It's pretty wild that people think that porn is more damaging to society than censorship.
The real censorship here is that a system has been constructed where payments must be funnelled through a small number of blessed companies and it has been set up that way to ... promote censorship. Authoritarianism in general, really. If it wasn't for anticompetitive regulations one of these game devs could just branch into banking. We've actually seen that dynamic play out in most of our lifetimes - in the early phase of crypto it was mtgox.com [0] that triggered the transition from cool nerd curio in the internet backwaters to a billion dollar market. So we know the pipeline there would work fine in the absence of KYC regulation.
[0] Magic The Gathering Online eXchange
In Europe they regulated exchange fees down to something like 0.3%. They just said the fees shall be low and lo, they were low.
They could also easily regulate that credit card networks can't block obscene content.
Anyway, some people wouldn’t even call it censorship if private businesses disagree and decide not to do business, for any reason, even if it’s public pressure. Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process? If not, why not? Be really careful with your answer, because taking away their freedom to choose is a type of censorship, and possibly a worse one because it would be a public/government censorship and not a private transaction censorship. Steam and Itch.io do still have the right to ship all these games, they’re choosing not to. They also still have the right to use other payment processors, and/or create their own.
I’d be willing to bet the payment processors in question would rather not be forced to cut off business, and do not care whether people pay for porn. They are simply trying to avoid public backlash and avoid being blacklisted by a large number of people who happen to believe porn is damaging.
We shouldn't have private payment processors. Access to the economy should not itself be a product that you have to buy and then worry about whether you own it or it owns you.
I don't really the ultimate purpose of the position taken by either side here, but it does seem to me that there's a path by which both can coexist, even if difficult.
If I were to take a stab such a protocol, it would live on a web of trust that kept track of interpersonal debts. So if Alice owes Bob, and Bob owes Charlie, then Charlie can "pay" Alice by instructing Bob to cancel both of those debts. In this case Bob is the clearinghouse. Some network connectivity is needed (Alice, Bob, and Charlie all on the same network) but it still works if the internet partitions. We incentivize Bob to keep his device available for this by creating a new debt when the transaction settles: this time it's one where Alice and Charlie owe Bob for having been the transaction processor.
If Bob didn't want to act in this capacity, he wouldn't have trusted Alice and Charlie to begin with. Charlie would then need to find a different path to Alice if he wanted to use the network to pay her. (Presumably they don't trust each other directly, otherwise they'd be creating new debts instead of cancelling transitive ones). In this scenario I suppose Bob would be acting as "censor" but his capacity to do so is not greater than any other user of the network.
For Charlie to be fully denied the ability to pay Alice, one of them would have to be behaving so badly that everyone refuses to trust them. That's a desirable outcome, if we must have something like censorship, it should not depend on the feeling of some guy who owns a bank but is otherwise unconnected with the parties of the transaction. It should be decided by the people who are near to Alice and Bob on the trust graph and therefore have to deal with the real world consequences of Alice and Bob's behavior. If they want to collectively prevent those two from doing business, that's their right since it's their community that that business is happening in.
One imagines this featuring in cases where some rich foreigner wants to set up mining operations that would poison the drinking water. The locals can collectively prevent that foreign money from buying local groceries, thereby limiting the ability of the foreign actor to harm them.
So that's my harebrained idea. But I'm not making up fictions and asking people to treat them like money. The people involved with USD are. If they want us to continue participating in their harebrained idea, they should recognize that giving us a system with problematic properties represents a risk that they might lose their privileged position. My point is just that it's on them, the designers of the system, to figure it out how to make it all work--we need only accept or reject it.
Some clock drift might even be ignorable. I say it's 5:00 and I have 100 tokens, you say it's 4:55 and I only have 99. Doesn't matter, I'm only spending 5 tokens anyway.
I'll confess to sort of making this up as I go along, so I don't have any sources to cite here, but when I sit down and think about it I come to the conclusion that partition tolerance means that when you come across a disagreement of this kind, you can't just let the more powerful partition win (We already have that, both in banking and in blockchains. Snore.)
Consensus has to come from the circumstances of the transaction. What's the intersection of the people I trust with the people you trust? Are there transitive trust pathways between us? Calculate the consensus value based on those pathways. It comes not from whether one of us is backed by a bigger bully, but rather because we've both personally chosen to trust the people that we have, and we've provided incentives for them to continue to be trustworthy.
How do you know what you're missing? IMO media platforms are heavily censored in comparison to ~10 years ago, to the severe detriment of American pop culture.
what damage is it causing?
(Except, remove the last panel)
Like, the people with the “blueberry expansion” one, you really think they were born with that? No, of course not, that would be dumb.
