What even is 'adult' content? [NSFW]
worldofmatthew.com
worldofmatthew.com
So maybe making nudity less common or accessible only makes it more valuable as a sexual thing.
The intro of the 1986 Once upon a time... Life animation series, that's the best human biology educational program that exists to this very day, starts with scenes many would classify as nudity - but it's also essential to the topic and the education it displays.
Western culture and its morals around sex, gender and nudity are founded on the patriarchal taboos of the Abrahamic religions, whereby human nudity in general, and female nudity in particular (because women are the source of original sin,) is to be considered shameful.
That and we're currently in the midst of a right-wing political reactionary shift against the progressive norms of prior generations (and a moral panic about "groomers" and "pedophiles") which makes censorship of this type far easier.
A photo of a Japanese public space, would you expect to see a) everyone clothed, b) everyone naked, c) roughly 50:50 as people choose for themselves and going naked is a perfectly acceptable thing to do which nobody thinks is weird ? (a), obviously.
Nudity doesn't only mean people on the street without clothes.
Norms against nudity within Western societies - excluding non-Western societies such as in China, Japan and India - are based on Abrahamic religions.
It is true that other non-Western societies also have norms regarding nudity, but those norms are not the same as in the West, and even within the West and other Christianized nations such norms tend to be more permissive than in the US. To give an example, in the US breastfeeding is considered implicitly sexual and thus allowing it in public spaces is controversial, whereas this is not the case in cultures where any display of the female breast is considered to be pornographic. You can even find cultures where public nudity has little if any taboo at all.
So no, other than the strictly physiological need for humans to provide a layer of physical protection around their bodies by means of garments, there is nothing more fundamental going on here. Norms around nudity are entirely cultural.
No it's not https://thelactationcollection.com/blog/breastfeeding-in-pub...
It’s like saying norms against murder are based on abrahamic religions because the 10 commandments say so.
Cultures the world over have general norms against nudity in nearly all contexts, and also have norms against murder in nearly all contexts. Clearly the driving force that makes humans have norms against nudity or murder is more fundamental than religion.
Abrahamic religions may add a particular flavor to it, but it’s icing on a big cake
Anthropologically, given that every mass civilization that’s ever existed regulated nudity in public settings, there’s likely some sociological advantage to it that enables communities of people to reach scale and endure.
Do you have a single counter example of a large scale human community (10,000+ people) where public nudity was normal?
Not altogether an unreasonable concern, considering that the International Lesbian and Gay Association at the United Nations was literally allied to NAMBLA and other pro-pedophilia groups, for 15 years [0].
It's only when the Americans threatened to take away the money that something was done about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILGA_consultative_status_contr...
As Nietzsche said, the time has come when we have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years. That's the simple answer, nudity and sexuality (also entirely natural and normal), have been deemed sinful, you're supposed to avert your eyes from it, and so on. It's so deeply ingrained in Western culture even secularized people still haven't shaken it.
It varies though, being German with half of my family having lived in the GDR, it is funny to see in particular Americans when you talk about nude beaches or mixed saunas and the general Freikörperkultur (lit: free body culture) that was so common and still has carried over.
This has been completely memory-holed despite the fact many people alive today should remember it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_swimming_in_US_indoor_poo...
https://www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/baring-it-all-why-bo...
https://www.npr.org/2006/08/01/5597441/naked-in-high-school-...
Well, not every "civilized culture" has a blanket ban on public nudity, but more of a "there is a time and place you know", like doing sauna naked and swimming naked in rivers/lakes (common in the Nordics at least) or being semi-nude (topless) at public beaches in Spain. Breastfeeding without having to shamefully cover up also seems to be more and more accepted, at least in the countries I frequent (mostly around Europe).
I'm sure there are more examples of "civilized cultures" where it's accepted sometimes to be nude or semi-nude.
Every civilized society has norms for everything, that's the tautological definition of what being civilized means. It's how civilized people define success. But this is not culture (as per Nietzsche) but just the opposite of it. To think the two are synonymous is exactly what he attributes to Christianity.
