The effect of porn on teenage boys and young men

Which people, PinkisRad?

. Qwerty232 Tuesday
"For make no mistake, porn damages boys. Good boys. One minute they're out in the sun playing football, forming healthy relationships with girls - and then they stumble into Wanktube and are having their heads messed up with God knows what nastiness. They're on the cusp of adolescence so they're naturally aroused, but they also feel fear and shame and confusion. All that innocence they felt is gone. And then they come back and feel more shame and fear, and the cycle continues until they're hooked."

I so completely agree.

I find it fascinating that men are, generally, just not prepared to say" OK, some women in porn are being exploited, I can't tell which, so I'll just stop using it"

It's not as if it's necessary to life or anything...........

I'm not sure anyone on here is saying it is possible to completely eradicate internet porn

Dodging the issue. People on here are saying exactly that. They want all men to immediately stop watching porn which as a consequence would lead to the eradication of internet porn. Hence why:

I support restrictions of access to such things

is meaningless to my very specific question if you support a ban on those things. You btw not being you in particular anon232, but a general one, the other posters who do actually talk so that no more porn exists.

They have a problem with it because they're self-entitled males who think they can do as they please. It's a kind of sociopathy.

Exactly anon, I can't see why anyone would have a problem with that?

And yes, super post Beach.

Do you also support the ban of cigarettes and alcohol or excessively fatty or sugary food and drinks?

I support restrictions of access to such things, public campaigns to raise awareness of their dangers and prohibitions on their advertising.

I'm not sure anyone on here is saying it is possible to completely eradicate internet porn in the world as it is - just that it should be state regulated and inaccessible to children.

Just as fags are now in blank packages with a picture of a diseased lung on them, locked away behind the counter and only available to people who can prove their age, so it should be for porn.

Do you also support the ban of cigarettes and alcohol or excessively fatty or sugary food and drinks?

Wonderful, wonderful posts, beachcomber. Total mic drop.

Roll back the sexual revolution - the old morality won in the end. Welcome back slut shaming, the derision of the 'fallen' women - who of course can just fuck off with their sex positivity and abandonment of gender roles. Hail once more the gatekeepers of 'correct' sexuality, and down with all those who dare step outside the box. Censorship! Suppression! Shame! Shame! Shame!

Oh what nonsense. The puritans , prudes, narrow minded and those crying shame, the gate keepers of sexuality are the pornographers. Sex has to be dirty, sleazy, shameful etc for porn to work.

The people who really deride women for being dirty sluts, are, believe it or not, the men who term women dirty sluts in the porn videos they make. Videos called things like 'Dirty Sluts'.

There is nothing 'sex positive' about a man jacking off to a video of a 'dirty teen slag'. Really, there isn't

Precisely.

image of a young conventionally attractive woman on her knees choking on a penis, her eyes are bulging and someone is pulling her hair

Ugh, there is absolutely nothing positive about that porn is a truly horrific and degrading industry, how can anyone defend it? It's bloody terrifying that children can access this material with just a few taps on their device, that their ideas of what sex and relationships are being shaped by such extreme images. At the very least there needs to be some sort of procedure in place to prevent this filmed abuse material getting into the hands of impressionable children and teenagers. Utterly perverse.

DeviTheGaelet, there will always be people who will try to frame objections to pornography as anti-freedom, anti-agency, anti-choice, anti-sex, anti-fun, etc.

Such people bluster on about "sex positivity" as though parents being concerned about their children being exposed to hard-core porn is somehow "sex negativity". I mean really, do they really think that it's positive for kids to watch videos of adults who may or may not be consenting engaging in hard-core porn sex acts? Do they really think that jacking off to videos called stuff like "Barely legal teen slut gets trashed" is "sex positive"? Or that an X rated video entitled "Ebony whore drinks cum" is making a positive statement about female sexuality and women of colour?

Who do these people think we are? Do they really think that we are stupid enough and inhumane enough to not recognise blatant rapey racism and sexism when we see it? They may think that teen porn and racist misogynistic porn and everything in between are somehow the price we all need to pay in the name of what they call freedom, but I have never yet seen one of them able to argue how that that actually works in real life.

Let's ask MephistophelesApprentice what is "sex positive" about specifics. It's so incredibly easy to post vacuous bluster about sex positivity/censorship/the world ending if porn is regulated/doom and gloom if X rated material isn't easily available to anyone all the time. But there is no actual concrete argument there.

I will bet you my mortgage that if you put "porn" into your search engine and click on the first result, there will be nothing "sex positive" about it. I just did. I clicked on the first result and I landed on a video called "Brutal slapping deep throat" in less than a second. I don't need to watch the video to tell that if this is "sex positivity" I want nothing to do with it (image of a young conventionally attractive woman on her knees choking on a penis, her eyes are bulging and someone is pulling her hair).

