What PH is really bad at is content moderation. Should they improve that? Absolutely. Is this grounds for legal action? Maybe it is. Is this a good reason to boycott them as an individual? Go for it! But is this a reason for a payment processor to get involved? I think it's not. But you're free to disagree.

As for "soul-sucking debasedness", please stop imposing your sense of morality onto others. Yes, there are some people who are forced into porn for various reasons, and we as a society should try to prevent that -- just like we should try to prevent all kinds of abuses. But there are many people who enjoy working as porn stars. Don't judge them.

If tolerance is the highest value, you have arrived at the end of values itself, because everything must be acceptable. I do not subscribe to that point of view. I do not applaud that which I find to be destructive for a world worth living in.

And more importantly, it doesn't have to be any of those negative things. Sex work and pornography can be enjoyable for people on all sides of the equation. The fact that it often isn't is a problem to fix, not a reason to brutally narrow our perspective on what's acceptable in the realm of sex and sexuality.

Yes. This is not the limit of my criticism, far from it. There is a world of difference between sleeping with 15 truckers a night, ie physical prostitution, and a middle-class student selling nudes on OnlyFans. The problems with the middle-class version of prostitution are the second order effects. I briefly touched on those in another reply in this thread.

1. They don't feel "tremendous shame and grief about it", you're just projecting. They wouldn't be doing it in the first place if that was the case, at least for the middle-class ones that I'm talking about.

2. The "significant harm later in life" does not stem from the (imaginary) shame & grief, it comes from the discovery when they inevitably hit The Wall that no high-quality mate wants to marry them, and that they have tarnished their reputation forever for a short-lived boost in income and attention that is guaranteed to fade one day. The progressive culture and their friends will tell them about "sex positivity" and that prostitution is just "sex work" like any other work, which it isn't. You will not agree to that of course, "I don't own her body haha".

If there is one thing to take away, let it be this: look at the people around you and their relationships, and observe what works and what doesn't. Don't theorize, don't moralize, don't judge, just observe and make up your own mind.

It doesn't matter.

Or rather, if the only idea you have for solution to the situation is repression, it doesn't matter what you think of the impact of porn because you're not going to stop it, you're just going to create "porn and repression, together" just like the war on drugs created drugs and repression together.

Guns and small pox weren't net wins for a lot of societies they were introduced in but once things start with certain processes, you kind of need to find mitigation, not a heavy handed repression.

And sure, a better for people to relate together than exists currently would be great but shoving the genie back in the bottle isn't going to it.

You also paint the picture of a new porn-DEA. I don't know what to say to that, except that I don't favour Sharia Law.

I posit that the ever expanding scope of liberalism with regards to intra-sex dynamics is the (or, at one of the) causes of much despair and grief, because they inhibit pair-bonding, family formation and are deeply non-lindy for various reasons. We see this in the number of older women taking anti-depressives, we see this in levels of male celibacy unprecedent since the middle ages, and collapsing populations all over the western world. None of these questions and dilemmas are new, they are as old as time. The idea that the rules have suddenly become invalid is naive at best, and destructive at worst. This will be non-obvious if you approach this from the viewpoint of enlightenment philosophy. It will become quite obvious if take the historical perspective on human behaviour and how societies function.

Is porn/sex work really being "normalized" in a historically contextual way? Outside of about the last seventy years (maybe less), prostitution and sex work were extremely common, and, compared with the modern era, basically not criminalized. I'm not aware of a body of research that demonstrates a causal relationship between the consumption of porn and any social ill. I'm also not sure if I feel like I'm in a position to decide if OnlyFans customers would be better off without that outlet.

There’s also a dynamic where people quickly get bored with porn and start consuming increasingly extreme or fringe porn to get the same satisfaction which I think is new. To clarify, kinks aren’t new, but just like political extremism, the internet is much better at radicalizing people into them.

I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, and I’m somewhat libertarian on the issue if only out of resignation, but I think that online pornography is extremely new and unprecedented and may indeed be very detrimental to society.

Anecdote of one, but I use it not infrequently and still have a healthy and fun sexual relationship with my spouse. Managed to produce two children and participate positively in society too. I may be baised, but I think I'm at most 25% degenerate. That being said, maybe I'll try going without for a while and see whether it has any effect.

Sources?

Also you seem to let's assume unintentionally mixing porn with its production modes, its ecosystem, all of its problems, plus the mental health problems of rich men, and so on.

It boils down to the fact that you're wanting to let opinions on "how things should be" steer availability of core economic infrastructure, rather than relying on the legal system which is more properly setup to come to these conclusions.

EDIT Oh PornHub is now implementing the following measures:

a.) allow uploads only from verified users;

b.) no downloads;

c.) improvements in moderation

Maybe I'm actually for this then. Apparently this is what it takes.

https://fightthenewdrug.org has the data. I'd be curious to understand data or reasoning that makes a compelling argument for the contrary ("porn is great or neutral for society").