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June is coming to an end, which means all the most controversial SCOTUS opinions are coming out in the traditional big lump. These opinions are sharply divided, often along ideological lines, with lively dissents and concurrences--pretty enjoyable for a law nerd like me. Relevant to this thread, these cases tend to focus on big culture-war topics like abortion and gender stuff. This week saw the following:
Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic - Abortion. Congress requires States who receive Medicaid funds to, among other things, permit patients to obtain medical assistance from "any qualified provider." South Carolina receives federal Medicaid funding, but excludes Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program because state law prohibits using public funds for abortion. Planned Parenthood files a section 1983 claim (this is important, IMO) arguing that it is a "qualified provider" and that Congress's Medicaid statute created a federal right for any qualified provider to receive Medicaid funds. The court, with a 6-3 conservative-liberal split, says "no." Gorsuch writes the majority opinion: the "any-qualified-provider" provision of the federal Medicaid statute does not create a right for medical providers to receive Medicaid funding. All it does is specify a condition with which participating States must "substantially comply" in order to receive federal funding. If South Carolina doesn't want to comply, the feds can kick South Carolina out of the Medicaid program, but that's not the same as creating a "right" to Medicaid funds. Section 1983 is only for vindication of a person's federal rights; there is no right for a provider to receive Medicaid funding from a State, so Planned Parenthood doesn't have a valid 1983 claim. Jackson writes the dissent; I didn't really read it carefully, because the majority seems clearly to have the better argument here. Everyone agrees that South Carolina could, if it wanted to, simply reject federal funding altogether. Then nobody in South Carolina would get Medicaid funding, and South Carolina wouldn't have to abide by any of the provisions of the Medicaid statute. It's hard to say that people have an enforceable federal "right" to receive Medicaid funding from a state, when everyone acknowledges that the state has no obligation to participate in the Medicaid system at all.
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.
Mahmoud v. Taylor - LGBTQ+ Books and Lessons in Schools 6-3 conservative opinion, Alito. Religious students and parents have a constitutional right, under the free exercise clause, to opt-out of pro-LGBTQ+ curricula in public schools. Thomas writes a concurrence. Sotomayor wrote the dissent.
In my opinion, the biggest case today was:
Trump v. CASA, Inc. - Immigration BUT ACTUALLY Federal Court Procedure (sounds boring but is, IMO, super important) 6-3 conservative opinion, Barrett. 3 concurrences! 2 dissents! This is the "birthright citizenship" case: does the Court agree with the Trump administration that some people born on U.S. soil are nevertheless not American citizens? IDK! Because the Court doesn't answer that question. Instead, it addresses whether the lower federal court had the authority to issue a nationwide injunction against the Trump administration's immigration enforcement proceedings. The Court held it did not have that authority. Federal courts can only determine cases and issue binding decisions as to the parties before them, not the country as a whole. The lower court's national injunction is stayed as to any people not among the parties to the suit.
Some are saying the Court "punted" on the birthright citizenship thing, but I think the Court actually addressed a far more important culture-war issue. "Nationwide" or "universal" injunctions have been part of the playbook for activists' (especially progressive activists) lawfare for a long time. The idea is to find some sympathetic plaintiff who would be affected by a statute or executive action you don't like, shop around the whole country until you find a judge who agrees with you, and then get that judge--before the case has even been tried--to indefinitely prevent the government from applying the challenged law/regulation/action to anyone, anywhere in the country. This opinion represents a potentially huge obstacle to progressive activist's attempts to stymie Trump's immigration agenda.
Less interesting cases, IMO:
Gutierrez v. Saenz - Criminal Procedure. A lurid murder case gives rise to a pretty boring dispute about death-row inmates' standing to request post-conviction testing of DNA evidence. I can't really figure out the nuances of the Texas law at issue or the procedural history, but it looks like the Sotomayor-led majority thinks Gutierrez has standing; he has a Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest in the ability to request post-conviction DNA testing, even though the prosecutor apparently has both the right and the express intention to refuse that request in this case. Barrett concurs but chides the majority for "muddying the waters of standing doctrine." Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, dissents. Thomas, typically, offers a solo dissent on the quixotic ground that the Fourteenth Amendment has been misinterpreted by the Supreme Court since the early twentieth century; in his view, the "liberty" interests protected by the 14A do not include state-created entitlements like Texas' post-conviction DNA testing procedure. My read: SCOTUS lets a death-row inmate file a doomed, pointless post-conviction motion that doesn't have any hope of success but will probably delay his execution for a few more years (Gutierrez was convicted in 1998).
Riley v. Bondi - Immigration/Deportation. Deportation is a hot-button topic right now, but this opinion about filing deadlines and the distinction between claims-processing rules and jurisdictional requirements is too dry for me to get worked up about. Perhaps notable for the fact that Gorsuch broke from the conservative majority to join, in part, Sotomayor's dissent. Pretty boring overall!
