porn on the web. I think it might have been more of a step function between offline and online.
It is so easy to encounter it, even accidentally. Things have improved a bit, but 3 yrs ago when I switched to DDG almost any image search with SafeSearch=off came with sudden unexpected nude or porn pics on page 2 or 3 almost regardless of the search term.
Sure, what can you expect, right? Imo not that any unrelated search yields porn. With google this never happened (actually I can't remember ever seeing porn images unexpectedly in ggl image search where I also had safe search off). It held me back recommending DDG to others. Though, as I said, things have improved a bit nowadays, and it happens less often.
I think I read it here on HN that google has/had an entire team dedicated to making sure you never ever got porn unless you were very specifically searching for it.
Most people also survived driving without a seatbelt before it became illegal.
Just because something is not dangerous or damaging in 100% of cases does not mean it’s not problematic or should not be made slightly less convenient to access. That prevention is not 100% effective also does not mean it will have 0 positive effect.
I’m still against age filters like this though, because they tend to also block access to legitimate sex education and info about HBT issues that can be life saving for teenagers.
A lot didn't though. Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences. Survivorship bias. These things don't exist in a vacuum, they shape our culture.
> Their kids are probably going to be better with tech at some point.
Hmmm. I know it's from personal experience but I think the vast majority of kids don't care about tech. It's 2020. I already heard that as a kid in the 90's (you are all tech genius ! born with it !) and plenty of 20-30 are still as dumb with computers as my peers were back then.
Now, indeed, it's way easier to access porn these days than back then or even 15 years ago.
> Wasn't the Australia block circumvented within 24h by a ~14-year old kid?
That kid is an exception, not the norm.
Most will use some kind of solution recommended by their peers and that's how we end up with "streaming website" installing malwares all over the place. It's easier for people to click on a website to watch their shows than going to a torrent site (or whatever tech is used these days to share movies and tv shows).
> Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences. Survivorship bias. These things don't exist in a vacuum, they shape our culture.
The same could be said for Facebook or vaping or mobile phones in general. New forms of stimulating the brain always have interesting side effects. If we knee-jerk banned this kind of stuff because it’s unknown and might be dangerous, we’d still be living in the dark ages.
I think that the GP comment that kids are smart enough to get porn stands. Kids are social, so even if one kid isn’t technically inclined, some of their friends will be. I recall that access to porn was a bragging point amongst my friend groups in mid 1990s, before Internet porn was even that common.
If you are a parent and you have Internet access you are straight-up naive if you think anything the government can do will “protect” your child from online porn. Just get over it.
> The same could be said for Facebook or vaping or mobile phones in general. New forms of stimulating the brain always have interesting side effects. If we knee-jerk banned this kind of stuff because it’s unknown and might be dangerous, we’d still be living in the dark ages.
Well... the same is said about Facebook and mobile phones (attention economy, media addiction, etc.) and vaping carries long lasting consequences if you use nicotine and or other substances.
We are far past the point of knee-jerk reactions regarding mobile phones and facebook usage.
> I think that the GP comment that kids are smart enough to get porn stands. Kids are social, so even if one kid isn’t technically inclined, some of their friends will be. I recall that access to porn was a bragging point amongst my friend groups in mid 1990s, before Internet porn was even that common.
Which makes it harder to type pornsomething.com into a browser. So not "kids" but "one of them". And his methods might not be the safest/easiest (see my comment about pirate streaming website).
> If you are a parent and you have Internet access you are straight-up naive if you think anything the government can do will “protect” your child from online porn. Just get over it.
You are calling me naive and claiming I believe the government will protect child from porn and that I support the whole thing. All things that are wrong. Then you proceed to tell me to get over something I am not endorsing or promoting.
I’m actually not calling you anything, my statement was a general statement regarding the efficacy of government regulations on Internet speech as a means of “protecting children” which always end up being 100% ineffective and 100% disingenuous. I apologize if it came off as a personal attack; that was not my intent.
The average Joe today can't even type facebook.com in the address bar, let alone anything else. One day Chrome will remove the address bar and few will notice.
Fair enough, I thought about changing `can` to `may` but I forgot it wouldn't fly on HN ^^.
> Research into associations between use or non-use of condoms and consumption of pornography among adolescents varies. Some studies found that the use of pornography was associated with non-condom use for both gay (Arrington-Sanders et al., 2015) and heterosexual (Braun-Courville & Rojas, 2009; Luder et al., 2011) male adolescents, yet was not the case for female adolescents (Luder et al., 2011). One study from the Netherlands, which asked adolescents about their sexual practices and pornography use repeatedly over time, did not find an association between pornography use and condomless sex (Peter & Valkenburg, 2011c). These associations may differ depending on the content of pornographies they consume, particularly between gay and heterosexual male adolescents, as gay pornography has a much higher rate of condom use (condomless sex represents a substantial minority of gay pornographies) than heterosexual pornography (condomless sex is the overwhelming majority of content). In addition, the relative cultural context of sexuality education and condom use is also important here (i.e., in the Netherlands sexuality education is more comprehensive and attentive to issues of gender and consent in general than in Australia, see Bell, 2009).
I let you follow the trails from there, just stay away from netnanny like and sexual addicts support websites as they are promoting a very specific agenda and framing things in a certain way.
So your evidence for the "lasting consequences" of pornography is that there are some studies indicating a correlation to a reduction in condom usage. This indicates to me a need for better sex education.
This doesn't justify the ominous phrase "some long lasting consequences".
We should acknowledge it's not a widely studied field, especially as exposing minors to hardcode pornography is not legal in most places. Having any evidence of studied effect is already pretty good in my book.
Outside of this specific question, current pornography landscape is already controversial regarding its effect on society regarding exploitation of the actors, gender bias projection affecting a range of fields including rape trials.
If adults can be ill affected by current porn production, is it a stretch to apply the same conclusion to children ? I'd argue it should at least be vetted as appropriate, the criteria for that being left to the parents.
If porn had no consequences then there wouldn't be a need for better sex education.
If you disagree with the fact that not using a condom can have long lasting consequences (as in getting pregnant or getting an std) then I don't think we should debate the subject any longer.
> If porn had no consequences then there wouldn't be a need for better sex education.
This is ridiculous. We'd need comprehensive sex education whether or not anyone watches porn. Before porn was trivially available online, teenagers still had plenty of sex. Sexual consent was still widely misunderstood too (and still is).
Of course pregnancy is a long lasting consequence, but if it is addressed by a program we need even without porn, it's irrelevant to porn.
> Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences.
If all you had in mind was condom usage and pregnancy, this is a bizarre choice of phrasing.
> This is ridiculous. We'd need comprehensive sex education whether or not anyone watches porn.
I don't follow. Of course sex ed is need and I believe it should be updated to take porn into account (if it's not already there).
> If all you had in mind was condom usage and pregnancy, this is a bizarre choice of phrasing.
Of course not, but I can't go around citing every publications or experts under the sun that points to cultural changes and implications on the children's upbringing.
