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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.
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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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