The Danish mixed nude beach goer is indeed technically less civilized but no less cultured, free, vital or unburdened by social anxieties about her body or conduct, she's strong-willed exactly to the extent that she's uncivilized.
How is general nudity of adult men considered by those participants? I always assumed that my nakedness would be perceived as a display of mateability, and I am concerned that my penis size relative to other men would reduce my attractiveness to women.
Note: I am not sure how I compare to others in the general population, as I live the typical American lifestyle. Also, I think Germans are statistically one of the greater endowed populations, so maybe this isn't as much an issue for them.
At a normal nude beach, with all age groups represented, people don't show off an erect penis. (Though there are beaches where that happens.)
Median erect penis length is about 13-14 cm and I don't think there's credible evidence for the median varying much between countries of Europe and North America. (Though there is some evidence for a smaller or larger median in some places outside Europe and North America.)
Does that help? (I'm not an expert but I think I know enough to write what I have just written.)
I think the problem is that even if I was one standard deviation above the mean, that's still only about the 68% percentile. So it's expected that 3 of every 10 dudes would be better endowded than me, and I'm sure nude beaches bias in sample towards the more well endowed. So likely I won't be laughed at but won't be a genetic prize, and I'm not sure I'm confident enough (or ever will be) to accept that as public knowledge.
Only if it leads you to sin, right? According to the original, if you can look at a naked body without immediately humping it, you're free to keep looking.
I know you’re trying to point out a logical fallacy; but I don’t think it is a good reason to ignore the grandparent commenter’s point.
It’s still a useful word, but it can’t really shoulder the burden of making one argument more rational than the other.
Tsunamis, earthquakes, flash floods, tornadoes, locust swarms, plagues are "natural". Amanita muscaria, Dendrobatidae and Boa constrictors are "natural" and will fucking kill you.
I think the better distinction is found in Leviathan, contrasting human society (and its set of social contracts) with the "state of nature" - what human life was like before we formed societies:
> In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
There's a strong correlation between "women force to cover themselves" and "women's bodies being an object of obsessive desire".
Countries where women MUST cover their bodies as much as possible have more of an incell culture. In countries where it's normal for women sunbathe topless, breasts aren't as sexualised of fetishised.
Sex and procreation which is arguably the complete opposite to murder is ostrasized because of it.
Because so many people "learn" words by guessing their meaning from context, it now means what Anthony Burgess called "ultraviolence" in A Clockwork Orange.
Cartoons have already had several re-thinking of what's appropriate as norms have changed.
I doubt that
> graphic (adj.) "vivid, describing accurately ," 1660s (graphically "vividly" is from 1570s) [...] Meaning "pertaining to drawing" is from 1756.
It’s more nuanced than sex = good, violence = bad.
No, you did.
>Would it not be much better if children see people having fun fucking each other
In cultures where sex is more taboo, they have bigger problems with teen pregnancy and early marriage. In the US, as access to porn has increased teen pregnancy has plummeted.
Making sex shameful doesn't just magically make people not do it. Tell kids "be abstinent, mmkay" doesnt lower teen pregnancy - it increases it.
Once puberty hormones kick in, teenagers are going to start figuring out that there’s something going on. We’re far better off educating them about the risks involved rather than letting them blindly experiment.
Pornography is probably the worst way to accomplish this goal, of course. Comprehensive sexual health education is vastly preferred. But pretending sex doesn’t exist is how you end up with pregnant kids.
Sending passport scans to random sleezy websites that are likely not even under British jurisdiction is beyond insane
Handing over details to sleazy websites is never going to happen. Everyone is going to use a VPN. That's the point. Next year, maybe the year after the government will concede that age verification didn't work and more needs to be done. Then they come for your VPN.
The BBC, always the mouthpiece of the UK government is already laying the groundwork [0].
I know how tinfoil hat this sounds, but at this point, its not a conspiracy, its just how the government that created and sold nudge units [1] operates. It's decades of thinking "they won't do that" then watching them do it.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k81lj8nvpo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team
edit: spelling
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-oauth-selective-d...
https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/presentations/2024/wpec2024...
