Seven states push to require ID for watching porn online
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
All of this is beyond sanity though. Porn is not evil. My dad grew up with Hustler, I grew up with The Pirate Bay, and my kids are growing up with 4K Pornhub (after they reached age 12 we disabled the content filters on the home DNS server, also using it as an opportunity to teach how DNS and basic networking functions).
Government (and let's be honest, on this topic it's almost entirely one party in particular) needs to mind its own business. Sex, and things related to sex, are a personal matter. Thinking that I have the right to dictate someone else's personal life in this manner is not something that ever cross my mind, much less thinking it consciousable, much less introducing and voting for it to be the law of the land.
It's not evil because there's no harm being inflicted. Adults who consent to have sex and doing it on camera are not engaging in evil. A person consenting to watch the video is not engaging in evil. There are tangential harms such as abuse and exploitation of the actors, but that's not inherent to porn (there is ethically produced porn) nor unique to it (actors in Hollywood are also exploited). The answer to those problems are breaking down existing power structures and zealously protecting worker rights, not banning Pornhub and AMC Theaters.
I would hazard a guess that the average worker in a large number of low-wage blue collar fields feels that their job is more degrading than the average porn SW.
Regardless of line of work the solution is robust worker's rights protections and social safety nets, so that workers can't be exploited or financially pressured into jobs they find degrading, not to forbid the line of work or portray it as taboo.
The UK abandoned their effort to do this precisely because of how pointless it is.
citation needed? why should a teenager not see pictures of a naked person? keep in mind that teenagers in africa are fighting and dying in wars.
Should we dismantle people's bodies and show it to those people's children? Should we show children their own detached arms while trapping them in a burning house with a company of their mom who is missing lower part of a body and crawling around screaming from pain while her intestines are falling out? And a mangled head of their dead cousin who's been decapitated by a sharp sheet of metal launched at him as the GRAD hit the building? Did I mention it's fucking dark and no you can't call 911. That kind of shit is happening right this second I lived in Donetsk until 2004 and the stories that I see from there are fucking brutal. Why don't you go focus on that?
I mean yeah I'm not saying we should show porn to kids. Why are you even thinking about that? What part of not wanting my fetishes end up on easily hackable government databases and known to the world is even remotely correlated to showing hardcore porn everywhere? I'm not an exhibitionist, man. I'm a prude actually. I'm easily embarrassed by my girlfriend bringing up anything about our sexual life in public. When we go to sexshop and she discusses our fetishes with employee I leave the store and puke from stress and anxiety. The thought of the entire world having access to my sexual identity is horrifying. What about people who are LGBT who's family will disown or kill them?
I probably shouldn't have gotten this heated and I honestly don't think you actually mean evil. Just think about broader implications, please.
It would normalize sex and make the idea of being ashamed of how we look naked outdated.
At a minimum this seems like something that would result in some interesting science papers.
I think a reasonable moderate start would be removing any restrictions on depictions of mere nudity. My city is already ahead of the game by legalizing public nudity (it is not necessary to wear clothing in public spaces - quite popular for sunbathing at city parks in the summer).
What the laws are really for is making voters in these states feel like their legislators are doing something, because proposing and voting on token nonsense like this is easy and negotiating effective change on meaningful policy is hard.
Voters are presumably striving to protect children and want their legislators to do something. These legislators are in no position to do anything. But they can play pretend and only make the problem a little worse as they do. In politics, that's a win.
But it's not a "concern for rising generations".
You're going to need to explain this more. All efforts start small. With support they grow and can accomplish things.
> But it's not a "concern for rising generations".
If "it" is referring to porn, then yes it is. Perhaps not in your view, or your social circles.
Even if they don't get the bill, they can still get something of an anchoring effect and shift the overton window. At the very least, they get to shout on their podcasts and religious radio talk shows about how they're fighting the good fight against us heathens.
I don't think being mainstream matters much, most Americans support abortion rights, for example.
If there was a good way to verify age without needing my full identity, I'd probably be in favor of something like this. God knows I'd prefer my kids don't have access to porn (although I'm not 100% sure I think they shouldn't be able to access it at all until they're 18, they're currently young enough that a total ban is correct).
A few years back, some blockchain enthusiast was extolling to me the virtues of a blockchain backed identity system where you could provide some kind of verified attestation based on a credential - for example, I could use it to prove I'm 18 to the porn site without also giving forth all the other information on my ID.
One of the more interesting ideas I've heard for blockchain. I don't know enough about the topic to know if a chain is _necessary_ for that use case, but I like the idea of being able to verify information in a minimally invasive way.
A blockchain doesn't help here because your personal identity is not a bearer token. If someone has your private keys they do not become you. And if they do have your private keys you better have some authority to revoke them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia
And yes, just in case it wasn't clear, I'm not advocating blockchain here, I have no stake in that stuff or any real understanding of it. But I do like the "digital signatures/attestations" idea. Thanks for sharing the wiki link, I'll have to do some more reading on Estonia's system.