Now I believe the debate is wrongly framed from the beginning. Children aren't teenagers, some culture have varying definitions for children, teenagers, adults, etc. and “porn” is way too generic (softcore, bdsm, gonzo, mutilation, etc.) to encompass the whole situation. Saying it's fine for children to watch porn won't fly when you hear about some kind of porn some people are consuming.
AFAIC I believe parents should take care to protect children from porn watching/accident, explain things sooner than previous generations (this is a change brought in by the total availability of porn content) did. There should be a mention in sex education about porn and how and why it paints some very specific sexual intercourse behaviour in specific ways and why it's not necessarily what's expected from a partner, etc.
I do agree and believe a government filter won't have any meaningful impact though.
Social bullshit around private life is much more destructive there. I once bought an antiseptic and the cashier gave me a weird look. Guess why. Because as an antiseptic one of its uses was treatment of STDs and the cashier obviously knew it.
I think the burden of proof should be the other way around. The desire for sex is one of the most fundamental instincts that we have. Who can really say that their first sexual encounters don't stick with them for life? Internet porn is a radical shift in how young people are experiencing sex during important developmental years. Why wouldn't it have a long lasting effect?
No, there have been claims for decades about the harms of pornography. There should be enough evidence for detractors against pornography consumption to use. The burden is proof is on them.
I've seen exactly that fearlessness with my six-year old twins when they get a hold of my phone or iPad. They've found features I didn't even know existed. They also are really adaptable. My wife, who is used to using either her iPad or her surface for computing has, despite a much longer span of using mouse/trackpad driven selection, developed a hard to break habit of tapping the screen on my MacBook. My kids, when we switched them to the MacBook for their virtual class meetings, adapted to using the trackpad without a moment's hesitation. They were also infinitely better than any of my co-workers have been about muting/unmuting themselves appropriately during videoconferences, as have their classmates. They're just learning to read still but once they've unlocked that achievement, I can only imagine what they'll be capable of doing.
Hijacking the thread to say: make sure they've got access to something with exposed innards. Windows is enough of a patched-together mess that it's a good candidate (I'd argue it's better (more messy) now than it was when I cut my teeth on it), but a 'nix with systemd, a web server or a low-voltage electronics kit would do nicely.
That's true and all but I wouldn't downplay the devastating effects of pornography addiction during adolescence through college and into adult life and how this unfettered all-access pass to sexual media can start to effect your social life and education negatively when your prefrontal cortex is constantly lit up to get that sweet dopamine fix from moving pixels on a screen.
Why go out into the real world and put in the work to be rewarded in the flesh when you can get 10x the novelty and fantasy of anything you desire at the click of a button? (generally speaking). Our brains never evolved to handle the onslaught of readily available hyper-pleasurable vices (e.g. drugs, alcohol, social media likes, porn, etc) that create positive, self-reinforcing neural pathways for addiction that are extremely hard to extinguish on your own and offer you an escape from reality and discomfort.
Not saying everyone experiences this, but it seems irresponsible to let young kids create and reinforce these addiction pathways in their reward centers of their brain before their brain and pre-frontal cortex is fully developed in their 20's. I know I struggle with this stuff from an early age after stumbling on magazines and VHS cassettes at a too young age to understand what this was doing to my young brain now looking back, the hooks have set in deep.
My hypothesis is just that they don't want to legalize selling pornography to teenagers, because teenagers are so horny that they'd become a big market for porn (sort of like they're a big market for casual-mobile gacha games) and then pornographers would start making porn targeted at teenagers. Which, uh.
I actually think that porn can have a detrimental effect on people, not permanent, but also not always the best. Will government regulation fix it? No. Kids now are having less sex, they are more isolated, and males are now having way less sex in general, so what fills in the place? Porn. If you get rid of porn and not have any changes in society, they will not magically go away.
Before that they'll use simpler methods. Twitter and Reddit have all the categories you'd ever need. And they won't get blocked / filtered for technical reasons.
You’re focused just on those looking to circumvent these blocks knowingly. Where there’s a will, there is a way, no doubt. I recently had an elementary-grade child stumble upon pornhub through a google search. I am ultimately responsible for this, and we now have more than one content filtering service in place, including one we pay for.
I don’t think it is too much to ask to have those who want to view this content to be the ones who have to jump through hoops.
I’m not that old, and the ease of access to adult content is much greater than when I was my childrens’ ages. The fact that it is so easy now and that technology is so ingrained in their everyday lives makes it that much more important to creat safe spaces for them.
But kids pass information around when there's motivation. When I was in high school, I didn't have a computer or access to BBS sites, but I had friends who did and that's how, for example, I ended up with an 800 number I could use to make free long distance calls and a binder full of Apple ][ software.
Does a greater amount of more varied type somehow make it more damaging?
I should point out that very explicit pornographic content that is now taboo in our society including bestiality, incest, and so on has existed for thousands of years. I'd much rather my kids be looking at pornhub than some of the things the Greeks and Romans were making...
What “exists” is not very relevant, the difference is that when i was a kid you’d have to steal a magazine from a shop and it would have a bunch of photos of naked women, sometimes having sex. Now endless amounts of porn is available at the click of a button, of course that’s much worse.
That doesn't disprove it. A random link on the internet is understood to be Schrödinger's Porn. A random link to YouTube, on the other hand, is a much more family-friendly Schrödinger's RickRoll.
>A random link to YouTube, on the other hand, is a much more family-friendly Schrödinger's RickRoll.
Except when it's not. The only way to find out is to open the box. Er, I mean click the link.
Others may be people that somehow 'peeked in that box' enough times they didn't want to do it again and their local memory has stored the URL and associated it with a negative outcome. URL shortener's totally destroy that learnt ability.
There's kind of a reason people came up with the term "risky click of the day" and now there's 'NSFL' (Not Safe For Life), which is extremely worrying.
Anyway, I got upvoted which means it still worked, and I got to legitimitely rickroll someone on HN and they appreciated the lesson. Woohoo.
One of the problems with the software engineers solution to these kinds of problems is that create a plugin that checks whether the url resolves to the rickroll video or not. The problem is definitely solved, but now the computer/browser is slower for everyday use. Also the problem is still easily recreatable at a different level of abstraction. (e.g. aforementioned URL shorteners or copying the rickroll video to another location) <-- this is the really hard problem to solve and we haven't even used encryption yet.
When it reaches the level of the politicians 'protect the children' where its about votes and appearing to do the right thing but none of the people understand the implementation problems and we discuss the absurdity of it on HN.
You do however get to be technically correct. It's not a proof. It's more like circumstantial evidence in experiential form.
Do you know what porn today is like? There's so much of it and a lot of it is highly stimulating, full of interesting and unattainable-in-real-life kinks. Maybe you were exposed, but it was not likely as accessible as it is for kids/people now. Unless you have experienced the pit of despair, going through porn addiction, it's easy to think that people are going to survive it fine just like we did.
A lot of people can enjoy a healthy amount of porn and then move on from it because they were able to get a real life partner or something. Many are destroyed by it, because they have no other option and simply go downhill from there.