There were others, but they don't have as much culture war salience as the above, IMO. I meant to do a longer write-up, a little paragraph for each case, but I'm too tired ... sorry
How did this case come about to begin with? Is Texas just requiring the same sort of "age verification" that's existed since the 90s (the website says are you 18 and you click yes)? If so, how was it possibly worthwhile for FSC to sue over that?
Texas is requiring that pornhub make potential viewers upload a photo of their driver's license. Presumably if a parent uploads a photo of their driver's license to let their kid watch porn and Texas attempts to enforce the law against pornhub then that would be a different lawsuit but let's be real, the tiny number of people who actually do this won't get caught.
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The specific law here holds that a "commercial entity" (some carveouts for Google) that serves material on the internet "more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors" must use either commercial or government identification of age, or be subject to fines up to 10k USD per day plus 250k if a minor sees it. There's pretty widespread potential to interfere or discourage adult-to-adult speech that is only obscene to minors, or even some speech that isn't obscene at all so long as it comes from one of these companies.
There's also a compelled speech problem in the original bill, 14-point font inclusion of a substance addiction help line level. This is currently blocked, though it had a weird period where that block was under an administrative stay for nearly six months.
Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?
I would argue that while presenting unsolicited sexual material to either adults or minors can indeed be harmful (to some degree -- I remember seeing porn ads when I was downloading cracks for games at age 12 or 14, and mostly went eeeewww and got on with my life, but it did not traumatize me. Getting DMed a dick pick would certainly be worse, though), things are often different when users actively search for such content.
Sure, there are things which are likely harmful to the person searching for it, a 10-yo searching for rape or beheading videos is probably better off not finding any. But I do not think that any person of any age or gender who is searching for "naked woman" is likely to be harmed by pictures or videos of naked women, even if they are sexually suggestive.
Quite frankly, I believe that sexual content consumed by minors is too influential to leave it to chance and adult entertainment companies targeting an adult audience. The sooner we accept that the effect of age verification laws is not that horny teenagers will not view sinful material, but at best that they will learn how to connect to a VPN service, the sooner we can start producing more age-appropriate porn for minors.
I do not think that viewing PIV sex on video after searching for it is intrinsically harmful. The stuff which is harmful is all the stuff where porn differs from what one would recommend as sex acts for beginners. A median porn video teaches a teenage male that of course a woman will be enflamed with desire as soon as you touch her, enthusiastically give you oral sex for a while, then be ready to get fucked however hard you want to fuck her, then happily switch to anal and finally let you cum on her face. Communication about consent, boundaries, or birth control? Nada (except for BDSM porn, which typically discusses boundaries explicitly on camera). She implicitly consents to everything, has no boundaries and is solely responsible for contraception. Getting her off? She just gets off being used by you, man, no need to learn anything about female anatomy or psychology. Pillow talk? Just call her a dirty whore.
Then you have all the kinks which are mainstream in porn. Incest? Super hot. Unhealthy power dynamics? "I would do anything to get a passing grade in your class ..." Spying on women? When caught, they are flattered and will have sex with you. Respecting your partner? Nah, they like to be degraded. Now, there are plenty of kinks which are fine between consenting adults who are into them. But the context "this is a thing which most women are not into" is generally missing in porn.
Just hire some 20yo porn actors and make them act out healthy sex scenes (where the actors play a couple (or actually are a couple), discuss boundaries, contraception and all that), put them on the web in 4k (or even better, find popular but healthy sex tapes produced (semi-)commercially and just buy the rights) and tell the minors in sex ed "it is actually normal and healthy to be interested in how sex works, if you are interested here are some videos which are more realistic than what you find on pornhub.
Sure, some will still prefer to watch gangbangs in 480x320, and for a few unlucky ones the good porn might actually be a gateway to the mainstream stuff, but by and large this will do much more to prevent minors from getting wrong ideas about sex (or see seriously disturbing stuff because they were curious how sex looks) than Texas just making the big US porn vendors do age verification and pretend that this will prevent any horny teen from watching porn.
But my suspicion is that the Texas move was never about protecting minors in the first place, it was about getting the filth off the Texan internet by pretending to care about minors seeing boobs and dicks.
I’m going to assert a couple points.
First, although I think there is a right and wrong way to have sex, I really, really do not want the government getting involved in it past the absolute brightest of lines (rape).
Second, the locus of the erotic is, for whatever reason, in the forbidden itself. Everyone knows that sex is dirty. If it’s clean, normal, and well-ordered, it’s not tempting in the first place. At minimum it must be private; the private side of someone which they would never show anyone else, but for you…
A practical middle ground would be to define a clear boundary between softcore (basically nudity and intense looks, no partners or penetration) and hardcore (intercourse, violence, unrelated obscenities), and put a lower legal age target for the former. There’s frankly not nearly so much that’s damaging to either boys or girls with just seeing naked people. Sure, unrealistic standards this or body image that, but it’s nothing compared to the implication of hardcore porn that women are supposed to experience sex in the manner of seedy porn scripts.
