5 ms·

It's pretty wild that people think that porn is more damaging to society than censorship.

ivape 1y ago
One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn. You only need to type any random sexual thing and find any explicit subreddit you want, that’s how pervasive the porn is on even an allegedly non-porn platform. Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. We’ve literally gone crazy. Holistically, you’re talking about a hyper sexualized society where the content and ideology are available at high density and velocity from a pretty early age until the day you die. It’s a problem. The truth is one side is not wrong forever. The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue. People need to take a deep hard look at what hip hop did to a generation of youth (both the violence and sexuality permeated deep into the culture). None of this shit is a joke, the kids end up fucked up.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  > that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.... The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue. I have news for you my friend, the Christian right is fucking people up way more than porn. So is the NoFap/incel movement. There are some pretty fucked up people who see women as breeding machines. This is tied pretty closely to the great replacement conspiracy theory and similar white nationalist conspiracy theories. People who believe this junk promote the idea that porn is bad because they want young men desperately horny so they breed with women either with or without their consent. This is the same reason it was a major priority for them to deny women's rights to their own bodies.
- dontlaugh 1y ago
  I was with you until the last two paragraphs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with hip hop.
- gosteinao 1y ago
  > One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn. This has no bearing in reality. The "manosphere" is mostly neo-conservative guys who are sometimes even performatively against porn. > Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. This used to be a lot more pervasive 20 years ago than now? Altogether with the "hip hop" thing, just feels like prejudiced, outdated arguments without data to back it up.
- redpill12345 1y ago
  In the original days of TheRedPill one of the first things recommended was to drop porn IIRC (also workout and get paid more) The manosphere is probably a very large umbrella of all kinds of views only united by one common trait - being a man. Although you're not wrong that society is hyper sexualised and dating has become increasingly transactional
  - ivape 1y ago
    Recommending one drops porn indicates porn a problem for one.
    - immibis 1y ago
      Many things can sometimes be problems. Porn. Video games. Tacos. One time I made myself nauseous by dancing too much (low blood sugar probably). Let's ban dancing, yeah? (Let's ban dancing, I wanna ban dancing with you, all night dancing (it's a reference to a music track))
- southernplaces7 1y ago
  Take a good look at the world around us, and note especially how the countries in which sexual expression and by extension porn are heavily censored also coincidentally have some of the most sexually repressive and hostile attitudes towards women and consensual intimacy between adults of any kind in real life. People being allowed to express sexuality in sometimes crude and commercialized ways is not what you should be pointing at if you want to mention a dangerous progression of society toward violent attitudes around sex.
  - ivape 1y ago
    There are many paths to a fallen society. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said. The answer is always in the middle. I think we've gone pretty far with the proliferation of commercialized sex in the West, and they have gone pretty far with regards to repression in the East. AI is the first time as far as I can remember where just about everyone is considering the ethical and societal implications of it. We really didn't do that for porn, video games, and social media. We're late to the discussion, but a discussion about "how much sex exactly?" is always a discussion that needs to be had. I'd say the same for "how much money exactly?". How much comfort, how much wealth, how much power, how much, how much, how much?
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  Your characterization of hip hop shoots the messenger. It's the stories of an oppressed people, if you don't like the violence in their stories, blame their oppressor. It's the same with porn and the Christian Right. If people feel incomplete and try to fill that gap with a porn habit, the porn is an indicator of a problem, not the problem itself. Filling that gap with right wing propaganda doesn't address the problem, it just changes it into something that can be used for political advantage. You're missing the root causes here.
patmcc 1y ago
They may both be damaging, but currently we have a lot more porn than censorship, so it looks like it's causing more damage. If we flip to having a lot more censorship we'll feel that damage more clearly. Or we won't, depending how successful the censorship is.
- jennyholzer 1y ago
  > we have a lot more porn than censorship How do you know what you're missing? IMO media platforms are heavily censored in comparison to ~10 years ago, to the severe detriment of American pop culture.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- _bent 1y ago
  > it looks like it's causing more damage what damage is it causing?
  - drdeca 1y ago
    I can say that I think my past use of pornography has harmed me. I haven’t used it in over 2 years, but I still on a daily basis observe the effects it had on me. Others might argue that it is only because of my views that the effects are “harmful”, but I think they are wrong.
    - cortesoft 1y ago
      What were the effects?
    - supplied_demand 1y ago
      Can you clarify how it “harmed” you? You didn’t quite answer that question.
      - drdeca 1y ago
        https://xkcd.com/598/ https://xkcd.com/598/ (Except, remove the last panel)
tempaccountabcd 1y ago
[dead]
roenxi 1y ago
