Besides, I'm not sure why you think that parents are able to be 100% in control of things that their children see/eat/etc. Should we legalize nudity on billboards, and would your suggestion then be to "simply drive on different roads"?
This is a modern social experiment, and while we don't have data on its consequences because so much else changed culturally at the same time, snarkily referring to people concerned about porn at a sociological level as harboring sky-wizard concerns indicates you haven't thought about the issue very much.
I'm non-religious; I have major concerns about modern or organized religions, despite recognizing psychological benefits or even necessities of religion in the abstract. However, I'm still very concerned that porn is causing unrecognized, negative consequences for society.
I don't mean all porn. I think some porn probably has net-positive effects on society and individuals. I'm talking about average, typical porn. If you go to places where lots of porn is shared, and you look at prevailing attitudes and fetishes in those places, and you think the only possible concern derives from sky-wizards, I think you're blind.
The one very recent saving grace of porn in its latest incarnation is that average amateur porn seems to be less horrifically impersonal and non-representative than average professional porn. That's tempered by the massive rise of parasocial relationships and simping for e-girls, which isn't necessarily porn per se but it's porn-adjacent and probably sociologically problematic too.
I don't know what the solution is. Porn bans are impractical, and I don't know what force could counter the ability to hang out on pornhub clicking on each new thing that looks even more enticing than the last, unleashing fetishes and unrealistic expectations. Some people seem to adopt a strong porn aesthetic that keeps them focused on less fetishistic, less absurd, and I would argue healthier porn. However, that's not the majority, and that's merely my personal subjective assessment. I have no idea if what I think is healthier porn is actually net-positive. It just seems that way to me. This is something we need generations of data on with the rest of society not changing much, and we're never going to get that.
Since I haven't brought up "sky wizard", perhaps if you have any actual evidence of harm you might show me?
*Citation needed
The fundamental questions are
1. Does porn usage line up with other patterns of addiction?
2. Are similarly addicting things withheld from children because their brains are less equipped to handle it?
If yes to both, then it’s a no-brainer.
Well, yeah, it would...
>1. Does porn usage line up with other patterns of addiction?
I'm not sure what this question is asking. Porn usage may or may not 'line up' with patterns of addiction. That doesn't mean that porn always or even the majority of the time is. Can you rephrase this question into something more coherent?
>2. Are similarly addicting things withheld from children because their brains are less equipped to handle it?
LOL absolutely not. Children, especially American children, are given huge amounts of sugar, which is actually physically addictive. Many are given huge amounts of caffeine which is again, physically addictive.
Millions of children around the country have tons of access to video games and TV, which can be addictive.
>If yes to both, then it’s a no-brainer.
Well, you're first question doesn't make any sense, and your second question is a resounding no.
The best way to keep your child from becoming addicted to anything is to act like a parent.
A kid with a peanut allergy who came into contact with peanuts, even accidentally one time, could be fatal.
And we already have something similar for porn sites, in the form of the "Are you over 18?" landing page banners.
You're not arguing that "laws don't actually do anything", right?
Gun control laws? Japan's ex-PM got blown away by a wacko with a homemade shotgun, so I guess gun control laws just don't work. Nevermind the rate of gun violence in Japan.. it's all or nothing.
that assassin was motivated by an extreme religious affiliation to the lawmakers. There is irony here.
> In 2019, 37% of US high school students reported lifetime use of marijuana and 22% reported use in the past 30 days.1 Past-year vaping of marijuana also remained steady in 2020 following large increases in 2018 and 2019. However, large percentages of middle and high school students reported past-year marijuana vaping—8% of eighth graders, 19% of 10th graders, and 22% of 12th graders.
> Past-year vaping of marijuana also remained steady in 2020 following large increases in 2018 and 2019.
I've got a guess about why the number might be rising, and it rhymes with "egalization", in which case, yes, making drugs illegal reduced use of drugs. I guarantee fewer people in general, including fewer kids, smoked when it was illegal, and less was consumed overall. I'd further bet there's a lot less pot consumption by kids now, than there would be if dispensaries didn't verify age.
But I also suspect it's just kinda hard to get clean data about teen drug use. I'd also guess the real figures are extremely uneven (that "8% of eighth graders", if accurate, probably means 20% some places and 2% in others) and high use correlates to places where it's easy to get, which supports the notion that carding or outlawing should reduce use (since they make it harder to get).
