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What even is 'adult' content? [NSFW]
- oliv__ 1y agoCould use a NSFW warning tag
- pmlnr 1y agoSo could a lot of classic art, right?
- anthk 1y agoAs an European with non-censored History books in my teenage years, that nudity was... boring. Women just lying in a bench with... dull, bland, faded out colours. I would need far more to get laid.
- guappa 1y agoMy anthology book had a few pages from Ulysses by Lob & Pichard. I went to a catholic school.
- JackFr 1y agoMy daughters went to a Catholic all girls high school. The translated Catallus 16 in Latin class. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16 I don’t think anyone considered that the Latin syllabus might be a cause for concern.
- pjerem 1y agoAs an European with non-censored History books in my teenage years, that nudity was... ok because I was working from home today. This picture isn’t sexual at all but it’s still Not Safe For Work in the strictest sense. I still wouldn’t have opened it in the open space :)
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoSure, unless your job is in a museum. Thing is though, if you can get in trouble for browsing the internet while at work looking at anything at all, you probably shouldn't.
- 71153750 1y agoI think you are being voted down but I disagree. I opened the article before the tag was added and although I very much appreciate the author's point, I think the added tag is necessary. Would be hard to argue any form of nudity appearing on my computer screen even it were an artwork I feel. The tag has been added. Society is tricky, nudity on the internet more so.
- amiga386 1y agoFor those who are now fearful to click the link, its an opinion piece about the given topic, and it's illustrated with a stock photo of a nude pregnant woman. The author's point is that this nudity is not pornography. So it's not "adult content", but probably "NSFW" unless you work in a maternity hospital. Just as a comparator, the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy leads with a clothed pregnant woman (unlike the pages on e.g. labia, penis, anus, breast, which lead with a direct shot of the body part), and overall that page has photos or illustrations of 4 clothed and 3 nude women (and a CT scan volume render, does that count as nude or not?)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- danielvaughn 1y agoWhat’s funny is that the image doesn’t load for me, and I’m in FL where we do have laws about online adult content.
- Chazprime 1y agoTry reloading the page, it didn’t work for me either the first time.
- homeonthemtn 1y agoThis is a relic mindset from the start of the Internet. The website itself even visually reflects that. Is there a marginal grey area around adult content? Yes. But beyond that margin is a vast ocean of explicit, intentional adult content. As someone who grew up in both the decentralized "new" era of the Internet, and now lives in the hyper localized algo driven version of it... It's all shit. And I'd never want my kids to be exposed to it.
- pmlnr 1y ago> hyper localized algo driven Maybe this is an even bigger problem.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoFor sure; viewing adult content is one thing, radicalization causing large political and societal shifts is a much bigger issue. Objectification is one thing, going back to an idealized version of the 50's where women were (in the idealized version) subservient to men is another.
- dandellion 1y agoAny young kid with a phone is cooked these days. NSFW content blocking makes such an insignificant dent into that issue that it pretty much rounds down to zero. What it does effectively though, is give the government an excuse to put in place more ways to control what people can read or watch.
- pmlnr 1y agoCensorship is one thing, the ability to blackmail anyone is more terrifying for me.
- tgv 1y agoYou're absolutely right. The article claims you can't define pornography by deliberately choosing a few borderline examples, and pretending that's all there is. It's simply not a good way to discuss the online safety act. One could apply the same kind of reasoning to theft: "I took a friend's car without his consent, but I returned it, with a full tank. It would make zero sense for him to denounce me to the police. They wouldn't even think of prosecuting. People borrow things all the time."
- calcifer 1y agohttps://archive.ph/53Eay https://archive.ph/53Eay (Warning: NSFW)
- anthk 1y agoThanks, but it needs JavaScript.
- uncircle 1y ago“Porn is fine, but Javascript, no thank you” :)
- ta1243 1y agoI don't see porn on that site, nor anything not safe for work
- evertedsphere 1y agono javascript please, we're british
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoClearly payment processors and lawmakers are focusing on the wrong problems here.
- forinti 1y agoSome Brazilian tribes had fertility festivals with dances meant to arouse the males, because simple nudity wasn't enough to get them interested in sex. So maybe making nudity less common or accessible only makes it more valuable as a sexual thing.