I think the main reason people put forth the “latent fetish” explanation is in order to argue that pornography is harmless.
As for why it harms me?
The purpose of sexuality is for relations with one’s spouse. On average, I expect it to be counterproductive in that regards. Most women wouldn’t find it appealing, and looking for specifically women who would find the idea appealing would substantially restrict the pool to search among. Also, most of the versions of the fantasy I have violated conservation of energy, and therefore cannot be physically achieved. Why would I want to want something impossible?
And, generally, lust promotes lust.
Says who?
That's not actually true.
That doctrine has been used to guilt-trip people and control their lives for many hundreds of years - but it isn't true. People are complex. We're not self-replicating machines whose sole purpose is to breed.
Just because the belief system I believe includes some beliefs that some other belief system has, doesn’t mean I’m like, taking portions from that other belief system.
(If you think that Christianity says that the purpose of people is purely to reproduce, you are quite mistaken.)
The purpose of people is to be in loving relation with God, and with each-other. The purpose of coitus is to further those goals, by symbolism, by strengthening affection among a married couple, and by producing more people.
And the purposes of sexual desire follows from these purposes.
(To justify the claim that Christianity does not say that coitus should only ever be done with the goal of reproduction: If one burns with desire, it doesn’t become not right to marry on account of being infertile. Now, I think one should be open to the possibility of a child, and be willing to raise a child if need be, but it doesn’t need to be the goal of the marriage.)
Of course, I recognize that some people reject the idea that there are purposes to these things / reject that there is a telos to things. I don’t think either I nor they will convince the other in this thread.
There’s a 3rd explanation: fetishes aren’t inborn, but they’re not instilled by porn either. Instead, they develop through a complex interaction of psychological, developmental, neurological, and cultural factors.
One theory is that, if a person repeatedly experiences sexual arousal in the presence of a specific object or situation (even coincidentally), the brain may begin to link that stimulus with arousal (classical conditioning). Or if the experience isn’t repeated but it is intense, it can become imprinted as erotically significant. In both cases, the fetish can be considered “latent” in the sense that it existed prior to one’s encounter with porn related to that fetish. Porn simply revealed what was already there (and showed the viewer there are others out there like them, too!).
So-called “normal” sexual behavior is just the median of millions of data points. There is not one person who fits that median in all respects. Even if you can’t find a partner who finds your specific fetish “appealing”, there are plenty of women out there who won’t specifically judge you for it either. Failing that, just enjoy the fetish in your own mind and don’t divulge it to your partner. You’re entitled to an inner life, after all.
Just as we have a biological imperative to procreate, we also have one to eat. But I’d disqualify any potential partner who thought less of me for liking tacos. Again, as long as one’s fetish doesn’t harm others, why should sex be any different?
There's probably a greater-than-zero number of people who had that experience, and there are probably similar fetishes around chocolate rivers, pneumatic tubes, and little orange people.
I can't think of an analogous reaso someone might like chocolate rivers or pneumatic tubes. There probably are people out there who really like little orange people but by a totally different mechanism.
Man, I can't wait to get invited to the next fungus wedding, seeing a little penis shaped mushroom with a little tophat, and the brides dress, why it must be a literal carpet on the forest floor so long and stretchy.
LOL this doesn't harm you int he slightest.
You should like, read a(actually man, from diverse positions, and not just your little right-wing fundie) psychology book and get out of your bible-thumping bubble.
I think the main reason people blame their fetishes on porn is in order to avoid confronting their inner compulsions.
== Also, most of the versions of the fantasy I have violated conservation of energy, and therefore cannot be physically achieved. Why would I want to want something impossible? ==
I’m not sure, but it’s probably something you should unpack with a therapist. Blaming porn is the easy way out. Exploring why you are personally drawn to it is the hard work.
But as to the potential harm, I recommend “Homemade” by Sebadoh.
Example verse: “There’s still pictures in my mind. I’ve been addicted all this time. It taught me everything I know. Tell me girl, did it leave me cold?”
We don’t need to ban porn. We need better sex ed, ideally starting at home.
she is awesome, and very responsive in the bedroom, but she is no longer a beautiful woman in her 20s. if i've been watching porn in the last month or so, my satisfaction with our sex is much lower. if i haven't, i'm happy.
there is also a lot of stuff that seems default in porn, like choking or anal. when i watch porn, i want those things. when i do not watch porn, i don't. my wife does not enjoy those things, but will do them if i ask. but they honestly do not make the sex any better for me.
you will say, "well don't watch porn then." but it isn't easy to not watch it. it has a powerful draw. i enjoy watching it in the moment. and it is always just a few taps away on the phone. it takes willpower not to watch it. if all the tube sites were banned, my life would be better.
the damage to me is small. i do not have an addictive personality. i do have a lot of willpower. other people might not be as lucky.