(Nb. I'm pro-legalization, I just think carding and outlawing almost certainly strongly curb use, though of course they don't stop it completely, and I think "this wasn't perfectly effective, so it's necessarily useless" isn't a strong point in most situations)
People do "make changes" for specific allergies & food restrictions by making the information available & creating some allergen-free zones (just like adult content is currently kept out of schools and family-friendly locations, and there are adult-content warnings most times) but peanut access is absolutely currently up to the parent, in general.
I'm not even sure what the billboard thing is getting at. We shouldn't have nudity on billboards (except female breasts in nonsexual contexts), just like we shouldn't keep peanuts where we know anyone allergic has to be. Counter-hypothetical: it would be incredibly stupid to lock up peanut butter because kids might take a $5 bill to the store and buy the clearly-labelled jar.
We mandate labeling. We could not do that and just say "parents, you must run a peanut-detection lab or have extremely restricted diets of only food you make yourself, to keep your kids safe", but we don't.
I realize I'm beating a dead analogy here, but I don't think we should impose those labelling restrictions on independent hobbyist websites, just like we don't require licensing or ingredient labelling for small bake sales.
But even if we did, "label obviously-adult content" would be way more reasonable than "collect personal information to verify the real-life identity of site visitors, and log this sensitive data so it can be accessed (/hacked) later"
It's still very much on the parents to prevent harm to their peanut-allergic children.
As an aside, the sharp rise in nut allergies is itself an unintended consequence of another well-meaning attempt at social engineering: about 30 years ago, manufacturers began printing "CHOKING HAZARD: DO NOT FEED NUTS TO CHILDREN UNDER TWO YEARS OLD" on nut labels. Many parents complied, and that lack of any early exposure to nut proteins resulted in a massive increase in life-threatening nut allergies among children.
But your attitude is, in a historical context, weird. At basically no point in history has it been the case that the sole responsibility for the well being of children lay entirely with the parents. If you look, for instance, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (see the Parenthood article section Parental Responsibilities), you will see, for instance, that throughout most of western history and for most people, there is an explicit or implicit understanding that it is, in fact, the parents who operate as stewards of children _on behalf of_ society and that the ultimate locus of responsibility for the security and well being of children is the society at large, not the parents. This is why, for instance, the state is typically understood to have the right to remove a child from the home of an abusive or neglectful parent. Given that understanding, there is a commensurate power in society to make rules which may protect children and in our particular historical moment these rules take the form of laws at multiple levels of government.
It places a powerful (and disordered) burden on parents to make them _exclusively_ responsible for the safety and wellbeing of their children.
In Hammurabi's Code fathers could literally sell their kids into slavery. This seems strange, shouldn’t society protect kids? But it turns out that’s a relatively recent idea, instead there were rules around what happens when both parents die but children were plentiful and many died or where even killed by their parents without consequence.
Which doesn’t mean I disagree with them, just that their argument isn’t sound. Slavery was also depressingly common and I am glad it’s become vastly less common today.
generally, human civilization is us picking and choosing sensible/humane parts of cultures we encounter. the romans who conquered greece were of barbarian culture, only civilized by their adoption of the greek culture, which they later spread to parts of the world the conquered. the greeks remained uncivilized for a long time as well. they attribute most of their development to encounters with egyptians and babylonians. thus, it's almost possible to see a primitive culture that upheld some of the core values of our civilization today: human rights (not too far back but pericle's athens abolished slave trade), etc.
If you go to Wikipedia for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide
“Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent.”
“Infanticide became forbidden in Europe and the Near East during the 1st millennium.” Except if you dig into the details those bans where very local, it continues:
“Christianity forbade infanticide from its earliest times, which led Constantine the Great and Valentinian I to ban infanticide across the Roman Empire in the 4th century. Yet, infanticide was not unacceptable in some wars and infanticide in Europe reached its peak during World War II (1939-45), during the Holocaust and the T4 Program.[2] The practice ceased in Arabia in the 7th century after the founding of Islam, since the Quran prohibits infanticide. Infanticide of male babies had become uncommon in China by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), whereas infanticide of female babies became more common during the One-Child Policy era (1979–2015). During the period of Company rule in India, the East India Company attempted to eliminate infanticide but were only partially successful, and female infanticide in some parts of India still continues. Infanticide is now very rare in industrialised countries but may persist elsewhere.”
Thus as far as we can tell it was common globally from the Stone Age up until quite recently. Also of note, those bans wouldn’t necessarily be reflected as a change in all cultures in that area only the options of those running the country.
> At basically no point in history has it been the case that the sole responsibility for the well being of children lay entirely with the parents.
The state will _inevitably exercise power_. Only a vigilant citizenry can hope to modulate it.
