There are a lot of GOP-controller legislatures in the USA pushing through so-called “child protection” laws, but there’s a toll in the form of impacting people’s rights and data privacy. Most of these bills involve requiring adults to upload a copy of their photo ID.
Considering these are Republican states, they’re just going to define Wikipedia articles about gender dysphoria as pornographic lol
Think carefully and double check before you ever agree with a Republican about anything.
This is literally the goal. They are using porn as a trojan horse because they know nobody is going to stand up and fight them on letting children see porn
Think carefully and double check before you ever agree with a
Republicanpolitician about anything.FTFY
I guess, but like, there’s only one party that wants me in a
concentrationconversion therapy camp for being trans.Perhaps, but it was a bipartisan effort that led to requiring ID to buy music.
Sure, and I’m not saying both parties don’t want to surveil and control the population, but as you might be able to understand I’m a bit more focused on the Party that has all but made extermination of people like me the Party platform.
This attempt of bothsidesing has failed.
The government has way too much influence over children already. Governments could do so much for children that would actually benefit them (better education, free lunch at school, better public libraries, ensure no kids are starving because of poor parents, no wars in foreign countries, whatever) but instead they use children to increase their control over people.
Its not the governments job to make up for absent parenting.
If you dont want your kids seeing things or doing shit online, its your job to monitor them and talk to them about it.
Stop throwing your kids a tablet and expecting that to be the fuckin parent.
Some principles and things to note:
- Adults’ expression to one another must not be restrained to only what is suitable for children.
- Sexuality is a normal thing that most people are interested in. It is not inherently illegitimate, deviant, or corrupting.
- Children and adolescents who are kept in ignorance and fear of sexuality are especially vulnerable to sexual abuse by adults.
- Anonymous and pseudonymous speech are necessary to the freedom of a free society.
- The chief threat of sexual abuse to children does not come from anonymous or pseudonymous speakers on the Internet, but from family members and acquaintances — especially those with authority over the child. As such, if the question is “Who should be subject to greater scrutiny, to prevent child sexual abuse?” the answer will be “parents, guardians, teachers, youth pastors, etc.” at a much higher priority than “anonymous and pseudonymous Internet users”.
- Identification requirements for speakers or audiences are a necessary step to violent and unlawful censorship, and are not necessary for legitimate purposes.
Given these principles and observations, I conclude that the expected effect of such regulations would be to increase sexual abuse of children, while also strongly harming the ability of a free society to discuss and educate about sexuality.
Very excellent points. While I agree kids shouldn’t be looking at porn, forcibly trying to keep all knowledge of sex and porn from them until they hit a magic age where now they can do anything they want isn’t the answer.
Children need to be educated so they can make wise decisions when the time comes. No matter how much people try to stop it, the time will often come before they reach the magic age set by laws, and unfortunately it’s sometimes through sexual assault or their naivety being taking advantage of.
This nails it right here, #1 and #2 especially.
Sex is fun, sex is awkward, sex is weird and messy and life-changing. Sex is mundane, sex is cathartic, sex is funny and sex is cardio. Also, sex makes people, oh and it feels good. All that is pretty fucking magical if you ask me.
What is done in private between consenting adults is none of your goddamn business, including porn. Don’t use kids as an excuse to control adults’ behavior.
I would combat that by saying I think most pornography is nowhere close to what sex is like. Anecdotally, I hear more stories about men who try to fuck someone like they’re in a porn film, which can result in physical pain to their partner.
I think teaching kids about sex and giving them access to porn that often displays non-consensual acts as normal are two totally different things.
But yes, I think 4 is a very strong point, which is why most of the bills that are being proposed are not being executed well.
Oh sure. Generally speaking, most porn is a terrible sex educator.
However, it’s also a wrong target for concerns about child sexual abuse.
And crackdowns on “porn” tend to end up being crackdowns on sexuality-related speech and sweep in a lot of other speech too.
None of these politcians who push for all those “protect the children” laws actually gives a shit about child safety. The only thing that such laws mange to do is restrict freedom of speech and expression for everyone including children.
If you are a careless parent, then no law is going prevent your kids from watching porn.
It’s almost like porn has been available, to varying degrees, to youth, for decades if not centuries. Even discounting all the good arguments like “small government” and “think of the kids is a dumb excuse to curtail privacy”… You have to ask, what’s the goal?
Keeping kids away from porn? Why is that an important goal for the government? Is it one the government is even capable of doing? At what age is porn OK? 16? 18? 21? Never? Did you ever look at porn when you were in high school? Do you regret it?
