Online porn gateway to child abuse Guardian article

[JoyousAsOtters]

www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/dec/15/how-extreme-porn-has-become-a-gateway-drug-into-child-abuse?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Ok Grauniad so far from my favourite news source lately, but important and somewhat horrific work being done here. Mirrors a lot of what has been said on this board, may (annoyingly) be taken seriously as it is now being said by a man, albeit with a female journalist.

Especially pertinent I think are the sections where he refers clearly to objectification and detachment - and how men who use this porn are horrified when they are asked to see these victims as real children with lives that involve schools, pets, and ordinary childhoods. Also the bit where he references the harm done to adolescent women who are confronted with preferences developed online rather than with a living human being.

I hate to disappoint, but yesterday, Guardian had an article about Pornhub. The gist of it was that it was a crying shame that Pornhub had been forced to remove so many videos as part of their investigation into their website platforming child sex abuse, and that it was obviously a victim of a moral panic:

www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/14/pornhub-purge-removes-unverified-videos-investigation-child-abuse

It's interesting what you say about a man speaking up about this. The Pornhub apologist is a female journalist (one of those woke American tech types).

I was just about to post a link to the 'gateway' article, but Otters has already done it. I can believe this gateway theory - it seems very likely to me. Internet porn is doing so much damage to society, in my opinion.

Porn hub is just vid after vid of abuse.
None of it is sex as I would recognise.
Just abuse and degradation.

GCacademic Fucking hell that article! Thought it was notable that they went with the phrase "a large number of them featured underaged and sex-trafficked subjects." Rather than words like rape, paedophilia or abuse.

And then the article just got worse, like Pornhub is somehow the victim of a smear campaign! FFS.

a large number of them featured underaged and sex-trafficked subjects

Subjects, ffs

13 million down to four mill, they weren't leaving themselves short.

These are both interesting examples of how the Guardian works. The pornhub article is for Guardian US rather than the UK edition. They seem to have different editorial teams and to make different editorial decisions. Hence the idiocy of pretending that pornhub is some kind of empowering platform for sex workers.

The other piece, about porn and child abuse, is a "supported by" article, which means that the content, though editorially independent, has an external sponsor. In this case it seems to be the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which runs the Stop it Now! helpline.

So you end up with this weird situation in which different bits of the Guardian are pushing very different editorial lines.

I don’t think we should be denying the term “sex trafficked” because we all know it happens.

I agree “under age” should be termed “a child” but he clarified that later in the article.

“Think of young women emerging into the sexual world and meeting men who are into strangulation and anal sex. It’s not criminal, it’s not being reported, but as a social and cultural experience it’s really significant. Is incest porn chipping away at a protective taboo around incest? Probably it is.”

It's all part of the same thing. I'm going to send this article (incidentally it is paid for content by Humanity United - it says at the top of the article) to every woman on here who says she doesn't mind her partner watching porn.

I guess the Guardian is really a loose collective of international editions now, with differing and sometimes conflicting agendas.

In any case I was glad to see this pointing out the clear and causative links between the normalisation of abhorrent behaviours in porn - and the fact that those ‘acting’ in them usually have absolutely no agency, and no, they probably are not ‘enjoying it’ - and the direct result in children’s and young girls’ lives. And young boys’ too, if this is how they’re encouraged to see sex and sexuality.

I think that a clear line needs to be drawn around the fact that porn desensitises it's viewers, as well. Which requires them to ramp up to more taboo subjects, and you get men who would have been horrified about something a year ago who now find they can't orgasm with real women or even vanilla porn. And either they disassociate, or they are ashamed which is better in one way but tends to mean they don't try and get help.

The normalisation o it all isn't only problematic because it sucks people in, but because it means that porn addiction isn't recognised.

I suspect it's not just the porn element at work in the denial - people are very similar about gaming addiction.

That’s a v. salient point Chestnuts about the parallels w gaming. I was wondering about gambling too. Especially online - isn’t it the case that the big social networks like Facebook were developed using casino gambling hooking techniques? Like the ‘endless scroll’ being effectively a pokie machine?

I bet the porn sites use the same, endless scroll, just one more hit, never ending choice type tech to get users eyes to stay on site for more precious ad seconds.

So trafficked children aren’t just being abused for some bloke to jerk-off to, it’s to hook new users (more children and young men) and to serve them all up to advertisers and data collectors.

God it’s grim.

I'm going to send this article (incidentally it is paid for content by Humanity United - it says at the top of the article) to every woman on here who says she doesn't mind her partner watching porn.

Thanks, Clymene. Weirdly, I couldn't see in my version of the article who the sponsor was - it must be a browser problem. I don't think it's paid for content, though, it's supported content, which is slightly different in Guardian terminology. Supported content generally means that a sponsor has paid for a series of articles but has no editorial control, whereas in paid-for content, the sponsor has editorial approval.

Absolutely. Online porn i addictive in a way that doesn't really apply to the old fashioned kind - there have been sex addicts of course but this is a whole different set of pressures at work. They want to reel in the men quite young, before they are really at an age to think through their responsibilities or the ethics around it, and when they are often curious and sexually inexperienced. I don't think we really know the extent to which it affects their sexual development, but it harnesses their sex drive which can be a very powerful motivator in that age group.

Social media and online gaming both use the techniques of gambling too, and there is significant denial about it - almost more heated than what you hear about online porn. It's very strange if you ever read an article about the research on this in a place like The Guardian - many young men are very upset by even the suggestion that there could be a problem.

Until it's more widely acknowledged I think people won't accept the reality of it around porn either.

Update : Pornhub removes all unverified videos from its platform.
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9054935/Pornhub-removes-unverified-videos-platform.html

@RoyalCorgi

I'm going to send this article (incidentally it is paid for content by Humanity United - it says at the top of the article) to every woman on here who says she doesn't mind her partner watching porn.

Thanks, Clymene. Weirdly, I couldn't see in my version of the article who the sponsor was - it must be a browser problem. I don't think it's paid for content, though, it's supported content, which is slightly different in Guardian terminology. Supported content generally means that a sponsor has paid for a series of articles but has no editorial control, whereas in paid-for content, the sponsor has editorial approval.

Yes, sorry you're right. Harriet Grant seems to focus on humanitarian stuff and a lot of it is sponsored (by different charities).

Interesting business model when they are always touting for cash for 'free' journalism