Republicans can completely ignore California and Democrats can completely ignore the Bible Belt (except GA which is now Purple)
As far as what the state can do. Again as a parent, when my children were minors, we chose trusted family members to be their guardian. If that wasn’t an option, we would have chosen friends.
No matter how you feel about the abortion issue for instance, even in conservative states, the majority of people don’t want more restrictions as proven by recent ballot initiatives, yet the politicians are still passing laws.
In my home state (Florida) the government is wasting all kinds of taxpayer money going after Disney and out of the list of things Florida and especially my city (Orlando) cares about is that Disney spoke out against a policy.
So you can’t have multiple marriage licenses, but you can legally hold a public polygamist civil ceremony followed by “cohabitation.”
Granted people want the legal befits of a recognized marriage rather than the state to treating it as two actors preforming a ceremony as part of a play. But such distinction are relevant when you say something is banned.
“On December 13, 2013, a federal judge, spurred by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups,[25] struck down the parts of Utah's bigamy law that criminalized cohabitation, while also acknowledging that the state may still enforce bans on having multiple marriage licenses.[26] The state of Utah appealed the decision, arguing that polygamist Kody Brown (whose relationships were documented in the show Sister Wives) lacked standing to bring his civil suit, since his county prosecutor, Jeff Buhman, had not followed through on any plan to prosecute the Brown family. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (Denver) agreed with Utah and overturned the previous decision, thus effectively recriminalizing polygamy as a felony.[27]”
Of note, the state of Utah won the appeal because they didn’t bring action against the group rather than because the lower court’s decision was incorrect. Thus polygamy can remain illegal as long as nobody is ever prosecuted for it.
It also mentions: “Given that almost no polygamists bother to seek a second marriage license, the practice of forming a family with more than one spousal-styled relationship is very difficult to criminalize. In the majority of cases, the additional partner is considered a wife in the context of religious beliefs. Legally speaking, the practice is more akin to adultery.”
> If even one of the marriages is a legal, civil marriage, then Kody and the wives are probably guilty of bigamy under Utah's definition. The Utah Code states that a "person is guilty of bigamy when, knowing he has a husband or wife or knowing the other person has a husband or wife, the person purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person." This is broad in three respects -- it criminalizes the behavior of both purported spouses, not just the one who is already married; it, as interpreted by the state's highest court, includes religious ceremonies undertaken without a civil license as falling under the heading of "purporting to marry"; and it criminalizes cohabitation (as well as actual marriage) with a second person while married to someone else.
The family brought the lawsuit, which was thrown out because they didn’t have standing. They lacked standing because the government hadn’t prosecuted them.
If the community’s role is to protect children, maybe the community shouldn’t be creating the trap in the first place.
Children are curious creatures. It’s natural that they are curious about sex and the human body. In the past they could look around and see members of their family, tribe, etc nude and having sex. Now we’ve taken that away and made it taboo. You can either do nothing, try and lock it away harder, or go the other way.
It’s a very complex issue though so there’s nothing close to easy. But this kind of legislation seems like a fight that has just as much to do with a particular religious viewpoint as it does anything to do with “protect the children”.
Calling a parent shitty because their kid does something they would prefer they didn't means we've all had shitty parents. Kids are individuals that gain preferences the minute they gain any sort of mobility and trying to reign everything in will backfire.
I don't have strong opinions on this particular topic. I don't think porn is quite so damaging as others to the point where society needs to protect them. But the rational response to the views you expressed seems to contradict your actual views on the subject of how parents should raise their kids.
Kids are going to do things their parents don't like. It's literally part of the kid learning about the world and themselves. It's shitty parenting to not know how to deal with this rather than trying to pass laws so that they can pretend the kid is just a miniature clone of their worldview.
You do parenting and education yourself, protect yourself and your kids from any kind of harm outside. If you can't do it, just admit you are incompetent and don't force consequences of paying taxes on me
just because schools and the "government" exist doesn't free you from educating or taking care of your kid outside of those contexts. learn to be a parent
The web is maybe easy to control, but what about all the other means of communication kids have now, like in-game social tools? In the end that comes down to do you ban everything that could cause an issue, and then you are isolating your child from their friends.
Even if that issue is solved, I've heard stories of kids 'forcing' other kids to watch porn on phones at school. How do you prevent that one? Most often the other parents are unaware, don't care, or even provide the porn.
If we want to live in an environment where children have any degree of autonomy, that means delegating some aspects related to restricting age appropriate behaviors to the state. Now, I'm not a fan of government mandated age restriction on websites, but your point is obviously not well thought out.