To think that porn should be illegal unless you specifically opt in

[Balloonatastic]

I am 40 and I think I’ve been deeply damaged by porn. Now I’m ‘sober’ as it were, but have come round to the view that its prevalence is so harmful for relationships and young people.

I’m not against it per se. If people like it and can use it healthily then perhaps that’s OK.
Pre-internet, people’s access to it was much less and involved them actively going to a shop or newsagent or whatever. The embarrassment must have put most people off and limited demand.

Now demand is huge. The industry is massive, and ever more participants in it are harmed as producers chase customers and performers need to do more extreme things.

So AIBU to think that we should go back to a situation where people have to actively opt in to be able to access adult websites? Bring back an embarrassment factor. I sometimes wonder whether this would have the knock on impact of reducing the demand for nude selfies etc that teenagers get into because there would just be less nakedness generally on peoples screens, if you know what I mean.

Age verification is all well and good but I wonder whether we should make it much harder for people to access porn.

I know that my life would have been better without it.

Yeah make it harder.

We seem to have a whole generation of men wanking themselves stuipid over free internet porn. How did that happen? Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

The (evil) genie is out of the bottle.

I’m inclined to agree.

Pre-internet, if you wanted porn, you really had to go out of your way to get it, and had to pay for it. Now porn is available on demand, in huge quantities, for free, via the internet.

I’m not against porn per se, but I’m not sure it being so readily available is good for anyone.

Sadly, I do think the genie is out of the bottle and it’s probably now impossible to get it back in. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try but I do think we have to be realistic and pick our battles.

There is, of course, a wider issue with the internet - it’s a total cesspit, a digital Wild West.

I think we could definitely try to get the genie back into the bottle though. If search engines didn’t allow searches for certain terms, and if porn sites were banned apart from those who opted in (hopefully via some very embarrassing method) then that would be a huge help. Obviously there would be ways round it like there are with everything else but it would be a start.

I don't agree. I think there should be far greater regulation of the porn industry with the aim of ensuring no abuse of sex workers. But I think using shame to regulate sexuality is ultimately unhelpful.

I'm not a fan of porn, but I ultimately think consenting adults can do what they like.

Well of course it’s only ever men that use porn.

I can assure you women use porn too @OhCalmTheFuckDownBarbara

Indeed. I was one of them. I’m sure lots do and apparently a large proportion of porn site visitors are women. It’s not a male/female thing for me. I’ve had negative consequences from porn use that have had nothing to do with men.

Yes, I do find the industry to be deeply disturbing and disgusting, and harmful to many of those involved (in performing, in watching). The next step would be to try and prevent young people from growing up on it, like so many of them do. Stronger regulations are probably the only way forward, but who knows how those regulations could be put it place. I know your post is about adults watching, which I agree can be harmful, but children watching? That is heartbreaking. Six year olds watching it. That is the reality, and it’s terrible.

I've said this before, I don't think banning will help. It has to be a social change in attitudes. I'm a child of the 80's, whilst laws have been passed, I fully believe the reduction in smoking and drink driving is driven by changing attitudes - these things are now frowned on socially. I think it has to be highlighted that:
Porn can lead to erectile disfunction
Porn will give you unreal expectations about people's bodies
Porn will make you a crap shag as not all women orgasm from PIV. Foreplay is massively important.
The female performers who love doing porn and say it empowers them, good for them, but it needs to be made aware that these are a small % of performers and for many others its an awful (sometimes forced) existence.

....apparently it's only ever men that use irony too. Hence the responses.

I have no objection to porn and watch it myself - and it definitely hasn’t damaged me. I’m certainly very selective about what I’ll watch though. And my age means I didn’t have access to it as a child (although I did still manage to read a ton of vastly inappropriate stuff like compilations of readers’ letters to Penthouse Forum and Nancy Friday books).

I do think porn should be more difficult to access and I don’t think sites should be able to suggest content in a feed like it’s TikTok - you should only be able to watch what you’ve specifically searched for and chosen to click on. I don’t quite know that could be enforced though. I don’t think making it ‘embarrassing’ will help - ultimately, if you ‘opt in’ it’s not like it can send an email to your mum or your boss to tell them. It would still be private.

Being able to access porn underage is certainly a major problem.

You won't stop everyone by a proper opt-in, but making it harder will perhaps lead to the harm it does being reduced.

Back in the day you could buy the Marquis de Sade’s book (120 days of Sodom???) on the high street.

That’s a good idea. I don’t see how opting in shames anyone?

I suspect due to the insane revenue it creates, those higher up don't want to push back too much as they'll have fingers in the pies so to speak.

It is more likely that as with Damien Green and the former MP who watched things in the Commons chamber, some MPs have a skeleton in the cupboard so to speak.

And, as I have just checked, it’s currently available on Amazon.
I couldn’t finish reading it as it just got too excessively repetitive and gross.

First poster nailed it

Says it all about men

@Balloonatastic
the embarrassment factor did not exist, back in the day, or hardly did, we had 50 shades of grey books.

back then you had book series of

black lace
nancy friday books
nexus books
various other erotica books and liturature
then amazon kindles in modern times you only need to type in erotica or similar to get photographic ebooks / or written stories

then modern times the website lit erotica has various stories etc

yes if you take it off the internet all you get is mass distribution of books/dvds/videos/magazines like it was back in the day

if the embarrassment factor existed back then, it didnt prevent it becomeing one of the largest industries' etc and thats pre internet

so although you mean well,

I definitely think extreme forms of pornography need to be behind a paywall. Soft core/vanilla porn thats showing respectful, mutually enjoyable sex fair enough to be widely available, but anything involving BDSM, choking, or fetishes of any kind shouldn't be freely available.
Maybe we should do what they do with smoking and have risk warnings and shocking photos about abuse etc before every film etc too.

There is a big difference between erotic literature (no matter how explicit) and hardcore porn films. And I think it was embarrassing even back in the day. I remember as an 18 year old being unbelievably embarrassed buying a Nancy Friday book from a shop.
Obviously such things wouldn’t be problematic now because of the internet, but I don’t think almost any erotic books are harmful. What’s harmful is the instant access to any kind of fetish or extreme video content you can imagine, with actual humans on film often being abused. The end user is obtaining the same gratification as ever but becomes numb to the human cost.
That’s why I stopped watching porn in the end. It made me feel too guilty afterwards thinking that my desire for an orgasm was worth more than the dignity and wellbeing of another person being filmed to arouse me.
And that’s before I even started to think about the real life encounters I’d had with people who wanted to mirror porn they’d seen.

Whilst I’d take your solution as a first step, I honestly think that even ‘respectful, mutually enjoyable sex’ shouldn’t be freely available.
For one thing, I think almost nobody being paid to have sex on film is in a respectful arrangement of any kind, especially if they then have no control over that film forever. Secondly, you can’t tell what’s mutually enjoyable. The actors may well be hating every second of it.
And also, moving away from the actors, the viewers themselves suffer. I was a frequent porn user for over 15 years from my late teens. I ended up finding it hard to enjoy sexuality without it, disliked perfectly natural things about my body (eg pubic hair) and engaged in activities which I wouldn’t otherwise have engaged in. I rarely if ever watched ‘extreme’ porn. It was in the main the type you describe.

I agree with you but it won’t happen as porn will be a massive percentage of internet traffic and companies like Google will make the free speech argument. Even if they blocked it, 101 other search engines or VPNs to hide location would be happy to oblige.

I am sharing your opinion!