France to introduce controversial age verification system for adult websites

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.

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).

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.

Are they? Just because a kid uses snapchat and their iphones a lot doesn't meant they're technically savy.

Really, what distinguish a technical person from a "normal" person is a certain fearlessness when it comes to technology.

For all the anecdotes about kids overcoming this or that technical, majority of kids has astonishingly little knowledge.

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.

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.

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'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.

If you or a loved one has a problem with porn: https://pmohackbook.org/

The teeth brushing thing is funny there was an onion video that said smoking is gay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82x9pzHkHK4

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.

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.

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.

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.

I hope not. Nordic model is as abusive of sex workers and as harmful as any other prohibition, just with more bullshit.

However that option should then be forced upon the customer asking if they wish to enable such service or not.

What great french internet startups have ended up expanding outside their country in a meaningful way?

"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.

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."

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.

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?