But it's true, you can't just ban it either. That's definitely what I'm not asking for.
That remains to be seen really. Internet porn is a completely different thing to finding a porn mag in a bush one day. The kids who have grown up with easily accessible internet porn are only just reaching maturity. We already know that birth rates are decreasing, sperm rates are decreasing, impotence in young, health men is increasing, single mothers are increasing. It doesn't bode well.
Speaking from experience I think access to internet porn is hugely damaging for young men. Men are naturally polygamous and want to mate with as many women as possible. Porn provides a simulation of that but with instant gratification and no concern for feelings of another person and all that stuff that comes along with a real relationship. Many men are finding that having sex with a single woman of average attractiveness just doesn't cut it.
But I have no idea what to do about it barring maybe a full Butlerian Jihad style expunction.
"Many men are finding that having sex with a single woman of average attractiveness just doesn't cut it."
Given that ~30% of young men are sexless and only ~15% of young women are sexless in the previous year, that just reeks of 3d wave feminism bullshit.
Just as men are polyamorous, women are hypergamous, but nobody dares try to limit that.
If we want normal birthrates and normal involvment from young men, we should: eliminate tax havens, tax, tax and tax some more owning more than one house, eliminate education borrowing, have affordable/public healthcare and education.
Have a hard, data driven look of the population self-sustainability of cities, and tax cities that benefit from influx of population, and use that money to develop areas that have higher birth rates.
Both suggestions from both of you don't fit with my observations at all. People that do actually found families are overwhelmingly faithful in monogamous relationships, complete penguin style with house, dog and kids. Yes, yes, of course every second couple has a secret BDSM-basement and countless affairs... or maybe not. I think the evolutionary explanation we often hear are mostly horseshit to be honest and wouldn't even make sense since humans need decades to mature.
The only trend I see is that people not married by 30 mostly aren't going to do it later and in many cases the men and women don't even want a relationship anymore. The sudden decision of settling down after having countless relationships is certainly a lifestyle lie to yourself and others. Just accept that marriage might not be for you, which is completely fine. Contrary to popular belief there is no pope forcing you to marry anyone. Some say there is societal pressure, but your mom and dad aren't society.
Maybe these impressions actually do stem from porn although I don't really believe that either. Lifestyle choice seem to be primarily influenced by class and education. Maybe porn consumption is too, but I doubt it.
"I think the evolutionary explanation we often hear are mostly horseshit to be honest and wouldn't even make sense since humans need decades to mature."
There is overwhelming evidence for those explanations, both scientifically, anecdotally and empirically -- just take an average looking 25 year old male and make him ask 100 random women on the street if they would like to have sex with him and I guarantee, there will be 0 willing women.
Then take an average looking 25 year old woman and make her ask 100 men if they want to have sex with her, and I also guarantee, 80+ men will be willing to do so right then and there(not in public, obviously).
Only if you thought the problem were that the standards of young men are too high.
I'd wager the problems are more related to self-confidence, the ease in which you can avoid social interactions, and the root issue that you don't get laid as a man until you learn how to approach and talk to women. Some men never even learn how.
The simple economics of sex (men having to pursue women, women being the selectors, just like in the rest of the animal kingdom) explains most of it.
90% of the men who lack confidence, lack confidence for a good reason.
Surely if it was just about confidence in itself, evolution and sexual selection would have made all men super confident by now.
The truth is men are mostly obsolete and worthless by the standard values that have been in place since the discovery of agriculture -- phisical labor is a lot less valuable thanks to mecanization and automation, the police, professional army, social wellfare have taken away a big chunk of what made men valuable before.
Nothing you've said contradicts what I said. Male polygamy and female hypergamy go hand in hand. These two strategies evolved together. You can't have one without the other.
Many of the 30% of sexless men have voluntarily withdrawn from the game for various reasons. Being able to satisfy their urges at home is a big one. This withdrawal just allows polygamy/hypergamy to enter society again. This is, after all, the natural order of things. Marriage and monogamy were just human inventions.
Men are withdrawing because they are not being selected by women. Freed from social pressures that used to act as a brake on hypergamy, women are following their natural instinct to pursue the top 10-20% of men.
Unfortunately, taken to its natural conclusion this leaves a huge chunk of people unhappy. Lower status men are sexless and unloved, and most women are unsatisfied because there aren't enough high status men to go around.
Excessive porn use is a symptom of this, not the cause.
Are you sure all of these trends aren't better explained by rock'n'roll or rap music, violent video games, "chemicals", too much/not enough meat in the diet or linguistic change? Because I'm sure I can find some reactionary who is.
Adult websites want brownie points and also don't like nonpayers, but mess with their revenue and you'll get a push back.
There's basically one company that runs all the major porn sites (Mindgeek). That company was going to be provider of the age verification system the UK government looked in to that's now been scrapped. The company also sells a VPN for circumventing blockers including the age verification systems. It's really a brilliant three-sided-market business.
The problem is that a lot people expect porn to be free now, because there are so many free videos it's enough for all but the most dedicate porn watcher. This move has nothing do with "protecting children" and everything to do with the porn industry realising that they've given their product away for so long that the best way they can make money now is by lobbying governments to make people pay again.
Well similarly, I can access BBC iPlayer from outside the U.K. too. It takes reconnecting to a VPN several times and streaming over a patchy connection, but I can do it. Does that make the BBC's geolocking pointless? No, because most people can't and even I am discouraged to do it because the experience is such a hassle.
And in this case even the kids who can access porn: making it difficult enough that their 12 year old selves can't but their 15 year old selves can is a success. Or making it something they can plan out, but not do in the spur of the moment is also a success.
People on HN always seem to misunderstand the point of these measures.
They're not there to make it impossible for anyone under the age of 18 to ever see pornographic content. They exist to make sure that porn isn't pushed at children who don't want to see it. It wasn't that long ago that pornographic ads were common on some ad networks or in email spam. It's this accidental stumbling upon porn that the measures aim to stop.
The blocks are always described in the strongest possible terms by the politicians pushing them because:
1) It makes the public think politicians are taking strong action against poor behaviour
2) It gives the politicians a stronger bargaining position: implement good voluntary age restrictions or we'll put in place a stupid filter.
Quite common if you were to watch a movie online for free. Not on Amazon Prime or Netflix of course, but not all movies that I am interested in is available on Netflix, Amazon Prime in my region.
Is it merely coincidental that the sites where you're most likely to find pornographic advertisements happen to be websites for pirating media? Which aspect of these websites are politicians truly clutching their pearls over? The part about morality and kids, or the part about media corporations and money?
Don't see what's wrong with streaming per se. Of course, this is assuming you can cache it if you want to watch it multiple times – which you can't if you have certain kinds of DRM.
My opinion as a father of two: Putting up roadblocks to accessing these materials is good. Some things really are damaging to young minds.
However, I'm not stupid. At some point they will get exposed to this stuff and if my children put in the effort to learn how to bypass those roadblocks, then great, at least they learned something in the process.