The only things I've seen are friends having to submit a photo of their ID to discord to keep using it, etc. The GP was talking about the British version of this specifically right
There’s a number of methods a site or app might use to ask you to confirm your age. They might do this check themselves or use another company to do the check. These methods include:
- Facial age estimation – you show your face via photo or video, and technology analyses it to estimate your age.
- Open banking – you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the site or app.
- Digital identity services – these include digital identity wallets, which can securely store and share information which proves your age in a digital format.
- Credit card age checks – you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card this shows you are over 18.
- Email-based age estimation – you provide your email address, and technology analyses other online services where it has been used – such as banking or utility providers - to estimate your age.
- Mobile network operator age checks – you give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18.
- Photo-ID matching – this is similar to a check when you show a document. For example, you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time – these are compared to confirm if the document is yours. """
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/a...
Chrome and Safari are working on browser APIs that seem reasonable, but will only be available around the end of this year. The various region specific identity providers (like GOV.UK One Login) will also need to integrate with those (possibly through Google/Apple Wallet or their own app).
That means one has to use shady 3p age verification services (like Persona) which do who-knows-what with customer data and cost on the order of $1 per verification.
This effort is because once labeled adult it is broadly socially acceptable to do anything and everything necessary to hide a concept from public life.
A specific recent example is Itch.io's recent removal of all content labeled adult, stemming from coordinated pressure by Collective Shout. The block has led to the hiding of some content labeled as lgbt, despite not containing adult content or being labeled that way.
Dare I ask, wtf is Maus representation of history??
It wouldn't be appropriate to use a form of nudity we now find "acceptable" (statues and paintings), when those media were attacked in their time by the same type of prudes who attack modern media (JPEGs of nude women on websites)
I know you probably didn't intend it that way but I often see criticism of OnlyFans specifically made when I wouldn't have seen it around traditionally male operated pornography publishing, and sometimes there's a feeling of subtle misogyny creeping in.
I have seen comments along the lines of "Onlyfans spotted, opinion dismissed," numerous times online under posts/videos completely unrelated to a content creators OF business. The idea that a person is a sex worker and therefore a slut (in a derogatory rather than reclaimed sense) and therefore they and their opinions are worthless, is the unstated logic of this sentence.
The misogyny drips off of the concept of an Onlyfans lessening someone.
“You’d make such a good porn star!”, we could say encouragingly to a new grad considering between OF and Stanford.
No, we wouldn’t, because despite a weird and deliberate normalizing effort in some corners of the Internet, it’s an intrinsically degrading field run by pimps physical or digital now, and an existential history of abuse and degradation.
Probably not, yet society depends on garbagemen to function smoothly. And we should be happy that in the modern era people can pursue unglamorous careers, and be accepted by society, and not suffer from the abuse and degredation of times past. Society is improving. It's only a dwindling number of bigots who look down on people because of their career choices.
Did humans stop abusing one another and I missed it, and all the harms of being used sexually by the world are gone now?
>It's only a dwindling number of bigots who look down on people because of their career choices.
Women have some of the strongest opinions against sw, so you have the floor if you want to attack that half.
https://prostitutescollective.net/independent-a-quarter-of-w...
I would be much safer making porn than being in the army, or even working in a warehouse. It would be less taxing on my body.
Aren't we lucky that 25% of women have a strong man like you to protect them from the other 75% of women.
However, submitting to pimps is degrading, submitting to the violence and extreme sexual behavior of sex clients is degrading, and at least in most societies, losing one’s social place to perform sex work is also degrading.
Not all sw’ers, sure, some sw’ers are wealthy, sure a few are.
It’s just extreme arguments of the extremely online. Zero parents in this thread are encouraging their daughters to participate in such an industry.
So, since the only things intrinsic to sex work are that you're performing sex as a form of labour it raises the question; Where does the intrinsic degradation lie? In the labour or the sex?
But that's not actually what I was arguing. My point was that women who produce their own content to sell on OnlyFans are generally treated with a contempt that isn't applied to men who hire women to produce the same content for them.