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I was wondering where the hell all the "women like/want/demand to be choked during sex" was coming from, and it seems it's from porn. And what boys (and I do mean boys, not even young men - in the linked article "transition year" is aged 15-16) are learning from watching porn is "when having sex, I should be choking my partner". That's something that can go very wrong very fast if you have no idea what you're doing, and how the hell is a fifteen year old having sex for the first time going to know what they're doing with breathplay?
This sort of undermines the rest.
You won't believe he shocking things men expect from women as a result of porn!
When late GenX was coming of age, those last two were not only part of a major motion picture, they were in the trailer.
The point is "exaggerated porn noises" during sex, even if the girl isn't enjoying herself. And choking certainly wasn't mainstream, but it's seeping out just like heterosexual anal sex, and that comes from porn. Kids are watching porn and picking up lessons from it about "this is what sex is supposed to be like", which is why we're trying to hold back the tide on minors accessing porn. Age-verification laws like the one in Texas may be futile, but the alternative surely shouldn't be "they've got Internet access since the age of six, they're gonna find porn anyway, let thirteen year olds watch hardcore BDSM, you can't stop them".
Yes, that was in said major motion picture trailer.
When (generic) you tell me "porn is making kids think choking during sex is normal", I'm inclined to consider it. When you say "Porn is making kids think choking, pleasurable noises, and women having (or faking) orgasms during sex is normal" I'm inclined to think you just have something against porn that might be unrelated.
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Wait a second. Women aren't generally watching porn[1], so where did they get this idea from?
And if it's true that it's 100% downstream from men watching porn then [insert Slootpost about hypoagency, in which case "yes, they do like to be degraded" actually being the correct posture to take for both sexes], but that's also completely ridiculous. Not that reality is itself not ridiculous, but I'm more interested in the men and women who actually have at least a modicum of self-respect beyond hyper-gooning[2], or trying to make love rather than just having sex.
But then, losing virginity (for teen-aged men or women) has never really been about that- from merely 'new experience' to 'just get it out of the way' to 'processing how your life's going to be now'- and maybe the people who are going to treat sex in the 'love' sense were always going to be fine[3] and those who couldn't or won't were always going to get fucked? I'd be annoyed if I got treated purely as a human fleshlight/dildo outside of a give-and-take context, that's for sure.
Of course, we're calling it "sex education", not "love education", so love is kind of outside the purview of this exercise. Which is kind of the problem with "women like to be choked while taking it in the ass" in the first place- wanting to going straight to that seems to reveal a profound incuriousity about [the physical pleasure of] one's partner in that case. But then, it isn't necessarily about physical pleasure, is it?
[1] You... don't read a lot of yaoi, do you? That shit's about as heteronormative in its seme/uke dynamics as breathplay is- maybe the Motte should compile an essential reading list.
[2] Someone said "human fleshlight" here once, and that stuck with me. I don't understand why having sex needs to be that way though from anecdote this is [a lot of the time] functionally what happens.
[3] People joke about 'cherry-popping' for various different experiences; part of that is the newness, but part of it's also the attitude being a 'virgin' to something bestows. The reason men aren't (or weren't, for a long time) considered virgins is because they're supposed to know everything already, which was the reason to be devoted to them -> the pathway to getting sufficiently choked in bed.
Actually, I think the people less likely to get off on those things as a submissive act are also those that devotion pathway doesn't work on, and the fact the people "[seeking to be] sounding the alarm" tend to be Liberated women in their 50s [where "men being sexually aggressive = bad" was at its highest- sometimes men even believe that] is significant.
[Edit: and considering TheNybbler pointed out the even more obvious- that is, "partners are expected to enjoy sex, clearly the youth are crazy"- it's another data point in the "performative shock by frigid old women who would rather be getting choked by 15 year old men, but demonizing said men for only wanting that with 15 year old women scratches that itch too" direction.]
Look, if I want my filthy depraved kink, I get it the old-fashioned way: by going on fanfic sites. I'm old enough that I don't need to lie about age-verification anymore, but these young'uns nowadays should at least have to work that much to get their porny kicks!
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I think one plausible explanation of this being "100% downstream from men watching porn" is that it is that the porn is making more sexual activities seem boringly normal and the women are getting off not to the degradation but to the idea that their partner's love for them is extreme. Thus as more extreme sexual behaviors are normalized they need to push the boundaries even further to get that adventurous kick.