But on a theoretical basis, yes, you could use so-called "soul bound tokens" attached to an Ethereum address, for example, for this use case. A soul bound token is similar to an NFT, but cannot be traded. It is bound to a particular address. So in theory, you could go through some service provider for the identity verification, give them an Ethereum address to attach the 18+ SBT to, and then you could simply sign a message from that address for any website that required 18+ verification (would cost no gas, it's just a signature).
See Vitalik's blog post on SBTs for more info: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html
Obviously I can’t tell you how to raise your own children, but you yourself are seeing that porn is harmful at least up to a certain age. It’s especially good to prevent porn during a child’s formative years.
I would argue that porn isn’t good for anyone really, considering at least the following factors:
1. Like a drug, it numbs the senses and leads to the consumer needing more and more extreme content to feel the same level of satisfaction as before.
2. It’s not clear whether or not the female participants are consenting or not. Not too long ago PornHub got a lot of heat for spreading videos of the abuse of minors on their platform. They ended up having to purge millions of their videos because consent could not be verified. So imagine if God forbid you or your child unknowingly watches these types of abuse.
3. It changes the viewer’s attitude to women. Porn portrays women as public toilets, no dignity or honour whatsoever.
4. If you’re fine with other people’s daughters acting in these videos, then ask yourself: would you accept that for your own womenfolk?
There is more to say, but let’s move on.
You can technically bypass this using a VPN. What this law practically does is adding an additional hurdle for children from seeing this stuff, and that’s something good. Adults on the other hand, are generally speaking capable of setting up a VPN to bypass whatever filter they want.
I'm mostly hesitant due to my own understanding of my own desire to see naked women when I was a teenager and, to be crude about it, a pretty constant desire to jerk off.
Obviously ideally my kids will stick to their imaginations and consenting partners, that's what I would wish for for them if I could.
But I'm not sure it's a totally realistic expectation, and one of the weird things about being a parent but also a person who was once young is that I want my kids to have the opportunities to come to their own conclusions about what's good and bad for them.
As another example, I don't want my kids to drink or smoke pot before they are of legal age to do so. And ideally, maybe never? But at the same time, occasionally doing that stuff when I was a young man was fun, and formed good memories and social bonds. While it's my role as a parent to set rules that they can't do those things, to issue consequences if I catch them smoking weed or drinking it whatever, I also understand the desire and think tm there's a certain... benefit, I guess, to their attempts to circumvent my rules?
I realize I'm pretty much contradicting myself repeatedly here, and also failing to take a hard beneficial moral stance... but that seems to be part and parcel to the experience of being a parent but simultaneously remembering being a kid.
The way I look at parenting is that initially it’s guarding and restrictive, but slowly one lets go in such a way that the child is on a good path in life. So the way I look at it is that it’s a parent’s responsibility to provide some kind of framework. Then different parents may obviously argue what that framework should be…
Re 1 and 3: I hate to be that guy, but I think "citation needed" is an appropriate request for these. Especially for "3", which seems rather strong.
Re 4: This is a little bit like "would you want your daughter to work at Wall-Mart?" Probably you will have higher hopes for your children than to work near-minimum wage all their lives.
2 and 3 don’t apply to gay porn for obvious reasons.
Point 4 probably has more to do with your proximity to sex workers than anything. I have plenty of friends that make their own amateur porn, to me there’s nothing wrong with it. Also, living in sf, I’ve also met plenty of professional gay performers. They’re just like you and I, but they have a more interesting line of work.
My point is not to say that the effects of porn are all positive, but that your issue with porn might have more to do with the way society treats women and sexuality than it does with porn itself.
It's like a drug that attaches to your love receptors preventing you from really loving and receiving love. And most steeped in its grasp don't even know it because it is hard to explain color to someone that has only ever seen black and white.
The clipper chip was a self-censoring device, which gave parents control over their children. It was one of the various things that got democrats labeled as the "nanny state". There's a good reason to oppose the clipper chip, and it wasn't because the chip was the problem, it's because the chip used content ratings, and its use would have required further labeling of content.
This ID law is a form of state-sponsored censorship and tracking. The true purpose here is to later push this to requiring IDs for other things on the internet, and to setup the infrastructure necessary to do so. It's nanny-state, but as usual, the "protect the children" thing here isn't the purpose, just the vehicle. They don't want to protect your morals or your children, they want the ability to control your access to information.
States simply aren't equipped to deal with the issue of access. And not only that, but the issue of access is a false framing of the problem, when there should be as much (if not more) concern about the very existence of pornography, the means by which it is made (prostitution, voyeurism, and exploitation), and the motivations for making it (injured intellect and corrupt will). Until people are having the more important conversation about sexual ethics, the very meaning of our sex, and not this phony "sex education" you get in public schools, I don't think we will see meaningful improvement.