- pmlnr 1y agoIt's a much bigger question why, such a completely natural and normal thing, like nudity, in the supposed to be educated - at least in basic biology - 2025, be made and exclusive thing. The intro of the 1986 Once upon a time... Life animation series, that's the best human biology educational program that exists to this very day, starts with scenes many would classify as nudity - but it's also essential to the topic and the education it displays.
- krapp 1y ago>It's a much bigger question why, such a completely natural and normal thing, like nudity, in the supposed to be educated - at least in basic biology - 2025, be made and exclusive thing. Western culture and its morals around sex, gender and nudity are founded on the patriarchal taboos of the Abrahamic religions, whereby human nudity in general, and female nudity in particular (because women are the source of original sin,) is to be considered shameful. That and we're currently in the midst of a right-wing political reactionary shift against the progressive norms of prior generations (and a moral panic about "groomers" and "pedophiles") which makes censorship of this type far easier.
- tjs8rj 1y agoSo China and Japan are abrahamic? India is abrahamic? Every civilization on earth has norms against public nudity. Seems to be something more fundamental than blaming abrahamic religions
- pmlnr 1y agoJapan?! The place where there's a festival of dicks? Lol. It shows how little you've seen of the world.
- metalman 1y agoanything that needs legal consent or age of majority to do, so all the sexy stuff, voteing, owning , buying and selling property, killing people(in the line of duty), running for political office, etc....someis deemed to be suitable for "viewing" and some not, but all fallunder the same legal umbrella of "age of consent/majority" where traditinional comunities had various ways of inducting, youth, and outsiders into the various "mysteries" anybody alert may have noted a child saying "YOURE not supposed to talk about that stuff with us around!!!, huff, huff, eye rolls.....adults, sheeesh" that stuff....
- Havoc 1y agoIt’s the checking part that’s the bigger issue to me. Speaks to some weapons grade incompetence at highest levels of government Sending passport scans to random sleezy websites that are likely not even under British jurisdiction is beyond insane
- RansomStark 1y agoI think that is the point... Like most things UK government related, this is about what is best for us, and what is best for us, is no porn, and no privacy. Handing over details to sleazy websites is never going to happen. Everyone is going to use a VPN. That's the point. Next year, maybe the year after the government will concede that age verification didn't work and more needs to be done. Then they come for your VPN. The BBC, always the mouthpiece of the UK government is already laying the groundwork [0]. I know how tinfoil hat this sounds, but at this point, its not a conspiracy, its just how the government that created and sold nudge units [1] operates. It's decades of thinking "they won't do that" then watching them do it. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k81lj8nvpo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k81lj8nvpo [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team edit: spelling
- worldofmatthew 1y agoI am planning a blog post soon on this topic and all the ways a "VPN Block" can be bypassed and how even trying could cause internet bills to skyrocket.
- dcow 1y agoThat’s the whole point of digital id. You won’t be sending a passport scan you’ll be sending a verifiable blob of data that says you’re over 18. Is it incompetent to ask for ID to purchase alcohol? Because that’s all this is, but more privacy respecting…
- nemomarx 1y agoDo they have that implementation? When I looked into it I thought you had to send your passport scan to a vendor of some kind?
- h1fra 1y agoHard question, and Instagram is getting abused by this. They allowed breastfeeding as a non-porn category, now you have hundreds of OnlyFans account faking breastfeeding. Effectively ruining the progress for everybody.
- kingkawn 1y agoIt is good to challenge these arbitrary norms through what amounts to a wild combo of civil disobedience and grifting
- AlecSchueler 1y agoI'm a new parent who recently stumbled into the world of Instagram breastfeeding pornography. I just wanted to say that the content I saw seemed to be almost universally published by men rather than women pushing their own OnlyFans content. I know you probably didn't intend it that way but I often see criticism of OnlyFans specifically made when I wouldn't have seen it around traditionally male operated pornography publishing, and sometimes there's a feeling of subtle misogyny creeping in.