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Surely people are aware that there's a difference between reality and fantasy? Movies teach me that with the power of friendship and snarky quips I can overthrow giant conspiracies and evil empires. But I don't try that IRL because the evil empire is actually very strong.
I guess there are a bunch of retarded people like the guys who openly masturbate to lingerie adverts on the street or try to rape girls in the park who don't appreciate this fine point. But they're not going to get the message 'don't be creepy and rapey' since they're already locked in on the creepy, rapey lifestyle. 'Why would I not rape when I can, how am I supposed to fuck' they might say and be right, since surely nobody consents to sex with ugly, poor, retarded men. The answer here is using force, not education.
Also, anything teachers or the state try to do will be extremely uncool and cringe. It'll be just like the 'informed consent, no means no' training that nearly every institution has but worse. Can you even imagine how groan-inducingly awful official state-sponsored pornography will be? How woke and diverse and uncool and stilted the dialogue is?
All this would do is teach the more autistic men insanely uncharismatic bedroom talk and make them more nervous. Anyone who wants to actually get off will go to real porn, or hentai, or impossible AI girls. I think it would actually make girls more pressured too, they don't want to be an uncool, frigid, lame bitch like that girl in Safe and Respectful Physical Connection Part 4, do they?
A better solution would be punitively obliterating Pornhub and co with massive fines and lawsuits so they stop profiting off people trafficking and child rape.
When you're old enough. But watching porn at a young age is trying to find out "how does this sex thing work? what goes on during sex? what am I supposed to do?" because porn is supposed to be 'real' sex (and I guess hardcore, if the distinction even exists anymore, is people having real sex on film or video). You pick up a general idea of "what is sex like?" from movies and TV, but that's not as explicit as porn, and you get directed towards porn from society around you and your peers, even if your parents try and keep it away from you.
The reality-fantasy borders are very blurred there, because these are real people really naked and really doing it. It's only when you're older that you work out that these are actors and it's all scripted and the makeup and hair removal and breast sizes etc. are artificial.
Average age of exposure to porn is now around twelve to thirteen. That's not a very mature age to be able to discriminate about "ah yes, this actress is faking her sounds of arousal, I see that the mild BDSM is added to the script just to spice it up, this is not a realistic portrayal of how people have sex in reality".
Maybe young teenage boys were always trying to sneak peeks at naked women in 'dirty' magazines, but that's not at all the same as on-demand moving images of whatever tickles your fancy.
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For most behaviors, minors are exposed to plenty of real-world examples. Even in a world where driving licences were not a thing, kids would play Need for Speed (or whatever car racing games kids play these days) but still get exposed to thousands of hours observing how actual humans in the world drive their cars. They see their neighbors drive their cars every day. The two areas where most exposure is fictional are grievous violence and sex -- they will likely never see their neighbor use a gun to defend her property or have sex with her husband.
For grievous violence, this is not a big deal, because thankfully most teens do not have strong urge to kill people, and are also living in a generally peaceful society where their misconceptions are unlikely to harm them. The ones which do end up in professions where they are likely to encounter violence can be taught why emulating Rambo is a bad idea.
For sex, things are different, because a significant fraction of minors will end up having sex. Now, not all of the fictional exposure is hardcore pornography, there are plenty of Hollywood movies with fade-to-black scenes implying sex, and unless kids are watching John Wayne exclusively, these generally depict a somewhat more realistic standard of behavior than porn.
I am aware of that problem. Telling minors "here is an educational and super hot and naughty video about consent and sex" will by default be as successful as telling them "today we will have so much fun learning the 7 row in the multiplication table".
As I added in parenthesis, a better idea would be to just buy the rights to stuff which is both popular and also unobjectionable from a "displaying problematic behavior" perspective. The nice thing about porn is that there is an ungodly amount of it produced, so even if you filter out 90% as problematic, you still have more to pick from than you could ever afford to pay for (or that minors could watch before becoming adults due to the runtime).
I have two problems with that. First, will it change the outcome? So you ban the big free-to-view US sites. Does this mean that teens will go back to jerking off to pictures of women in swimsuits, as god intended? No, because the internet is literally full of porn. You would at least need a Great Texan Firewall, and even then, I suspect that horny teenagers will find a way.
The second problem is the claim that pornhub is making profits from sex trafficking and CSAM. In a very technical way, you are correct (at least about sex trafficking) -- since there is no good way to identify sex trafficking victims in porn videos, a fraction of the videos on pornhub likely contain sex trafficking victims and add to their bottom line just as all the other videos. But your framing suggests a moustache-twirling villain CEO ordering his underlings to get him more sex trafficking and CSAM because he wants more profits, which I think is kind of the opposite of what is the case. Pornhub will earn their cut whether the viewers watch free-range amateur porn, porn with sex trafficking victims or hardcore CSAM. They have zero incentive to dabble into the latter two, because this will bring the state down on their money-printing machine for sure. For CSAM, I would assume that they spend orders of magnitude more to filter it than they make on the odd video which makes it through before it is flagged. For sex trafficking, I will grant you that there is technically more that they could do to avoid hosting the odd video. For example, they could require a notarized statement about the identity, age, residence, location and travel accommodations for anyone in a video uploaded to their platform, and I am sure some anti-trafficking charities are calling them out to do such that. Obviously they don't do that because that would destroy their business. But that is different from consciously deciding that you want more sex trafficking videos.
