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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25205 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.

A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)

Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.

EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.

Texas recently started enforcing HB 1181, a viewer-age-verification law. The sort which intends to make it very annoying to distribute pornography if and only if one intends to run a business in the U.S.. Hosting a server out of Czechoslovakia is, as I understand it, still untouchable.

Pornhub’s parent company responded by cutting all services to Texas. Should a Texan IP address make a request to their site, he will receive instead an angry letter about his lawmakers’ shortsightedness, questionable legal footing, and so on. Other sites have followed suit. The argument goes that 1) the law only hurts the most compliant companies, and 2) it fails a variety of Constitutional protections.

Naturally, it was wildly popular, passing 141-2. It has also survived legal challenges up to the 5th Circuit Court. Even though one of the provisions was struck down as improper government speech, proponents insist that the rest is perfectly above-board.

So far, it’s looking like another step towards pillarization.

And I think it’s worth noting- nobody is going to call their lawmaker demanding more access to porn(duh) and no lawmaker will go out on a limb to make porn more accessible, nor was Texas the first state this has happened in.

Massive L for our system of government. Who the hell wants to ban porn? And yet, it happened.

"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function."

"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Exposure to this content is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses."

"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography."

Are these things even true?

It's true for some people, at least, or possibly much easier for some people than others, same as alcoholism.

However, there's only something like 12 scholars publishing on it worldwide, and most of the research is very bad of the type "we handed out a bunch of surveys to a 60% undergrad female body" or evaluation of an "online survey".

Banning obscenity and vice are two very popular pastimes.

Who the hell wants to ban porn?

Me.

Who the hell wants to ban porn?

Quite a few people, actually. Even on the ACX survey (not a demographic known for its social conservatism) over a quarter of respondents said that they would wave a magic wand to end pornography permanently if offered the choice. Now making something magically disappear is not quite the same as banning it for a number of reasons, but the sentiment is much the same.

You might be confused because of all those statistics indicating that 90%+ of men have used porn. Past, or even current, porn use is not inconsistent with wanting it to not exist. People don't have perfect self-control, after all, and it is Well Known that people have diminished judgement and self-control under... relevant circumstances. Many people are quite capable of disapproving even of their own vices, and think that it's bad to have widely available temptations for them and others to succumb to them.

I am almost certain that banning internet porn is part of the intention of laws like these, not an accidental consequence. For the state of Texas (and for other states with similar laws) this is the system Working As Intended.

Agreed. Times have changed. I suppose there was an era when porn was largely seen as a mostly harmless pastime of adolescent boys, who were assumed to consume it only in moderation, partly because it was relatively complicated to obtain as compared to now. Not anymore.

Those warning labels are so vague as to be insultingly trite. Impaired brain development/functionality can just be post coital sleepiness, heightened demand for sexual services can just be normal sex stuff... this is almost insulting.

When the word 'gooning' has been not only coined but escaped containment to the point fossils like Norman Finkelstein are aware of it, yeah, it's way past time.

Impaired brain development/functionality

Erectile dysfunction in <35 men has gone up from 2-5% to 20-30% in recent years.

Really no substitute for giving it a try. Just get a good hentai game(youtube link,sfw) and a free afternoon and find for yourself.

'PORN MAKES YOU SOFT WHEN YOU NEED IT MOST' or some catchier tagline would at least make coonsumers pay attention to something. In this current iteration it's as useful as cigarette warning labels. 'SURGEON GENERALS WARNING' is more naggy schoolmarm than hypnotoad.

Re porn games I get the appeal; my Skyrim mod list is basically an archive of Loverslab over the years including now deleted works, and I briefly did product development for VR Mate integration with animated joiplay-generated visual novels. Combining parasocial AI relationships with immersive VR and haptic feedback (fleshlights) is basically a recipe for total motivation death. I honestly think that would be a fucking fantastic way to manage stupid violent impulsive young men.

Texans like to complain about the influx of Californians. But the driver is the traffic.

They're trying to model it off of the Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes, which are obnoxious, but balanced out by the fact that smoking literally causes 5-20% of all deaths in the United States.

They aimed for Koop, but got Proposition 65

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