It's the worse than the previous gilded age inequality causing all this despair that drives people to cope in increasingly self and society damaging ways, surely. Look a little further than porn. Porn (to that level) is a self administered medicine for the sick, not the disease.

The disease is despair. As a socialist I'd argue that despair is primarily caused by alienation from our labor and the fruits of that labor. For decades now we've seen X% increases in productivity increase our bosses wages X%, not decrease the amount of work we have to do to earn the same money, or make more money ourselves.

We see an increasing share of society confident our jobs provide no value. Porn drugs gambling over eating all the addictions are an attempt to quell despair.

And can we really be surprised a world where 3 own more wealth than the bottom 50% combined[1], is abundant in despair?

>at one point he did seek mental health treatment, failed to find it, and consoled himself with...porn

You say near as much here, to my ears.

>low cost of consumption

You're really on to something here though. It definitely is the easiest vice to consume. Like imagine if heroin were free in infinite amounts out of your computer I imagine a lot more people would become junkies.

>for some people, it really can be as bad as Texas claims.

And here too really on to something. This is a bar, if cleared, we deem acceptable and actionable. One we can and do warn all users for , look no further than cigarette packaging. Really interesting stuff here for something I never gave much thought to past blind rejection as ridiculous.

[1] In the united states

Does this happen? I've yet to see this phenomenal be validated in studies, but the closest I've read is that certain individuals have really good gates or have a very narrow taste and thus keeps themselves restricted.

But overall there's no conclusive evidence that makes a person with a "normal brain" become a pedophile, a furry, a fetishist or whatever because they watch porn.

Otherwise we would see more of this escalation in other issues like drug usage or watching, reading or listening to violent content.

But we don't, the issue also is that studies about porn is so often junk because of the bias against it (one case 40000 studies looked over less than 1% was usable)[1].

Now again I need to stress I am not making the claim addiction does not exist when it comes to porn, but instead it's the "you start with seeing an attractive face and you end up a becoming pedo" slippery slope with no conclusive evidence beyong trust me, bro.

And it doesn't either help that a lot of anti-porn are driven by religious or political ideology when there are genuine concerns that you could chalk up to being anti porn but not due to an agenda (like addiction, body image, dangerous kinks, etc).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_pornography#:~:text...

I'm anti-porn primarily because of the harm to women and girls. The pornography industry is built upon misogyny and abuse. There is a huge predatory aspect to it, with many of the performers being trafficked or otherwise coerced. It encourages its consumers to view women as subhuman sex objects to be degraded, abused and tortured.

Perhaps this could be considered a feminist agenda, but I consider these to be genuine concerns.

To give you an example:

Let's say you want to ban or put up several restriction in the road where you live because of playing kids or elderly people.

In this case you're not against the idea of cars existing and you main focus is to see a resolution that suits the concern at hand, no cars on the road or at the very least a compromise (speed limits, roadblocks, etc.) to that specific road.

A person with an agenda to say ban all cars will completely agree with your concern, however they will further push and push and demand the total ban and even push for banning associations with cars (if we take it to a more fanatical degree), because it might "entice" people to build their own cars.

And in both cases there might be studies and data that support both of your claims (traffic accident statistics, studies conducted by your department of transportation, news papers documenting murder/death/injury caused by cars, etc.) but even then it does not make the anti-car arguments untouchable.

With specifically using anti-porn from an agenda perspective, they do not want to stop at real issues with porn, they want it banned and criminalized - no matter if there are nuances.

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I do agree that there probably are cases as you state of trafficking victims casting as porn stars. In fact in Russia it's far, far worse than that.

But I would also argue at the same time that even then, the fundamental issue isn't the foundation of porn, but instead the lack of society acceptance and subpar treatment and scrutiny of the industry.

Instead I would argue that what you seek is a similar push towards is what the Labor movement did for blue collar workers which is no exploitation, no coercion and full rights to unionization and labor rights enshrined in law.

Plus ending the stigma about "sex", not to the point where you can show up naked at a funeral, but at least we should treat porn actors/actresses and prostitutes with the same respect and dignity as the common worker ought to be.

If the Romans/Greeks/Egyptians and more could marvel at the natural state of man and woman, I think we can also do this without casting judgement as if these statues were a symbol of sin and degeneracy.

And I do agree with you there's a very unhealthy narrative within porn about how we ought to look at men and women and how we ought to be "judged" based on sexual characteristic (which sometimes is beyond our control), but I think it's a lost cause to throw in the towel and go scorched earth (not trying to make the claim that you are, just that it's all too common for anti-'anything' to move in that zealous direction).

One argument I've heard is say for instance that the meta story of porn movies have all but disappeared (the cheesy acting and cheesy plot) and instead shifted to hyper-accelerate instead onto the "act" or "object" and as such we've moved away from seeing the experience/plot as erotic to only merely the "perfect" sexual attributes.

I guess people are trained by infinite scrolling pages to be mindless consumption zombies.