Suppose I had an axe to grind against letter or parcel shipping companies (perhaps I think they ruin brick and mortar stores, or have some religious objection to cardboard boxes). Saying that parcel shipping is evil and should be prohibited, while it might be my true belief, will likely not convince a majority. Instead, I could go after something which is tangentially related and very unpopular: dark net marketplaces (for the record, I think DNMs for drugs are not very objectionable, and clearly better than dealers in street corners and all the violence that brings, but I recognize that is a minority view). If we take the reported gross profits of Silk Road (100M$/year), and conservatively estimate that drug vendors spend 10% of the Silk Road commission on shipping costs, this means that FedEx and co have made at least ten million dollars per year from drug trafficking!
This is your argument in a nutshell.
Of course, if I was Texas, I would not just outlaw these companies (which would be seen as partisan and un-American), I would simply pass legislation which forces these companies to do everything in their power to stop drug parcels, i.e. mandate that ever parcel is inspected with a CT scanner by a trained operator. Oh, you can't operate profitably under these conditions? Real shame, that, but we are not going to cut you some slack when drug shipments are involved.
Meanwhile, most of the drug sellers would just switch to use the US postal service (which is not covered in the Texan regulation) and send small quantities of drugs in letters.
They'll hopefully move onto the boorus or hentai or whatever, where at least no real people suffer. It's not exactly educational content but it doesn't weirdly push incest and it's harder to confuse with reality. As far as I'm concerned, killing pornhub would be an unalloyed good. It's not like there's any prosocial value like Fedex or whoever else.
Furthermore, I've read a fair few stories about their business practices that really do resemble the mustache-twirling villain. The verification system they have from producers doesn't seem very effective. From the NYT:
Even though it's not possible to crack down on internet pornography, it is at least possible to wipe out the biggest and most obnoxious offenders and rake in a bit of cash too. You're confusing my 'loot and burn' gunboat action with nation-building.
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Minus the notary I think this is in place for identity, age & residence at least; federal penalties are severe and I think it's pretty widely observed in the pro world:
https://adultbizlaw.com/2012/10/22/porn-101-18-u-s-c-2257-the-basics/
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We already have plenty of evidence that no, people are not aware of the difference between reality and fantasy.
My sources here are going to be limited because googling these topics is a distasteful experience.
Choking: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/sep/02/i-think-its-natural-why-has-sexual-choking-become-so-prevalent-among-young-people
Similarly anal:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/11/rise-in-popularity-of-anal-sex-has-led-to-health-problems-for-women
I don't have statistics on an increase in incest irl as a result of incest in porn (and I'm not interested in doing much googling it) but it's enough of a concern that people who work in organizations dedicated to fighting child sexual assault mention is as an additional risk of the legally produces videos, aside from the cover and camouflage those videos provide for the millions of videos of actually illegal rape
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/dec/16/online-incest-porn-is-normalising-child-abuse-say-charities
There is a sub-Reddit about "incest is not wrong". How much this is real people who really think banging your full-sibling or your dad once you're all grown up is just peachy, and how much this is a kink site, I have no idea and not much interest in finding out. But like they say, whatever you can think of, it's out there on the Internet.
Not helping are the kinds of chin-stroking 'thought experiments' on philosophy sites about "but why is consensual incest wrong, you Neanderthal knuckledraggers who aren't as big brained as I am?" and, of course, contrarians but contrarians we will always have with us.
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One of my friends is a porn producer and has been in the game for a couple decades. One time I was talking to him and the whole step-thing came up, and in his opinion it's simply popular since it injects taboo into a scene without requiring anybody to do anything actually physically excessive beyond a standard pornshoot.
We're beyond saturation point for normal PIV, so just doing a quick find-and-replace in your normal script to slip in 'stepwhatever' gets you equivalent taboo value as having to recruit people to do stuff that's actually physically onerous. Also the relative paucity of large families plus the increased rate of step-relationships adds fuel to the fire.
I hadn't considered that, but yeah: with divorce and remarriage and having kids outside of marriage, it's a much more 'realistic' scenario now than previously, because there is always that faint chance the hot chick you saw at the club might be a half-sibling by one of your momma's baby daddies who moved on to have other kids with other women. So you get the taboo and the nice, naughty thrill, without doing anything "physically excessive" as your producer friend says, plus it's becoming much more relatable to the audience.