If you make chocolate milk just a little harder to reach, kids at scale will be reaching for it less, and we're just talking about chocolate milk. You make returning your product just a few minutes harder and fewer people will be getting their money back.
I mean, before the internet kids were generally not allowed to buy porn, and yet I remember we managed to get VHS, games, magazines, and even erotic comics as minors.
Umm. In fact, most adult site revenue comes from non-payers, they view ads and help keep that count up. If they are allowing Chinese traffic (and most do), they'll take anything.
In most countries pornography is restricted to people over 18 by law.
This was not too difficult to enforce when access was mostly in person, but it has become difficult now that access is mostly online.
If society agrees that young people below a certain age should not have access to pornography then it is reasonable, even necessary, to try to implement ways to enforce that restriction online.
Alcohol and cigarettes are restricted to people above 18/21 in most places. Yet somehow I see 14-15 year olds drinking and smoking (even weed, which is illegal).
I think I first saw a porn magazine before I was 10.
Where there's a will, there's a way. You can't use technology for this, because there will always be a will, so they'll ALWAYS find a way.
The point is that proportion of young adults that will access to porn will change from 100% to ~25%. Of course people will find a way, but the question is how much effort will they put in before they give up. If the effort barrier is too high, you will cull off some people - the purpose of this legislation.
Why would it change? It's not like officially not being able buy alcohol stops anyone who wants to drink from drinking.
We can pretend that this is the biggest danger that people under 18 face, but let's be real, much worse things can happen to them, than watching porn.
This shouldn't be solved at the government level, but at the family level. By parents talking to kids.
Also, unless they implement something like the PRC's firewall, it will a 100% be an inept solution that's easy to get around.
I think many men today have their brains altered from watching too much excessive porn. Fetishes develop and normal healthy relationships become problematic due to performance issues. There are many worse thing than porn, yes, but to be healthy well rounded adult, it does not help (at least excessive). Family can help, but some topics are taboo in many families, especially when man ego is in question. If you could not statisfy your wife, would you speak with your mother for help?
Yes, you can say it should start from young age, but both parents are at work and kids are left with high-speed internet and tablets. They react positively to porn and can get addicted - its a single click away. Hard to prevent that, eh.
I think we will witness the true effect of porn on males mind in future.
I generally agree with you about the effects of porn, especially on children, it definitely had an effect on me.
But, this kind of age verification bullshit will not help anyone. The politicians will be able to say they did something, and the parents will feel that they don't have to worry about this, making their children even more vulnerable.
I think porn addiction, and its effects are a societal issue, that can not be solved by legislation, only by making it a non-taboo topic, and talking about inside the family.
Edit, ps: your replies are marked as dead for some reason when you make them, and I had to vouch for it before being able to reply.
If it were 100% -> 25% I could see the value/justification. Even if it were 100% -> 90% there's value there. But these restrictions will not have any impact whatsoever. Anyone who wants access will have it regardless of age verification measures.
I remember when cigarette vending machines were banned. I'm sure it had 0.000000 (repeating of course) percent effect on the availability of cigarettes to kids who were motivated to get them. Same with alcohol regulations. Same with weed. Anyone with even an ounce of motivation can and will bypass.
I wrote that if there is a legal restriction on pornography (or cigarettes, or alcohol, or whatever) then it is reasonable to make efforts to enforce that restriction.
There is no enforcement that is 100% effective and some people always find a way to break the law. That's another issue and arguing on this is a strawman argument to my point.
It is absolutely impossible to enforce. The internet certainly makes it easier for kids, but such age barriers are only a minor inconvenience really.
Officially 18+ video games and movies can also be only accessed by adults, yet in my school a 13 years old kid literally ran a black market for horror movies and games like Call of Duty. It won't be any different for porn even if the government goes as far with blocking as the CCP.
> If society agrees that young people below a certain age should not have access to pornography then it is reasonable, even necessary, to try to implement ways to enforce that restriction online.
I think you're skipping a step here. It was reasonable when everyone involved was in the same jurisdiction and bound by the same laws.
Now that's just fundamentally not true. The question is, is this feasible today? If it is not feasible, I have a hard time calling it reasonable.
I am not skipping a step. On the contrary I start from the start: Society does not want that young people access pornography.
This is the starting point and everyone seems to ignore it and to immediately jump to strawman arguments about the feasibility of absolute enforceability.
If the starting point holds, then it is reasonable to try to enforce that restriction.
Only then does the issue of the feasibility become relevant.
Enforcement is always a balance between cost and benefit and is never 100% effective for anything. This is not an argument.
It is feasible to implement effective measures to enforce age restrictions online. The degree of effectiveness depends on how far we're willing to go. I think at the moment the aim is to discourage a significant enough portion of the people, knowing full well that the most motivated will find a way around it.
> is the starting point and everyone seems to ignore it and to immediately jump to strawman arguments about the feasibility of absolute enforceability.
That does seem like the natural progression (save for the strawman part).
Have desire to do something -> evaluate feasibility -> if it's feasible do it.
Perhaps that's not as standard of a flow as I originally thought. That would actually explain a number of laws on the books now that I think about it.
The 'argument' seems to be that there is not point enforcing the law because it is not feasible to enforce it absolutely.
This logic is obviously fallacious as is reducing enforcement to absolute enforcement.
I also find it disappointing that I was flagged for pointing this out. Strawman arguments are very common. Sometimes they are not used consciously but it is useful to call a cat a cat.
> The 'argument' seems to be that there is not point enforcing the law because it is not feasible to enforce it absolutely.
My argument was more that it is stupid and undermines the credibility of the government to pass laws that it cannot enforce. It's that they were passed in the first place that bothers me personally. I'm not holding anything against someone whose job it it to enforce the law having to enforce a stupid law.
We already saw this with the pirate bay, you can't block information. In fact, the harder you try, the funnier it is for people to find ways around it.
currently, people of all ages can easily access commercial pornography which then profits from the activity (either through advertising revenue or overt sales).
So in effect, due to not requiring and not enforcing age restrictions, pornographers are profiting from distributing pornography to minors, which is a crime and should be a crime.
Even if this fails to block access by minors, it will certainly to a much larger extent block the ability of pornographers to profit from illegally distributing adult content to them, and with that, the potential incentive to market to them and the attendant cultural knock-on effects this situation creates.
The way you word this is kind of problematic. I very much doubt the guys at pornhub are slouching on their throne of evil, drinking from a chalice of deceit, while scheming how to reach all the kids for increased profit.
Websites that don’t follow the new AV laws will have to sanctioned. If the website is local, you can go ‘round to their office and arrest the owners. Lock ‘em up and throw away the key, it being the only language they understand etc.
However, if the website is not local then it must be blocked, either by statute, by the courts, or by a regulator.
This may require a National Firewall to block sites (eg The PRC.) As a bonus, your blocking infra can also be used for monitoring and logging.
If you’re lucky though the nation state will implement its Great Firewall using a borked DNS infra (eg The UK) that isn’t even mandatory for ISPs with a small enough userbase.
Exciting times, er, temps fantastiques, even. What tech does En Marche intend to mandate for blocking hairy armpits? Hopefully nothing too competent.
