The world would almost assuredly be a better place if 14 year olds were looking at playboy magazines instead of having easy access to every fetish under the sun. It has distorted many a young man’s ideas of intimacy and sexual relations.
https://www.them.us/story/lesbian-marriages-weddings-divorce...
And they are less likely to create whole ideologies, political parties and movements that rationalize and defend all that abuse.
That explains why women like Ghislaine Maxwell or Kat Torres don't exist I guess.
Nice try. But while some women were part of Epstein network, overall it was male network. And pretty ideologically misogynistic at that.
Women are less likely to create whole ideologies, political parties and movements as a general baseline.
I'm not sure they do evil shit any less once you account for that.
The commenter tried to play the "erotic romance books are as bad as hard core porn and no one is treating it that way" bullshit.
Women do create political ideologies and movements. They do participate in them too. The topic is specifically who is building and defending sexual abuse networks, who is invested more in defending right to abuse.
It's not clear to me if women are less predisposed to violence or have on average less opportunity due to average smaller physical size specially compared to men. Though from experience I would say women also seem less pre disposed to violence in the first place.
What is the difference between erotica and porn?
I am no expert, however, the former requires and stimulates the imagination, whereas the latter doesn't do that, everything is shown and nothing is left to the imagination.
From my experience of the 'stumbleupon' (a link-sharing site from many years ago), I would describe the saucy pictures women collected/liked as erotica rather than porn. Clearly porn would not make it to Stumbleupon, however, erotica tended to be collected by women rather than men.
This is just anecdotal observation from a few years ago.
Fundamentally, Western culture objectifies women (for profit) whereas other cultures don't necessarily do that, to consider porn as degenerate.
There is also local culture. Compare the boy that has strong women in their life and attends a mixed school with the boy that has older brothers but no sisters, goes to all-boys schools and is exposed to 'DJT locker room talk' (that would not never wash at the mixed school). The former is going to find porn to be cringeful and boring, whereas the latter gets hooked, particularly if they have a weak father figure that is into porn.
In the USA there is an incredible amount of sex and violence in the media. Just because it is all around, American women are going to be 'ambient' consumers of porn, with partners that think that watching porn with their partners is okay. I am not disputing your 'third of consumers' statistic, however, there are parts of the world where women have some 'immunity' to it.
As an aside, we all have our price and I did do some work for Playboy many aeons ago. I thought this would be a career limiting move, however, the Playboy people behind the camera were all women, extremely intelligent and a joy to work with. We didn't have full nudity, with the women in front of the camera being down to earth, friendly and not what I had 'feared'.
Playboy also had the articles, some of which would not be touched by the mainstream media, enabling Playboy to be a platform for whistleblowers, whilst giving some 'plausible deniability' for readers.
I don’t know if this is true. I’m fairly certain that all cultures have prostitutes. And porn is more a function of technology and income rather than geography. Lots of exploitation of women in Asia, Africa, and other non-Western cultures.
Of course, this is something that all culture need to work on improving. But understanding reality is a big step to stopping or reducing this objectification.
"In an essay published in The Free Press in August, 16-year-old Isabel Hogben described how, by the time she was in 4th grade, she had seen internet porn featuring “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism and unthinkable physical violence.” This is not an isolated case: A French government task force on equality recently reported that as much as 90% of online pornography features “verbal, physical and sexual violence toward women.”
Playboy wasn't necessarily a beacon of feminism (although sometimes surprisingly it was) but what young people are exposed to is in an entirely different category.
"Is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?"
And I think that's understating it. I have not read a Playboy (is it even still in print?) since I was a teenager. At that time, the pictures showed breasts and maybe some pubic hair. Even the more "hardcore" magazines that were generally available such as Penthouse and Hustler were tame compared to even the front-page thumbnails on Pornhub. There were more explicit magazines produced, but you could only get them in "adult" bookstores and if you were under 18 you could not get in, and if you were over 18 there was a certain fear/shame of possibly being seen there that kept most people away.
If you really wanted it you could get hardcore stuff of course, but it was a lot more effort and cost compared to just opening a web browser. It was not something most people had ever really seen, certainly not among young children and teens.
Disclaimer: my parents would not have that "birds and bees" conversation with me, so they instead subscribed to Playboy & Penthouse magazines for me.
That was the world I grew up in. It was not better, it was just less open.
Fetishes aren't what has distorted mens' ideas of intimacy and sexual relations. Fetishes can be a perfectly healthy and consensual form of sexual expression. The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.
Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids, and any site about womens' health issues, because "public morals" tends to consider all of it obscene, inherently pornographic or just "icky."
Explain that one for the class
Its a common conception but today is your lucky day to articulate it
that's... interesting. can you instead tell us why you prioritize men's sexuality over others then? or if that's somehow a distortion of what you said too, can you tell us why the focus on men at all?
The UK has a lot of sex education, no such taboos, and is the home of OnlyFans. Are any of the problems you mention better in the UK than the US?
> Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids,
There is no reason this has to be true.
I don't know, probably.
>There is no reason this has to be true.
The incessant need of moralists and God-botherers to purge society of anything they deem immoral is the reason. You give these people an inch and and a legal pretext and they take a mile.
