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Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

That was, in fact, what COPA mandated in the US in 1998, and SCOTUS struck it down as too onerous in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, kicking off the last 20 years of essentially completely unregulated Internet porn commercially available to children with nothing more than clicking an "I'm 18" button. At the time, filtering was seen as a better solution. Nowadays filtering is basically impossible thanks to TLS (with things like DoH and ECH being deployed to lock that down even further), apps that ignore user CAs and use attestation to lock out owner control, cloud CDNs, TLS fingerprinting, and extreme consolidation of social media (e.g. discord being for both minecraft discussions and furry porn).

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Despite TLS, filtering is easier to set up now than it was in 1998. You might have to block some apps in the short term, but if you suggest apps can avoid age verification if they stop pinning certificates then they'll jump at the option.

Consolidation is the only tricky part that's new.

Filtering has never been easy or practical for the general public. But the situation has become much worse.

In 1998 it was easy for a family to have no computer at all, or to put their single computer in the living room where it could be supervised. Internet use was limited because it tied up the phone line. These factors made it easy for parents to supervise their children.

Today, computers are everywhere, fit in your pocket, and its very easy to get online. Even if you don't buy any computer for your children (which is hard, because your children will tell you that they're getting bullied and socially ostracized, which probably won't even be a lie!) they will probably be given a computer by their school and any filters on that computer will inevitability be circumvented. And even if that doesn't happen, they can trade or buy one of their peers old phones and use that on free WiFi to access the internet without you knowing it. Are you going to thoroughly search their belongings every week? If you do, they'll know and find ways to hide it anyway.

And yes, I know kids used to procure and hide porno mags. What they have access to on the internet is a lot more extreme than a tattered playboy.

Seems like a reasonable argument to ban encryption rather than actually parent your children. As a conservative voter with nothing to hide, I’m in.

Banning encryption that the device owner can't control actually seems like a great idea. So e.g. for TLS it should be easy to install a CA and MITM filtering proxy as an admin user and all applications must trust that CA.

I non sarcastically agree that communication obfuscation should not prevent owner access to comms, but that’s not really the point I was making.

lets just skip straight to the logical conclusion, buddy. no amount of "web" or "discord" regulation stops porn consumption. the statistic of "minors viewing porn" wouldn't be affected even slightly, even if all of the regulation in question here were passed to the fullest extent. this is because people can just download and run whatever software they want, and communicate with any party they want. what you want is for people to not have control over their computers/communications made from them. people talk about a middle ground, but there is none, because you will always just notice that the "minors viewing porn" statistic is not affected by your latest law, until you have absolute control over civilian communications. this is completely against what anyone in the open source community let alone democracy, stand for.

Right. My friends in middle school would trade floppies with porn on them, which older students and siblings would be happy to provide.

My complaint was exactly that with modern devices, the owner does not have absolute control over communication on the device, and that's a problem. I think anyone in the open source community or people that believe in democracy would agree that e.g. the owner of a phone or computer should absolutely have the ability to intercept, record, manipulate, and filter all communication that device is doing.

Do you believe the ease with which a service can be used influences the amount of people who use that service?

Like with marginal users?

This has already come up before the Supreme Court, with the argument that filtering was a less invasive technique to fulfill the government’s legitimate interests back in the early 2000s.

That ship has sailed. Even the opposition admits that trying to get everyone to filter is not going to work and is functionally insignificant. The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.

> trying to get everyone to filter

We never needed everyone to filter, just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.

Instead, they should purchase devices for their kids that have a child-lock and client-side filters. All sites have to do is add an HTTP header loosely characterizing it's content.

1. Most of the dollar costs of making it all happen will be paid by the people who actually need/use the feature.

2. No toxic Orwellian panopticon.

3. Key enforcement falls into a realm non-technical parents can actually observe and act upon: What device is little Timmy holding?

4. Every site in the world will not need a monthly update to handle Elbonia's rite of manhood on the 17th lunar year to make it permitted to see bare ankles. Instead, parents of that region/religion can download their own damn plugin.

There's a peer / social issue at play as well though. If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids (I happen to think so), and don't allow your 13yo daughter to have one, you are pretty much forcing her to be the odd one out. Maybe that's OK for some parents, but you can't deny that this cost exists.

Preventing your son from playing certain video games that all of his friends enjoy also has a social cost.

This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class. When left up to the parents individually it's an absolute disaster.