- Lockyy 1y agoThere's more than a subtle misogyny to the anti-OF messaging people throw around, not to label the grandparent comment as falling into this issue. I have seen comments along the lines of "Onlyfans spotted, opinion dismissed," numerous times online under posts/videos completely unrelated to a content creators OF business. The idea that a person is a sex worker and therefore a slut (in a derogatory rather than reclaimed sense) and therefore they and their opinions are worthless, is the unstated logic of this sentence. The misogyny drips off of the concept of an Onlyfans lessening someone.
- 9x39 1y agoWould you celebrate the choice of entering sex work like, say, that of someone entering medicine or law? “You’d make such a good porn star!”, we could say encouragingly to a new grad considering between OF and Stanford. No, we wouldn’t, because despite a weird and deliberate normalizing effort in some corners of the Internet, it’s an intrinsically degrading field run by pimps physical or digital now, and an existential history of abuse and degradation.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- laurent_du 1y ago> The image attached to this blog post is a stock photo of a nude pregnant woman. Absolutely nothing sexual. How is this not sexual? The fact that it's a stock photo, or that the woman is pregnant, is irrelevant. It's very clearly a sexual picture.
- macintux 1y agoThe question comes down to: is nudity inherently sexual? Not everyone feels it is.
- laurent_du 1y agoLet's be real, everyone feels nudity is inherently sexual, except on HN and probably on reddit where men love to claim that it's not. I don't know if it's virtue-signalling, sexual frustration, or something else. It does sound weird and creepy to me - grown up men who claim that naked women are not arousing, the same men who rally en masse every time pornography censorship is discussed, to complain about freedom of expression, when they are really just afraid they will lose the ability to stare at naked women having sex. Another, more charitable, explanation, would be that a lot of people around here are asexual. It's possible - but to this extent? I am skeptical.
- nemomarx 1y agoNude beaches are pretty old as a concept? Always a niche community but there's definitely been hippies talking about non sexual nudism for decades and etc It must have been non sexual at some point in our historical development, before clothes. So I can't really agree that it's inherently so - just that we've culturally made it a sexual thing for basically all of history. That might be close though to functionally be inherent to human society depending on your viewpoint though.
- aaomidi 1y agoThere are plenty of people who grew up in naked households. Ranging from just being nude at home to being intermittently undressed around others. Do you think those people found nudity sexual? How about doctors and nurses that see naked people all the time? Is simple nudity sexual for them? How about athletes that shower in open showers together. Are they experiencing a sexual experience when they’re showering after practice? There’s so many counter examples to this that saying nudity is sexual is just silly.
- ta1243 1y agoIt's not hard 1) Get any porn site that is going to obey this to instead list themselves in some open way (TXT record in DNS, blockchain, some other form of list) 2) Get any provider in the UK to block access to those lists if the account owner wants it. That's ISPs and phone providers. I'd say it should be opt in, but opt out would be a reasonable compromise. That way I can be happy that my 12 year old won't accidentality end up on some really shady porn site following a link from a classmate's whatsapp if they aren't at home. Of course classmates can still share the content on whatsapp, and this isn't going to stop that. If you want to really tackle the problem - and this would be really controversial -- have lists of "healthy porn", which people could opt in via their ISP to allow, or perhaps allow for a set period. I have no problem with a teenager looking at boobs, there's a big difference between the modern equivalent of FHM or playboy and many kinds of aggressive porn that's just as accessible.
- louwrentius 1y agoIt's very hard. Teenagers will teach each other to circumvent any of this within seconds. It's as old as the internet. But maybe it would be healthier if you discuss this topic with your 12-year-old. The reality is that they'll be able to find any kind of pr0n within seconds when they has access to an unfiltered computer or phone. At age 12 it's also expected that you start the transition from a child to an adult, so trying to block the outside world isn't preparing them for the freedom they'll encounter at 18-21. The idea that there is even a definition of 'healthy' porn seems ludicrous to me. That's not 'really' tackling the problem. That's not understanding the problem in the first place. Speaking of which: there isn't a problem in the first place.