I think the issue would be more that people don't accept this is censorship - the surface level here looks like companies negotiating who they will and won't do business with which is actually encouraged. If companies have a moral objection to something then they don't have to be involved. In theory stopping a flow of money takes a lot more than some crazy from Australia getting upset. The real censorship here is that a system has been constructed where payments must be funnelled through a small number of blessed companies and it has been set up that way to ... promote censorship. Authoritarianism in general, really. If it wasn't for anticompetitive regulations one of these game devs could just branch into banking. We've actually seen that dynamic play out in most of our lifetimes - in the early phase of crypto it was mtgox.com [0] that triggered the transition from cool nerd curio in the internet backwaters to a billion dollar market. So we know the pipeline there would work fine in the absence of KYC regulation. [0] Magic The Gathering Online eXchange
- immibis 1y ago
  and those companies aren't heavily regulated. In Europe they regulated exchange fees down to something like 0.3%. They just said the fees shall be low and lo, they were low. They could also easily regulate that credit card networks can't block obscene content.
vitaflo 1y ago
You can’t have a free market without censorship. It’s one or the other.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  Maybe that's true of intellectual property, but are you claiming something more general?
MangoToupe 1y ago
Tbh I lost track of what people thought "censorship" is, especially as a pejorative, many years ago. Not only is censorship good, but information is more free than it has been at any point in history. Just pirate the games ffs.
innocentoldguy 1y ago
In some ways, porn is more damaging, isn't it? For example, there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry. I strongly oppose censorship and believe that payment processors and banks should be prohibited from engaging in it. Still, I have to admit that porn can be extremely destructive.
- __loam 1y ago
  There's no evidence in actual psychological literature that porn is harmful to people beyond making some religious folks feel a little more shame than normal. Porn addiction isn't an actual psychological condition. I question the bit about sex trafficking. From my perspective a lot of consenting adults are making a lot of money by willingly participating in the industry. If someone is abusing that and forcing someone to participate, that's already a crime that should be prosecuted. It's not an excuse to shut down commerce between consenting adults.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  > there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry [citation needed] I'll grant that there is sex trafficking going on at least in the fringes of the porn industry - but that's at least in part because of censorship. If porn production was widely legal and appropriately regulated, there'd be significantly less market for the edgy stuff filmed in Eastern European basements (i.e. the exact same argument as for marijuana legalisation). There are also a bunch of regimes around the world who love censorship, and also engage in a bunch of human trafficking. For example, the UAE is notorious for both widespread censorship, and an entire class of foreign workers in various forms of indentured servitude (which for women is often prostitution)...
  - innocentoldguy 1y ago
    Here you go: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/pornhub-sex-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/pornhub-sex-traffickin... https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-persons-report/japan/ https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-persons-re... https://www.tokyoreporter.com/japan-news/breaking/npos-more-women-claiming-they-were-forced-into-porn-industry/ https://www.tokyoreporter.com/japan-news/breaking/npos-more-... https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/girlsdoporn-owner-michael-pratt-pleads-guilty-sex-trafficking https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/girlsdoporn-owner-micha... https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-japan-porn-20160613-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-japan-porn-20160613...
anonzzzies 1y ago
Or guns. Or payday loans. Or credit card debt. Or credit score. Etc.
dahart 1y ago
Some people think porn is worse than censorship. Some of those people even feel that censorship is good, not damaging at all, and should be mandatory. I’m not one of those, though it does seem like there’s a possibility that some of the things we’re doing a lot of in society today, like porn and also social media and AI, are changing society in ways we don’t understand yet and don’t have control over. I don’t think it’s wrong to have fears about that. Anyway, some people wouldn’t even call it censorship if private businesses disagree and decide not to do business, for any reason, even if it’s public pressure. Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process? If not, why not? Be really careful with your answer, because taking away their freedom to choose is a type of censorship, and possibly a worse one because it would be a public/government censorship and not a private transaction censorship. Steam and Itch.io do still have the right to ship all these games, they’re choosing not to. They also still have the right to use other payment processors, and/or create their own. I’d be willing to bet the payment processors in question would rather not be forced to cut off business, and do not care whether people pay for porn. They are simply trying to avoid public backlash and avoid being blacklisted by a large number of people who happen to believe porn is damaging.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  > Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process? We shouldn't have private payment processors. Access to the economy should not itself be a product that you have to buy and then worry about whether you own it or it owns you.
  - dahart 1y ago
    What’s the alternative? How do you propose to fix it?
    - haneefmubarak 1y ago
      Notionally, opening new banks and/or buying an existing one that lacks current customers is feasible. Presumably once you do that, you could easily plug into FedWire/FedACH/FedNow, which would allow you to process electronic payments on behalf of whomever you choose to bank, as long as you comply with all the KYC/AML and other finance regs. You might not be able to process visa and mastercard, but virtually any of your customers' customers presumably still have financial accounts that are enabled on Fed rails, which will not be as likely to discriminate. Requiring end-customers to initiate payment (push) as opposed to doing pull, would also reduce transaction reversal risk. I don't really the ultimate purpose of the position taken by either side here, but it does seem to me that there's a path by which both can coexist, even if difficult.

