I suppose you do not have children. I am open-minded, mid 40's. The level of violence in porn you can get access to with just one click, has no comparison with what I could get access to as a kid (basically nothing).
With the net, you get access in one click to the worse and the best. It is a lot of work as a parent to educate the kids about that.
As kids, teenager and even as 20 something, if we wanted to do some experience, we had to physically access the media or be physically present. This was not on-demand over a screen.
So, I filter the access at home while also trying my best to educate. This is not easy and I can understand that non tech savvy people request more laws, even so I am personally against.
The article is pretty well balanced, we have no silver bullet here.
Sure, but if the goal is to minimise access to violence, why did the GP say "they can access porn" instead of "they can access violence"? I doubt the two are synonymous.
They're not synonymous but a vast amount of pornography available online constitutes violence against women.
The commercial sex trade, including both porn and prostitution, is a multi-billion dollar industry that seeks to normalize extreme acts and promotes the dehumanisation of women and girls.
This framing trades nuance for moral panic. The assertion that pornography inherently constitutes violence against women is not an argument but a slogan. It is ideological posturing, not analysis. The so-called ‘commercial sex trade’ as you put it is complex, and your narrative is not intellectually serious.
Nice idea, but how? How could that actually be accomplished, without stacking SCOTUS with conservative and/or feminist justices? My other comment pointing out the 1A problem with proposals to ban porn was downvoted but nobody has been able to explain how I'm wrong.
Requiring porn businesses to check IDs would be, legally and politically, much easier.
The whole point here is to prevent impressionable children from growing up watching videos of women being treated like objects, so that they don't grow up to view women as objects
If the states banning porn weren’t generally the same states restricting medical care for women, I’d say you have a point, but that’s simply not the case.
“Protecting women” is the sales pitch, not the objective.
Noncentral fallacy. Nobody's against "medical care for women" except where they believe it overlaps with "legalized murder of children", and it's extremely disingenuous for you to ignore that and act like "medical care" is the part they're against.
Has there been some outbreak of this? Genuinely confused. My impression is that sort of behavior has been decreasing my entire life while access to porn has been increasing.
As a recovering porn addict that had issues with socializing with the opposite sex growing up... I don't think there's enough evidence to scientifically conclude anything either way.
As for me, I sought out a large amount of porn "too early". The porn was not violent and I was ashamed to talk about it with anyone. Then again this was before social media became mainstream. I wanted to talk to girls my age but had too much anxiety and depression from my upbringing. ..the real reason for my addiction. So I got called a teenage stalker and got punished so hard I stopped talking to women entirely. The porn was because I was so depressed in the following years. Nobody even realized I had a porn addiction to this day, because I didn't talk about it because... it was cringe.
Still a bachelor but I go to meetings and have worked on it for several years by now. When I worked on my issues enough the urges went away. To the point I wondered why this was such an issue for so long. I no longer feel the need to find a mate to feel complete anymore. Which ironically would make talking to women possible again. But that wasn't because of porn - it was because of depression/anxiety.
I ascribed the causes incorrectly for a long time ("excess porn usage causes the tendency to sexually harass/assault people you're attracted to") which only contributed to my shame and depression for a long time. I think it's because people don't want to admit that they cannot help every person with major depressive disorder ("you need to want help to get help"), so they go after bigger fish that are open to litigation to make it seem like the problem is being addressed. And all this labeling of porn as a problem rubs off onto actual addicts who misjudge the real root of their issues like me.
I have a hypothesis that telling teenagers their minds will be permanently corrupted by too much pornography of any kind and they should be ashamed of themselves for having sexual urges is... not exactly the most productive decision. Especially when gore videos remain unregulated and legal. I think depression/anxiety has a greater chance to cause the behavior they're talking about - "hurt people hurt people" - and those people just so happen to be addicted to something to self-medicate. Shaming people is certainly one way to make them depressed.
But I was sorta glad I avoided talking to people I was attracted to for so long, in my depressed state not much good would have happened. I now have a healthier appreciation of the other sex without completely abstaining and in my view it had nothing do with porn. It was actually about seeing and accepting reality for what it is, not through a depressed filter.
My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists. Maybe that isn't happening and it's just a moral panic? Or maybe those boys watching lots of pornography and coming to believe that women are whores are two entirely unrelated phenomenons?
Media diet shapes what we are, and kids are more impressionable than most. It is therefore natural and reasonable for parents to want some control over what media gets fed to their kids.
> My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists
This seems more in line with the increase of mysoginist influencers (Andrew Tate and the like) and less to do with porn. The former of course being the type of content that social media companies are more than happy to proactively promote to children.
I'm not particularly familiar with Tate or his story, but wasn't he literally arrested for human trafficking in connection with a porn site that he ran? And that site was part of the start of his "Internet" career? And part of his shtick is bragging about being an "Internet pimp" and running said site?
Even the stuff that’s less extreme than Tate should be totally unacceptable for children and teens to access. Not just the “manosphere” but everything adjacent to it: the alt-right, Nazis and White Supremecists, Qanon, conspiracy sites, flat earthers, antivaxxers, cryptoscammers and so on. They are all in orbit of the same dark barycenter of toxicity.
I’d rather my kid accidentally run into porn than them accidentally run into this garbage. But guess which one I have to worry about all the algorithms steering my kid to? Hint: it’s not the porn.
I don't think that's quite what's happening, I think the phenomenon in question is occurring primarily within a specific age group, and I think it doesn't correlate with porn availability or consumption.
If X predates A by a long time then any attribution of A to X is going to need extensive evidence.
I think the phenomenon you refer to has to do with politics and culture. It's loosely related to the pendulum swinging back against DEI type stuff. Depending on your political persuasion you might replace "bitter misogynists" with something like "angry cynics".
The first ammendment, as presently interpreted, makes banning violent pornography virtually impossible. Restricting access to it is a far more tractable solution.
I keep hearing this argument, but I don’t come across any violent porn unless I explicitly look for it. What are the search terms you people are using?
With the net, you get access in one click to the worse and the best. It is a lot of work as a parent to educate the kids about that.
As kids, teenager and even as 20 something, if we wanted to do some experience, we had to physically access the media or be physically present. This was not on-demand over a screen.
So, I filter the access at home while also trying my best to educate. This is not easy and I can understand that non tech savvy people request more laws, even so I am personally against.
The article is pretty well balanced, we have no silver bullet here.