These are just some specific examples of where I the nanny state can be beneficial. For most things in general though I'd also prefer people govern themselves (and their kids) whenever possible.

> This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class.

Agreed on the classroom angle, there are many reasons (e.g. cheating, concentration) to treat the availability of devices in a uniform way there.

> If you believe that smart phones are disastrous for kids

A focus on the handheld device also makes it easier to handle other related concerns that can't really be solved any other way, like "no social-media after bedtime."

So does being vegetarian or vegan. So does being not the dominant culture in any aspect of life. That's a decision for parents to make and honestly "they'll be left out" is such a crap parenting take. Especially since it's a bunch of parents together who don't want their kid to have access thinking this together. If they actually talked to each each or just made a stand so people could see, we wouldn't even have this so called social cost.

I'm seeing this as a parent in real time. I'm actually changing my kid's friend's parent behaviors by simply being like, "Cool. But my kid isn't/is going to do that" I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.

> I don't know when parenting happened by social committee, but I don't believe in it.

It's always been the case. We've just become so individualistic, at least in some western cultures, that we rail against it. There's even an old saying "It takes a village to raise a child".

Your points only make sense in the absence of bad and/neglectful parents. For many decades it was required to prove age in order to consume porn. Porn on the internet ought to have the same requirement. I don’t know the best way to implement it but since the industry isn’t trying to find a solution then government should impose one.

Then the government should come up with a good way to prove age that does not negatively impact privacy. It shouldn't be possible for "who is viewing what porn (or other thing)" to be accidentally leaked; because it should be possible to not store the "who" part.

Such a proof does not exist. It is already the case that your porn viewing habits can be leaked. It’s just that at present the one storing the information is not the government.

Can they? It seems highly unlikely to me that most web site operators are colluding with my VPN provider to unmask me.

(Yes fingerprinting is a huge issue but the implications of that get fairly complicated.)

Years ago Google released anonymized browsing data to researchers. The researchers were able to determine who did the searches. I imagine a state actor can already determine almost everyone’s online activity.

There's definitely some critical information missing there. I don't think you could individually identify me if all you had to go on was the text and timestamp of the searches I made within the past 24 hours. At least yesterday I didn't even look up any local businesses on maps.

State actor and porn site operator are two very different things. Pointing to the former in this context reads like a non sequitur to me.

I believe most websites keep track of viewing history and ip addresses of where that history comes from. I believe if the government wanted to determine what your internet history is they could do so with a great deal of accuracy. As such I think the complaint that requiring proof of age would be a privacy nightmare is not relevant.

We already live in an age of relatively little privacy.

A targeted investigation by the government is not the same as dragnet surveillance is not the same as sharing the equivalent of my driver's license with some random site operator who can potentially turn around and sell that data (or just inadvertently leak it). The complaint is relevant because the proposed measure would make the status quo significantly worse than it currently is. That applies regardless of how bad it already is at present.

The government could fairly easily gain access to the contents of a security deposit box. That doesn't justify a policy requiring proactively declaring their contents to the authorities.

And all of that is before we even get to the essential question - would the proposed measure actually accomplish the officially stated goal?

Since Obama’s presidency we know dragnet surveillance by the government is already the norm.

So after a protracted back and forth your reasoning comes down to the following. The government is already engaging in dragnet surveillance. Somehow this automagically unmasks VPN usage (global dragnet (as opposed to targeted) traffic correlation on that scale would be a seriously impressive feat) in addition to any other privacy measures a typical individual might take. Therefore we should be okay with a system that enables the government to see you registering with various websites, or alternatively with a system that reveals various personal information to said website operator, or alternatively both simultaneously.

Or to summarize, the situation is already organically bad so everyone should be okay if we enact laws that artificially make it even worse in new ways.

To be blunt your reasoning seems entirely specious to me.

It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors. There is already virtually no privacy in these matters in the sense that Google and others already track us so the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak. As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution. I favor age verification being the law. You don’t.

The choice between you and others keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access to hardcore pornography I choose the latter as the more important issue.

> It’s not ok to allow easy access to hardcore pornography by minors.

I don't believe anyone here suggested that it was.

> Google and others already track us

This is not related to the discussion at hand. I already explained to you. Google does not track me on non-google sites. My state government does not track my browsing history. Neither does the federal government.

> the argument against age verification on privacy grounds is weak

You are responding with nonsense and ignoring the information I provided.

