A porn user claiming he's fine carries about as much weight and authority as a drug addict claiming he's fine. You've been watching since your early teens, and

A porn user claiming he's fine carries about as much weight and authority as a drug addict claiming he's fine. You've been watching since your early teens, and presumably wanking. It's all you've known for practically your entire post-pubescent life. Porn is very damaging, and habituates destructive habits, disordered views of human beings, disorders the appetites, and impacts cognition and perception of reality (which used to be called "mental blindness" in the classic texts). It creates a fantasy harem in the mind, an escape into delusion, and cripples one's ability to relate to members of the opposite sex in a healthy manner. Never mind the destructiveness of wanking itself. No one has the right to make, distribute, or watch pornography. The idea that it even could be a right is absurd, as no one has the right to what is unethical. And it isn't free speech. It is obscenity, and obfuscation of this fact is tiresome. If banning the production and distribution of this filth outright is too difficult to achieve politically, then burdensome regulation is a good Plan B. I would prefer targeting the industry, personally, rather than individuals, but perhaps there are reasons why that, too, is too difficult to achieve politically in the current climate. Recall that Alan Dershowitz pulled off a nice piece of legalistic sophistry when he defended porn as "free speech". Perhaps that's the notion that needs to be roundly defeated first, before we can crush the industry as a whole. But it is worth mentioning that restrictions on pornography use are not new. Israel effectively requires citizens to register to be able to view it. That's quite a light touch, but obviously goes beyond what we see in the West. The law has an instructive dimension, and banning porn and stigmatizing it can help nudge most people away from such bad habits, and signal that it is not good, serious, and shameful. Consider that porn is also weaponized, and has a history as an instrument of psyops, both domestically and against foreign enemies. (In a military context, and since we mention Israel, recall how Palestinian airwaves were flooded with pornography when the IDF captured a Palestinian TV station in Ramallah some years ago. You think the Israelis were trying to "liberate" the Palestinians by doing that? If porn was a nothingburger, you think it would have been used in that manner? The US has employed similar tactics.)