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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, adolescent exposure to porn has proved as meaningless as adolescent exposure to violent video games.

It dawned on me the other day that millennial men, being the first generation with access to seemingly unlimited amounts of porn from a young age, are not a bunch of sexually deranged rapists. In the same way we aren't a generation of murderers despite growing up on golden eye and counter strike.

You probably don't want your kids looking at porn, but I also think it's miles (kilometers?) from the point where we want a surveillance state in order to stop it.

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Unfortunately here in the UK, Ofcom doesn't agree:

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/news-centre/2024/tech-firms-must-ta...

"Sites and apps must introduce robust age-checks to prevent children seeing harmful content such as suicide, self-harm and pornography"

>but I also think it's miles (kilometers?) from the point where we want a surveillance state in order to stop it.

If you look at Canada in a broader sense, the goal from the current federal government is a surveillance state.

> millennial men, being the first generation with access to seemingly unlimited amounts of porn from a young age, are not a bunch of sexually deranged rapist

It's caused the complete opposite, they aren't having sex at all.

True, but the causal link is hard to demonstrate. There's also a drop in friends, especially close friends. In-person social activity is down across the board.

Not that porn definitely isn't a factor, but I'm pretty certain there's larger factors at play.

> True, but the causal link is hard to demonstrate.

Plausibly, they don't have a taste for sex with people who don't look like porn stars.

But as you say, demonstrating that as a causal link would be hard.

If porn is involved in that equation, it's not the primary or fundamental driver.

I'd argue inflammatory foods that have a depressant effect on the nervous system, especially damaging during development stages, along with where mainstream culture is directing people - along with government policy heavily captured by industrial complexes and bad actors (domestic and foreign) in general, will be the leading causes.

If we simply look at the shallow metric of "not having sex" vs. studying to see what's different between those who are and aren't having sex, aren't having children - that's not going to be very fruitful except for people to simply conclude "be attractive; don't be ugly;" attraction is far deeper than the skin, however in part I believe that the inflammatory-depressant state I mentioned is likely to block to a small or large degree, a person's stimulation and excitement from deeper signals and processes that would otherwise 1) make more people attractive to them, as a stronger signal overall - which will be motivating on its own, and 2) also provide nuance to help with targeting to have the nuanced signals to know-learn more accurately who you're actually most attracted to - from more breadth and depth, where you could argue it allows a person's intuition to flourish; rather than be stunted by inflammation, or past unprocessed/unhealed trauma causing people to avoid, etc.

Is it porn, or an additional effect of whatever has been decreasing sperm counts over the past century

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1393072/

It is surprisingly easy to correlate continuously increasing and continuously decreasing functions

https://donhillson.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/link-found-betwe...

Sperm counts are going down for the better part of a century, and people are having less sex. Obviously coincendal and cannot related to each other in the least...

Who's to say that's not also attributable to porn, which after all causes a drop in sperm counts too

That the drop started in the 1940s

More than likely not caused by porn but less in person social situations

In jest I'd say it's caused not by porn but by Counter Strike.

Realistically I see much more issues with decay of Third Places (social meeting spaces) & decay of local society in general. But rather than have no culture & be bored, we have incredibly engaging interactive media to go engage in: CounterStrike or TikTok or whatever else.

I don't think these things are per se to blame. Cost of living being what it is, lots of people can't afford to go out to bars & clubs, one of the most traditional gathering spots for people. It's unclear what a lot of folks would change, what else they'd do, if the IT/media link they rely. on so heavily were to shut off.

that's the great male sedation hypothesis

Surveillance isn't about porn or violence from video games.

It's about having power to control the population. To find people who may be a threat.

Porn did not turn kids into deranged rapists.

However, it did plenty of damage. Completely unrealistic dating expectations to the point where nobody dates anyone; women getting treated violently during sex ("what do you mean asphyxiation isn't normal?"), far greater experimentation with potentially dangerous behavior (anal sex), increased tension between the genders (hard to look at a man knowing he's looked at hundreds of you), etc. STD rates have also increased - syphilis has increased 80% in just 5 years. It is also a scientific fact that heavy porn use is correlated with depression, and depression rates among the youth have (to put it mildly) exploded, especially among young women (obviously other factors are contributing).

https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/2021/2019-STD-surveilla...

It is fair to say, I believe, that:

A. It doesn't make children rapists, but...

B. It's terrible for mental health and relationships.

C. Anything that is terrible for mental health, or relationships, is fair game for regulation on that basis alone when it affects children (alcohol, drugs, etc.)

The kinkshaming is not making your viewpoints sympathetic.

Technically speaking, pedophilia is a kink.

That doesn't change anything about what I said.

Why are you running interference for this person?

Not really, we are just coming out of an unusually boring period in human sexual history. Ancient civilisations seemed to manage to be plenty deviant without any porn.

The sunset of Christianity's influence in the west has just as much to do with it.

> The sunset of Christianity's influence in the west has just as much to do with it.

What a common lark, and yet completely false.

Look at China - pornography is illegal. Guess what the firewall is also censoring. They are a completely atheist government by policy.

Look at India - pornography is illegal to distribute, and even though it is legal to privately consume, violent pornography is just as illegal as child pornography for private consumption. They are also not a Christian society.

Look at any Islamic country - be it Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, etc. You'll be lucky to save your head if you get caught publicly using it. (Of course, privately, there's a lot of users - but that's useful for blackmail.)

Look at Japan - pornography is legal, but all genitalia must be censored or blurred.

Look at most of Africa - pornography is illegal and heavily restricted, despite their Christian status being tentative at best.

Ironically, post-Christian countries are the only countries where this stuff is legal and unregulated as it is. Believe me as well, as Islam gets stronger in this country, you might be surprised where the strongest opposition starts coming from.

This argument is somewhat undermined by the inclusion of Japan, a country well known for just how debased its porn is.

Laws are not a good proxy for culture. Culture is only one of the inputs into a country’s laws. Frequently the people who make the laws are not the same as the people who have to follow them.

As for Islam, Christianity and Islam are closely related, both being Abrahamic religions. I don’t think a distinction is meaningful in this context because both the Bible and the Quran include same story of Sodom and Gomorrah, so their sexual morality comes from exactly the same Abrahamic tradition.

Considering it’s a real place…

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destruction-of-cit...

How much do you want to bet that both of them are wrong?

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