X has new rules that officially allow porn
theverge.com
theverge.com
This could get pretty wild considering the whole bot situation and the way Red States are handling adult content these days...
[1]: I'm not saying it is a right wing place, I have no idea as I have no data (not even anecdata because I don't really use it), but I've certainly noticed an uptick in people sharing that view on sites like HN since Elon took over. Have also heard that there is a decent balance of viewpoints on X. My guess is that both are probably true (and are not mutually exclusive), but again I have no data.
Or is it just that their NSFW freedom of speech isn't significant because it's not to the benefit of a billionaire that these politicians happen to like.
That campaign to ban porn never really ended AFAIK, but my impression is the priorities of the party really shifted about 10 years ago to the point it's no longer an open policy (the word pornography no longer appears anywhere in the Republican party platform [1])
Remnants of the anti-porn part of the party can certainlystill be seen in the republican party, eg: Mike Johnson extolling his use of "covenant eyes"
Thus the arrow is flipped. The anti-porn cause was very active against printed pornograpghy and continued into the internet age. A right-wing/conservative movement and efforts both predating the internet.
[1] https://prod-static.gop.com/media/Resolution_Platform.pdf
I think all those factors combine to make them have to be kind of politically neutral.
In contrast, right wing views these as problems to be solved also with the legal system. Ban entirely and enforce with police and criminal sentences. Thus the "hates" I don't think is quite equal between the two.
I will concede for sure though that if you go far enough left the degree of 'hate' levels out between right & left, but the number of people on the two sides is different.
The "silent majority" part of the right wing, the old Reagan coalition for a long time was a pretty sizable part of the Republican party. Meanwhile, the twitter left progressive wing of the Democratic party is not as large compared to the republican religious-conservative right.
If we think to the OG far-left hatred of porn - that was there before revenge-porn etc were even concerns. Those OG left-wing concerns that did want to ban porn - were concerned about how porn disempowers women, can glorify violence, further genders inequality, etc..
As a general left/right difference, the approach is not equal. In the cases where the approach is to ban entirely - there are just different numbers of people in the far left "porn should be banned" camp compared to the "porn is sin" camp.
Sure, they technically didn't use the legal system, they just used the technicality that payment processors hold the same power over internet-dependent companies as a government.
In contrast, I would consider Charlie Kirk as a right-wing activist (hopefully this will work as a good example). If there were an action taken by him and similarly small group of activists, perhaps with backing from their organization - I would be very hesitant to extrapolate that action as broadly representative of "the right."
Which is to say, left wing or right wing activists might not be representative of the broader views, and also those broader views might not be consistent (not everyone on the right/left agree on everything)
I see those people as on the moderately far left, at least in the United States. There are plenty of people on the moderately far left who are not libertarian in the vast majority of positions, but who would agree in the case of drugs.
The libertarian party platform states: "we favor the repeal of all laws creating “crimes” without victims, such as gambling, the use of drugs for medicinal or recreational purposes" [1]
Which I interpret as full legalization of all drugs. It is interesting that this is essentially an extreme left point of view on the topic. I really think libertarian philosophy is just kinda fascinating. I'm now curious though on where libertarians stand on tort laws.
> Are dedicated porn sites like PornHub and friends considered somehow left wing?
Not directly no, but since the overlap between right-wing and religious (mostly Christian) are so significant, and many right-wing Christians believe that there is a spritual war going on and that porn is a sin/evil, and it can lead to atheism, and atheism is so frequently associated with left-wing, I think there's some consideration there.
> Or is it just that their NSFW freedom of speech isn't significant because it's not to the benefit of a billionaire that these politicians happen to like.
I'm sure that's a factor as well. No (or very, very few) politican of any ilk is going to stand up for Big Porn and risk becoming the porn candidate. Personally I'd sure love to see them at least stand up for Big Porn in the name of free speech, but I'm not expecting it anytime soon.
