I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway | Hacker News Reader

I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway

thefp.com

4 pointsmistersquid5 comments

The article claims to be written by a 16 year old. I'm at least as concerned about the way she's been indoctrinated with such an extremist viewpoint and all the talking points she raises as I am that she's seen porn.

I've been reading this kind of article for about 30 years, that modern porn is more violent, more unrealistic, worse for kids than furtively reading playboys. I know accessibility is higher, but I think the article is painting it all with the most extreme brush possible, and it makes it read like a moral panic rather than an objective assessment.

I don't look at porn and have never been to pornhub, so maybe I'm out of touch? It's really the fact that I see these arguments over and over again that I'm suspicious.

I'm also a little weirded out by her "zeal" about this issue, given the claimed context of being a high school essay competition winner. The line about what kind of porn she thinks adults are imagining when she chats to them about this issue stuck out to me. Is this 16 year old also a seasoned anti-porn campaigner? Does her helicopter-mom know about that as well?

Also, despite one of the main points being that modern porn has descended into violent abuse, and not like grandpa's old porn, she also takes the time to attack OnlyFans.

> Meanwhile, models and female entrepreneurs—women who little girls look up to—are flocking to OnlyFans to sell naked photos of themselves.

I'll take her word for it as I'm not familiar with OnlyFans content, but if it is "naked photos of themselves" isn't that the "good" kind of porn that the old folks are imagining, possibly even better than the old kind since they're self-employed?

So it's more of a slippery slope kind of argument she's making?

I worked on a porn blocking app a while ago and pornhub (modern porn sites in general) is definitely not equivalent to "furtively reading playboys".

So in the article she mentions some of the extreme stuff that's on there, but I think that's conflating what exists with what people are actually looking at. Aren't most people probably looking at pretty benign stuff?

This is a pretty dry article:

https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/61/5/1243/6208896

Which describes it's methodology quite clearly.

Their conclusion is that: "In total, we found 12 per cent (n = 15,839) of the total analysable sample (n = 131,738) of titles described sexual activity that constitutes sexual violence."

Their data set comprises of content shown to first time site visitors.

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