Websites may already be blocked in France upon order from the Government, based on anti-terror laws.
Basically, the Ministry of the Interior decides and orders all Internet access providers to block a site. Courts are not involved on the premise that this must sometimes be carried out as quickly as possible, though there is a right to contest a decision a posteriori.
There's no such thing as blocking a site. You can direct DNS providers to block DNS, which doesn't help for anyone using Firefox. You can direct ISPs to block an IP but then you have hard decisions when the site you want to block is hosted by a foreign cloud provider.
How does foreign cloud provider matters. As of now encrypted SNI is not there, so they can block simply based on SNI. If SNI info is not correct, they can ask the foreign cloud provider to block the website. Any cloud provider where SNI block won't work well is large enough to not deny requests from the french government.
In the long term things are hard to predict. If we look from 2010, E2E encryption wasn't there, or atleast not in a form usable by the masses. E2E is now here, and is as easy as using Signal. However, you see countries making laws against it. I doubt they will let eSNI pass through. And eSNI will be much easier to block, since you don't need to block it for consumers, you just need to impose big fines on businesses using it, since any such business will need to earn money somehow from their customers in the country. Unlike E2E, you don't have to worry about some random person forking signal and running their own servers. And video on internet is expensive enough that only an entity with good bank balance can do it, thus easy to punish with economic fines.
Not that you're wrong, but passively sniffing SNI's is much more involved than DNS replying with an incorrect IP. Maybe countries highly invested in it like China can do it.
Oh so using sex to implement fear and uncertainty and despair ( FUD ) among the populace? Think of the children! By the way, here’s a firewall to block whatever websites we don’t like. Oh and you’re being monitored 24/7 now. But not now. In like, five years.
There's a meta-issue with pushing regulatory requirements that are trivial to bypass: you effectively normalize bypassing regulations and effectively create a culture where regulatory bypass is seen as "not a big deal" even if that wasn't your original intent.
People have been using VPNs because they think region-locking streaming content is something where the risk-reward calculus is fairly obvious, and from what I can see that's a fairly normalized cultural trend.
If you do the same thing with porn, you are now adding another layer of depth to the emergent cultural phenomena.
If you think there needs to be a serious conversation about porn access and psychology, implementing restrictions trivial to bypass only serves to reduce the legitimacy of agents trying to make the case for such education.
Edit: you also see this phenomenon with respect to COVID mask mandates
It's a continuation of an ongoing trend nowadays to elevate to a government level issues that should be solved in the family. Instead french government should spend its efforts on actual society problems that affect every child, like fixing french school system. But then they have to spend brain power and money while fighting entrenched interest groups, so as always, low hanging fruit is easier to pick.
Honestly, this is completely ridiculous and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It'll not only disturb people's lives if it goes on ahead, but could also have the potential risk of identity theft increasing depending on how it is implemented.
And the saddest part of all, is that this is completely pointless. It's extremely easy to circumvent, including for those with little to no tech knowledge, not to mention you can find hardcore pornography on platforms such as Twitter by typing 3 letters "Sex" and one click, plus all the hundreds of thousands of keywords that will lead you there, including such words as "Amateur", "Schoolgirl"...
If a 9-year-old types into Google, they will easily find porn.
But, maybe it shouldn't be so easy. And yes, once they're in middle school and high school they'll just figure out alternatives, but I don't think it's unreasonable to put up some dead simple barriers to protect innocence.
Just because it was easy for those of us growing up in the 90s and after doesn't mean all children have to be exposed like that.
Oh, thank you for reminding me that I'm still paying for a VDS that runs a Telegram proxy.
I think this whole story made people a tiny bit more technically literate. It also made it abundantly clear how clueless governments are about modern technology.
I wonder why they're using credit cards or leave it to the platforms to figure out verification mechanisms. In Germany the national ID card has age verification mechanisms built in[1]. This also has the advantage of not handing personal information over to the porn websites as all the veriifcation is done by the official eID server.
Given that the article also addresses future standardized European solutions this seems like a pretty reasonable step forward.
I suppose they would know which provider requests the authentification. However in one document I found the process is described as 'ephemeral' which I suppose suggests they don't store these requests.
Germany is pretty pedantic regarding age verification. For porn only closed user groups are legal. I guess providing the ID card would be not enough for the KJM, but I didn't read through all accepted systems. (edit: There is the AUTHADA ID system where you have to enter your eID PIN each time you login). There are very few third-party age verification providers that are deemed OK by the KJM. This describes a typical process they like:
> The Age Verification System is easy to use: the customer simply needs to take a photo of the front and back of their ID card as well as of their face. Then the system makes sure that the ID card is authentic and matches the photo of the customers face to the one on the card using biometric data. If successful, the age is verified – in under a minute. Companies can incorporate this fast and easy process directly into their procedures and identification systems.
After first registration, the user has to use SMS TANs to authenticate each time.
Other systems include stuff like logging in with your online banking account so the risk of giving this data to your children is low.
This is all pretty useless since foreign adult sites are not blocked. It just really restricts German companies. This all seems hypocritical to me, especially when you consider how Germany deals with prostitution. I hope we adopt the Nordic model in this regard. Anyway I don't get why the UN don't try to push a viable solution that works international. Everything else is pointless.
Criminalize the purchasing of prostitution services while decriminalizing (but still not legalizing) their sale. Its basically the compromise and leave everyone unhappy approach.
The main issue the the gp was alluding to is that because prostitution is still illegal prostitutes can't get any help from the government as they still face fines. Which for the very poor are only slightly better than criminal penalties.
Also since prostitution is illegal there can't be any government oversight or regulation of the prostitution industry which is a primary benefit touted by legalization proponents.
All I know is that Germany's way did not work out. Trafficking and forced prostitution are a huge problem and the police has to deal with controlling legal brothels and fighting against illegal forms of prostitution.
Nordic model is a way of implementing "sex work is bad and should be illegal". Whether it's implemented in the Nordic model way, or in the "let's jail sex workers!" way does not matter that much - it's still a morality based law (on the idea that sex is sinful I guess) that puts a whole class of workers to illegality.
Germany's approach is it's not. That you can have sex for money if you want to.
So if you think that sex workers shouldn't exist, of course Germany's approach "does not work".
But if you don't think that sex work is amoral, then Nordic model just oppresses an already marginalized group. For me, that is what does not work.
Fighting human trafficking and abuse is of course necessary, but doing it by hurting already vulnerable and marginalized people makes it hard to believe that you're actually interested in helping, instead of enforcing morality where sex is sinful.
The Nordic model is not based on the idea that sex work is unethical per se, but that the ones pursuing sex work are to a huge extent victims of a failing society and in case of women victims of a society dominated by men. This a huge difference to your interpretation. I am sure that in a world where such factors are negligible sex work would be legal in the Nordic states.
Children should be deterred from looking at pornography. Watching pornography of normal acts with male or female anatomy I doubt will cause issues. But what about other nasty content? It's easy to fall down a rabbit hole and such content is available with just three words in google.