I believe that the Texas law applies to sites where more than 1/3 of their content is sexual material harmful to minors. I don't know exactly how it defines "sexual material" and "harmful to minors", but I suspect that Twitter does not qualify as such a site.
YouTube, Twitch etc all have such vague standards on NSFW that it's pretty common for streamers to be completely unsure if something that could be perceived as NSFW would be considered as NSFW by the platform. It leads to all sorts of disappointing self-censoring for no logical reason.
Edit: I wonder if the idea behind this is to make it so legitimate accounts feel comfortable labeling their NSFW media properly, so that X can deal with the bot problem by detecting unmarked NSFW media.
For the same reason we have spotify blocked at work, but not youtube because we publish our comms there. Which results in... people listening to music videos and wasting a ton of bandwidth for no reason (because they're downloading the video just for the music). A bit stupid but the powers that be are unwilling to unblock spotify.
But I don't think most people at the company care, they just want to listen and take whatever they know. I don't think most of them even know youtube music exists. Spotify is really popular here (Europe) but it's banned like I mentioned.
So I'm going to guess the workaround is that Apple requires NSFW content to not be accessible as a default, but does not get in the way for the content being accessible via some form of external switch. The 'external' requirement makes me think that maybe it's about shifting some sort of perceived liability? X might have to add a similar option I guess.
Some NSFW based accounts regularly complain of shadowbanning and weird behaviours compared to SFW accounts
I wonder how the other backers of the Twitter deal feel about financing pornography.
This includes Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, MUFG, Société Générale, Mizuho Bank, BNP Paribas, and the KSA.
If not properly gated (via special accounts that can be filtered out, etc, or profiles that have ratings baked in), this can become a mess very quickly.
Porn is illegal in KSA. So this is going to get a bit awkward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_the_Middle_East
And Dubai is sin city.
They happily invest in all manner of unislamic things, it is good to be the king. How are you so naive.
However it should be behind a filter of course. Just like reddit does. So those who are interested can view it and the rest can avoid it.
https://news.byu.edu/intellect/pornography-use-at-any-level-... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9922938/
Also those only focus on the user. The pornography business itself is a lot more horrible as it's closely linked with sex trafficking.
The NIH paper is from the following authors:
Haseeb Mehmood Qadri, corresponding author 1 Abdul Waheed,1 Ali Munawar,2 Hasan Saeed,3 Saad Abdullah,4 Tayyba Munawar,1 Shaheer Luqman,1 Junaid Saffi,1 Awais Ahmad,5 and Muhammad Saad Baba r6
1 Surgery, Lahore General Hospital, Lahore, PAK
2 Surgery, Shaikh Zayed Hospital, Lahore, PAK
3 Pathology, Allama Iqbal Medical College, Lahore, PAK
4 General Surgery, Allama Iqbal Medical College, Lahore, PAK
5 Surgery, Jinnah Hospital, Lahore, PAK
6 General Surgery, Lahore General Hospital, Lahore, PAK
And think of all those hippies from the 70s that would have sex parties in the park. They're all grown up now. Don't see them running around raping and murdering. Might run into them at the swinger club though :)
Ofcourse, correlation does not imply causation. But personally I do think pornography contributes to some of the above in some ways.
Why are we limiting this to western countries?
This is clearly a problem with (checks list) Bhutan, Maldives, Puerto Rico, Nepal, South Korea, Saint Lucia, Taiwan, Carbo Verde, Djibouti, and Bosnia. I'm missing the list of "most western countries" there in the most critical ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#Caus...
Is the reduction in fertility possibly more influenced by things like... https://www.statista.com/statistics/259518/birth-rate-among-... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th...
Or https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/05/07/family-...
> The more education a mother has, the fewer children she will have on average in her lifetime. While fertility drops somewhat with each additional level of education, the biggest fertility gap occurs between women who lack a high school diploma and those who have completed high school.
> Moms ages 40 to 44 who lack a high school diploma have about 2.9 children in their lifetimes, on average, while those with a high school diploma or some college have about 2.4 kids. Mothers at the end of their childbearing years who have a bachelor’s degree or higher have about 2.2 children on average.