- ta1243 1y agoThey're really not interested yet now and get annoyed when other kids in the class post it It's about being able to control and monitoring in the real world, where unlike the 90s the "family computer" isn't the thing in the corner of the living room. There's 6 more years before they're an adult, 4 more years before they can legally have sex, and typically at least 4 years before they start heavy petting, plenty of time to transition. Someone on their first driving lesson isn't dropped in the middle of the arc de triumph and told to drive to Rome, it takes a lot of lessons to get that far.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoI'm not trying to knock the author, but I would have used a much more durable example for experiencing nude content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_sculptures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_sculptures
- andsoitis 1y agoand specifically the most beautiful sculpture of all time, Michelangelo's David - https://www.accademia.org/explore-museum/artworks/michelangelos-david/ https://www.accademia.org/explore-museum/artworks/michelange...
- amiga386 1y agoPuritans chiseled the penises off Greek statues, indeed the lead image of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship is a fig leaf over the penis of Michelangelo's David. It wouldn't be appropriate to use a form of nudity we now find "acceptable" (statues and paintings), when those media were attacked in their time by the same type of prudes who attack modern media (JPEGs of nude women on websites)
- willidiots 1y agoMeanwhile, violence remains perfectly acceptable.
- JackFr 1y agoIf people are gonna use “natural” as a justification, nothing more natural than violence.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- Lockyy 1y agoAdult content is whatever is deemed to be objectionable and abhorrent to the dominant social group within a culture and that which needs to be censored and hidden from public view. Beyond a desire to "protect the children" from sex, violence, and drugs. It is a desire to hide and suppress dissent around major social issues. It is a desire to label representation of trans liberation and queer lives as adult, obscene. And it is a desire to label realistic representations of history such as Maus and others as unsuitable for children. This effort is because once labeled adult it is broadly socially acceptable to do anything and everything necessary to hide a concept from public life. A specific recent example is Itch.io's recent removal of all content labeled adult, stemming from coordinated pressure by Collective Shout. The block has led to the hiding of some content labeled as lgbt, despite not containing adult content or being labeled that way.
- salawat 1y ago>And it is a desire to label realistic representations of history such as Maus Dare I ask, wtf is Maus representation of history??
- nemomarx 1y agoIt was an autobiographical comic about the Holocaust? How's that not a representation of history?
- salawat 1y agoNever said it wasn't one. Just never heard of it. Wasn't aware it was considered obscene either. Will look into.
- nemomarx 1y agoIt's got some depictions of violence that I think parent groups object to, so that kind of obscenity. There's technically nudity in some of the dead bodies I guess?
- 1y ago
- binary132 1y agothese people really need to stop with the shameless gaslighting
- tbrownaw 1y agoAh yes, this concept has fuzzy edges and therefore isn't valid. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
- danbruc 1y agoWhy is this discussion always about nudity and sexuality? Would it not be much better if children see people having fun fucking each other than seeing people murder each other in countless ways? Why is it more acceptable to show Wile E. Coyote trying to murder Road Runner by dropping anvils onto him than showing Bugs Bunny and Lola Bunny fuck each other? Ignoring for the moment that children probably find the former much more funny than the later.
- dcow 1y agoGraphic violence generally is considered adult content. Let’s not pretend slapstick comedy is the same as graphic violence. Furthermore, you/kids definitely see cartoons where one character is enamored with another (heart eyes jumping out of sockets) and pursues that character for the entirety of the episode.