> As with most things there are tradeoffs and there is no perfect solution.

An empty platitude. The thing you are arguing for fundamentally does not work to accomplish the stated goal, although it is quite likely to accomplish other unstated goals. The "tradeoff" is a systematic loss of privacy that is likely to weaken civil liberties in the long run.

> keeping the belief that your porn viewing habits are completely anonymous vs. allowing minors unfettered access

Yet another misrepresentation. At this point I have to assume that your behavior is intentional. I'm left with the impression that you are an ideologically motivated actor who is fully aware that you don't have a leg to stand on but is attempting to sway the perception of an unseen audience anyhow.

The actual choice presented here is between a "solution" that openly invites government overreach without actually solving the stated problem versus the current status quo or possibly some alternative approach. Honestly I've yet to be convinced of the issue with the current status quo. Parental controls exist. Whitelists exist. Why can't we expect parents to do their jobs by parenting?

The mainstream social networks don't permit nudity. If you really have so little faith in your own child's judgment then whitelist Facebook, Wikipedia, and a few others and call it a day. Although I do have to wonder. Assuming they're a teenager, why do you have so little faith in their cognitive abilities?

In the end I'm reasonably certain that unfettered access to social networks is far worse for development than unfettered access to hardcore pornography. C'est la vie.

The fact that there are already many threats to our privacy is not a reason to not push back on new threats. Rather, it's a reason to push back harder, and then try to fix the existing threats, too.

Then create one, or something much better than is being demanded, first; before demanding companies use it.

If a porn company has to collect all the information about me (name, address, age, etc) and keep it in their database then, if they get hacked, then all that information, connected to what I viewed, is available to the hackers.

If the porn company has an ID that it assigns each person, and it reaches out to some government agency to say "is this person of age" (without their internal ID), then stores "yes/no" with the ID; then hacking cannot (or is much less likely to be able to) connect "what account has viewed what" with "what human being is attached to the account".

Effectively, by making the porn site need to collect and maintain personal information, privacy is made less safe. If the government is going to demand proof of age, then the government is on the hook for supplying a reasonable way to check it.

Then create one, or something much better than is being demanded, first; before demanding companies use it.

Before demanding car companies build safer vehicles I first invented the seat belt.

That's just not possible in practice. There's lots of people who enjoy publishing their sex, not commercially. There's no place under a single jurisdiction that can be filtered or required to prove age. Any social network will contain groups of people using it to distribute porn. When common ones are closed, dedicated ones are created.

I don’t understand what you are saying. The government can force providers to make their users prove their age. And people can violate the law and try to avoid this.

It's important to teach our children that different people have different restrictions. Some of my daughter's friends have no phone. One of them has no phone, but does have a tablet. To the best of my knowledge, none of them are ostracized by the group. I mean, I've seen them hanging out at our house and other places.

Just curious, how old are they? I'm planning on having kids and I'm afraid of how to answer the smart phone question. I imagine that it could start to be an issue by 12 or 13

Not even close. Some peers will have effectively their phone at 6 or lower. https://www.waituntil8th.org/ tries to promote delaying till 8yo. It may start being an issue as soon as they get to primary school.

The website you linked encourages waiting until 8th grade (ie. about 14 years old), not 8 years old.

That's what I get for posting while tired...

My daughter is 13 and has a phone for a number of years, and she got it later than some friends, earlier than others. I know that's not a lot of info, but it gives you some idea of the range _I_ saw.

> To the best of my knowledge, none of them are ostracized by the group.

Yes, in my experience it isn't as severe as "Ostracized", but definitely a bit "left out" occasionally, especially when friends are all doing "snap streaks" and swap BFFs (as they do) etc.

So at least in my area, a girl at 12+ will miss out on some social peer activities if she does not have a phone. End of the world? Probably not, but I guess it depends on your community's local culture. Also, the valley probably isn't a great baseline for comparison.

I'm not recommending anything. I just think we tend to ignore the nuance.

> This is why I think it's great when schools ban phones in class.

This was the absolute norm in the 00s when cellphones became common and cheap enough for teens to often have one. If you were seen with a phone out it would be confiscated. At some point schools apparently just gave up and only a few are starting to rediscover the policy as though it's a novel idea.

What the fuck happened? When exactly did this transition happen?

> When exactly did this transition happen?

In the late 2000s, as a response to a parental demand for communication and safety following high-profile school emergencies, especially school shootings.