One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn. You only need to type any random sexual thing and find any explicit subreddit you want, that’s how pervasive the porn is on even an allegedly non-porn platform. Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. We’ve literally gone crazy. Holistically, you’re talking about a hyper sexualized society where the content and ideology are available at high density and velocity from a pretty early age until the day you die. It’s a problem. The truth is one side is not wrong forever. The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue. People need to take a deep hard look at what hip hop did to a generation of youth (both the violence and sexuality permeated deep into the culture). None of this shit is a joke, the kids end up fucked up.

ants_everywhere 1y ago
> that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.... The Christian right is wrong about so much, but the progression of our society has finally made them mostly correct on this issue. I have news for you my friend, the Christian right is fucking people up way more than porn. So is the NoFap/incel movement. There are some pretty fucked up people who see women as breeding machines. This is tied pretty closely to the great replacement conspiracy theory and similar white nationalist conspiracy theories. People who believe this junk promote the idea that porn is bad because they want young men desperately horny so they breed with women either with or without their consent. This is the same reason it was a major priority for them to deny women's rights to their own bodies.
dontlaugh 1y ago
I was with you until the last two paragraphs. There’s nothing inherently wrong with hip hop.
gosteinao 1y ago
> One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn. This has no bearing in reality. The "manosphere" is mostly neo-conservative guys who are sometimes even performatively against porn. > Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days. This used to be a lot more pervasive 20 years ago than now? Altogether with the "hip hop" thing, just feels like prejudiced, outdated arguments without data to back it up.
redpill12345 1y ago
In the original days of TheRedPill one of the first things recommended was to drop porn IIRC (also workout and get paid more) The manosphere is probably a very large umbrella of all kinds of views only united by one common trait - being a man. Although you're not wrong that society is hyper sexualised and dating has become increasingly transactional
- ivape 1y ago
  Recommending one drops porn indicates porn a problem for one.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Many things can sometimes be problems. Porn. Video games. Tacos. One time I made myself nauseous by dancing too much (low blood sugar probably). Let's ban dancing, yeah? (Let's ban dancing, I wanna ban dancing with you, all night dancing (it's a reference to a music track))
southernplaces7 1y ago
Take a good look at the world around us, and note especially how the countries in which sexual expression and by extension porn are heavily censored also coincidentally have some of the most sexually repressive and hostile attitudes towards women and consensual intimacy between adults of any kind in real life. People being allowed to express sexuality in sometimes crude and commercialized ways is not what you should be pointing at if you want to mention a dangerous progression of society toward violent attitudes around sex.
- ivape 1y ago
  There are many paths to a fallen society. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said. The answer is always in the middle. I think we've gone pretty far with the proliferation of commercialized sex in the West, and they have gone pretty far with regards to repression in the East. AI is the first time as far as I can remember where just about everyone is considering the ethical and societal implications of it. We really didn't do that for porn, video games, and social media. We're late to the discussion, but a discussion about "how much sex exactly?" is always a discussion that needs to be had. I'd say the same for "how much money exactly?". How much comfort, how much wealth, how much power, how much, how much, how much?
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
Your characterization of hip hop shoots the messenger. It's the stories of an oppressed people, if you don't like the violence in their stories, blame their oppressor. It's the same with porn and the Christian Right. If people feel incomplete and try to fill that gap with a porn habit, the porn is an indicator of a problem, not the problem itself. Filling that gap with right wing propaganda doesn't address the problem, it just changes it into something that can be used for political advantage. You're missing the root causes here.