The internet is not a safe place and when a child watches obscene content that very well starts to warp their mind and perception. They hunt for further gratification and this can lead in to more murky content. Pornography can be malicious and internet pornography addiction is real too.
I am in favor of restricting content however for the reason that there really is nasty content which young children are discovering and it's leading them to grow up corrupt. If there was a way to divide the two but you can't, however the way it is it's either all or nothing.
Filter it, let a child hack around the filter expanding their computer skills and reward it. That it self is far more positive then being able to view all the content that is available. Innocence can be lost prematurely and that's disastrous for the child if it is lost.
Pornography nowadays isn't like it was during the MTV years which many will compare from.
> Watching pornography of normal acts with male or female anatomy I doubt will cause issues
It's not that simple. Not only is there habituation, but sex is something the brain reacts pretty strongly to. It can't be that neutral.
There are also the ethics of how porn is created - basically prostitution with a camera. And the social aspects of it all : intimacy as something banal, available at any time, completely separated from actual human relationships, and marketable.
Me. I declare censorship an absolute obscenity in a free society. There now that we have rendered that stupid question meaningless we can move on as a society.
It's been a while since I worked in adult, but I recall when Germany did something similar, no one outside their jurisdiction had to follow the rules, so no one did. Additionally it just required the user to enter an ID number the site owner had to validate against a government API, that charged per request. This was flawed because... Kids could find/share the ID card numbers and bad actors could run up your bills by dictionary attacking the validation form. It was a need and was utterly unenforceable.
The solution is parents need to be parenting. Where there is a will, there is a way (and that's directed to both sides).
Blocking content is absolutely pointless, and ironically increases demand. Circumventing controls and doing something you shouldn't is exciting.
Personally I don't have a problem with porn and I'd rather not see this used as a way to weasel in real id verification systems into websites which I think is the real motivation here.
Next it will require real id for comment forums to quell "hate speech", and then eventually to identify dissenters and other utopian pursuits.
Parents aren't technically competent enough to do this kind of thing properly. Governments, on the other hand… aren't technically competent enough either.
This will never work, there are too many websites and too many ways of getting around this limitation.
BUT, there are plenty of parental control softwares for computers and phones, I think this is the only valid solution. So instead of passing some stupid laws, we just have to teach parents.
Otherwise, it's like trying to replace all knifes by platic ones; no we let parents teach kids it's dangerous.
There would be informal distribution networks via groups on various messaging apps or general-purpose cloud storage services. This might spell the end for the major "tube" sites if they can't make enough ad revenue, but this is definitely not going to be the end of porn.
The thing that cracks me most is that they suggested to mandate the use of e-government authentication tools for accessing adult content.
If they want to fight this, the most effective way would be a nation-wide ban of VPNs, ip blocking and deep packet inspection to discover and ban other tunnels/VPNs. Sure, you can rent your own server and run shadowsocks on it but it will complicate the process.
In Turkey, I feel like most VPNs are actively banned, it’s a roulette basically to get a working one. The only reliable solution is to rent your own server and setup your own VPN. I think in China, they can also find out and block those.
> Until 1996 one had to ask permission to use any form of encryption, or pay a 6000-500000 FF fine with 2-6 months of prison if found out. Currently encryption that the french authorities can break is legal, but this is not secure enough to encourage e-commerce.
That also explains a whole lot of French tech jealousy politics and their many stupid failed ventures. They always were moronic control freaks essentially and won't change, the only solution is to replace the damn fools.
Ignoring the subject matter of the article, one phrase in particular stood out to me - "digital sovereignty."
This is the first time I've heard that phrase. I've never conceived of the web being carved up into territory by governments before. However, when I think about it now, the Web is being fought over by governments - China, India, the USA, etc.
Always remember the true meaning of sovereignty. If the universe was really a MMO server and the PVP flag was switched off and magically nobody could kill or steal, detonating a bomb only endangered the bombmaker if it was in a blast radius, and even drunk drivers could only harm themselves it would be a catastrophy for sovereignty.
Only for the record, the (of course, and as often happens not possible in practice) Italian norm has nothing to do with credit cards and age verification by the content provider.
It says essentially that phone, TV and internet providers must by default prevent access to some type of contents and that this access can only be unblocked by the subscriber of the contract through an explicit request.
I.e. it is more like a form of Parental Control", and of course the basic issue (since the "not suitable to minors" includes not only pornography, but also violence and other objectionable content) deciding which is which is either impossible or needing to implement some sort of automatic filters that inevitably will tag objectionable contents as "fine" or viceversa block access to perfectly suitable content, in this latter case with obvious consequences to freedom of expression.
The UK has a similar system - agreed between the four main ISPs and the government, rather than legally binding. The code of practice says that subscribers must be forced to make a choice between a filtered or unfiltered internet connection.
It is so interesting to see various country approaches to the flow of information, i.e. internet regulation.
At its foundation, the idea amounts to ‘there exists information that is dangerous and it is our job to protect them (the people).’
Based on the range of human abilities, few could argue against the idea that ‘there exists dangerous information’ (that is dangerous to some people).
In the U.S. those on the left are asking corporations to protect people by banning ‘dangerous information’
In China, the CCP has spend a large percentage of their GDP and has defined almost all information not related to consumerism and good manners as ‘dangerous’
In France, this.
If everyone were perfect, there would be no dangerous information, because people would be able to read things in perfect context. That will never happen.
If you are a parent - use https://nextdns.io AFTER having a conversation to filter porn. Why let government do it? Why not state funded child education and parenting centres if you can't even do this or educate yourself about it?
As an underage person, I would just run wireguard on the router with open wrt if I wanted to bypass filter.
Being brutally honest, if your kid is at high risk of porn addiction or is already addicted - you have failed miserably at parenting. You really want to look at their other aspects of life to evaluate and fix the underlying problem. Porn addiction is a result of some other problem in 95% cases.
I am French and this is the first time I hear of that.
After checking the sources, there is indeed a law passed, it needs an extra vote end July and then it is up to the site to cooperate.
Otherwise the can be blocked after a trial.
Which means in clear text that this is a law passed so that someone can put a checkmark on a list.
The funny thing is that there wqs a proposal to use FranceConnect, or uber serious portal allowing unified login to serious sites (tax, health,...). Having a porn site using this would be memorable.
> We tend to forget the damage that porn causes to young minds.
There's a fair amount to unpack here.
"We tend to forget" seems to indicate this is proven and beyond dispute. I'm not sure that is true.
"damage" is a very strong word that implies permanent harm - almost at the cellular level. Not everyone would accept that "damage" is even the right way to frame this. It's part of a complex social and behavioural pattern that is very hard to pick apart.
"young minds" - how young? Is it dependent on countering with good sex education or is the "damage" something that would resist all countermeasures?