Crazy. Compromising the quality of education for everybody every school day so that on rare occasions a very small number of students might be able to call their parents (who will be powerless to help over the phone.)

Yea I’m a parent and “what if there’s an emergency” is one of the silliest excuses to allow students to have phones. If there’s an emergency, the school is already going to have called the police. What the hell am I going to do if my kid calls me? I’ll tell her to hang up the phone and follow whatever emergency procedure they have.

In other words it is a multi-agent coordination problem from game theory. You can have an outside force change the rules, or you can figure out how to collaborate/compete within the game.

> just parents busy lobbying the government to impose crap onto every possible service and website across the entire world.

Its not parents, primarily.

IMO the pressure comes from a few lobby groups, media scares, companies with age verification products to sell and big tech - the last because it imposes compliance costs that removes competition, and new entrants in particular.

Ah, the old "all we have to do" solution to complex technical problems. "Just" design it this way!

> The only question is whether age verification is still too onerous.

You've skipped right past the "does it work" question. It doesn't. Porn is available on file sharing networks in far greater quantity than it is on reputable websites.

The only realistic methods I'm aware of are whitelist filtering, sufficient supervision, or sufficient interaction and education.

[flagged]

it is recommended not to employ sarcasm when counterpoints are easily available

Unfortunately, when counterpoints are easily available, I expect the person to have already thought of them, hence the sarcasm.

Edited to delete my comment. I was mistaken about who was replying to who. As such my comment was entirely wrong.

Please point me to where the original comment mentioned anything about violence.

Thought the comment in question was a reply to loic. The mistake is mine.

Ah, fair enough, that's an easy mistake to make, I've replied to the wrong comment many times too.

What? There's zero suggestion in ndriscoll's comment that he's talking about "extremely violent porn".

The most specific he gets is "furry porn", which might be a kink you don't approve of but is not obviously more objectionable than "people having sex".

I made a mistake about who stavros was replying to. I edited my comment.

I was being somewhat flippant while also using a group that's known as a gateway to more deviant behaviors (e.g. libertarianism). I think though that you'll likely not find much success in litigating whether children ought to be able to access porn (and whether porn has anything close to a healthy depiction of relationships/sex. Yes, some healthy material exists. It's extremely rare, especially with commercial websites). e.g. no one thinks children should be able to shop at physical adult stores. It's probably more productive to participate in the "what to do about it" discussion.

I suppose you do not have children. I am open-minded, mid 40's. The level of violence in porn you can get access to with just one click, has no comparison with what I could get access to as a kid (basically nothing).

With the net, you get access in one click to the worse and the best. It is a lot of work as a parent to educate the kids about that.

As kids, teenager and even as 20 something, if we wanted to do some experience, we had to physically access the media or be physically present. This was not on-demand over a screen.

So, I filter the access at home while also trying my best to educate. This is not easy and I can understand that non tech savvy people request more laws, even so I am personally against.

The article is pretty well balanced, we have no silver bullet here.

Sure, but if the goal is to minimise access to violence, why did the GP say "they can access porn" instead of "they can access violence"? I doubt the two are synonymous.

They're not synonymous but a vast amount of pornography available online constitutes violence against women.

The commercial sex trade, including both porn and prostitution, is a multi-billion dollar industry that seeks to normalize extreme acts and promotes the dehumanisation of women and girls.

So why would the solution to dehumanising women be "minors shouldn't be able see it"?

The whole point here is to prevent impressionable children from growing up watching videos of women being treated like objects, so that they don't grow up to view women as objects

Has there been some outbreak of this? Genuinely confused. My impression is that sort of behavior has been decreasing my entire life while access to porn has been increasing.

My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists. Maybe that isn't happening and it's just a moral panic? Or maybe those boys watching lots of pornography and coming to believe that women are whores are two entirely unrelated phenomenons?

Media diet shapes what we are, and kids are more impressionable than most. It is therefore natural and reasonable for parents to want some control over what media gets fed to their kids.

I don't think that's quite what's happening, I think the phenomenon in question is occurring primarily within a specific age group, and I think it doesn't correlate with porn availability or consumption.

If X predates A by a long time then any attribution of A to X is going to need extensive evidence.

I think the phenomenon you refer to has to do with politics and culture. It's loosely related to the pendulum swinging back against DEI type stuff. Depending on your political persuasion you might replace "bitter misogynists" with something like "angry cynics".