In times past children weren't exposed to porn in the way they are now. I'm old enough to remember a world with no mobile phones, no internet, no DVDs and even no video recorders. If you wanted to look at porn you had to go to an XXX cinema or buy a magazine in an "adult" shop - both were illegal for under 18s.

Now, anything goes. And there is something wrong with you if you don't embrace that. That is, according to the pornhounds.

Remember that Maria Miller is a fan of the same kind of rhetoric transactivists use, and that they and their allies are often also pro porn and prostitution.

WIll it make men stop bothering all together? If there is no need to impress a female, or be stronger than another man who might get her if doesn't, will men begin to lose their energy?

I do agree with you tartansnowman. It’s just that couldn’t someone claim that the Chaturbate clip was published with consent? That they asked whoever they were communicating with ‘Oh, by the way do you mind if I record this and put it on Pornhub?’. Now you and I know that’s fucking ludicrous. That that 99.99999% did not happen. But whatever clever, cynical lawyers these people have the money and power to hire will argue otherwise. And here’s another theoretically possible albeit highly unlikely scenario. Suppose the Chaturbate thing was recorded (which is illegal) and then forwarded to the participant who then uploaded the clip of her/himself? 2.0 platforms warp all the conventional legal concepts of ownership.

Plus, even if clips are almost certainly non-consensual the authorities clearly do not have the time and resources to be going through all the millions of clips being uploaded (and being immediately downloaded, reduplicated and re-uploaded to other sites) and verifying the consent or otherwise of the participants. Plus, hardly any of the mainstream porn is uploaded consensually is it? No one gets Jenna Jameson’s consent. That form of regulation would just consume huge amount of time and resources and would for subject to all manner of legal quandaries and disputes.

No, the only way to address this is to hit the hubs at the point of access and to make them 100% legally accountable for anything that appears on their site. And it is also to make the consumer 100% accountable by demanding their credit card details.

This has to be about accountability and access. The porn empire is just too big to regulate internally on a video by video basis. We need blocks and deterrents so people don’t even get so far as uploading something dodgy in the first place. I’d have it so that anything on a site without cast iron documentary evidence of the age and consent of the participants in any image or video is illegal in and of itself, and the site is accountable for any such material.

I fully agree that recording and publishing online private intimate chats is the same crime as revenge porn, and I also find the term "revenge porn" problematic as it implies the victim is to blame for upsetting the perpetrator.

The clips aren't removed because there is a massive problem of illegal recording of material, whether pornographic or not. You could just as easily ask why 123movies or Putlocker still exists.

It's completely implausible to claim to have a participant's consent when they have a huge sign on their channel stating they do not consent and anyone who films them is breaking the law.

Yes, hubs should be banned under the law, but there are two separate issues - changing the legal framework and chasing social and ethical attitudes. I would say that recording someone's chaturbate is very similar to revenge pornography, and that requires people to take a strong moral stance. You can get people to agree they would not view revenge pornography without requiring them to take a wider anti adult material stance.

Someone being a participant in nudity or sexual behaviour via social media does not mean they are consenting to creation or distribution of a recording. The fact that someone is also a porn performer does not mean social and ethical standards about secretly recording someone or distributing that should not apply.

It is illegal to record someone's chaturbate, and it says all over the site that the participant does not consent to you doing so.

It is. But could someone claim they did get the participant's consent, however implausible that is? Perhaps you're right. And if you're right, how come the porn hubs are getting away with this? Aren't these clips removed?

But the problem remains that no one knows whether consent has been obtained regarding anything else. The whole lot should be banned. That's the only way to do it. You can't just focus on the stuff that clearly is illegal - all the stuff that isn't proven beyond doubt to be legal has to be addressed too.

You never did enlighten us as to how your preferred state of "all pervasive surveillance" is going to work, Meph.

No, that is not what I am saying.

It is illegal to record someone's chaturbate, and it says all over the site that the participant does not consent to you doing so.

There is proof that they have said no to that recording existing.

It's also difficult to make a distinction between amateur and professional work. Professional work is usually a form of marketing and the person makes most of their income from amateur work talking to fans.

And just because someone is a known porn performer it doesn't mean clips of them are there with their consent - if from chaturbate they definitely are not and if from snapchat probably not.

Of course,. Exactly. My point is that there is no proven consent on these platforms. They're out of control. I wish Laura Bates et al would have more to say about this.

You do know absolutely if chaturbate video footage appears on a porn hub that it is illegal and without the participant's consent.

It is possible to know in that situation.

And just because someone is a known porn performer it doesn't mean clips of them are there with their consent - if from chaturbate they definitely are not and if from snapchat probably not.

If someone wants to view snapchat or chaturbate they should do so on the actual platform so the person participating has the opportunity to block them and they should not record the footage, even for private use.