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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25661 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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The right wing has seemed to gain some ground on the porn-being-viewable-by-children issue. North Carolina has passed some legislation requiring age verification for adult sites. I remember Matt Walsh at least advocating for this quite strongly. Not only that, but it's not the first state to do this; laws in Louisiana, Virginia, Utah and Montana also require age verification. Pornhub's response is to block access to its website in these states, stating the following:

“As you may know, your elected officials in North Carolina are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” adult entertainer Cherie DeVille said in a video message that pops up when users attempt to access the website. “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”

“The safety of our users is one of our biggest concerns. We believe that the best and most effective solution for protecting children and adults alike is to identify users by their device and allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that identification. Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in North Carolina.”

That statement by itself actually boosts my opinion somewhat of Pornhub; a device level safe search would probably be the best approach to this. Parents could set the birthday of the child in question, a password locked setting, and the phone could then block access to many of these sites. There probably exists some amount of parental options like this, right? I have no knowledge of them, but I doubt they quite reach the level I'm talking about here. If any of you know anything about child safety tools currently available to parents for Android or iPhone, let me know. I'm sure there's a ton for Windows and Linux, and maybe macOS too. You could even get pretty scary and start talking about algorithms that determine if local files are porn or not.

There would certainly be some ways to skirt this, but as always there are ways around any law, really, if someone is motivated enough. Even with a border wall, some Latino illegal immigrants would manage to climb or swim around it, or get in some other way. Despite all the background checks in the world, one could choose to 3d print their own gun. When lawmakers create legislation, they're not counting on that legislation stopping everyone; just stopping most people is satisfactory.

However, none of that is on the table right now. What is on the table are these current laws; Virginia doesn't specify how the sites should verify that users are 18 or older, but others like North Carolina require an external commercially available database containing user age information. The porn sites check with this database and verify the user. At least in theory, if sites like Pornhub and e621 don't decide to self-immolate in response.

I think the arguments for this are pretty obvious. For conservatives, porn is pretty obviously bad for kids, and as that article says, over half of 13 year olds have seen porn by that age. Pretty bad! Requiring some ID would at least nail the mainstream sites that they use. That alone could do a lot. And asking for this database isn't too much; we ask for IDs in various other contexts. Alcohol and cigarettes come to mind. And buying porn in person would require the same. I'm pretty sure you can buy tobacco online, though I do not know the method for verifying the age of customers.

But there's plenty of ammo for people to dislike this law, too.

  1. If you take easy access to porn away, some kids will chase it down elsewhere. Viewing a Pornhub uploader's video is very different from getting into a Discord chat and getting porn directly from a stranger. The latter would be almost impossible to regulate, and it's a lot worse for children. They could also go onto worse virus filled sites.
  2. The effectiveness of this does not seem to be very high. This is the internet. There's an incredible amount of sites out there and it's impossible to catch them all. And preteens and teens can be incredibly motivated in seeking out explicit content. Without parental oversight, this probably wouldn't slow down most kids. Legislation can't replace parenting.
  3. Database leaks could be a problem, depending on how that's handled.
  4. If this becomes a nationwide thing, for people who want to avoid databases for privacy concerns, it could get a lot harder than just grabbing ProtonVPN and going to town. Maybe it would be adopted internationally and you'd HAVE to sign up for the database. Having such a hurdle to something that is arguably a free speech issue would be frightening.

What I'm mostly disappointed in are these redditors that seem to take it for granted that the legislation is a bad thing. Because they assume it's just about exerting control and the Republicans are fascist dictators and Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater. I don't think these are convincing arguments. The people passing these laws are probably the same types that go for things like the Brady Campaign, they're not supervillains doing evil things for the sake of it.

Leaving aside the arguments against it you've already mentioned, I am utterly unconvinced that seeing porn is "bad" for kids. The majority of studies on the longterm effects on pornography showed just about zilch in terms of effect, be it on sexual violence or anything else. The fact that conservatives consider it "obvious" is of little consequence to me here. The entire debacle seems to be far more concerned with arguments from moral purity rather than concrete harm, and I have an exceedingly dim opinion of those. Parents who want their kids to not watch porn should invest in parental controls, not a nanny-state, not that either will really work.

Well, at least it might make the little tykes more tech-savvy, at least they'll learn to use VPNs or even just torrent videos. Or else they might just learn to develop a vivid imagination, you don't need porn to jerk it, don't ask me how I happen to know that. I'll pour one out for the poor aphantasics.

I am utterly unconvinced that seeing porn is "bad" for kids.

As others have mentioned, this is going to be almost impossible to study.

I don't need to prove porn leads to rule-breaking or delinquency for it to be a net negative. That's not what I'm concerned about. The hedonistic treadmill available in pornography is astonishing. "Our" generation had the fences of bandwidth and screen resolution around us - and even so there was Goatse, One Guy One Jar, LemonParty.

I would be hard pressed to find someone who thinks that moving from a squirreled-away lingerie catalog to piss-bangs was healthy for their sexuality. Of course Close Your Eyes Haha and all that, but asking a teenage boy to do so isn't a historically simple ask.