Now imagine if this was done for different proclivities: alcoholics, speadfreaks, over-eaters, game-addicts. Do you want the government limiting those activities for everyone because a minority lacks self-control?
In other words how do you distinguish between a dopamine exploit and just dopamine?
"Regulating" and banning/limiting intake are 2 different things. What's the limit of sucrose you can buy/consume?
Also, since your dopamine tolerance is higher, you enjoy real life less, which is bad mkay
I am writing this from the tail end of a 4-day techno music festival. I haven't taken any mind-altering substances, but I've enjoyed dancing to the music. Should it be banned?
Irl, if a crazy person gets on a soapbox and starts shouting at everybody, then people can shout back. Online, anybody who flamebaits is protected by the platforms and can censor the responses. They delete opposing comments, shadowban users, harsh language usually gets automatically deleted by the platform - and all that shouting-down is actually just counted as "engagement" which algorithmically boosts and spreads the bad idea further. The argument just directly profits the person with the bad idea, and incentivizes them to come up with even worse ideas to make everybody even madder.
This kind of censorship is causing a whole lot of problems right now.
Porn might involve large media files which gives it an up-front advantage re: "more", but it doesn't create shockwaves the way censorship does. Remove a porn video and the world stays largely unchanged. Undo an act of censorship and, well, maybe the world stays unchanged, or maybe everything is different.
I strongly oppose censorship and believe that payment processors and banks should be prohibited from engaging in it. Still, I have to admit that porn can be extremely destructive.
I question the bit about sex trafficking. From my perspective a lot of consenting adults are making a lot of money by willingly participating in the industry. If someone is abusing that and forcing someone to participate, that's already a crime that should be prosecuted. It's not an excuse to shut down commerce between consenting adults.
[citation needed]
I'll grant that there is sex trafficking going on at least in the fringes of the porn industry - but that's at least in part because of censorship. If porn production was widely legal and appropriately regulated, there'd be significantly less market for the edgy stuff filmed in Eastern European basements (i.e. the exact same argument as for marijuana legalisation).
There are also a bunch of regimes around the world who love censorship, and also engage in a bunch of human trafficking. For example, the UAE is notorious for both widespread censorship, and an entire class of foreign workers in various forms of indentured servitude (which for women is often prostitution)...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/pornhub-sex-traffickin...
https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-persons-re...
https://www.tokyoreporter.com/japan-news/breaking/npos-more-...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/girlsdoporn-owner-micha...
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-japan-porn-20160613...
Regulation and enforcement thereof is obviously a necessary part of ensuring that porn producers are operating legally/safely, and if porn production were more widely legal/regulated then these fly-by-night trafficking operations wouldn't thrive
You only need to type any random sexual thing and find any explicit subreddit you want, that’s how pervasive the porn is on even an allegedly non-porn platform. Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. We’ve literally gone crazy.
Holistically, you’re talking about a hyper sexualized society where the content and ideology are available at high density and velocity from a pretty early age until the day you die.
It’s a problem. The truth is one side is not wrong forever. The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue.
People need to take a deep hard look at what hip hop did to a generation of youth (both the violence and sexuality permeated deep into the culture). None of this shit is a joke, the kids end up fucked up.
I have news for you my friend, the Christian right is fucking people up way more than porn.
So is the NoFap/incel movement.
There are some pretty fucked up people who see women as breeding machines. This is tied pretty closely to the great replacement conspiracy theory and similar white nationalist conspiracy theories.
People who believe this junk promote the idea that porn is bad because they want young men desperately horny so they breed with women either with or without their consent. This is the same reason it was a major priority for them to deny women's rights to their own bodies.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with hip hop.
This has no bearing in reality. The "manosphere" is mostly neo-conservative guys who are sometimes even performatively against porn.
> Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days.
This used to be a lot more pervasive 20 years ago than now? Altogether with the "hip hop" thing, just feels like prejudiced, outdated arguments without data to back it up.
The manosphere is probably a very large umbrella of all kinds of views only united by one common trait - being a man.
Although you're not wrong that society is hyper sexualised and dating has become increasingly transactional
(Let's ban dancing, I wanna ban dancing with you, all night dancing (it's a reference to a music track))
It's the same with porn and the Christian Right. If people feel incomplete and try to fill that gap with a porn habit, the porn is an indicator of a problem, not the problem itself. Filling that gap with right wing propaganda doesn't address the problem, it just changes it into something that can be used for political advantage.
You're missing the root causes here.