- jodrellblank 1y ago[Edit: I've been chronically online for a long time and seen this argument hashed out many times, and this blog post is one of the shallowest considerations of it. For context, the UK's online safety act has just gone into force and Reddit has switched all NSFW-tagged subreddits to require proof of ID for UK visitors. There's a lot of interesting argument to be had about government overreach, subs which are non-pornographic being included, the loss of pseudonymity when tying an account to a real world ID, the people who are "proving" their age with AI generated images, the mass sending of UK PassPort data to 3rd party American companies (not even to Reddit); "but who can say what is or isn't rude? Hah!" is ... basic. Anyone can say. Most people can easily say and be right often enough to be useful. Observing that people disagree on some edge cases is not an argument.]. > "It’s simply too subjective (teenagers will find almost any nudity sexual, no matter its context). How does anyone decide if any nudity is age-appropriate? Especially at scale." OK (blog author) has made the case that one cannot decide, the government has gone with "ban by default". If you (blog author) object to that, can you make a case why that's bad? You wrote "apart from 'think of the children' being a classic call to censorship" so you've closed off that route for your objection which may have been a strong one. If you work then you have given your employer proof of ID for things like showing your right to work in the UK, getting a paycheck, or a criminal record check; so the principle of an employee proving their age seems out of scope for you to object to - at least you haven't made a case that people need to be able to work anonymously. [Although the method of proving one's age is up for argument, it's not this argument]. It boils down to: if you can't decide, do you allow by default or block by default? Government has gone for default-block, blog author seems to be taking the position that default-allow is better but has not made a case why. By comparison we tried that with digital security - for years computer systems were default-allow and it caused a lot of problems and we've had to reengineer them to have firewalls, ports closed, seperated user accounts, minimal user account permissions, minimal data-execute permissions, minimal employee access to company systems, minimal access from one app into another's data, then in each case grant-as-necessary with proof of identity and audit logging that it happened. Result? Reduced problems, reduced hacks, reduced crime, limited blast radius of mistakes. It used to be that we made any product and sold it, and over thousands of years we got fed up of saying "okay you can't make bread padded with sawdust", "you can't sell arsenic wallpaper", "you can't sell deathly metabolism boosters as diet pills", "you can't sell public buildings that are a death trap", "you can't say your product was approved by The King if it wasn't" and flipped to say "you can only sell medicine and treatments which are generally recognised as safe, or you prove case-by-case that they are safe", "your advertising must tell the truth". And that's better. We humans also used to be naked by default, and over time we've switched to being clothed-by-default. Occasionally it results in people having to cover their genitals when they'd rather not, but mostly it's resulted in body protection from sun, heat, cold, brick, concrete, metal, and reduced amount of poop covering communal seats and other surfaces, the ability to carry stuff in pockets and is generally a big win. Frankly, "here is an edge case hah gotcha" is geek fun for arguing, but a shitty way to decide what to do. If a sorting algorithm sometimes doesn't sort things it's a dealbreaker, but a restaurant which keeps separate raw and cooked fridges, separate chopping boards and knives, and asks the staff to wash their hands with soap before food preparation might have an edge case where they employ someone foreign and dyslexic who cannot read the English sign about hand washing and because of that some customer gets food poisoning is a far far better situation than saying "hah I imagined an edge case therefore let's not have any public health laws, let's just make it a free for all".
- nrvn 1y ago> The image attached to this blog post is a stock photo of a nude pregnant woman. Absolutely nothing sexual. maiesiophilia (pregnancy fetishism), maschalagnia (armpit fetishism)…
- do_not_redeem 1y ago... and? We shouldn't erase things from the world just because some people have obscure fetishes. I'll keep having balloons at my kid's birthday parties, despite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_fetish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_fetish
- spacemadness 1y agoYou obviously didn’t read their article then because they already made your point in a following sentence.
- dcow 1y agoI’m sorry… all these comments about societies banning nudity and graphic violence are really skirting the point. In the context of modern age regulation, at a social level, nobody is arguing people at large should not have access to violent and sexual content. This isn’t about religion oppressing women’s sexual freedom. The argument is that children should not have unguided access to adult content. On top of that most parents I know allow children to experience violent and sexual content with supervision. The goal is not to censor society, it’s to draw some reasonable and realistic lines in the sand so parents can introduce sensitive content to children in a way that is empathetic with their child’s context and maturity level. Now I’m sure even that is arguable, but the conversation should be around that and not superficially related tangents.
- nemomarx 1y agoThe recent payment processor stuff is more "no one should be able to have this at all" than age gating, so I don't think there's a lot of faith this week that people still stick to only hiding it from children.
- macintux 1y ago> In the context of modern age regulation, at a social level, nobody is arguing people at large should not have access to violent and sexual content. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/project-2025-porn-ban-lgbtq-transgender-rcna161562 https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/project-2025-por... > Just five pages into the foreword by the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank, the proposal stakes out an uncompromising position that porn should be banned, porn producers and distributors should be sent to prison, and tech companies that circulate it should be shut down.
- homeonthemtn 1y agoI just want less porn and violence exposure on the Internet. I dunno why this turns into a mouth frothing event. That's a pretty reasonable ask in any other context other than the Internet.