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In theory, the term's pretty clearly picked to mimic federal obscenity-to-minors jurisprudence from Ginsburg, which... is a clusterfuck, but supposedly trades socially redeeming values against what extent the material is 'patently offensive to prevailing standards of what is appropriate'. In practice, I'd expect the Texas AG's going to act more based on what he thinks he can get away with and who makes particularly good news headlines.
There's some good arguments for this policy (and some against: do gay or trans versions of those get commissioned? should it recognize any kink at all, if in very 'correct' ways?). There's even been some, albeit mixed, efforts along those lines (one 'documentary' is very popular among het breeding fans, which... uh, Shinzo Abe meme, but probably not intended). You even get really awkward discussions about what the 'correct' age for this involves, and that's not a fun thing to even consider.
I dunno. I was a late bloomer. I don't think I have a good model for a lot of what'd be best, here, or even what a lot of potential harms would be. There's a lot of motions in both law and psychology about how any exposure to even 'normal' sex early on can cause harm, but then we're relying on a bunch of (mostly 1970s) psych research, and I would prefer not to.
I'd expect it's even less good than that: the end result's just going to make the stuff operated by American businesses less profitable and crush smaller actors, and scare straight websites that intermix adult and non-adult content.
Sure for lesbians, gays and trans. Actors who are bisexual in that they have partners of different partners in different videos are also fine. I am under the impression that group sex is not something which a substantial fraction of minors will end up doing, so how to organize a safe and fun gang-bang is probably not required. Perhaps some light BDSM, if that is not too niche, safewords and all.
The idea is not to provide a nice version of every porn genre there is, because most of the kinkier stuff is unlikely to make it into their sex lives. Most people's first sexual experiences do not involve needle play and a couple who is into that is likely to search for best practices beforehand, while a couple who is into vanilla sex might be under the impression that as they went trough sex ed and watched some porn, they are sufficiently prepared. Focus on pacing, boundaries, contraception, lube and how to have a great time when PIV is too uncomfortable.
While from the WP description, this looks like a good effort, it is notably targeted at girls, which would still leave boys to learn sexual behavior from porn.
I think that until minors have unrestricted access to the internet, there is no reason to give them access to sex videos to prevent them from going to pornhub instead. Realistically, I would not want any 6-yo with unrestricted internet access. At age 12, a kid is going to have access to the internet. If you lock down their devices (and are more tech savvy than your kid), there will always be a classmate whose parents are less concerned and let them have a smartphone. Ideally, their smartphone would be configured so that it blocks hardcore porn but allows access to educational sex videos from that age, without the parent or state pushing this too much into the face of the minor. If they never google for "sex video" until age 18, no problem.
Humans have been around millions of years longer than privacy has, so I have every reason to believe that in the ancestral environment, children would be exposed to more sex than in the contemporary Western world (though with worse illumination, depending on the taboos of their specific culture). I think a kid of any age watching its parents have sex through their ajar bedroom door will perhaps pick up a fetish or two out of the experience, but not be traumatized for life. By contrast, being made to watch, being flashed or being made to participate in sex acts is obviously very likely to disturb the development of a child (especially if it is against the cultural norms of their society).
This is just my gut feeling, but I think that my gut feeling is about as valid as 1970s psych research :)
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Suppose we invent a new and improved form of heroin. Unlike normal heroin, you can't overdose on it, it doesn't cause chemical dependency, you won't catch anything from taking it because it comes in pill form. It also costs basically nothing. Like heroin, consuming it feels really, really good, significantly better than 99% of other experiences, and it puts you in an incapacitated stupor, often for between 1-3 hours a pop. Some people want to try to keep children and teenagers from having unrestricted access to this drug. Do you think they have a valid concern?
I'm more on Team Gooner, which I'm sure will surprise absolutely no one, but this metaphor seems to occlude more than it illuminates. I've got some complaints about its accuracy, but assuming it for the sake of this discussion:
`1. Why is this 'drug' different from any other over-the-counter one, not just that people want to restrict children and teenagers from having access, or even that the state gets involved in restricting access, but that it's so vital that state restrictions can put sizable burdens on adults doing things entirely away from minors? Things like alcohol or cigarettes have the obvious physical ramifications that you're pretty clearly -- no one's getting cirrhosis of the dick, here. Am I missing some other parallel, or what distinguishes gooner materials from vidya or youtube or people who get way too into painting minatures or spend every weekend at a sportsball game?
`2. Why is this 'drug' so bad for minors such that we're willing to accept onerous restrictions on adults, and yet not something we need to hold against the adults themselves. There are restrictions like alcohol and cigarettes and the entire DEA. Maybe Texas won't end up being that bad, if only by the standard being set so low, or maybe we're just being cautious because it's so dangerous otherwise?