Though I would certainly not say that one should be encouraging teenage pregnancy nor hindering the education of women in an attempt to boost the fertility rate.
Blaming the declining fertility rate in western nations on pornography seems to miss the more obvious causes.
What do you think are the main factors for highest % of men not being sexually active (compared to historically), highest % of people living alone (in US).
Lack of social support for families with children. Once you have a child, the costs and demands on the family are significant. This extends to things like reducing the support for WIC, difficulties in finding childcare (and its expense). Again, the outlook for having a child is a lot of money.
The difficulty of maintaining a family and a career (side bit - telecommuting is a step in the right direction for white collar jobs). Having a stay at home mother / wife is difficult in today's world. Both the expectations of "that's not what I want to do" and the income that isn't there. Supporting a couple on a single blue collar isn't viable, and supporting a family is way out of the question.
And so, yea, guys aren't sexually active. The social, medical, and economic risks are too high for all people involved.
Under this model, porn isn't the cause, but rather the symptom of the social and economic difficulties faced by individuals. Attempting to "treat" the symptom (of people watching porn) isn't going to make men more sexually active any more than a box of tissues next to the bed treats the flu instead.
Me? why am I a single male living alone? Because when I was in the SF Bay in the '90s and early '00s, the ratio of single women to single in the 20 to 29 age bracket was about 80 to 100 (map from 2015 http://visualizing.nyc/bay-area-zip-codes-singles-map/ - its better now than it was in the '90s ). The only place in the US that was worse were Air Force bases in Alaska. Put that down for two decades and then adding the "well, I got no money" after the dot com crash and '08 ... and I'm certainly not looking to start a family with some (un)lucky lady.
This story writ large of economic insecurity combined with misaligned demographics ( https://jonathansoma.com/singles/#2/3/2/0 ) in places where young men go to work. And while now I'm in https://jonathansoma.com/singles/#7/8/2/0 - I'm a cranky gray beard that is certainly not looking to start a family.
In an alternate universe with today's technology I would have stayed in my college town and worked remotely in tech and hooked up with that cute young woman (back then) from one of my classes rather than going our separate ways when I got a job ... though if I was 21 today that would be back to the "can't afford it" category.
The thing to do is to make the ability for someone to plan a family for the next 20 years something that can be done. Until one can look to the future and be able to feel some assurance that they'll be in a better situation than they are today, the risks and uncertainty of "settling down" are enough to stifle many of dreams of a family.
I don't really see how you equate being sexually active with reproduction though. In this day and age they are very different things. And many men and also many women (though I believe less, they often have an urge to have them) simply don't want kids. Doesn't mean that they can't have a relationship or a healthy sex life.
> Well, birth rates are below replacement rates in most western countries where pornography is consumed more than elsewhere. Also, more people are single, more men are not sexually active, high divorce rates, etc.
The implication is that porn is hindering the replacement rate of a population.
This gets into various other dog whistles (if you poke at dead comments you'll find even more overt ones). https://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/ICSR-Report-Sle... (page 22 is where the section on pornography begins) (the publisher of the document is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Centre_for_the_S... )
Are those bad things? I think it is great for the population to shrink a bit for environmental reasons. It's not like humanity will go extinct tomorrow. We have way too many people on this planet competing for scarce resources already. And that's with more and more poor countries rising in welfare and wanting their microwave ovens and fridges too.
> Also, more people are single, more men are not sexually active, high divorce rates, etc.
It's just that we have more freedom. Couples that married young and were forced to stay together to appease the community were super common in the 50s. We don't have to anymore. And I don't think divorces are a problem as such. I don't think marriage is important. I've had a more than a decade-long relationship and we never thought of getting married.
And kids are just difficult to have now. These days it's necessary for both partners to work and that doesn't fit well with having kids. It's a big hassle. I never wanted them in the first place and I'm glad I didn't. That doesn't mean that people don't have sex.