I don't know where that meme comes from, but the studies I see show negative effects on adolescent exposure:

On the negative side of behavioral patterns, a small number of previous studies have addressed the impact of exposure to pornography on adolescent behavioral problems: rule-breaking or highly delinquent youth [41,70] and youth showing symptoms of borderline or clinical depression have been reported to use pornography more frequently [41,71,72]. Similarly, Ybarra and Mitchel [42] (2005) linked pornographic consumption with behavioral problems and depressive symptoms. Accessing online pornography may be a dysfunctional way to cope with stress or with abnormal mood, and as such, it is reinforced and maintained [73]. Accordingly, Brand, Laier, and Young [74] suggested that problematic internet use is associated with expectations that the internet can positively influence mood, the disappointment of which may in turn worsen preexisting mental health problems. Alternatively, the content of the pornographic material may impact negatively on youth by shaping adolescent beliefs and their attitudes towards sex, which may, in fact, come into conflict with those instilled by their families [75]. Tsitsika et al. suggested that Greek adolescents might develop unrealistic attitudes towards sex through exposure to online pornography. These conflicts need to be addressed in sex education classes. Psychosocial impairment associated with pornographic exposure suggests a need to further explore and address underlying mechanisms reinforcing pornographic use behavior among some adolescents.

Regarding aggressive behavior, Mesch, in his study of the social characteristics of pornography users in a sample of Israeli adolescents aged 13–18 years, found a significant association between pornography consumption and aggressiveness in school, with higher degrees of consumption related to higher levels of aggressiveness [45]. In a similar study discussed previously, Alexy, Burgess, and Prentky [76] found that juvenile sexual offenders who were consumers of pornography were more likely to display forms of aggressive behaviors such as theft, truancy, manipulation of others, arson, and forced sexual intercourse [76]. The effect of androgens in both sexual and aggressive behavior shown in the past could be a possible mediator of these relationships [18]. Testosterone levels are positively correlated with the level of aggressiveness, violent behavior, and sexual offences, particularly among adolescents [77,78]. However, well-designed studies are necessary in the future in order to clarify the causality of this relationship.

If you want the keyword that gets all the salacious articles on Google Scholar, search "“Problematic pornography use.” It is a subset of and is the most common manifestation of CSBD (Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder) in the ICD-11.

In brief, PPU is related to: (a) attentional biases toward sexual stimuli, (b) deficient inhibitory control (in particular, to problems with motor response inhibition and to shift attention away from irrelevant stimuli), (c) worse performance in tasks assessing working memory, and (d) decision making impairments (in particular, to preferences for short-term small gains rather than long-term large gains, more impulsive choice patterns than non-erotica users, approach tendencies toward sexual stimuli, and inaccuracies when judging the probability and magnitude of potential outcomes under ambiguity).

What studies are you looking at that show otherwise?

All of those demonstrate correlation and not causation, but thank you for tracking them down. Certainly I don't care at all if their parents disapprove of them consuming porn, as one of the concerns quoted.

Here's an example of what I recall from Psychology Today

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/talking-apes/202104/does-porn-use-lead-sexual-violence

And:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359178909000445

The effects of pornography, whether violent or non-violent, on sexual aggression have been debated for decades. The current review examines evidence about the influence of pornography on sexual aggression in correlational and experimental studies and in real world violent crime data. Evidence for a causal relationship between exposure to pornography and sexual aggression is slim and may, at certain times, have been exaggerated by politicians, pressure groups and some social scientists. Some of the debate has focused on violent pornography, but evidence of any negative effects is inconsistent, and violent pornography is comparatively rare in the real world. Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships. Although these data cannot be used to determine that pornography has a cathartic effect on rape behavior, combined with the weak evidence in support of negative causal hypotheses from the scientific literature, it is concluded that it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior.

Emphasis added.

The experimental research Ferguson and Hartley mention are mainly varieties of showing a college student a video and asking them to answer a survey immediately after. I would not expect that this experimental design is able to detect the effects anti-porn activists are concerned with. Many of these college students likely regularly engage in porn, muddying the waters.

The studies on pornography showing positive effects on attitudes towards women explicitly exclude violent porn. "It is important to note that in the present paper, the focus of our literature review and research is on pornography represented by examples such as Playboy, sexually explicit but nonviolent videos, and adult movie channels." Garos, Beggan, Kluck, and Easton (2004) Are parents supporting these bills worried that their children might stumble on a Playboy magazine, or are they worried their kids are watching an 18 year old girl in a simulated gang rape?

Research by Scott (1985), however, found no correlation between semi-hard-core pornographic magazine consumption and rape rates, but consumption of more soft-core magazines were correlated with rape.

They were studying such a different phenomena from what we are experiencing today.

Regarding the correlational studies, 98% of men in America have watched internet porn in the last six months. When there are so many people in one group, and so few people in the other group, correlational statistics get wonky. Looking at kids is the only way to get a large sample of people who haven't been exposed yet.

It also seems weird to blame the decrease in violent crime in the US on the proliferation of pornography, when there are so many other things to blame, like decreasing lead levels in childhood, increased abortion rates among impoverished groups, etc. I am not familiar with what happened in Denmark during this time, maybe they had a lead problem as well? But being able to cherry pick three other countries that match the correlation does not hold a huge amount of weight. One hypothesis that fits the evidence could be that we would see even less rape if pornography had not proliferated.

Potential confounds abound and no one is going to be able to conduct an RCT for this.

Anecdotally a lot of men report “porn brain” interfering with their ability to have normal relationships with women. Having decided to be done with porn about a year ago, I do notice a difference. But there’s a also a finding-religion confound in my case.

Self-reports from those who can't access a counterfactual surely would be strongly biased by explanations that are available and believed in our society. Some centuries ago, people would have reported humoural deficiencies as the cause of their problems.

But there’s a also a finding-religion confound in my case.

Would you mind writing more about this, when you have a chance? Religiosity among Motteposters is very interesting to me, as I've been wandering a bit down that path.

I would be interested, if the mods give a green light, in doing a standalone thread for motteizeans to write about religion in their lives.

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