You can probably find more information than I did with a Google Scholar search for the effects of porn on adolescents and children - though this is a very hard thing to "prove beyond dispute" for several reasons - people react to media in very different ways, effects may only be activated by pre-existing patterns of behaviour and attitudes, there is a large influence from religiosity, among other things; and of course, it'd be unethical to expose children to porn in a lab setting. The best you're going to get is controlled suveys and questionnaires, from researchers working at a school, for example. Consider that we know cannabis and alcohol can have a detrimental effect on young people, but we're obviously not able to watch them smoke or drink it in a controlled environment. All that said (and note that the authors of the first paper are probably the foremost scholars of porn effects research in psychology):
"Additionally, there is meta-analytic evidence to indicate that viewing more pornography and viewing extreme pornography is associated with the sexual objectification of women and more aggressive attitudes (Hald et al., 2010)[0]. Some longitudinal findings link sexual aggression and use of violent pornography, for example, one study of 10-15 year olds in the US found that those who intentionally viewed violent X-rated materials were nearly six times more likely than others to report sexually aggressive behaviour (Ybarra et al. 2011)[1]."[2]
The research on effects of porn is chequered and often has methodological problems, replication problems, and unfortunately assumes one kind of mainstream porn (leaving out, say, erotica, fanfiction overwhelmingly written and read by teens, online erotic roleplaying, etc.) - that said, from my own amateur reading around the topic, there is a strong pointer to substantial negative effects which are usually (though not always) mediated, much in the same way alcohol consumption effects are.
[0] Hald, G.M., Malamuth, N.M., & Yuen, C. (2010). Pornography and attitudes supporting violence against women: Revisiting the relationship in non-experimental studies. Aggressive Behavior.36, 14-20. doi: 10.1002/ab.20328
[1] Ybarra, M.L., Mitchell, K.J., Hamburger, M., Diener-West, M. & Leaf, P.J. (2011). X-rated material and perpetration of sexually aggressive behavior among children and adolescents: Is there a link? Aggressive Behavior, 37, 1–18.
[2] Victoria et al. (2016). Identifying the routes by which children view pornography online: implications for future policy-makers seeking to limit viewing report of expert panel for DCMS. Technical Report. Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
Violent people watch violent porn, who would have thought. Then increase vanilla porn to offset violent porn, maybe this way people will be more exposed to non-violent content.
This is not what the research is showing. It's showing that increased exposure to any porn has effects on attitude (measured in a lab setting; outside the lab, we need to be careful with mixing up correlation and causation), but the effects are more pronounced with violent porn. There's also the Coolidge Effect to take into account.
> that increased exposure to any porn has effects on attitude
What does your research say about the fixation of that attitude? Is it like, forever and ever? How those effects compare to watching martial arts, war footage from the news, movies etc?
Isn't it just a Pavlovian response training thing? Before the age of 25 people are more susceptible to learn or relearn, and some are just born (and exacerbated by insane upbringing instead of proper diagnosis and meds) with predilections.
> but the effects are more pronounced with violent porn
Sure, and if they had a fist fight behind a school, a kiss, a cigarette, a caffeinated drink and listened to violent music in a short time they'd probably had a heart attack.
Your conclusion reminds of witch-hunt-approving arguments like, violent games make kids violent. Which is moot, Take for example Children's Crusades[1] in 13 century, which was induced by religion and politics. Or, I know some parents who watched a documentary about how a talented musician was raised with beatings, so they took that literally, you know what I mean? Sick ideas find a fertile ground.
Btw did you watch that Black Mirror episode "Arkangel", seems related. Or The Alienist by Caleb Carr, the book and series, about underage male prostitution in 19 century, the plot is based on real life, sort of.
>Your conclusion reminds of witch-hunt-approving arguments like, violent games make kids violent. Which is moot, Take for example Children's Crusades[1] in 13 century, which was induced by religion and politics. Or, I know some parents who watched a documentary about how a talented musician was raised with beatings, so they took that literally, you know what I mean? Sick ideas find a fertile ground.
I can see and understand the concern, and some results can fuel moral panics and witchhunts, but they don't need to lead to there necessarily. Finding that porn has effects on attitude and aggression, and long-term, increased, or more violent use can have greater effects does not provide an ought from the is. It can provide some scientific and empirical basis for such an argument (for example, an argument to ban porn), but we shouldn't reject science because of the normative conclusions it might lead us to.
You may be interested in a book[0] from a little while ago which examines the debate quite closely, with lots of empirical data which supports both sides of the argument. From what I've read, behavioural scientists and policy-makers largely do not consider the evidence "against" porn to be all that decisive in supporting a ban.
In other words... the proper strategy should be to get the data, scrutinise the data, and then decide what action we will take (if any) based on the data. The book mentions a comparison with the effects of alcohol, which is quite apt. Many people who would argue for porn to be banned, I imagine, would not have the same opinion on alcohol, especially given the history of the Prohibition.
I could be wrong here, but isn't there a pretty well established relationship between testosterone and violent/aggressive behaviours?
I understand the difficulty of testing this kind of relationships but the casual link might be totally inverse, kids who have too much testosterone also are predisposed to that type of content rather than it being the content that informs the tendencies.
Regardless of the real reason thats a ton of material to read, so thanks!
Ah, the complex interaction of testosterone. Not only is it inverse, but the cause and effect is also inverse. Aggressive behavior is not predictable by testosterone levels, but the inverse, testosterone levels are predictable by aggressive behavior.
For example, male sport teams that win a match has increased testosterone levels afterwards and reduced levels if they loose. Similar, sport spectators mirror this pattern.
If for example two people have fisticuffs at a bar and we measured testosterone before and after, the winner would see an increase in testosterone secretion while the looser would have an reduction.
And then we come to violent content, and indeed there exist some research on this. The result is a bit more complicated. Only people who are already disposed towards aggressive behavior see an increase in testosterone secretion after watching a violent movie.
So what does that mean? There is a theory called the challenge hypothesis. In this theory testosterone acts as a modulator to how much behavior an individual will spend in order to retain status once challenged. If an individual gain status, such when two males compete and one wins and the other losses, testosterone secretion increase in order to encourage more energy use towards defending that possible short term gain in social status until a new social hierarchy has stabilized. The more sudden the gain the more testosterone is secreted, and the more the relationship between testosterone and violent/aggressive behaviours can be observed.
(for some interesting reading I can recommend The Trouble With Testosterone by robert sapolsky or one of his lecture on the topic)
The fact that the quotation I found was cited in a normative report is irrelevant to the research it (and I) am highlighting - the first two citations; my only goal was to provide some information on the topic, which hopefully another commenter here can expand on. Think of [2] as more of a 'cited in ...' citation than a "here's the evidence" citation.
I don't know how I missed that, even when pointed out. I think I'm much more used to seeing the word "normative" in these discussions than I am "nominative". Thanks for clearing up the confusion.
Adults have the possibility of fulfilling their sex drives in ways that are considered healthy and responsible.
Obviously it would be our preference to delay puberty until after graduate school, but given that we can't, what is it that we'd prefer teenagers do instead?
He even speaks of delaying puberty until after graduate school:
p.71 "Here, too, an inner dishonesty disclosed itself, for the middle-class calendar in no way agreed with that of Nature. As far as society was concerned, a young man did not reach manhood until he had secured a “social position” for himself—that is, hardly before his twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year. And so there was an artificial interval of six, eight, or ten years between actual manhood and manhood as society accepted it ; and in this interval the young man had to take care of his own “affairs” or adventures."