When I was about 10, playground rumour was that alllllll men who have sex with men end up in hospital for torn anuses ("my mum says so and she's a nurse!"; I did not believe this at the time, but I was 10 and this was 1993, what was I going to say to that?)
If you think the mere "existence of the western term gooning" says much of anything about changes due specifically to internet culture, you've not seen the ancient erotic collections in museums. The internet makes it more difficult to be ignorant of the diversity of the human condition; in the past it was still diverse, but easier to ignore those differences.
What does seem to have actually changed (though even here it is difficult to be certain) is that our exposure to presentations of "perfection" has resulted in reality being dissatisfying: people still want relationships with other people, but reject potential partners who are in real life anything less than 9/10 on a scale of "how hard did you go on an Instagram filter after also going hard on makeup and even then this is scored on a curve from the best that the algorithm decided to show me?"
The reason why this is so important is because of the preservation of the family. It is undeniable that a two parent healthy relationship is best for children regardless of religion. However religion is the proxy that is used to get there.
Holy…what the actual…get out of my head. Where can I read more about this idea/how to recover from this type of upbringing? Please?
Porn, let alone fetish porn, has a big problem because all the actors, including "amateur", are not only 'heavily used' and completely desensitized, but also the sort of people willing to publicly share video of themselves having sex. And so anybody taking any sort of que from there, whatsoever, has no clue what normal sex or normal relations look like.
I'm pretty sure most guys know that what they see on pr0n isn't "real."
Maybe, but none of that is germane to the subject at hand.
It's the responsibility of parents and other adults to keep children away from porn, and to teach them about sex and normal relations. Removing porn doesn't solve that problem because again the problem isn't the porn, it's the fact that porn is serving a role in educating people that society refuses to.
The only way to do that [currently] is legislation. It is impossible otherwise.
Agreed. And the adults who run the porn sites should not be excluded from that. They should be at least as responsible as the parents, actually more so as they are the ones providing the porn.
Not that long ago we would all have been very used to watching people have sex.
https://ncac.org/resource/timeline-of-abstinence-only-educat...
America maybe a melting pot, but if you'll let me abuse the metaphor a bit- there's not a lot of stirring going on. There are conservative churches in every city in the US, and this is still a fairly religious country.
I know of many lutheran [cool] pastors who had earrings, pony tails, never preached a single word about strict abstinence. There are many gay members of the Lutheran church and are welcomed.
I'm not religious at all anymore. But I value my time as a devout person, it was super educational, and honestly I got a lot out of it. But I wouldn't go back there even for the social aspects.
There are many parts of the US that have legislated away all sex education other than abstinence, despite it having the obvious effect on teen pregnancy (and therefore abortion rates where it is legal!)
There are tens of millions of fundamentalists "christians" in the US.
"I haven't personally seen it so it can't be real" is absolutely a wild take in a place as heterogenous as the US, with 350 million human beings, huge diversity in backgrounds.
Have you even stepped foot in a random Christian church? Or "Christian" church? They are utterly insane, and will have a hundred loyal adherents even in rural towns.
The "christian" cults that were common around northern maine included one that banned Halloween and reading harry potter.
There is, right now in the US, a stupid cult of "Catholics" that insist the church's official policy stances after about 1970 were blasphemy, and that they want to go back to pre Vatican-II policy, which includes such gems as Jewish people as a whole being officially labeled at fault for the crucifixion of Jesus
The US has, in it's history, cultivated up to SIX "Great Awakenings", which were events in US past where millions of dumbasses just started following whoever showed up to give speeches in the park, where multiple modern "Christian" religions spawned, including Mormonism and "Christian Scientists" which were literally a harem of morons who fell over themselves trying to please an insane woman who made up stories of former illness so she could claim she was "Healed". Her lies were mostly stolen from a quack practicing Animal Magnetism.
Go look up Ken Ham and the Answers in Genesis folks. Their absurd Noah's Ark gets a million visitors a year.
Insane fundamentalist christians in the US are so big and powerful that they run an entire parallel economy for all their grifty grievance propaganda, where you can buy shoddily produced ripoffs of popular teen movies that have all the writing removed and replaced with "The government wants to murder us for believing in god", because it's essential they keep their kids indoctrinated in a belief that they are forever victims, so they can justify their absurd acts like voting in a literal pedophile just so they get supreme court justices who will overturn Roe V Wade, and as they show with their refusal to actually educate teens about sex and it's risks, they do not care about reducing abortion or unwanted pregnancies, and instead simply want "Sluts" to be made to suffer, which should be the complete opposite of what Jesus Christ would do, as Jesus made a big show of accepting the literal untouchable class of people like a prostitute and lepers.
About 35% of Americans, 100 million people, will state directly that they believe the earth is less than 10k years old. They explicitly believe that God created us as we exactly are now, that evolution is impossible, and therefore that all of science is in a gigantic conspiracy to mislead you, and therefore all of science must be an agent of Satan himself.
The other two options in this poll were "Humans have evolved over millions of years, but god was involved in this process" and "Humans have evolved over millions of years, but God is not involved".
The First Amendment makes this kind of stuff borderline impossible to regulate in the US, but it's pretty obvious that this stuff is harmful to people's brains and that society would be better off it was not available to people (especially minors).
So it really is just a reflection of your proclivities than anything societal.
What?