> My impression is that parents are increasingly alarmed at young boys becoming bitter misogynists

This seems more in line with the increase of mysoginist influencers (Andrew Tate and the like) and less to do with porn. The former of course being the type of content that social media companies are more than happy to proactively promote to children.

I'm not particularly familiar with Tate or his story, but wasn't he literally arrested for human trafficking in connection with a porn site that he ran? And that site was part of the start of his "Internet" career? And part of his shtick is bragging about being an "Internet pimp" and running said site?

He was but he’s more well known for his social media posting than for his cam site stuff

Andrew Tate is basically the core of the Manosphere [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere

Even the stuff that’s less extreme than Tate should be totally unacceptable for children and teens to access. Not just the “manosphere” but everything adjacent to it: the alt-right, Nazis and White Supremecists, Qanon, conspiracy sites, flat earthers, antivaxxers, cryptoscammers and so on. They are all in orbit of the same dark barycenter of toxicity.

I’d rather my kid accidentally run into porn than them accidentally run into this garbage. But guess which one I have to worry about all the algorithms steering my kid to? Hint: it’s not the porn.

Why are they in a state of mind where people like Andrew Tate resonant with them in the first place?

Because they’re young and impressionable.

As a recovering porn addict that had issues with socializing with the opposite sex growing up... I don't think there's enough evidence to scientifically conclude anything either way.

As for me, I sought out a large amount of porn "too early". The porn was not violent and I was ashamed to talk about it with anyone. Then again this was before social media became mainstream. I wanted to talk to girls my age but had too much anxiety and depression from my upbringing. ..the real reason for my addiction. So I got called a teenage stalker and got punished so hard I stopped talking to women entirely. The porn was because I was so depressed in the following years. Nobody even realized I had a porn addiction to this day, because I didn't talk about it because... it was cringe.

Still a bachelor but I go to meetings and have worked on it for several years by now. When I worked on my issues enough the urges went away. To the point I wondered why this was such an issue for so long. I no longer feel the need to find a mate to feel complete anymore. Which ironically would make talking to women possible again. But that wasn't because of porn - it was because of depression/anxiety.

I ascribed the causes incorrectly for a long time ("excess porn usage causes the tendency to sexually harass/assault people you're attracted to") which only contributed to my shame and depression for a long time. I think it's because people don't want to admit that they cannot help every person with major depressive disorder ("you need to want help to get help"), so they go after bigger fish that are open to litigation to make it seem like the problem is being addressed. And all this labeling of porn as a problem rubs off onto actual addicts who misjudge the real root of their issues like me.

I have a hypothesis that telling teenagers their minds will be permanently corrupted by too much pornography of any kind and they should be ashamed of themselves for having sexual urges is... not exactly the most productive decision. Especially when gore videos remain unregulated and legal. I think depression/anxiety has a greater chance to cause the behavior they're talking about - "hurt people hurt people" - and those people just so happen to be addicted to something to self-medicate. Shaming people is certainly one way to make them depressed.

But I was sorta glad I avoided talking to people I was attracted to for so long, in my depressed state not much good would have happened. I now have a healthier appreciation of the other sex without completely abstaining and in my view it had nothing do with porn. It was actually about seeing and accepting reality for what it is, not through a depressed filter.

If the states banning porn weren’t generally the same states restricting medical care for women, I’d say you have a point, but that’s simply not the case.

“Protecting women” is the sales pitch, not the objective.

Noncentral fallacy. Nobody's against "medical care for women" except where they believe it overlaps with "legalized murder of children", and it's extremely disingenuous for you to ignore that and act like "medical care" is the part they're against.

I’m disputing your claim that I am invoking a logical fallacy here.

Revoking access to life-critical medical care that is specific to one’s sex is indisputably making the people of a given sex less safe.

Threatening to persecute people who wish to assist women in pursuing life-critical medical care is making women less safe.

If medical care specific to one’s sex cannot be considered protecting the safety of someone on the basis of their sex, what is?

Is porn a bigger problem than Andrew Tate in that regard?

Perhaps because as an adult you understand we understand this can influence them when its not supervised?

Perhaps it would be a better solution to ban the dehumanising kind of porn for everyone.

Nice idea, but how? How could that actually be accomplished, without stacking SCOTUS with conservative and/or feminist justices? My other comment pointing out the 1A problem with proposals to ban porn was downvoted but nobody has been able to explain how I'm wrong.

