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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

Don't get me wrong, raping girls is not normal.

But how is that different from any other illegal business? It is the same thing with drugs? people who smoke cannabis are aware of people in Colombia being killed for them?

Making porn legal and accepted is the way to go to solve those problems. Not making it forbidden. The more you will try to make it illegal or to hide it the more harm you will do to those girls.

I'm not sure pornhub is encouraging people to upload rape videos, child porn on their platform, and actually it is pretty rare to see that kind of content on pornhub. Contrary to telegram, periscope, vk, and small porn websites

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Personally, I prefer to mainline my uncut Colombian cannabis.

Columbia has legalized cannabis and is looking to legalize cocaine to undercut the criminal enterprises.

Jesus christ. It's "not normal"? What kind of absolutely detached statement is this?

Porn is legal in many countries, especially in the USA and Germany, two big markets for creation and consumption. Yet, still a lot of women are raped. Your logic is just completely wrong.

> Making porn legal and accepted

Just to add another perspective, Scott Santens had an interesting reply[0] to a tweet AOC had about legalizing sex work

> Sex work is work, but as long as poverty exists it's impossible to tell who is doing it voluntarily and who is doing it because they feel they have no other choice in order to make a living. It's another reason unconditional basic income is so important.

[0]:https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1339053954144014338?...

Are you aware that smoking cannabis is absolutely nothing like rape? and moreover is already legal in many U.S. states where cannabis can be grown and sold legally???

Also, Porn is already legal.* And it is already accepted by large portions of the population.

Making porn more acceptable doesn't end the rape problem.

I don't know, I think that if we treated it as less of a taboo we could popularize regulations and unions and stuff like this.

Yeah, kinda reminds me of the legalized prostitution that is heavily regulated by the government in the Netherlands.

>Are you aware that smoking cannabis is absolutely nothing like rape?

You severely missed the point. The comparison was between the relatively lack of outcry over cannabis smokers who presumably enable atrocities carried out by drug cartels in Colombia and elsewhere.

Coke users might have been a more apt analogy given weed is increasingly legal around the world, but, yeah. Wooosh

No, did not miss the point because you didn't make one.

Cannabis wasn't grown in Colombia until very recently; cocaine has always been it's primary drug export, and unlike cannabis, cocaine has not been legal in the U.S. (or most of the West) during the lifetime of anyone alive today.

If you had said cocaine from the beginning I might have agreed with your sentiment if not the specific details, because porn has enabled sex trafficking and CP and other heinous crimes.

But you clearly meant cannabis, not cocaine, and so your statement doesn't make any sense.

Their comparison was entirely fabricated so I can rest easy in missing the point.

Is the point; most things have an undesirable aspect that is disregarded by the consumer?

It's best to avoid analogy when the analogy isn't true.

> It's best to avoid analogy when the analogy isn't true.

surely you jest. are you unaware of the violence, death, and suffering created by the black markets from illegal drugs?

the comparison is very apt: keeping porn "in the dark" allows for a generally underadvantaged population like sex workers to be taken advantage of because there is not an abundance of legal, regulated institutions for them to be a part of. similarly, illegal drugs proliferate in dangerous circumstances because there is no other option.

Where are you getting that women getting raped or abused is unique to only the porn industry? Is there any hard data, or is this just some bs that people assume happens in porn.

I don't claim that rape is unique to the porn industry; only that porn makes it worse. (Porn can be addictive, so supply increases demand increases supply. This has been documented with respect to CP. As those studies require library access, I will leave it to the reader to find someone with academic library access to read those articles.)

The major studios are a small part of the problem, however, it's the non-U.S. and underground scene that generates most of the problematic content.

> As those studies require library access

You can include references without linking.

Evidence Mounts: More Porn, Less Sexual Assault: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601...

How the Web Prevents Rape: All that Internet porn reduces sex crimes. Really: https://slate.com/culture/2006/10/proof-that-internet-porn-p...

In addition, the study finds that the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible.: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h...

These studies?

This correlation seems incredibly spurious.

It's the only evidence presented so far. And how else would you test this, if not by correlation? Persuasive narratives? Anecdotes?

First of all, it’s not just women appearing in pornography.

Some people believe that pornography is inherently harmful; that viewing it degrades the viewer and psychologically harms them. Making pornography “acceptable” would be accepting this harm, inflicted on countless millions of people, in order to protect the relatively tiny amount of people who perform in it.

How many many of the people telling this message publicly watch at porn privately?

Probably a similar percentage as the people with drinking problems who will tell you to abstain.

And we call such people "puritans" and don't let them dictate our moral norms.

We also call them “behavioral psychologists.”

You're not really addressing their point. Some people believe that drugs are "inherently harmful", but an outright ban or "war on drugs" made the problem worse. It pushed drugs to the unregulated black market.

The same would happen if you were to ban porn. Demand would still be there, people would just be forced to go onto the unregulated black market to satisfy their demands. Meaning it would make the situation much worse.

If porn were to remain legal than the government can resolve these issues by proposing regulation to mitigate the abuses.

Please read my post a bit more carefully. I’m addressing the “acceptable” part, not the legality.

Again, his point that making porn more "acceptable" means that people and our government will start having open conversations about it. This means making clear rules that both acknowledge the right of these sites to exist while also ensuring actors are treated fairly.

Sticking your head in the sand like we have been doing has helped no one.

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