patmcc 1y ago

They may both be damaging, but currently we have a lot more porn than censorship, so it looks like it's causing more damage. If we flip to having a lot more censorship we'll feel that damage more clearly. Or we won't, depending how successful the censorship is.

jennyholzer 1y ago
> we have a lot more porn than censorship How do you know what you're missing? IMO media platforms are heavily censored in comparison to ~10 years ago, to the severe detriment of American pop culture.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
_bent 1y ago
> it looks like it's causing more damage what damage is it causing?
- drdeca 1y ago
  I can say that I think my past use of pornography has harmed me. I haven’t used it in over 2 years, but I still on a daily basis observe the effects it had on me. Others might argue that it is only because of my views that the effects are “harmful”, but I think they are wrong.
  - cortesoft 1y ago
    What were the effects?
  - supplied_demand 1y ago
    Can you clarify how it “harmed” you? You didn’t quite answer that question.
    - drdeca 1y ago
      https://xkcd.com/598/ https://xkcd.com/598/ (Except, remove the last panel)

tempaccountabcd 1y ago

[dead]

roenxi 1y ago

I think the issue would be more that people don't accept this is censorship - the surface level here looks like companies negotiating who they will and won't do business with which is actually encouraged. If companies have a moral objection to something then they don't have to be involved. In theory stopping a flow of money takes a lot more than some crazy from Australia getting upset. The real censorship here is that a system has been constructed where payments must be funnelled through a small number of blessed companies and it has been set up that way to ... promote censorship. Authoritarianism in general, really. If it wasn't for anticompetitive regulations one of these game devs could just branch into banking. We've actually seen that dynamic play out in most of our lifetimes - in the early phase of crypto it was mtgox.com [0] that triggered the transition from cool nerd curio in the internet backwaters to a billion dollar market. So we know the pipeline there would work fine in the absence of KYC regulation. [0] Magic The Gathering Online eXchange

immibis 1y ago
and those companies aren't heavily regulated. In Europe they regulated exchange fees down to something like 0.3%. They just said the fees shall be low and lo, they were low. They could also easily regulate that credit card networks can't block obscene content.

vitaflo 1y ago

You can’t have a free market without censorship. It’s one or the other.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
Maybe that's true of intellectual property, but are you claiming something more general?