Requiring porn businesses to check IDs would be, legally and politically, much easier.

The first ammendment, as presently interpreted, makes banning violent pornography virtually impossible. Restricting access to it is a far more tractable solution.

This framing trades nuance for moral panic. The assertion that pornography inherently constitutes violence against women is not an argument but a slogan. It is ideological posturing, not analysis. The so-called ‘commercial sex trade’ as you put it is complex, and your narrative is not intellectually serious.

I keep hearing this argument, but I don’t come across any violent porn unless I explicitly look for it. What are the search terms you people are using?

> Jesus, how does your society still function when underage people can see videos of people having sex?!

It kind of isn't anymore. But not just because of porn, obviously.

Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence. Seen women constantly railed and treated like meat when that young probably does do something.

"Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos. It's clear you'd rather be snide than correct.

> Early porn exposure goes hand in hand with the problems we see typified in the recent Netflix movie Adolescence

There's really no evidence of this. I find it much more plausible that the boom in misogynistic radicalism is caused by the flourishing of radically far-right niche content online. Our society has become more politically extreme in a number of ways over the past couple decades, and there's no porn equivalent for anti-immigrant or anti-trans sentiment. Andrew Tate, however, is very much of a kind with figures like Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones.

That's not to say porn viewership doesn't have an effect on kids, but I expect it would be much more modest. Unrealistic ideas about sex, anxieties about penis size. I'm in my mid-20s; internet porn was highly accessible to me & my peers when we were young, and while it did have an effect on youth culture, it was quite modest—nothing like the hard pivot to misogyny which I've heard teachers describe when their students become interested in (again) Andrew Tate.

> "Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading, modern porn is not dry educational science videos.

Implying the opposite is deliberately misleading too. "Modern porn" is not entirely 1 thing or another. Much of it's sensible, a lot of it is extreme. Much like any area in life, I think, the real solution is to teach our children what's wrong with the more extreme stuff.

People are scared of porn causing their children to "objectify women"? Then teach them to respect women from a young age and when they see the extreme side of things they'll be like "That's wrong"

It's probably easier to blame the Internet though and to try to neuter it instead - rather than teach your kid the values you want them to have, just make sure they're never faced with values other than those!

> "Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading

it literally isn't. porn is mostly people having normal sex or just nude images of a woman. the existence of fringe fetish stuff doesn't affect that in any practical way. but your confusion seems to be thinking this discussion was about feminism or something when it's really just a decrepit boomer who is against sex being even legal lying through his teeth to justify completely pointless and harmful legislation (see 2 posts up)

You can map the availability of pornography to a rise in risky sex practices like choking. This isn't a problem inherent to pornography itself—rather, it's a factor of inadequate sex ed combined with the commonplace irresponsible presentation of certain sex acts in porn. Still, it'd be misleading to present porn as an entirely neutral depiction of sex. Mainstream pornography demonstrably does spread some harmful ideas. This is also true of Hollywood cinema, though; all media works this way, to a greater or lesser extent.

My girl discovered self-pleasure at the age of 5, ironically during an exam from her doctor (she doesn't think it was intentional). I had an ex discover masturbation around the same age. I personally discovered it around 11 or 12. All of the above discovered porn accidentally as kids. I don't know about them but after that I intentionally sought it out.

Guess what! Both of us are perfectly fine!! (Well the ex is a bit psychotic but that's unrelated...)

This obsession with protecting kids from the realities of life is just fucking stupid. We as a species have the stupidest, most ridiculous views about something that is required to keep us alive!

The problem is that most porn depicts sex as somewhat violent and sets unreasonable expectations of what sex is like.

Not every woman is capable of deep-throating or going straight from vaginal to anal without adding some extra lube. Most women don't want their man to put his hands around her throat during sex. Almost none of them are okay with going from ass to mouth.

Porn also sets an unrealistic standard for penis size. When the average is 5.2 inches with a standard deviation of about an inch, it becomes clear that the 7+ inch penises used in porn are like the top 5%.

I don't think parents are having these conversations with their kids about this.

I would be interested in a discussion here about what sex acts people find demeaning to women. You cherry-picked from a narrow band of agreeable examples. Are blow jobs themselves demeaning to women? I suspect that many (perhaps here but certainly elsewhere) would say so.

I would also welcome a discussion about how porn might be disadvantageous to boys (and the very medicated male performers) and how all this contrasts with tolerance towards non-sexual violence depicted on screen.

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