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Comment by Andrex | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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