I see a lot more sexual freedom too. Swinging, sex-positive parties, polyamory etc. Many couples I know share their intimacy, as do my partner and I. I don't think this is due to porn but rather due to a more relaxed attitude to sexuality, which I consider a really good thing. These things can strengthen bonds as well. I know several married couples that would have not been able to stay together if they weren't so liberal to let off steam once in a while.
> It's just that we have more freedom
Partially, yes, explains no kids/somewhat divorce rates, but does not explain men not being sexually active, as every man (that's not asexual) wants to bone. And irregardless of marriage, more people are single/not in a relationship.
> . I don't think this is due to porn but rather due to a more relaxed attitude to sexuality, which I consider a really good thing. These things can strengthen bonds as well
I disagree. Studies show that those that have more sexual partners are more likely to divorce [1]. Personally, and that's just personally, I could never have the love of my life fuck another man.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0192513X231155673
It might be a bit bad short term like with the boomer wave getting old and nobody being there to take care of them. But in the long term we'll get over that bump and it's way better for the planet. It won't support infinite growth.
> Partially, yes, explains no kids/somewhat divorce rates, but does not explain men not being sexually active, as every man (that's not asexual) wants to bone.
It's still their choice though. If they don't have a partner they can always just pay for it once in a while. I also do sometimes between relationships, no big deal.
> I disagree. Studies show that those that have more sexual partners are more likely to divorce [1]. Personally, and that's just personally, I could never have the love of my life fuck another man.
I understand, it's very personal. I like it myself. But I find it can have a stabilising effect because you can never cover all your partner's needs equally well. I don't think it's bad if relationships don't last anyway. I'm still best friends with most of my exes. It just moved into a different phase. I didn't get married anyway and I've never wanted kids.
I don't think you can blame porn for all that though. I think it's more of a symptom of the higher sexual freedom we have now, than a cause.
Out of cohorts that consume no porn, to what degree are those variables you cited different? If those cohorts are introduced to porn, do those numbers change? In those cohorts, is there full honesty about usage? It's very difficult science to fo.
There are studies that show porn use particularly in women will lead to higher divorce rates [1] though, it is noted the relationship is curvilinear, as porn use goes to a high level, the effect of separation decreases. Are people unhappy in marriage seaking out porn, or is porn causing the unhappy marriage? Are people who are likely to be divorced later more likely to seek out porn? Correlation and causation are incredibly hard to tease out. Is it the porn's fault? Who knows, in some specefic cases - probably, but generally speaking it is not supported by data. If supported by data, to get that causation claim, then a dose and effect relationship needs to be identified as well as a clearly articulated mechanism of action.
Interesting study. I agree that it's very difficult to find the causation.
It's not nearly as satisfying as the real thing though. For me it can never be a replacement. Just an addition.
Well, yes, absolutely. It's quite difficult actually. Especially if your only goal is "to get laid" and don't want any other commitment. There's apps like tinder of course but even then it's quite difficult to stand out for men. I certainly don't manage that.
Personally I think it's more fair on the lady in question to just pay for it in those cases. Where both parties know what to expect and there is no pretense of more. No messing with hearts.
When it comes to that it's not like it difficult (though I suppose in the US it's illegal in some states, where I'm from it's quite normal).
What if you don't have any, and nowhere to get? What if you're 14 and realistically any serious romantic relations are many years in the future for you?
So man cooomers ITT it's just sad.
https://policy.byu.edu/view/rank-and-status-policy
> Expectations of Professorial and Professional Faculty
> 2.1 Faculty Standards
> BYU is a private university with unique goals and aspirations rooted in the mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is a faculty member’s responsibility to contribute affirmatively to the full realization of human potential and to a university environment enlightened by living prophets and sustained by those moral virtues which characterize the life and teachings of the Son of God (see Mission Statement). Faculty members should also provide students an education that is spiritually strengthening, intellectually enlarging, and character building and that leads to lifelong learning and service (see Aims of a BYU Education).