The book you quoted, The World of Yesterday, is fantastic. Thank you! What a fantastic read. I am astounded how much the world of the past, as it is described in storybooks, was made-up, and the truth was grim and desperate.
(and, for the pre-Great War predecessors of OnlyFans, see p.122 "...it held no less than twenty-seven pictures of famous dancers and actresses in extreme décolleté, as well as three or four nude photographs..." or p.67 "“Art” and nude photographs in particular were offered to half-grown boys for sale under the table by peddlers in every cafe.")
Something interesting about being forced to use the "FranceConnect" OpenID service for adult websites is it's what we use in France to connect official taxes, health insurance, retirement and car registration website. It also use social security number as login depending on which website you bounce from.
Yes, it is entirely safe to post PII to sites that are known to be targeted by hackers heavily and daily, to extract data that can be used to blackmail people. The adult websites are never hacked before right?
Proponents of these types of laws are anti-porn. If fear of sharing the required PII with porn sites reduces the number of visitors to those sites, all the better in their mind.
The 'save-the-children' vibe is a smoke screen for banning porn.
More thrill to get the content, more dopamine hit once you get to the goal, the more likely it is to be more addictive. If it's not forbidden, it's not nearly as exciting.
I think the main difference is that far too many people eat sugar, and even more importantly, far too many people can proudly admit in public that they eat sugar.
People just don't realize it precisely because we don't talk about it, people around don't notice it and you can keep the same pair of trousers (unlike when you drink too much soda).
I think that in a few years, opinion will shift and we'll consider porn as a public health problem.
When will we consider prudes a public health issue? Their shaming is unhealthy and when they get power cause generations of harm. Worse they have no care for it so long as they get their righteous indignation high! Given the sheer toll of prohobition judgementalness is the most insidious and deadly of all of the vices.
Shaming? prudes? judgmental?? What on earth are you talking about?
Look, an increasing number of people (not just me) are realizing how detrimental to their life this little habit has been. Many wish they realized it sooner. And when they realize they are far from being alone [1], they naturally tend to think the effect of porn might be understated in our society.
I'm not judging anyone, if people enjoy it and it doesn't affect negatively their lives, good for them. And if I'm wrong and people like me end up being just a minute minority, then Great News!
But I really don't understand why I get downvoted for this and I understand even less this rambling about 'prudes'.
A similar system was attempted in the UK. The controversial part here was that there would be some central body with potential knowledge of the sites you visit associated with your passport/credit card/ official license. In addition the potential for fraud in spoofing the verification process etc...
There was much humorous satire e.g. calling the Queen for access to porn. Before some tech contracts fell through and the whole system was abandoned at the end of the Theresa May government.
I was looking forward to the tertiary effect of kids becoming network experts in the next 20 years.
It might for example require reddit to ask you for your credit card before it lets you see an nsfw subreddit. And then again the same procedure on the target site. Not everyone is comfortable with giving adult websites their credit card information. (I for sure would not be.)
And at the same time you'd give your NSFW internet usage patterns to your credit card company. I image they'd love it, even more information to sell about you!
Many consider it bad to create a regulatory environment that leads to the creation of lists where real world identities are tied to specific sexual preferences.
This is because in the contemporary western world, sexual preferences are considered intimate and highly personal. Creating such a data basis enables future discrimination. It doesn't mandate it, just enables it.
There's a famous (and arguably untimely crass) example of such data gathering in the German past. It's different in scope and consequence (smaller scope, bigger consequences), but maybe still interesting.
Sadly there's no English Wikipedia article about it:
There should be much smarter moves to work with porn sites towards better sex education.
Force porn websites to do age verification on their models (most high traffic site currently do).
For all videos and especially those that display acted scenes where consent is unclear, prominently display next to the video in English+local language that the video actors and actresses are performing willingly consentual sex acts, even if the video scenario suggests otherwise for some fantasy's sake.
I did it. In fact, for a lot of people who got an higher education the main question for after graduation is not what will you do but where will you go (where being implicitly abroad). This is of course not because of porn sites, but the general negative and insecure (economically, etc.) climate. The ship is sinking and people are asking for more of the things that precisely made it this way. This is painful to see.
Hailing from a former communist state from which quite a few people emigrated to France I wonder what are your options as a French person?
What countries are France's France, or in other words, places where salaries are easily 2-3x as high and the general standard of living is proportionally better?
Canada, US, UK, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Japan, etc... Salaries don't have to be 2-3x as high (past a certain level it doesn't matter all that much), salary isn't the main reason why french people emigrate.
Every time I see a news about my country, it is for bad things, and that makes me sad. But I made the right choice.
There were many reasons for this.
The most notable thing in my experience of moving to Japan is the shock when I actually discovered what freedom and a liberal economy means. I now seriously view my country as communist.
The taxes are insane. For example, if your company pays 2000 Euros for your work, 1000 Euros goes to taxes ("charges patronales", social security, pension and dozens of useless stuff that nobody understands)
Then you have city taxes are usually about half a month of salary
If you are a landlord, you have to pay a second tax to the city (about half a month of salary too)
Then you have the "impot sur le revenu" which is an annual tax that is roughly 1.5 month of salary for an average salary. The higher your salary is, the higher the tax percentage is (up to 75%).
There is a 20% VAT on almost everything, and there are hundreds of other different taxes on anything you could imagine ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_imp%C3%B4ts_et_taxes... ).
Public services are shitty.
Justice and security does not exist anymore.
There are so many dumb laws and regulations that is it very hard to innovate without doing something illegal.
There are hundreds of useless government entities that consumes millions of euros every year, and whose only activity seems to be to harass companies, entrepreneurs and rich people.
The standard of living in France is by far inferior to Japan in my experience (on almost every criteria).
There are tons of ways to (legally) avoid taxes in France. However, those ways are not applicable to regular workers. And that may be unfair...
You don’t want to pay the (ex-IFS) IFI tax? Doable: just make a real estate company. Want to pay even less tax when you have more than one house? Make two real estate companies and keep them under a holding company (consolidated accounting).
You want to pay less real estate income tax? Do the "Loi Pinel" stuff. Too lazy to manage physical real estate? Just buy some SCPI shares (taxes are the same!)
You want to make money with stocks without paying tax? Open a "PEA" brokerage account (up to 150k€, not including composed interests) or open an "Assurance Vie" and keep them at least 5/8 years.
You can avoid taxes in France. Unfortunately, that’s only for a small fraction of the French people.
Interesting, because we have something similar in Poland.
I am currently self-employed because not only does it give me the freedom to just invoice companies regardless of where they're headquartered but also because I can choose to have a flat 19% income tax rate and a pretty low, decoupled from my income pension contribution.
There's much more, but being self-employed is just this basic thing one usually starts with.
Adult websites want brownie points and also don't like nonpayers, but mess with their revenue and you'll get a push back.