Does Porn Hurt Children?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://www.aa.net.uk/kb-broadband-realinternet.html
(I'll probably be moving there when my BT contract is up).
(Also, Tunnelbear is my friend.)
However: regardless of whether porn harms children (disclosure: everything I've read, from the Meese Commission report onwards, says that it doesn't), the problem with the net.nanny filters is that they're indiscriminate and over-block important material that is not the ostensible target of the block. Want to find out about breast cancer? Good luck with that -- breasts are of course only ever of interest in an erotic context. Teenagers wanting to explore non-mainstream aspects of their sexuality are SOL; LGBT content is commonly blocked. And so on. This shouldn't be a problem for sensible parents -- who will opt out, and discuss the issues face-to-face with their kids -- but is storing up lots of trouble down the line. Not to mention providing a temptation for politicians who might want to follow that nice Mr Erdogan's example and censor viewpoints hostile to them.
And meanwhile, Page Three of the Sun remains on display in every newsagent and supermarket in the UK.
But there are people who think that porn does change behaviour. They might. Have a point - hairlessness seems to have come from porn.
While it's weird that breasts are displayed in a national newspaper (not because they're breasts, but because that paper is so judgemental about s lot of things. See also Daily Mail "all grown up" while shreKing about paedophiles) unclothed breats are not the "problem" that filters should be addressing.
1) it easy to find extreme, graphic, porn for free.
2) some parents find it difficult to filter that porn.
3) we don't want health or sexuality etc information to be filtered.
These are hard problems to solve and it is immensely frustrating that Government ignores all the expert advice they get about the difficulties. I tend to welcome a "can do" attitude ("you're Google! You can do this!") it should be realistic.
I have a child and I honestly have no idea how I am going to talk to them about porn.
I've seen a lot of just-so stories on this subject. Has anyone got any evidence to show?
"Shaved" used to be a niche fetish in porn. Now "hairy" is the niche.
More substantively: When divided into "pro-impact" and "no-impact" groups for the "improvised debate" mentioned in the article, the former camp is described as having essentially parroted all the various arguments their elders make for pornography being bad for teenagers, while the latter camp had no such arguments for the position they were assigned to defend. Segal is (somewhat) careful to avoid explicitly drawing any inferences from that, but the obvious implication is that the "pro-impact" camp is correct ("Given that pornography is emotionally charged, it would be shocking if it had no impact.") Leaving aside the question of what a small cohort of randomly selected 16-to-18-year-olds, an age not generally noted for its keen introspective abilities, can be expected to know about much of anything, I'd be curious to find out whether the cohort which produced this result had had anything like equal exposure to both sides of the debate, or whether instead the "pro-impact" kids drubbed the "no-impact" ones because only the former had been fed lines beforehand.
I realize you're not making that argument yourself, but it strikes me as exceptionally weak. The "obvious" response is that it's been extremely difficult to document any experiences as having measurable impacts on children (starvation is a big exception, but hopefully it's not too difficult to see what might make that different...). So the baseline expectation should be a fairly strong confidence that no matter what it is that you're showing children, the effect is likely too small to measure.
This stood out for me as a very weak part of the article.
Cite studies and meta-studies that substantiate some relatively minor impact of porn on personal development and then turn around, toss the scientific way of thinking and take some random sample of teenagers in a non-controlled environment as the ultimate measurement.
[Devil's advocate] If you had children, would you need peer-reviewed literature to inform your decision to allow them access to pornhub? And similarly, if you were a politician elected by people with children?
That sounds flippant, perhaps, but behold: I knew lots of kids growing up whose (usually extreme Southern Baptist) parents tried to prevent them getting hold of porn, but I didn't know even a single one whose parents succeeded at so doing; those who couldn't get it themselves, and who didn't have friends willing to share, at the very least had acquaintances willing to be paid or otherwise persuaded to serve as brokers.
This held true even during the year I spent in a Mississippi reform school which operated as an arm of a Roman Catholic monastery, and where getting caught with such outrageous contraband bought you a half-dozen wallops on the bare ass with a razor strap from a monk who was serious about it, the sort of thing that'd leave you sitting lightly for the better part of a week.
I'm not sure whether anyone actually believed this had any dissuasive effect on the older students' desire to possess pornography, but anyone who did so believe was destined to be disappointed; indeed, the only effect such punishments had was as a strong incentive to develop the skills of misdirection, concealment, and lying with a straight face. (Me, I'm a cynic, and I half suspect that that was the whole point. If so, whoever designed the curriculum deserves some sort of award for unparalleled effectiveness in pedagogy.)
The point is, even in an environment which was by design totally inimical to it, everyone who wanted it had as much porn as he could keep hidden. (Which, in a couple of memorable cases, was a three-ring binder full.) In a more permissive environment, where hiding one's stash was a simple matter of keeping it out of sight -- rather than, say, getting hold of a contraband razor blade and waiting until after lights-out to carefully slit a mattress seam where it didn't show -- the question didn't even arise, even for those of us not so fortunate as to have what was then the rare prize of unmonitored access to the Internet. Now? You'd have to not only homeschool your kids, but keep them locked up in the basement all the rest of the time, and even then I wouldn't lay odds against their finding some way to get hold of porn -- after all, in extremis, all it really takes is a hormonally overheated imagination and a pencil, and the pencil is optional.
