How India tried to ban porn and failed | Hacker News Reader

How India tried to ban porn and failed

economist.com

25 pointsjimsojim14 comments

"ban porn" sounds like banning wind or sun. 35 years ago in USSR - an environment where banning things was a normal practice and frequently worked, and porn was a banned thing - in elementary school we had porn - it were texts copied on type writer :)

Oh, pornography is still banned in some countries that used to be in the soviet bloc. In Bulgaria for instance, even though the country is part of the EU now, porn is still absolutely banned. Possession of porn, selling of porn, disseminating porn - all illegal with jail time. The only thing you can buy is erotica, like Playboy and others like it featuring naked women, sometimes with naked men, doing naked things. Whether a work is classified porn or erotica is decided on a bribe by bribe, I mean case by case basis. The law is practically not enforced, you are absolutely free to browse the entire internet and can purchase por.. I mean erotica magazines freely.

Why would they want to ban it? If anything it would result in an increase to population.

Maybe the regular rapes have been partly attributed to access to pornography ?

It was not long time ago that Sweden attributed violence in society to TV and movies, and it's only in current enlighten days that the old censorship is now finally removed. A person doesn't go and murder, rape or steal just because they happened to see a movie that displays actors doing those things.

I'm not saying there's an actual logical relationship nor that I believe porn causes violence but governments might end up believing so. I strongly think porn, even inevitable, especially in teens, is amazingly detrimental. It might not be a reason for someone to force someone else (I never thought of shooting someone after playing Doom), but it will twist the notion of intimate relationships.

During the 90s, people argued that teens watching movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would get a twisted notion of what normal was. The detrimental effect on teens was seen as such large that they banned the cartoon darkwin duck for TV, and blamed TV violence for the increase in violent crime amongst youths.

Those claims has since proven at best to be speculative, at worse outright media fabrication. Studies have shown that even very young kids can distinguish that what happens on a movie is not real, and that the social rules that gets shown on a movie does not exist in real life. Teens and adults has a more mature brain and longer life experience that if there was an effect, movies would have destroyed them long before.

I agree but I didn't indulged the 'ban' logic. I'm just saying it might be one of the reason invoked for the Indian government decision.

India already has the world's second largest population, and they should be passing China soon.

things has changed:

"In actuality, India’s TFR is only 2.5—and falling steadily. This figure barely exceeds that of the United States. In 2011, the US fertility rate was estimated at 2.1, essentially the replacement level; a more recent study now pegs it at 1.93. Still, from a global perspective, India and the US fall in the same general fertility category

Source: http://www.geocurrents.info/population-geography/indias-plum...

also "How Electricity and TV Defused the ‘Population Bomb’" :

http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenb...

May be because there is a 69.37% increase in the Indian American population since 2000's? ;) Just saying!

all the bans that are implemented for only political reasons rather than socio ones have the fortune to fail because they are not aligned with our practical lives. And like any other none practical rule, this one will not only survive but also result in a higher negative(for the gov't)numbers. Just like we saw during the Prohibition period, this will also make people to see the law as whimsical and unimportant, instead of something good and protecting. It did nothing to encourage the respect and obedience the law deserves. I agree there is a lot of harm that's caused by porn, both personally and sociologically. Personal one is our own free will, governments cannot ban everything that is harmful to us but in this case I can understand and support governments who will fight against sociologically disruptive porns with the content of rape, beastiality, extreme fetishism and definitely child porn.

  They didn't fail ISP's are now responsible for the content so Isp's will play safe and not unban the porn sites.
 So the government will be able to get the ban without calling it a ban.

Unprotected sex is opium for the poor in India leading to pregnancy/population growth;

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