Is there any real research that porn is corrosive to a 16 year old? I mean we can’t even pass simple, popular gun legislation because the NRA swears up and down we don’t know “for sure” if it will save more than a couple lives. We can’t even have an EPA that enforces laws, while millions of people suffer from asthma and other stuff that kills them.
Yes l, actually. We do have research into the effects. Here’s a summary I found:
https://aifs.gov.au/research/research-reports/effects-pornography-children-and-young-people
Things the study finds hard to do:
- define pornography. That will make it hard to legislate.
- they conclude it leads to unsafe sex practices but that also sex needs to be taught to kids. Probably not news republican legislatures want to hear.
- not really a link to crime
Also worth noting this is one study. In Australia.
Not saying the study should be discounted. But it’s not really a clear support for government intervention.
It’s not one study, it’s a review of research done across the USA, UK, and AUS.
To clarify, the review states multiple studies found links to sexual aggression and negative views of women. Decrease in safe sex, and an increase in riskier sex acts.
This is a highly cherry picked set of conclusions from the study. Sex Ed would probably, as the authors note, negate these negative aspect of accessible porn.
Odd, I found your points to be cherry picked as well. Where does it say it would entirely negate the negative effects?
For the government to restrict something, there needs to be a very good reason. Removing the anonymity of watching porn (which to be honest, was removed a while ago with Google and co spreading their slimy tentacles everywhere) is a dangerous breach into the private lives of citizens.
It’s like someone gets to go into your head and know exactly what turns you on. If you need an ID to watch pornography, this is exactly what is happening.
This is what you’re actually advocating for. Just because something may be bad doesn’t mean we need to get rid of it. It’s like banning cigarettes because it causes lung cancer or alcohol because men beat their wives while drunk.
Didn’t we figure out a while ago that banning shit arbitrarily is a bad idea that will have unforeseen consequences? I already envision a large exodus of young people to the dark net in an attempt to view porn, which is a natural desire for a teenager going through puberty, where they will be exposed to much worse than is on mainstream porn sites.
So we would have not accomplished our goal of preventing children from seeing porn but instead have made the situation worse AND we have removed the anonymity from adults leading to all sorts of potential issues. What if a porn site gets hacked and all the IDs are leaked? Many a closet gay could be in hot water. People deserve privacy where they can escape into their private world. This is basic 4th amendment stuff translated into the modern world
Do not miss the forest for the trees. A little bit of sexual aggression (allegedly) in our children is not a serious enough problem to justify this overreach. Not even close. The real solution is raising a society that treats men and women the same.
It is still very shocking to us in Europe that the United States wants to control pornography before guns. I don’t know many people who have killed themselves by masturbating.
I’ve come close.
Ahh I see the strategy. Put out this trafficking movie, hype dems as pedos (and commies) and stir up a whole terd of doo doo. Classic.
I’m not uploading my ID to shit.
It’s the parents job to do that, not the government’s. I have kids, when they were at the age I didn’t want them seeing porn I made sure it was blocked, and I educated them on safe internet browsing. I don’t need the government’s help with that.
I don’t need the government’s help. Plus it’s probably a front for keeping kids uninformed. I’m more concerned about Florida teaching that there was some benefit to slavery.
I’ve started looking at porn on the internet at 8 or 9 years old, and nothing bad happened to me.
I understand why the law says that porn is for 18+ only, but that’s it. The access shouldn’t be restricted. It’s the parents’ role to stop kids from going on those websites, if any.
We shouldn’t let the government parent our kids. I know it’s human nature to be lazy, but the government isn’t the answer.
None of those blocks actually work, it’s theater. I think it’s better to prepare your child for the world and how to handle it than to try and lock them in a bunker.
Children get their own internet. If they get in adult internet, then they get juvenile detention and a criminal file, their parents are arrested for child endangerment and child services take over.
And anyone complaining about what is on the internet gets an helicopter ride to the deep sea from 10’000 feet.
This could work 🤔
On a moral level, I do agree with keeping children from accessing certain content online, especially porn. I think I’d be happier if I porn was less accessible to me until I had the mental faculties to understand it.
On a practical / policy level, I disagree since there is no way to stop children from accessing this content without drastically hampering the freedoms of all people. I see no good solutions. I really feel bad for parents who have to raise kids in the internet age.
That’s basically my thinking too. So is the solution just increasing transparency in sex ed? I think someone has to say to kids “pornography is nothing like real sex and a lot of it is degrading to women”
Basically that. I don’t want to say ‘bad parenting’, because my own parents basically never spoke to me about this stuff at all and I don’t think it negatively affected me at all. I think they just observed that I didn’t really need them to have that talk, and so didn’t bother. In my case, it worked out. But for many kids it might not.
