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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Pornography is bad for its consumers, bad for willing actors, and obviously terrible for people featured without consent. Tolerating it will be one of the great shames of our time.

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If a war on drugs has taught us anything, a war on porn is going to lead to far worse porn being spread further than ever before while innocent lives are ruined, much like how teenagers are already being charged as adults for sexting while not adults. There are likely places the law can be improved but a blanket ban would be a large step backwards even if we ignore freedom of speech implications.

In the world where entire sites are pulled over some silly Q conspiracy theory, we can surely do more to combat porn. We've largely dealt with smoking, also addictive, also once prevalent, also while cigarettes are still available at every gas station and grocery store.

We can definitely do better, but you have to allow for legal porn with consent to remain or else you will push everything to an underground market where the end result will be far less rules to control content.

One thing that would be nice is an automated take down. Anyone who no longer consents to their porn being hosted (or who never consented) can have the selected files added to a database and all porn sites would have to take down based upon matches to this database. This technology already exists with PhotoDNA for fighting known child porn (though I think the technical details are kept secret to avoid people finding work arounds).

As long as one draws a line between consensual and nonconsensual porn then I think you'll be able to crack down on the non-consensual material without having to worry about the failures of a 'war on x'.

Think of it like the difference between cracking down on weed and cracking down on synthetic 'weed' that is killing people. Or just look at stores that are able to sell alcohol. Because it is generally allowed, specific bans are much easier to enforce because business likes keeping the legal status.

Alcohol and weed are not good examples because these are failed interventions if you consider them harmful. Consumption of both exploded in the last few decades.

This is why I use smoking: it's also legal or semi-legal, it used to be prevalent but its popularity cratered.

"Consumption of both exploded in the last few decades." -> I don't know about weed, but it's definitely not true for alcohol, it's roughly stable; in USA there has been some decrease in per capita consumption since a peak in 1980s - see https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco... for example.

Why? Is porn bad per se?

Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, seems to think so. He has written a couple of books on the subject of deteriorating development of young men, and has suggested a correlation to the advent of high-speed internet.

Not sure if he's right, but it's certainly a reasonable theory.

He also did a TED talk briefly touching on the subject.

https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_the_demise_of_guys

You can always find people believing all sorts of things.

Most of them aren't experts in sociobehavioral psychology who write books on this particular subject.

Lots of people also write books. And the Stanford Prison experiment has received a huge amount of criticism by now, afaik.

Also being famous does not automatically make you an expert.

Edit: googled citation for criticism of the SPE https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/

Whether you think the experiment itself was good or bad (Zimbardo recognized its failures and ended it early), the lessons it taught were invaluable and that's why they brought him in as an expert witness for the Abu Ghraib trial. Your suggestion that "lots of people write books" is a silly pooh-poohing in that context, especially considering that Zimbardo was already a Stanford professor by that time in 1971, 50 years ago.

You bring forth one expert to support your claim. I am merely pointing out that there are other experts with differing opinions.

An expert in psychology is basically a modern haruspex.

Trying to decide for other people which parts of their sexuality are "tolerable" or not is actually a far bigger mistake, historically and presently

Blaming porn is like blaming cheeseburger for obesity. While you're not wrong but it's hardly the root cause.

You're right, fast food is probably not the primary offender, and there are many causes (HFCS, seed oils, not cooking, abundance in general), and future is overdetermined... but fast food definitely carries some responsibility for the obesity epidemic.

Same with porn and Pornhub. But it is the mental tobacco of our time.

> mental tobacco [of] our time

You may want to check how early does porn (or sexualised images) exist. "our time" may turn out to be "since we discovered drawing".

I don't see your point. Tobacco use is prehistoric, barely more recent than drawing.

You should check your history. Tobacco was native to South America and introduced to the rest of the world in the 1500s. You could argue it is prehistoric to South America, but that is very different from "barely more recent than drawing."

Hemp smoking, on the other hand, has been traced back to many prehistoric sites in asia and africa which would fit your description much better.

What was your intended meaning for "of our time" in that case?

It was in relation to widespread use and availability of pornography, like tobacco was in the 20th century. Or like obesity is now.

We had obese people since at least the first settled societies. But it was nothing like today, both in how widespread and how extreme is has become.

Same with drugs. An opioid epidemic pushed by mega pharma is nothing like a shaman serving ayahuasca.

A nude cave painting or a figurine is nothing like thousands of hours of streaming porn. Barely related.

I am not convinced that is is bad for consumers. Occasionally I see people talking about their porn addiction. But it can also boost people's mood. I don't know why some people seem to get addicted, but it clearly doesn't happen to everybody.

Whether it is bad for willing actors also needs citations. I don't know why people do it. I can think of some cases where it seems to have solved a psychological need, and they went on to lead successful lives afterwards (like Sasha Grey, or Sibel Kekilli).

Edit: googled article about Sasha Grey, with her quote about women in porn: "the reality is that there are a huge amount of women who are very happy with their careers and where they have gone in their lives"

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/exclusive-sasha-grey-d...

Can you elaborate a bit more?

I’m very curious because I think the existence and availability of porn and the sex industry is very important for the well-being of lots of people. Definitely some problems.. but I’d parallel those to problems with prohibition and suppression.

Have you always held this opinion? Are you religious?

I'm genuinely curious, how do you feel about erotica or written smut? How about drawn porn?

I think pornography has also helped bolster sexual freedom to new heights, which I think has been a good thing for humanity.

There are countries where porn is blocked. VPN software is very popular in those countries.

Especially with environments where anyone can upload anything without proof of consent. Essentially you have a system where producing and distributing this regardless of consideration is maximized. However, even if pornhub et al. required proof of consent for every video it would still likely lead to many situations where the actor was "willing" for bad reasons which will play out over time with an increasingly negative effect.

As I get older I'm expecting more and more to have a future generation look at our with quite a dark opinion.

"A future generation" will think poorly of our mass incarceration and meat consumption, but they won't have our body image hangups and literally every second of their lives will be recorded from multiple angles so they won't care about porn.

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