Or are restrictions going to keep going on from children and teenagers to everyone else? Because a lot of people, including the Texas politicians writing this bill, pretty clearly want to restrict it in general.
`4. Why is it so hard for advocates of these restrictions -- either on minors, or on everyone -- to actually focus on this 'drug'? No one was gooning from a single 1970s Playboy or a couple grainy standard definition videos; it's supposedly something specific to modern porn that's so much worse... and yet the Texas law here wouldn't just cover a 1970s Playboy, but even material softer-core or less overtly prurient than that. Even people here treat hobbyist weird content as at best as acceptable side effect.
`5. There's a model of addictive personalities as responding to spaces they can't get fulfilled otherwise, in the same way that mineral deficiencies can drive people to find weird or even inedible things delicious. In addictions with serious chemical dependency or withdrawal it's hilariously wrong, but gooning doesn't seem to have those things, and some gooners even challenge themselves to go long periods without (... usually in November, for acronym reasons).
That old TLP article has a punchline in the middle about how "Pornography is a scapegoat", and while TLP puts it on ego and narcissism because... uh, well, he's a coastal psychiatrist. There's a pretty mindboggling set of statistics about the sorta thing (not-Aella) people usually do before consensual sex, and everything from dating to marriage to mixed-sex casual meetups are all down the tubes.
Is this missing nutrient model wrong, here? If it's right, might it suggest to something else that's driving more of the changes in behavior people think is downstream of a couple hours on an unexciting hobby and a jacked right wrist? Because if there's something broken in relationship formation well before sex (or, uh, handies), removing that outlet might cause people to start putting a lot more effort into working around the break... or it might end up with a stampede of people going over a creaky bridge held in place by one rivet. And given how broken relationship formation is (especially for <18s and <25s), I'm not optimistic about that.
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Are you implying that masturbation (1) feels significantly better than 99% of other experiences, (2) puts you in an incapacitated stupor for 1–3 hours, and (3) can be performed as many times per day as you want, just like a real drug can be taken? If so, I think you're exaggerating a little too much.
I mean, masturbation pretty clearly does feel really, really good. It, uh, results in an orgasm.
See response here.
I guess I like orgasms more than you. Or maybe you get much more enjoyment out of videogames than I ever have.
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We're talking about porn consumption, not masturbation.
...One of the best porn-related pieces of advice I've ever seen is from The Last Psychiatrist:
...He gives this advice, because he thinks people need it. Why do you suppose he thinks that?
I've been depressed for a few years, so I may be misremembering the comparative enjoyment. But, IIRC, before I became depressed, playing video games was a much more reliable source of enjoyment than masturbating to a jade-like beauty, and fapping was merely an extra bonus that could be quickly extracted at the end of the day without requiring me to invest hours of time into it (but still requiring a significant amount of annoying arm exercise).
Based on personal experience, I assume that the meme is a gross exaggeration and the typical person engages in, not two-hour edging/gooning sessions, but 30-minute fap/schlick sessions.
It takes all sorts, I suppose. The meme is not an exaggeration, though, and the phenomenon is widespread enough that it is a meme and you have heard of it.
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No. This new law effectively requires adults to upload their driver's licenses for age verification.
(I don't know what "a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data" would be.)
what if you're homeless/transient and don't have a driver's license or any other sort of ID? That's the argument that's always been used against requiring voter ID, so I don't see why it wouldn't apply here.
Just because a really bad argument has been adopted in other contexts doesn't mean we should extend it to enabling homeless people to masturbate anonymously in the library.
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So what? You don't have a right to easy porn, so even if an ID requirement is an onerous burden, onerous burdens are fine sometimes.
In this case, the law requires age verification for a web site run by a commercial entity where one third of the content on the site is 'harmful to minors', or the Texas AG can bring 10k USD/day charges even if no minor has visited the website. There's a lot of speech you do have a right to that can fall under that bar.
Maybe it's close enough to the right policy as to be worth that burden, but it needs to at least be considered in the context of what it's actually promoting, not just what the sticker on the front says.
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I feel like these burdens should get their own category. It's not really onerous. It's actually very easy to meet the requirement to upload a picture of my driver's license. It's just stupidly dangerous for my well being.
It would be like if airport security asked you to stick your hand into a wood chipper that sporadically turns on to get your fingerprints. There is a helpful little red and green light to tell you when it's safe, but damn I'd rather not trust my fingers to this machine run by minimum wage employees. And of course if my hand gets mulched I'm allowed to sue the judgement proof employees, or the shell company wood chipper manufacturer, but not the government that put the requirement in there in the first place.
Yeah I don't disagree it sucks and is inconvenient and has risks. It's just they're allowed to make porn access inconvenient and risky.