1) Get any porn site that is going to obey this to instead list themselves in some open way (TXT record in DNS, blockchain, some other form of list)
2) Get any provider in the UK to block access to those lists if the account owner wants it. That's ISPs and phone providers. I'd say it should be opt in, but opt out would be a reasonable compromise.
That way I can be happy that my 12 year old won't accidentality end up on some really shady porn site following a link from a classmate's whatsapp if they aren't at home.
Of course classmates can still share the content on whatsapp, and this isn't going to stop that.
If you want to really tackle the problem - and this would be really controversial -- have lists of "healthy porn", which people could opt in via their ISP to allow, or perhaps allow for a set period. I have no problem with a teenager looking at boobs, there's a big difference between the modern equivalent of FHM or playboy and many kinds of aggressive porn that's just as accessible.
But maybe it would be healthier if you discuss this topic with your 12-year-old. The reality is that they'll be able to find any kind of pr0n within seconds when they has access to an unfiltered computer or phone.
At age 12 it's also expected that you start the transition from a child to an adult, so trying to block the outside world isn't preparing them for the freedom they'll encounter at 18-21.
The idea that there is even a definition of 'healthy' porn seems ludicrous to me. That's not 'really' tackling the problem. That's not understanding the problem in the first place.
Speaking of which: there isn't a problem in the first place.
It's about being able to control and monitoring in the real world, where unlike the 90s the "family computer" isn't the thing in the corner of the living room.
There's 6 more years before they're an adult, 4 more years before they can legally have sex, and typically at least 4 years before they start heavy petting, plenty of time to transition.
Someone on their first driving lesson isn't dropped in the middle of the arc de triumph and told to drive to Rome, it takes a lot of lessons to get that far.
Healthy is a continual conversation from aged 8 through 18
Currently, it's already opt-out on major UK ISPs. Anyone with the brains to download a free VPN app (which includes kids) can bypass those blocks, though. That's probably why the government moved from putting the blame on ISPs to putting the blame on web hosts.
I think an effective age block is only going to make things worse for teenagers. If all of the responsible, normal porn sites follow the rules and enforce an age gate, the niche/shady websites will be all vulnerable teenagers can access.
I'd rather see a distinction between "normal porn" and "extreme porn" when it comes to content filters, but the UK also tried that when regulating UK porn productions. The list of banned acts included "caning, aggressive whipping, and humilation" (which makes sense to be labeled extreme, IMO), but also "facesitting, female ejaculation and urolagnia", which I feel are more like someone writing laws revealing their personal icks in legal texts.
Well parental controls exist to prevent that from being added. But once you have vpns, you simply connect to another country's end point to bypass this anyway.
> If all of the responsible, normal porn sites follow the rules and enforce an age gate, the niche/shady websites will be all vulnerable teenagers can access.
That's my main worry.
Far better regulation of the generation of porn, which can ensure that the actors are doing it for their own free will, not harmed (any more than many other jobs), etc, would be a far better approach. This of course is easier said than done.
> but also "facesitting, female ejaculation and urolagnia"
It does feel like they are taking the piss.
Exists in the form of the "rating"/RTA <meta> tag - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
Now I’m sure even that is arguable, but the conversation should be around that and not superficially related tangents.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/project-2025-por...
> Just five pages into the foreword by the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank, the proposal stakes out an uncompromising position that porn should be banned, porn producers and distributors should be sent to prison, and tech companies that circulate it should be shut down.
maiesiophilia (pregnancy fetishism), maschalagnia (armpit fetishism)…
We shouldn't erase things from the world just because some people have obscure fetishes. I'll keep having balloons at my kid's birthday parties, despite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_fetish
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16
I don’t think anyone considered that the Latin syllabus might be a cause for concern.
This picture isn’t sexual at all but it’s still Not Safe For Work in the strictest sense.
I still wouldn’t have opened it in the open space :)
Thing is though, if you can get in trouble for browsing the internet while at work looking at anything at all, you probably shouldn't.
So it's not "adult content", but probably "NSFW" unless you work in a maternity hospital.