---
Do you have any secular citations?
> It is a condition of employment that faculty members act in accordance with university policies, including the Academic Freedom Policy, the Church Educational System Honor Code, and the Church Educational System Dress and Grooming Principles and Expectations. Faculty who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and who accept an offer of university employment on or after January 27, 2022, also accept as a condition of employment that they will hold and be worthy to hold a current temple recommend.
> As integral members of the university community, faculty are expected to be role models of a life that combines spiritual values and personal integrity with intellectual rigor and academic excellence, and to conduct their work in a professional manner consistent with the principles and values espoused by the university and the Church of Jesus Christ. They are expected to live lives reflecting a love of God, a commitment to keeping His commandments, and loyalty to the Church of Jesus Christ. They should engage in continuing faculty development and maintain high levels of performance throughout their careers.
Does this suggest that one could research such a domain that would run counter to teachings of the church and remain employed?
Feel free to disregard byu, because plenty of other studies agree
In other comments USU extension is Utah State University... which while not BYU has similar influences.
The impartiality of these sources is to be brought into question.
I would also note there is a significant cultural difference between Utah, Poland (the sources for two other links), Lahore, and the US at large that may more than slightly influence the agendas of the authors.
Instead of disregarding the sources because they originate from culturally different, let's attack any points made.
These excerpts from [1] sum it up kinda well (I recommend reading the full article, it makes a few additional points not listed here):
"“My biggest concern regarding the scientific study of porn is that a noticeable subset of researchers come at these issues with a focus on harm in their minds. They try to establish ways to confirm that porn is causing whatever harm they already believe exists,” he says. “The field needs more people who are willing to look at the data and leave aside their politics and their issues.”" [1]
"Voon says. “What we do know with porn is that there are some patterns that are consistent with an addiction – but some that are not. We need much larger epidemiological studies to know for sure.”" [1]
"A meta-analysis – a study of studies – published by Malamuth in 2009 found that hundreds of papers from the 1980s to 2008 were fairly consistent in linking high rates of porn viewing with violent ideas and behaviour. But here’s the caveat: not all men respond to porn in the same way." [1]
"For most men, consuming porn will not cause them to view women differently. But in those who already are predisposed to hold sexist views or to behave in an aggressive fashion, porn can exacerbate pre-existing and dangerous propensities. In this way, it’s just like any other drug."
"Alcohol, for example, is in many ways comparable to porn because it is ubiquitous, socially acceptable and legal."
“For some people, alcohol can truly ruin their lives,” explains Malamuth. “But for others it can be mildly positive, such as providing stress relief or enhancing their sex lives. It depends on the cultural context – and the individual.”
"The field is riddled with misconceptions and biases that are not supported by the data, she says."
"Despite concerns that porn can decrease libido and lead to impotence due to ‘tolerance’ and ‘desensitisation’, research published by Prause in the journal Sexual Medicine in 2015 shows these worries to be unfounded."
"“The most well-replicated and concerning harm is reinforcing rape myths in men who already believe them,” says Prause. Such that if you take a woman on a date, she owes you sex. Or that women secretly want to be coerced into sex."
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/is-pornography-h...
I did not edit any of my comments.
Either way is fine, but it would be good for you to disclose that as it has an impact on the downvotes and the other comments are received.
The site will go down imminently! Traffic is cratering! Everyone I know have switched to mylittlepony tooting on mastodon!
I get it, you don’t like him, by all means. But stop manifesting reality.
Edit: awww you guys, sorry if I hurt your feelings. Twitter is down, tooting ftw! musk bad, I conform with all your pet issues and hatreds, please don’t shun me!
With all the downvote this clearly triggered some people in bad ways, but it is true. Twitter is about 250M, Pinterest is about 500M.
Twitter is down substantially in all publicly disclosed metrics / investor writedowns since the go private transaction. I don't know what it is about them that makes some people treat the company with deference it doesn't deserve, but it's a shrinking, niche social network.