> Older men are also damaged, but they're likely lost causes
That's quite rude, particularly when you basically say the opposite in the following paragraphs.
> men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness
Men as a class are vulnerable to a lot of things, but they are a hard demographic to reach and, fundamentally, very few people care about their mental health.
Just today, BBC Radio 4 passed a news headline about UK suicide numbers being at their highest in 20 years, with 3/4 of them being men and mostly between 45 and 50 years old. The headline before (risk of quarantine for UK tourists in Portugal) and the one after (Facebook vs Australia on news links) were longer and both had a relevant expert interviewed, but not the suicides one.
> that men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness, and design public health interventions to help divert men
Interesting. The ancient lawmaker Solon instituted public brothels with a standard fee as a public health measure. But people think that s horrible -- damned if you do, damned if you don't. I guess the suggestion is that people shouldn't have sexuality or desires, they should just cut off their genitals and live as vegetables. O what a world we live in
Being choosy about your culture and protective of your youth on a societal scale is necessary. Without it, corporations with Billions of dollars will be competing to extract as much value out of children of families with a median net worth of about 40k. And that already massive imbalance is only getting worse and worse, not just through inequality, but through technology where corporations are more and more able to access their entire mind in evermore convincing fashion (VR up next!).
So you’ll take base desires that should be met as naturally as possible (sexual desire met with supervised interaction with peers of the same age) and you suddenly have unlimited virtual reality porn with facetuned, hyper optimized algorithm, AI generated responses, and suddenly you have a new generation of “incels” or similar who were so satisfied by their internet porn addiction that they never were forced to grapple with... well, real women, and the fact that they are absolutely not constantly sexually available and hyper optimized for your pleasure. And then you have Big Problems.
Listen, these are all, like, opinions, man. But with where we are heading with technology. Having seen TikTok and how it’s radicalizing and dopamine retraining a whole generation... I wish the government would get a whole lot more overbearing with requiring regulation - not to ban it per se, but to ensure platforms that provide it must validate age with more than a checkbox, etc. At least that Apple continues to provide evermore effective parental controls.
Then there's the issue of helicopter-like supervision of children. This is a very recent phenomenon and has deprived the latest generations of any 'risky' and unrestricted encounters. I can understand why they feel the need to escape from it, because it really acts like a prison wall. If anything, their online escapades probably help them to grow and discover their own personality.
Although Puritan culture is certainly not enhanced by media much at all, if anything the exact opposite.
And helicopter parenting is a totally different thing which I don’t like either.
Do you have the same strong feelings about other addictions, like social media in general or gaming? These are industries designed around creating psychological hooks at the expense of their user (some are worse than others).
Should we be surprised people spend that much on porn? I certainly am, especially with its presence almost everywhere today. So there has to be another factor that draws people in. Maybe they have just fun and this is over-analyzing things.
I honestly think they should be deplatformed, one way or another. Young men in their teens and twenties are psychosocially damaged by this style of money-mediated intimacy, and at best they will play catch up with their peers the rest of their lives, and at worst will be permanently stunted. If I had a son, I'd honestly prefer he end up addicted to nicotine than to OnlyFans. (Older men are also damaged, but they're likely lost causes.)
We also need to recognize that men as a class are vulnerable to this kind of illness, and design public health interventions to help divert men from it and pull men out of it if they find themselves trapped by it.