Just as a comparator, the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy leads with a clothed pregnant woman (unlike the pages on e.g. labia, penis, anus, breast, which lead with a direct shot of the body part), and overall that page has photos or illustrations of 4 clothed and 3 nude women (and a CT scan volume render, does that count as nude or not?)
> "It’s simply too subjective (teenagers will find almost any nudity sexual, no matter its context). How does anyone decide if any nudity is age-appropriate? Especially at scale."
OK (blog author) has made the case that one cannot decide, the government has gone with "ban by default". If you (blog author) object to that, can you make a case why that's bad? You wrote "apart from 'think of the children' being a classic call to censorship" so you've closed off that route for your objection which may have been a strong one.
If you work then you have given your employer proof of ID for things like showing your right to work in the UK, getting a paycheck, or a criminal record check; so the principle of an employee proving their age seems out of scope for you to object to - at least you haven't made a case that people need to be able to work anonymously. [Although the method of proving one's age is up for argument, it's not this argument].
It boils down to: if you can't decide, do you allow by default or block by default? Government has gone for default-block, blog author seems to be taking the position that default-allow is better but has not made a case why.
By comparison we tried that with digital security - for years computer systems were default-allow and it caused a lot of problems and we've had to reengineer them to have firewalls, ports closed, seperated user accounts, minimal user account permissions, minimal data-execute permissions, minimal employee access to company systems, minimal access from one app into another's data, then in each case grant-as-necessary with proof of identity and audit logging that it happened. Result? Reduced problems, reduced hacks, reduced crime, limited blast radius of mistakes.
It used to be that we made any product and sold it, and over thousands of years we got fed up of saying "okay you can't make bread padded with sawdust", "you can't sell arsenic wallpaper", "you can't sell deathly metabolism boosters as diet pills", "you can't sell public buildings that are a death trap", "you can't say your product was approved by The King if it wasn't" and flipped to say "you can only sell medicine and treatments which are generally recognised as safe, or you prove case-by-case that they are safe", "your advertising must tell the truth". And that's better.
We humans also used to be naked by default, and over time we've switched to being clothed-by-default. Occasionally it results in people having to cover their genitals when they'd rather not, but mostly it's resulted in body protection from sun, heat, cold, brick, concrete, metal, and reduced amount of poop covering communal seats and other surfaces, the ability to carry stuff in pockets and is generally a big win.
Frankly, "here is an edge case hah gotcha" is geek fun for arguing, but a shitty way to decide what to do. If a sorting algorithm sometimes doesn't sort things it's a dealbreaker, but a restaurant which keeps separate raw and cooked fridges, separate chopping boards and knives, and asks the staff to wash their hands with soap before food preparation might have an edge case where they employ someone foreign and dyslexic who cannot read the English sign about hand washing and because of that some customer gets food poisoning is a far far better situation than saying "hah I imagined an edge case therefore let's not have any public health laws, let's just make it a free for all".
Is there a marginal grey area around adult content? Yes. But beyond that margin is a vast ocean of explicit, intentional adult content.
As someone who grew up in both the decentralized "new" era of the Internet, and now lives in the hyper localized algo driven version of it... It's all shit. And I'd never want my kids to be exposed to it.
Maybe this is an even bigger problem.
It's simply not a good way to discuss the online safety act. One could apply the same kind of reasoning to theft: "I took a friend's car without his consent, but I returned it, with a full tank. It would make zero sense for him to denounce me to the police. They wouldn't even think of prosecuting. People borrow things all the time."
That is why parental controls exist. As a close to middle aged adult without any kids, why do I have to hand over my ID to protect YOUR kids?
But that isn't want this is about. The people who don't want porn around aren't doing it because of the kids, they are doing it for some religious/cult belief.
If you look into the history of how law enforcement has protected children in their crusade against porn, you will see countless examples of them being able to protect a child, but instead leave them with their abusers for years to gather evidence.
