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.
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.
> Fundamentally, Western culture objectifies women (for profit) whereas other cultures don't necessarily do that
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.
The topic is specifically sexual abuse, porn vs erotic books.
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.
The fact the list ends at 2 women who were already named, when the men involved number in the hundreds and are still being protected, kind of ruins your point…
I've got plenty more if you want them. The fact that any exist at all is enough to prove that the statement "women dont create whole networks of sexual abuse" was a lie.
Ghislaine Maxwell was a part od male run male dominanted abuse network. The one which was supported by powerful men in goverment and politicians. Adult women were minority there.
Nice try. But while some women were part of Epstein network, overall it was male network. And pretty ideologically misogynistic at that.
Every person must have some natural violence pre disposition but that needs to be weighed by their ability to inflict it. I could be a super violent guy on a desert island and so never inflict violence. How physically strong you are must come into that which means opportunities for violence go down with physical size. Even if I want to be violent if I'm somewhat rational and don't want to get beat up.
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.
Size doesn't matter all that much in the modern world. Even toddlers can murder people with a gun. Tiny people can kill very effectively with knives, poisons, cars, etc. The smaller you are the easier it can be to get away with it too.
This is not true. IIRC this factoid comes from the results of surveys asking people whether they had ever been the victims of domestic violence (not necessarily in their current relationships), and it should come as no surprise that relationships comprised of two women have the highest reporting rates of having been subjected to violence over their lifetimes, and relationships of two men the lowest rates. Within-relationship rates of domestic violence for lesbian couples are not higher than for heterosexual couples!
it contained significantly less extreme content. There's studies on kids as young as 12 routinely being exposed to sexual violence, practices such as choking or degrading activity in porn and viewing it as so normal that young women report being expected to take part in it. Fetishes and kinks that were reserved for adults are now normalized among teens.
"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.
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.
It also had (has?) articles that were (are?) informative. There are a few photo spreads of naked women. Also some bawdy jokes that appeal to boys of all ages.
Disclaimer: my parents would not have that "birds and bees" conversation with me, so they instead subscribed to Playboy & Penthouse magazines for me.
> 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.
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."
> 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
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,
IMO you are too caught up on the religious part of the teaching [ maybe rightfully so ] and less on the actual message.
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.
>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?
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.
i consider the negative impact of child exposure to hardcore pornography as outweighing the positives of online sex education and would prefer them both deleted rather than having the former involved
it already is the dominant culture. just look at the birth rate, as well reported damage from hardcore sex eg anal fissure rates, as well the existence of the western term gooning.
> it already is the dominant culture. just look at the birth rate, as well reported damage from hardcore sex eg anal fissure rates, as well the existence of the western term gooning.
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?"
Sex education is, outside of some places in Europe, very rare. You'll certainly find such things far and few between in Asia. So not only is it absent in non-Christian nations, but the places where it is present, like Scandiland for ex, tend to be Christian.
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.
>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.
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.
> It's the responsibility of parents and other adults to keep children away from porn
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.
“ 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.”
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?
I think it's important to make a distinction between actual porn sites and sites that just have people talking about LGBTQ stuff. I'm trans and me and my spouse don't want our kids to watch porn.
To be clear, you want me to articulate a point that you fabricated and then attributed to me? I think I’m going to pass, but feel free to continue the discussion with yourself about things I didn’t say.
to clarify, you're suggesting I introduced a strawman argument because your focus on men wasn't mean to exclude anyone else?
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?
Lol I have never met someone in my adult life in the usa who was strictly for abstinence before marriage. You are extremely overstating the taboo of it here.
I know dozens. I'm sure I've met thousands. I used to be active in a lutheran (LCMS) church. If that's where you form your social network, you're likely to be _primarily_ around people who believe in abstinence before marriage. And if you're non-religious, you'll have a different social network.
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.
LCMS is more conservative as you know, There is a lot of disagreement between ELCA.
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.
LCMS and ELCA are practically different religions, IMO. In fact, my pastor at the time had a long angry rant about one of his peers who gave a speech at an event where ELCA pastors also spoke- he said that speaking alongside them gave the false impression that we condone their behavior (ordaining women, accepting gays), which we absolutely did not.
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.
Sounds like you're extremely limited in your experiences in the US. Maybe you should sit this one out? Your ignorance is not as good as someone else's lived experience.
Sure, but many schools teach only this. It is the dominant culture by construction, meaning we intentionally made it this way. I only got an abstinence only sex education as a young gay boy. That's dangerous. I had to learn about consent, protection, and HIV on my own as an adult. This is how teens become pregnant and why HIV is still a problem today.
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 two videos listed on PornHub.com are "FUCK THE CONDOM! Skinny Blonde Girl Opens HER LITTLE ASSHOLE FOR MY BIG COCK" and "2 Friends Want to Try an African Dick in the Ass for the First Time While They're Pissed On and Humiliated."
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).
The first two videos listed on YouTube.com are "FUCK THE SCAMMER! Indian Scammer Opens HIS LITTLE WALLET FOR MY BIG COMPUTER HACK" and "2 Friends Want To Try Benadryl Challenge for the First Time While They're Pissed On Drugs"
“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*”
You have to be mentally insane to think porn websites provide health education or that they are the only source in a conservative society for adults, and then you mention kids in the same comment. I’m not sure if you’re being edgy or just trolling.
Many of the people in the US behind attempts to ban "pornography" also classify anything involving LGBT people, including children, as pornographic. It's about the specific definition of "pornography" as it will be in the law, and that's what will matter.
I think they're saying that religious extremists classify sex education (especially gay or transgender related) as porn and try to use porn laws to get it banned.
