Comment by docjay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by docjay | Hacker News Reader

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I’m very interested in the “harm to minors” aspect of porn. I don’t agree or disagree, I truly don’t understand and I’d really enjoy having someone clearly explain it to me.

Where I’m stuck:

When asked, people tend to kind of hand wave and say “distorted view of sex” or similar. But what, specifically? And how does it harm them?

I’ve tried to think through the pieces myself and I can only come up with things that sound too silly to be the reason. Are we worried they’re going to discover a fetish? Is that bad because it doesn’t align with “missionary sex for the purposes of procreation”? Are we afraid they’ll pick up on the caricature representation of sex and break a leg trying to t-bone their girlfriend? Are we afraid they’ll think they need to slap their girlfriends ass far too much, then get broken up with, become a social outcast, and never get into law school? Are we afraid they’ll get overstimulated and bored with sex as a result, quit caring about hygiene and dating, which will inevitably lead to a population decline and the downfall of society?

I honestly couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound as silly as accusing king fu movies of distorting their view of fighting, which would arguably cause more harm when they try to do “crane style” and get their ass kicked.

I’m looking for the action->action link, not the “messes them up” headline.

I think the person above you is referring to CP, which I think is a very different harm than you’re talking about.

For what you’re talking about, I’ve heard a couple of explanations.

The first is one you pointed out, a largely religious objection to non-traditional sex. They find any sort of fetish immoral and worry porn will push children into fetishes as adults.

The second one you missed and I find reasonable, I just don’t see porn bans as the solution.

The theory is that porn will make children aware of more “extreme” or “unusual” varieties of sex, but it doesn’t endow them with the ability to have an open dialogue with a partner about wanting to do that, whether their partner is comfortable with it, etc.

The fear is that young adults will accidentally pressure their partner into sexual acts their partner isn’t comfortable with. They either see it often enough on PornHub they overestimate how normalized actually doing it is, or they’re young enough that discussing sex with their partner is still uncomfortable.

To be clear, this isn’t a puritan stance. It’s not saying that eg BDSM is bad, but that participating in BDSM should be prefaced by a conversation about safe words, boundaries, likes, dislikes, etc. Without the context of having been sexually active, it’s hard to know what parts of PornHub are “normal” and implicitly agreed upon by agreeing to have sex, and what parts really need a separate conversation.

To me the solution is mostly sex ed, though. Open communication solves most of this. The only ones I think would still be a bad idea mostly hinge around control. Eg CNC is probably a bad idea because the lack of control is part of the appeal, but it could also cause someone inexperienced to not speak up and say they aren’t enjoying it.

Maybe I underestimate the younger folks and times have changed, though.

Mmmm…their comment was a response to someone scoffing at “morals” by rhetorically asking if porn sites should be taken offline too. Replying “The CP ones? Yes, and some have been.” would be a wild twist away from the topic and a nuclear level strawman. Their actual reply was fitting if you just consider that normal porn sites have advertising, thus are profiting from kids browsing it too. It seems they took issue with that aspect, layered on top of “kids watching porn is evil.” At least, that’s what I hope because otherwise I absolutely barked up the wrong tree looking for a reasonable explanation of their objection.

Anyway, thank you for sharing your theory. It’s something that I did touch on, but I buried it in terse humor and it’s easy to miss. It was the “ass smack = breakup” part; they do stuff they saw in porn, partner doesn’t like it, {insert contributing failure}, they break up and societal collapse ensues. Whether the addition failure is “won’t stop pressuring” or “communication failure” or something else entirely, it didn’t matter because whatever it is would be the actual problem, as you pointed out.

I also didn’t want to assume they were being specific to niche or extreme interests since the “harm children” agenda never seemed to take narrow aim at them, hence the age gate laws don’t specify “BDSM or other fetishes.” It had been clear to me for years that Playboy was just as “destructive” as ‘Whips & Chains’, which is why I’m confused.

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