Traci Lords began filming porn at 14 with a fake ID her kiddie diddling "stepdad" got her. The FBI admitted to knowing she was underage basically from the start, but "allowed her to continue" until she was 18 before attempting to prosecute her - instead of extricating the child from the exploitative pornographers. [1]
The FBI ran child porn sites for years as honey pots, they even bragged about running the largest CP site on the internet. Instead of providing information how they found the users in discovery they would drop charges. [2]
Anti-porn movement in the US. [3]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traci_Lords:_Underneath_It_All
2: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39180204
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pornography_movement_in_t...
That's the thing with this whole discussion though. both of these asks are totally reasonable My kids should have freedom to explore | my kids should not be exposed to violence and crude sexual content despite my best efforts to moderate their Internet usage
But the responses are overwhelmingly lopsided
They are going to be, they're just now going to be exposed to more shadier, less scrupulous stuff, or via vpns harvesting your children's data.
How is this not sexual? The fact that it's a stock photo, or that the woman is pregnant, is irrelevant. It's very clearly a sexual picture.
Another, more charitable, explanation, would be that a lot of people around here are asexual. It's possible - but to this extent? I am skeptical.
It must have been non sexual at some point in our historical development, before clothes. So I can't really agree that it's inherently so - just that we've culturally made it a sexual thing for basically all of history. That might be close though to functionally be inherent to human society depending on your viewpoint though.
Do you think those people found nudity sexual?
How about doctors and nurses that see naked people all the time? Is simple nudity sexual for them?
How about athletes that shower in open showers together. Are they experiencing a sexual experience when they’re showering after practice?
There’s so many counter examples to this that saying nudity is sexual is just silly.
I think de-sensitization [*] may play a big role here; I'm convinced that the more porn you look at, the higher your threshold goes. I've not consumed any porn for years now (as I write in my other comment), and I find the lady in the picture extremely sexual. Yes, she's not suggesting / soliciting / provoking; she is just standing there. I agree. Yet she's no less sexual for that fact.
[*] edited comment for fixing my wrong use of the term
I think this is why there's a lot of pedantry and "know it when I see it" to the discussion
I propose you watch 5 minutes of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Jungle with nude Keith Chegwin, and you will be disabused of that notion.
Your argument will be reduced to "everyone feels some kinds of nudity, preferably not featuring Keith Chegwin, are inherently sexual"
Whether nudity is considered sexual is cultural, not "inherently", and you claiming that "everyone" feels like it is is highlighting your own blinkered world view. You don't speak for "everyone".
Then again, there are societies that will shame (and do worse things to) women for showing their hair or skin to strangers.
If you're (un)lucky, your innocent holiday pictures may make the front page of Wikifeet, but that doesn't mean you're a creep for posting your holiday pictures online. There's a spectrum here and claiming to know the absolute truth and branding everyone else as perverts is silly.
Personally, I find the puritan idea that any nudity is sexual to be quite childish and immature.
Taking just one example, in Finland it is extremely common for people to visit saunas, and from what I've heard, you'd be laughed at if you tried to wear clothes (or even a towel) in the sauna.
One Finn posting online I saw a while back remarked that a lot of the problems Americans have would be resolved if we all saw our grandmas naked regularly.
I imagine you've been to a locker room before - was that sexual? Of course not. But you're not gay, you might say.
So then it's not nudity - it's your own inclination to sex. If you see the world sexually, you'll sexualize nudity.
If you say “everyone’s idea of what is sexual can be different,” I would agree, which I think is part of the point of posts like this: why does the most restrictive definition of sexual content always seem to be the point of view our lawmakers are protecting?
Edit: she’s not showering, I think. I went back and looked at it, when I read the post from my phone I thought she was showering.
I came here for your comment. That stock photo is strikingly sexual; it immediately makes me horny. (I'm a cis-het guy nearing 50 years of age, I have an active and satisfying sex life with my wife, and I've not looked at porn, or engaged in self-pleasing, for several years now. The reason I find the photo sexual is not that "I'm not getting any". I've been getting plenty, thank you very much.) I had had regular sex with my wife during all of her pregnancies; if anything, pregnancy makes women more arousing to me (without it being a "kink" for me).
Some people suffer/enjoy getting aroused by cars, does that mean every car picture is sexual? Probably not.
