a survey of 1,000 young people concluded that pornography can normalise sexual violence and harmful attitudes among children.
That’s irrelevant. This argument assumes that age verification laws will reduce children’s consumption of porn. The war on drugs has shown us that prohibition of this kind of stuff doesn’t reduce anything and only ever makes it worse. All that will happen is children (and adults) will now go to worse/less moderated websites which will on average have more CSAM and other real sexual abuse.
True. But the people advocating for these laws don’t want to deal with nuance and compromise on what it would take to have a society where you educate people on sex in a healthy and positive way. These prohibitionists see the world as either bad or good - nothing in between. Good (how ever they decide to define it) must win no compromises, and the weapon that they use is unfounded fear of the bad and it works.
And the reason fear works is because it is easy and visceral and reality’s complexity doesn’t work for media’s need for sound bites.
I think the part about IDs is what’s important. They are not against porn, it’s just a good excuse to account for another part of your activities. Which may be used to classify you or even blackmail you, but I think knowing your preferences is enough. It may allow secret services to predict whom you may like or may not.
Naturally it will allow to track you.
There are many factors affecting energy spent on doing something.
I personally think that this timeline is fucking bullshit and we got there by always choosing the lesser evil, so libertarian (you may make it left-libertarian, I genuinely don’t care about left-right division because it’s mostly traditional and imaginary) revolutions in all the civilized countries are long overdue.
Not even libertarian, maybe the Empire at War: Forces of Corruption game was onto something. Maybe the left-right and libertarian-statist distinctions are obsolete for our time just like Roman optimates-populares distinction. Maybe we need some new line, formalist-naturalist (as in formal law versus natural law) or something. Where the former part would be existing political mechanisms and the latter part would be saying “no” to fools, thieves and bandits.
If you were a teenager, back when online porn were all pay sites, and so you were using Kazaa/Limewire instead, then you know.
That was never a thing. I grew up in the 90s and I could easily find free porn websites. My main limitation was dial-up internet, not knowing where to find it…
I used to leech my neighbours WiFi on my PSP and download stories on the Sex Stories Text Repository because images were too slow.
Pretty sure the normalization of sexual violence and harmful attitudes came from the adults in my life. If parents and teachers adequately teach kids to identify those things and know that they are unequivocally wrong, then teens who see unhealthy stuff in porn will notice and be critical of it. Probably indignant, too, since no one is more justice focused than a teen who has just learned something about the world.
The issue is backward ideas about relationships being reinforced by adults, either through active misogyny or just never talking about it. This argument boils my blood because the porn itself is not the problem. Awful attitudes about relationships and women start very early and they often come directly from parents themselves.
I honestly think it’s about degrading the right to free expression. But yes also probably. The people who cast women and kids as pawns in need of protection are usually not super respectful to the real women/kids in their lives.
How could American politicians be so against pornography, when so many keep getting caught with prostitutes?
Typical. Rules for thee I guess.
They pander to the Christian nationalists for their votes. They just want power, they don’t actually hold those values.
They’re against pornography, not prostitutes. There’s a difference, I guess.
They are also against prostitutes. Sex work is work! Criminalizing it only serves to endanger those who are most at risk.
It’s entirely about loyalty and institutionalized stratification. Laws are meant to constrain those outside the party, while those within the party are given a lot of latitude.
Pornography and prostitution are different.
One is information, allowing you to dream (maybe of stupid things), another is in the physical world.
I don’t want to think a lot of these parallels, but I’ve noticed that people close to actual government bureaucracies are in general very sceptical of imagined things against physical.
Among other things, consuming pornography doesn’t make you feel powerful, while a prostitute is a real human working for you.
Also 30s’ propaganda had traits clearly aimed at, eh, sexually dissatisfied youth.
So maybe it’s just about feeling their own power, and maybe it’s about returning that device of affecting minds. I dunno
For those wondering about the upswing here:
If the age verification movement goes unchecked, it’s possible that you could be forced to tie your government ID to much of your online activity, Gillmor says. Some civil rights groups fear it could usher in a new era of state and corporate surveillance that would transform our online behaviour.
“This is the canary in the coalmine, it isn’t just about porn,” says Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. Greer says age verification laws are a thinly veiled ploy to impose censorship across the web. A host of campaigners warn that these measures could be used to limit access not just to pornography, but to art, literature and basic facts about sex education and LGBTQ+ life.
Yup, and this is exactly why I plan to use a VPN once my state starts enforcing this law. There’s no way I’m going to show ID to any website unless they absolutely need it. There are very few websites where that’s necessary, so I’ll just use a VPN to a neighboring state (or even to Canada) instead of complying with that nonsense.
I already have to worry about identity theft, I don’t want to make that even easier…
I don’t think there’s any website where it is necessary, excluding ones that adhere to unjustified laws.
I’m going to link my ID and look up the most mind blowingly vile, while remaining legal, porn. If they want to talk to me about it, then I am going to make them describe each video before I “remember” what I saw, after which point I will refuse to acknowledge it as porn.
Sure, it’s dumb, but it’s fun dumb.
it’s not a war on porn; it’s a war on lgbtq people and content. the people pushing for these bills have straight up said that.
It’s a war on both, but especially on LGBTQ people. The fundamentalists are anti-porn in the same way that they are anti-sex in other ways, like opposing sex education.
But it is absolutely part of their strategy to define anything LGBTQ-related as sexual or pornographic, and therefore to criminalize any public visibility of LGBTQ people.
It’s a war on any free speech, they don’t like. They could just add more restrictions for certain people.
Exactly. They want to know who is saying what, which is why they’re making these services ask for ID. It’s about control, and “protecting children” is the excuse.
It’s the same reason they’re trying to ban cryptocurrencies like Monero (private, non-traceable transactions), end-to-end encryption, copyright circumvention tech, etc. They want backdoors to access all the information under the guise of “security,” but really it’s about control.
Screw all of it. Resist at every turn, and hopefully they’ll violate your rights so you can sue them (with help from groups like the ACLU) and force a policy reversal. That’s the most effective tool we’ve got.
Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.
Royce dupont on the truth about god and porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeeR38i2QqY