I think if you are not allowed to ban something then you shouldn't be allowed to make access risky. All bans are is adding a risk component to a thing. You can at least pretend like onerous requirements serve a purpose. Where onerous crosses over into risky is where I'd prefer courts to draw a line and say "you are just banning the thing, so unless you are allowed to just straight up ban the thing, get rid of that requirement."
Isn't this how it is in meatspace?
Going to the shitty area of town to the adult bookstore was one of the things you could do when you turned 18.
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Sure, but not in this case.
The internet has always been open for all.
Porn has been around since day one.
I remember trying to go on espn the first time I went online in maybe 1996 via AOL and porn came up. No damage done.
This is, imo, just puritinism.
I get it’s not a right … but having to wait for someone to unlock the deodorant to buy it is annoying as hell.
It is if you go off the beaten path of the internet. The difference you're recognizing is that the beaten path of the internet didn't used to be all that much of it insofar as it existed at all. But you'll still be bombarded with porn ads and porn spam if you use imageboards, pirate, etc.
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You know, I am not a puritan and don't really care if porn is available. But are we really supposed to be concerned that homeless people can't access free porn? Like their presence isn't making public libraries and coffee shops unpleasant enough as it is?
Porn, setting aside you saying both "porn" and "free porn?" No, inasmuch as that seems like the least of their problems, liberty aside. Everything that a state or municipal government may deem harmful to minors? Yes. (And California already has a law against advertising guns/shooting sports to minors.) And while it's easy to say "Well, I can't think of anything like that I want homeless people to have," it's presumptuous to think this category will remain small, with SCOTUS giving governments a favorable precedent, and presumptuous to think one knows what tools/services are best for the homeless (compare politicians who propose to "fix" the cash-based economies of the working poor). (And short-sighted to say "I don't care if homeless people suffer;" they're not going to suffer purely in ways that don't affect you, no matter how much some people hope this would be the case.)
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Yeah, the 'homeless person' concern is not the main objection, and I don't think anyone here's going to care what Texas' policies about low-cost IDs are.
That said, I think there are serious privacy and chilling effect concerns regarding this specific implementation and how it interacts with normal website management. The Texas law applies to any website run by a commercial entity (with a tiny number of exceptions), where more than 1/3rd of its content is 'harmful to minors', must do this verification or face sizable fines (up to 10k USD/day, plus 250k USD if a minor sees any banned content). Any web host operating in the United States that serves both adult and non-adult content, or even repeats content from its users, needs to do some pretty serious evaluations.
This wouldn't be too rough if the burden from age verification was tiny -- you take the precautionary principle to the max or divide the website and/or commercial entity -- but that doesn't seem to be the case. The plaintiffs here had a bit of a nut for a lawyer, but his claims that age verification could cost 40k USD for 100k users were plausible enough for a skeptical Texas court to accept it. That's steep but workable for a conventional commercial porn site; HB 1181 does not operate based on being a commercial site selling porn, but on being a commercial entity serving partially adult material. Even if he's off by a 'mere' couple orders of magnitude, there's a lot of websites and services where that's going to bring the risk-reward underwater, or outspend what sort of losses that a hobbyist is willing to lose out on.
So they have to get rid of the porn?
Whatever you think of porn on an individual level, it has ruinous effects on society. A chilling effect on porn is clearly 'good', even if a determined actor can still get it. 'Not having porn on hobbyist sites' seems well worth whatever inconvenience it causes to people with the weirdest hobbies ever.
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This is about teenagers, not homeless people. It is, specifically, an age verification law- yes, getting around it is probably very doable for a motivated young lad, but we can reasonably assume that the people the law is explicitly targeted at are the ones most affected.
It is a privacy violation with the purpose of deterring adults pretending to be an age verification law. "Think of the children" is as usual nothing more than a cover story. As Kagan notes, if it were just an "age verification law" and the impact on adults was as minimal as possible while still achieving the goal of deterring youths then the law would survive strict scrutiny and the majority wouldn't have had to twist itself to support lower scrutiny.
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I don’t actually mean to care about the homeless here - it just seems like me putting in my Drivers License to watch a Nikki Sims pov video from 15 years ago or something more obscene and German may lead to someone revealing this to people in an attempt at something.
Replace me with ten million other people I guess.
Maybe it’s an unfounded fear but there’s tens of thousands of people right now upset that Leo went to a wedding - I don’t want to not retire in 20 years because I have a foot fetish, and on occasion watch foot fetish video, of which on occasion veer towards obscenity.
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Well, no, it hasn't.
Yeah, thieves suck.
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Ah, I see. Well, that makes more sense, then.
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Basically credit card transactions or services using those transactions. It might allow MindGeek-like auth, but the US doesn’t really have that. Presumably with a good faith effort to validate that the credit card holder’s name is above 18, though it didn’t come up in any args I could see.
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