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Roll up, roll up to yet another round in the "Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape, or Degradation of Women And Should Be Banned" boxing match!
This time, news from Ireland. A study by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ‘Use of Pornography by Young Adults in Ireland’, was published today. It's generally on the negative side. I was surprised by this plum which I plucked out - men from advantaged, as opposed to disadvantaged, backgrounds use porn more.
Before anyone goes "Ah yeah, well this is what you'd expect the ESRI in Ireland to say", they're not religious, they're no more right-wing than any semi-government body, the Church has nothing to do with them, and remember we're up to our necks in Pride parades and trans non-binary gender rights (as Leo tried and failed to get with the recent referenda. Speaking of which, I'll be coming back to those elsewhere) with social liberalisation now, so it's not "little Catholic Ireland finger-wags at porn, the backwards repressed bunch".
This is the age cohort they studied, the ESRI says the study is about "pornography use among over 4,500 young adults at 20 years of age" which is when the last reporting was done:
Now! The juicy summation of findings, which is where the hair-pulling starts!
I'm leaving this here for discussion, I'm not going to express an opinion one way or the other.
It is plain to me that "pornography" - in the broadest sense of the term, any material that contains the explicit depiction of sexual activities or sexualized nudity, fictional or not, regardless of context or intended purpose - represents the most urgently necessary direction of development for art in general, the most fertile soil for aesthetic discoveries and innovations, and indeed the greatest possibility of an experience that might be called "spiritual".
Plainly there has never been an epoch of human history where sexuality was not of central importance. And consider the explicitly acknowledged centrality of sexuality in contemporary political discourse - not only the status of men and women in general, but also transsexuality and homosexuality, consent, the depiction of women's bodies. An art that does not fully develop its capacities in this domain is a dead art, an art that has abdicated its duty.
Some of the most important and advanced works of recent decades were not produced by the organs of the academy and traditional "literary circles", but are instead being circulated on obscure Japanese doujin sites and fanfiction platforms.
Anyone who flatly announces themselves as "anti-pornography", without first demonstrating that they have clearly perceived the aesthetic necessity for art to become more "pornographic", instantly arouses great mistrust in me. It is evidence that their senses have been dulled regarding certain vital matters.
I might as well mention it here, even though it's very tangential: today, Gumroad announced that NSFW content will no longer be allowed on the platform (well, I say "announced," but it's more that this KB article was uploaded/updated today).
For those who don't know, Gumroad is a sort of storefront service, akin to Etsy and the like: you open your storefront, add products (generally digital, but there's some allowance for selling physical goods), and people can buy from you. Simple as. The thing that's notable about Gumroad is that probably something like 80% of all products available on Gumroad are NSFW art of various kinds--many 18+ artists who take commissions or run Patreons and the like tended to open up a Gumroad storefront to sell monthly content and such a la carte to fans and others interested.
Now, granted, even previously, Gumroad did have limits as to what you could sell, but I think the hardest line was essentially "no porn of or between living humans." It was otherwise pretty permissible and you could indeed find anything from explicit cosplay to explicit illustrations and everything in-between.
However, some months ago, Gumroad added PayPal support (and/or they had it even further in the past, but removed it at one point?), and was already also using Stripe for credit card processing. Both these companies, as you may know, tend to disallow their services being used to purchase adult stuff (and they themselves attempt to pass the buck to the credit card companies themselves, who have had a policy of not supporting adult stuff because of allegedly high chargeback rates from embarassed men). The announcement today was perhaps inevitable, but still quite disappointing.
If Gumroad didn't do this, they'd presumably lose support and be choked off from money for too long. The CEO did at least try and bargain for an extension to the deadline, but no dice. Every day, the argument of "just build your own financial system" seems like less and less of a ridiculous proposition.
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