This is a straw-man attack. Porn produces a huge dopamine dump. Do some research on how dopamine works in the brain. Regular dopamine dumps can have a huge impact on quality of life leading to depression and building an addiction cycle.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13591...
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/sexual-intelligence/...
Yeah, maybe seeing a boob never killed someone, but aggressive grabbing, intimidating a partner who doesn't seem "normal", and expecting rougher more extreme sex acts that women are not comfortable with are not harmless.
Only way to fight glorification of violence would be to be treat violence same way as how sex is treated and over centuries we may end up with more peaceful societies.
We can certainly discuss 1980s vs 2020s and how the Overton window has shifted. Boobs weren't as big of a deal in our past.
80s were also quite violent in our movies/media as well. It seems like everything has been clamped down.
I was surprised to see the dick of the David Statue get messed up in the children's movie 'The Goonies' for example. Apparently dicks weren't a big deal either even into the 90s.
It's not something I'd really noticed before I had a similar conversation with someone regarding how movie ratings have changed over time vis a vis nudity.
That aside, it's a brilliant sci fi movie, and I'd recommend it to everyone here :)
I'm not that old and I remember the controversy when someone found a sex game in GTA: San Andreas _if you hacked the game_.
Nowadays a kid with a smartphone googles and there you are, AI generated hardcore porn with your classmate's face. Different world.
If it is not obscene, it's afforded First Amendment protections and allowed.
If it is obscene, it can be regulated by various entities, should they choose to do so.
Since the mid-70s(?), the Miller test [0] has been used.
Parent is pointing out that the Internet effectively obliterated the technical ability of various government entities to impose restrictions of any sort on obscene material, and consequently there's been essentially no regulation of internationally-based pornographic content since the 90s.
I find Pornography in specific, and sex in general, is something people have very strong basic opinions about. In particular, a lot of people intersect religious morals into the picture, which can make conversations difficult at best, disingenuous more commonly :-(.
For example, my own basic approach is "what do you mean 'obscenity regulations'? What kind of silly thing is that amongst adults?". It then tends to get complicated due to numbers - often people promoting such regulations and laws upon other adults are hugely vehement about government over reach and regulation in other areas, so it ends up feeling like hipocrisy or "I want government to ban things I don't like and allow things I do like".
But this is hacker news! Nothing stops are from trying to have that honest conversation :-).
My honest opinion is that I come from a prudeish culture, and thank goodness teenagers today can have their key questions answered more openly and have access to things I had to sneak and feel guilty about. Access to porn is not in top ten things I worry about for my kids, but I am willing to listen otherwise :-).
I'm more thinking about the downsides of the erotic material being available 24/7 to every person in their pocket and inducing addictive behaviors. The teenage boys that have seen explicit pornography before ever even kissing a girl, and how that influences their expectations and behaviors while dating. The incels that don't even attempt to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex but instead indulge in auto-erotic gratification from consuming digital content (hikikomori), soon to be augmented by AI. These people are chasing dopamine hits instead of genuine human connection, something formally driven by lust/sexual desire for better or worse and it's going to have major cultural impacts.
In the 1970s.
We did not have an Internet. No, the volume wasn't nearly as high, nor was the technical quality.
As for "expectations", non-porn media also have horrible expectations about gender and relationships. In fact, they have more of them and are able to convey them in more detail. And the fact is that today's teenaged boys are a lot more respectful toward their prospective-or-desired partners than my cohort was, porn or no porn.
An honest conversation, sure.
Porn is a hyperstimulus, unrealistic and so reality seems bad in comparison.
This may be why teens these days are having fewer accidental pregnancies.
Those missing accidental teen pregnancies, according to a comment I saw on Hacker News recently and never checked the veracity of, are a big part of why fertility rates are now below replacement levels.
The dichotomy that won't be believed: Ban the "adult" content to force the teens to grow up before they need to; or let them be "corrupted" so that they can keep their innocence. (Scare quotes because I remember being a teenager, even if it was the 90s).
We as a democratic society should want that everything legal is available.
It is up to parents to take care of what is available to their offspring. Much like any other potential risk behaviours.
And it is up to other democracies to curb the US's continued attempt at pushing their protestant obsession with sexuality onto everyone else.
Truly addictive things, e.g. dopamine hijacks, are hard to make widely available. Gambling, dopamine drugs (cocaine, meth, etc.), porn, etc.