Why Are Birthrates Down? Two New Studies Point to Phones | Hacker News Reader

Why Are Birthrates Down? Two New Studies Point to Phones

nytimes.com

2 pointshsuduebc26 comments

I think the thing that is not mentioned here and hardly ever explored in these situations is how the IPhone/Smartphone made sexaully explicit media vastly more accessible. There have been studies that show addiction to sexaully explicit material is equivalent neurologically to using drugs. (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...)

Either way I do believe this may have more affect on general fertility but generally it goes unspoken, generally, because no one wants to admit allowing free and and nearly unfettered access to sexaully explicit material to both adults and minors is a bad thing.

Maybe it's not mentioned because it's not supported by data and probably wrong. I think if that if porn were effectively banned outright, not only might nothing change, it might get worse. After all, we remove AI-child-porn from online services under the argument that such porn would increase the desire to do the activities shown, right? If that's true then it's true whether the people depicted are 17 or 19.

> it goes unspoken.. because no one wants to admit

A more likely explanation is that few people actually agree with you. Your argument is extremely common among people using motivated reasoning to try to ban content they don't like, starting with porn.

I am not just trying to ban content for the sake not liking it. I generally air on the side of free speech over and above banning content becaue I am not in favor of it or disagree with it. I think there is legitimate concerns about how it is affecting both the mental health of young men and the ability for young men to be able to have social relationships with women that are not skewed by the active objectification that they practice when viewing sexaully explicit media. I am not saying that low fertility is mono-causally caused by this issue but I don't believe enough research has been done on this on the cause and effect.

Naaaaa I don't believe you. If you were actually concerned about objectification of women, especially as it applies to relationships, you would be 100 times more concerned about TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube than porn because the impact of those is proven 100 times over. The term "body count" didn't come from porn, it came from the manosphere. Incel ideology didn't spread because on xtube, it spread on Reddit. Manosphere influencers are having such a large effect on the population that men vs women demographic shifts are showing up in questionnaires about religious affiliation.

And please don't say, "I care about those things too." You brought up porn specifically. That's why I don't believe you.

Yeah I am not going to say "I care about those things too," because I was thinking about adding something about that before you responded. I don't think the manosphere and sexually explicit media are far a field from each other. I think it is often the case that men go from one to the other. Typically from a life filled with meaninglessness in pornography and the objectification of women to a life ultimately that ends up in another meaningless pothole of objectification of women and other groups of people for a different end but ultimately achieving same thing. It is in the end that Nietzches Madman was trying to warn us of.

https://archive.ph/t7Hrn

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