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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

> Pornography should be strictly regulated

The government should fuck off and not get the idea that it has any authority over the sexuality of consenting adults.

>> Pornography should be strictly regulated

> The government should fuck off and not get the idea that it has any authority over the sexuality of consenting adults.

Zealous adherence to oversimple principles like that are the root cause of a lot of harm.

How about a more broad assertion: Anyone that seeks authority over the sexuality of consenting adults needs to fuck right off.

Drugged out gullible young girls in a perverse and depraved industry, creating "content" that can potentially isolate and mess with the minds of teenagers, consenting adults ?

Pedophilia is already illegal.

Does the government have a role in trying to ensure the actors are capable of legally consenting? I.E. they were not under the influence, posessed their own passport vs it being held, there was no implicit threat used, they were of age, etc.?

...yes? What you list here is all covered by "consenting adults", is it not? These things are already crimes.

But are there any real blocks to stopping underaged people from having access to adult content? Unless parents are tech savvy enough to get content controls, which even then suck. Like the parental controls for TMobile has no granularity, Comcast only allows basic filtering on the router level, and very little in logging and alerting.

I feel like this is in keeping with regulation in the real world. A kid needs an id to buy adult magazines, a person needs to be involved selling that item. With the internet, where are those societal safety's? It doesn't stop all, but it would handle most.

How do you verify age from a porn site's point of view, and how do you do it without opening a huge privacy pandora's box?

But is there any real evidence that adult content is harmful to underaged people? Unless scientists have put together a rigorous study, which even then there are confounding factors. Like all existing studies are small and don't control for desire to access such material.

I feel like this regulation is outdated in today's world. We have an opportunity to review existing practices to see if they make sense. With the internet, will children have issues? We don't know so we shouldn't jump the gun.

> But is there any real evidence that adult content is harmful to underaged people? Unless scientists have put together a rigorous study, which even then there are confounding factors. Like all existing studies are small and don't control for desire to access such material.

Plenty of people who have gotten completely out of pornography can tell you directly about the difference in their lives. That doesn't require a study. It's as simple as, I touched the hot stove, I got burned. Perspective provides better answers than numbers. We don't need a controlled study of 1500 randomly sampled people to establish that touching a hot stove is bad. The difficulty is that this "touch" can play out over years or a lifetime and is done principally within your mind and affects your relationships and emotions. You can find various studies [0] to support these general conclusions also.

When you're a regular consumer of porn, you cannot really see its effect on you unless you have a clear perspective of what it is like to not be a regular consumer of porn and indulging in objectifying sex objects in your mind. Teenagers, or worse, children, who have become addicted, haven't had the time or experience to have any other perspective. All they know is the haze of porn sexuality.

It clogs up your love receptors and transmitters like a drug. It's like seeing love through a thick fog, being unable to really comprehend it. Without perspective the individual just assumes they can see everything clearly. That a sexual relationship can be cheaply bought at a glance and satisfied in a moment and then tossed in the trash when inconvenient without even needing to talk to someone. It creates the appetite for low effort relationships, which are often short-lived instead of durable. We should strive for the kind that can go 60 years of happiness for both parties and be more in love than when they started. That's what we're capable of. But with lust addled minds mired in selfish indulgence — we don't get there.

0: https://marripedia.org/effects_of_pornography_on_marriage

Problems can often be solved far better, and with far less threat of violence or use of force, when solutions are persued via means of education instead of censorship.

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