While fun to hear about others perspective, "suggestively sexual" usually requires at least some attempt at being suggestive, a pregnant woman just existing probably isn't suggestive, even though you find it so because of your sexual preferences.
I don't know how old you are, but this paragraph from the article felt strikingly accurate (and familiar):
> Every person’s idea of “adult” imagery is different. A young child or an adult won’t automatically think any image including breasts or nudity is sexual, but a horny teenager (generally) will.
I agree that the photo is not suggestive; in other words, I fully agree that in the picture, she's not "soliciting" or even "provoking" (even without having any actual intent to participate). That's fine. She doesn't have to be suggestive, or to do anything other than exist and be visible (like this), for me to find her sexually (very) attractive, and to make me horny.
Maybe being able to discern our own perspectives and sexual preferences from a wider labeling of content might be beneficial?
Yes, with one tweak: it's because I find the person sexually attractive. It's not the kind of attractive that urges me to start "socializing" with the person, for example; "trust", "friendship" etc are not my first impressions. My first impression is that I'm horny as heck.
> That would quickly lead us to classifying 90% of everything on the internet as sexual, as there is a wide range of stuff that makes people aroused, like people having sexual attraction to cars.
I'm confused by your repeated allusion to "sexually aroused by cars"; I've never heard of that. Other than that however, 90% of everything everywhere (not just on the internet) is sexual. Absolutely everything is advertized with attractive women (clad to various levels of decency, dependent on the medium), precisely because sex is the #1 drive for men, and so "sex sells" (to men). It may be subliminal, or it may be "in your face", but a huge proportion of all ads is sexual.
> Maybe being able to discern our own perspectives and sexual preferences from a wider labeling of content might be beneficial?
Oh definitely. I have absolutely no personal interest in the "content labeling" debate, as I've not been a consumer for several years now. It's just the fine article's qualification of the picture -- which the author tried to use as a representative, for driving the point home, IIUC -- that I disagreed with.
Also, my English could be failing me here (I'm not a native speaker): you seem to use "sexual" and "arousing" as two (at least somewhat) orthogonal concepts. To me, they mean the same thing: "stuff that makes me horny". If I cared about cars, I guess I might call some cars "exciting", but that's not "arousing". Arousal implies excitement, but not the other way around, in my vocabulary.
It does, in the one particular context where I would be looking at it.
(I understand that this response of mine is unusable for labelling images, without the context that they are displayed and viewed in. That's fine. I'm indifferent wrt. labeling pictures on the internet, for the purposes of lawmaking.)
Consider this. Assume you have a nice big poster "featuring women who are from a culture where partial nudity is normal and not considered sexual". Assume you take it to your workplace, to an office where several ladies work, and you put it on display on the wall of your cubicle. I think the picture will be defined sexual in that context, and most women at the office will be uncomfortable with it. I, as a man, would get an arousal response, and therefore, in that context, I would also immediately feel uncomfortable with the poster (and I would also request that it be removed). Indeed I very frequently disagree with being exposed to arousing impulses, and I may try to protect my senses from that. Either way, such a picture is sexual, most of the time. It does depend on the context, so I guess I agree that without context, classification is futile (lacking sufficient nuance). Assuming some "default Western context" though, I still claim that the picture you are proposing is sexual. The context where that image is not sexual, is that culture where the picture originates from. But we are not that culture.
Again, I'm neither supporting nor opposing politicians in labeling and/or restricting images. I'm only talking about what the pregnant woman's picture in the fine article makes me feel, and what urges it generates in me.
I don't think it shows that at all. Any content not suitable for a work computer in the typical office gets a NSFW label, it's literally in the name. An image of some war-time event can be as NSFW as an image of a woman removing her clothes, and at the same time neither images can be sexual.
Most workplaces would find there to be many categories of inappropriate things other than sexual content: violence, profanity, non-sexual imagery of people in unprofessional contexts, etc.
https://www.cpreview.org/articles/2021/8/firearms-and-the-ph...
Is
1) far more sexual
2) far more dangerous than the picture on the linked site
And that's nowhere near the level of say this:
https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-girl-licking-her-gun-...