MangoToupe 1y ago

Tbh I lost track of what people thought "censorship" is, especially as a pejorative, many years ago. Not only is censorship good, but information is more free than it has been at any point in history. Just pirate the games ffs.

innocentoldguy 1y ago

In some ways, porn is more damaging, isn't it? For example, there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry. I strongly oppose censorship and believe that payment processors and banks should be prohibited from engaging in it. Still, I have to admit that porn can be extremely destructive.

__loam 1y ago
There's no evidence in actual psychological literature that porn is harmful to people beyond making some religious folks feel a little more shame than normal. Porn addiction isn't an actual psychological condition. I question the bit about sex trafficking. From my perspective a lot of consenting adults are making a lot of money by willingly participating in the industry. If someone is abusing that and forcing someone to participate, that's already a crime that should be prosecuted. It's not an excuse to shut down commerce between consenting adults.
swiftcoder 1y ago
> there's a lot of sex trafficking going on in the porn industry, but not so much in the censorship industry [citation needed] I'll grant that there is sex trafficking going on at least in the fringes of the porn industry - but that's at least in part because of censorship. If porn production was widely legal and appropriately regulated, there'd be significantly less market for the edgy stuff filmed in Eastern European basements (i.e. the exact same argument as for marijuana legalisation). There are also a bunch of regimes around the world who love censorship, and also engage in a bunch of human trafficking. For example, the UAE is notorious for both widespread censorship, and an entire class of foreign workers in various forms of indentured servitude (which for women is often prostitution)...
- innocentoldguy 1y ago
  Here you go: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/pornhub-sex-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/pornhub-sex-traffickin... https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-persons-report/japan/ https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-persons-re... https://www.tokyoreporter.com/japan-news/breaking/npos-more-women-claiming-they-were-forced-into-porn-industry/ https://www.tokyoreporter.com/japan-news/breaking/npos-more-... https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/girlsdoporn-owner-michael-pratt-pleads-guilty-sex-trafficking https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/girlsdoporn-owner-micha... https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-japan-porn-20160613-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-japan-porn-20160613...

anonzzzies 1y ago

Or guns. Or payday loans. Or credit card debt. Or credit score. Etc.

dahart 1y ago

Some people think porn is worse than censorship. Some of those people even feel that censorship is good, not damaging at all, and should be mandatory. I’m not one of those, though it does seem like there’s a possibility that some of the things we’re doing a lot of in society today, like porn and also social media and AI, are changing society in ways we don’t understand yet and don’t have control over. I don’t think it’s wrong to have fears about that. Anyway, some people wouldn’t even call it censorship if private businesses disagree and decide not to do business, for any reason, even if it’s public pressure. Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process? If not, why not? Be really careful with your answer, because taking away their freedom to choose is a type of censorship, and possibly a worse one because it would be a public/government censorship and not a private transaction censorship. Steam and Itch.io do still have the right to ship all these games, they’re choosing not to. They also still have the right to use other payment processors, and/or create their own. I’d be willing to bet the payment processors in question would rather not be forced to cut off business, and do not care whether people pay for porn. They are simply trying to avoid public backlash and avoid being blacklisted by a large number of people who happen to believe porn is damaging.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
> Should private payment processors be free to choose whose money they process? We shouldn't have private payment processors. Access to the economy should not itself be a product that you have to buy and then worry about whether you own it or it owns you.
- dahart 1y ago
  What’s the alternative? How do you propose to fix it?
  - haneefmubarak 1y ago
    Notionally, opening new banks and/or buying an existing one that lacks current customers is feasible. Presumably once you do that, you could easily plug into FedWire/FedACH/FedNow, which would allow you to process electronic payments on behalf of whomever you choose to bank, as long as you comply with all the KYC/AML and other finance regs. You might not be able to process visa and mastercard, but virtually any of your customers' customers presumably still have financial accounts that are enabled on Fed rails, which will not be as likely to discriminate. Requiring end-customers to initiate payment (push) as opposed to doing pull, would also reduce transaction reversal risk. I don't really the ultimate purpose of the position taken by either side here, but it does seem to me that there's a path by which both can coexist, even if difficult.