Children who aren't interested in porn actively reject it even when they accidentally find it. It's hard for me to imagine what hypothetical damage it's supposed to do.
The line "i don't have any evidence of harm" will be weak, because laws exist to prevent children under 18 from having access to porn.
If you pick "eyes", you lack understanding of the strength of evidence and the fallibility of in-person observation.
Reproducibility, in the unfortunately exceptional cases where it actually exists, is all that saves you from going over the edge; that said, even when I can reproduce an experiment to see whether my results match what the journal saw fit to publish, using a child of mine as a test subject is not a thought which appeals.
Only now after so many years from having read the Cliffs Notes do I realize that Holden was "catching" the children from the Rye that was pornography - more specifically to what J. D. Salinger had in mind, bittorrent clients and Kazaa. :)
E: “If we start teaching kids about equality and respect when they are 5 or 6 years old --" And what does this BS SJW propaganda have to do with porn? It's just a way for people to get off.
If someone only sees sexual relationships it's probably not caused by pornography at young age but some other mental problems. You mustn't mix up porn and relationships because frankly they don't have anything to do with eachother.
I've seen plenty of assertions that porn is a special case for which the general lesson doesn't suffice, but never yet run across a supporting argument which didn't reduce to "well, because genitals are involved." Which, I mean, I understand why that would seem to an ape like a sensible thing to say, if an ape could talk, which we can. But I'm curious to know whether anyone has a genuinely novel argument to make in defense of the proposition.
In any case, porn has the issue in that it's "secret", and not discussed with adults with experience in the subject like most things are. It's also usually discovered well before any experiences with actual sex.
I posit that because it's not discussed with adults with a more experience mindset, kids do not have a framework to understand how it relates to the real world; they don't usually even know what sex in the real world is from an emotional standpoint (and usually not really from a technical standpoint either).
That is, I posit that the way we understand things, and the way they affect us, depends heavily on how we discuss them, and past experience. If we don't discuss sex, and we have no past experience of sex, then how are we supposed to process something which appears to be a depiction of sex?
> ...how are we supposed to process something which appears to be a depiction of sex?
I grant the result of such processing isn't likely to be all that accurate to reality. I do not grant that the result of such processing is immutable even in the face of compelling new experience.
Between lack of information and a natural tendency to confabulate, young children often form bizarre ideas about how copulation actually works, to the extent they think about it at all, which they rarely do because their glands aren't yet giving them a reason to take an interest. When, years later, copulation becomes a pressing concern, they seek out whatever information is available, on which basis they revise their understanding of the subject. The result is a gradually increasing congruence between the understanding and the reality, which in most cases culminates in a successful first sexual experience.
Sure, in the intermediate, i.e., pre-experiential, stages of this investigation, porn probably does give a kid some bogus ideas about how things work. On the other hand, so could a kid's best friend who lives next door, who's picked up a farrago of half-understood bogosity from his older brother in college. In either case, once the matter proceeds from the theoretical stage to the practical, everything that's gone before tends to get revised in a hurry. I've yet to see anyone posit a way in which pornography is somehow magically exempt from that process.
If I may rephrase the question: what are the effect on a growing mind whose only experience about intimate/sexual relationship is alone watching videos.
Scientists are having a hard time proving that porn even has an impact, let alone that the impact is negative. What are they even looking for? That children will somehow start practicing BDSM after stumbling on porn? That their "precious minds" are tainted by the Real World?
People who do practice BDSM are not somehow damaged, and would be the first to state that the "dominant" person is in fact not in that relationship.
I find it saddening that people should be ashamed of their fetishes and whatnot, like it's a taboo. Why couldn't we just express our sexuality openly and the way we want to without social stigma surrounding it?
If there's something I think which needs disruption in our Western societies, it is human sexuality. What's holding us back and with what arguments?
If you start playing with children, real rape and animals, I'm going to be the first person to call the police.
I suspect the OP used BDSM because many view it as "perverted", as "bad sex", as "something people shouldn't do". The hell with that. All consenting sex amoung adults in private is fine and ethical and normal.
Does porn cause harm? That it does is indisputable. There are many cases where men report decreased sexual performance as a result of watching too much porn (that is a harm particularly if it interferes with close intimate relationships). If nothing else, that is a harm. Does it cause harm on the balance? That, however, is unknowable.
But the harms which are readily documented don't match the harms which are posited. The harms which are posited are also readily observed but a causal connection is impossible to draw. Our culture has for the better part of a century (since probably the 1920's or at least 1930's) slowly been decoupling sexuality, marriage, and reproduction. Pornography may be seen as a consequence of that separation, but it certainly cannot be seen as the primary cause given the timing. Whether it furthers and further entrenches a pattern of hedonistic sex may indeed not matter -- it is only one small piece of a much larger cultural pattern.
So in the end, I don't know if it causes the harms portrayed. What is clear is that a failure to deal with the context rather than the technology is a much larger problem.
Isn't the whole point of this thread, and the whole international debate, that it is disputable?
> Does porn cause harm? That it does is indisputable.
> So in the end, I don't know if it causes the harms portrayed.
But, hey, what's a little internal inconsistency when you're urging everyone forward into the past?
But the point of my downvoted post is that you can't take an element of culture and assume that it is responsible for other elements. These things form tangled webs, not linear chains of cause and effect.