Yes it does. Both are examples of something demonstrably bad, and one person saying, “well it didn’t negatively affect one person, so it must be fine!”
Not only is a sample size of one useless, but unless OP is claiming to be fully well adjusted with great mental health and no negative feelings towards woman(implicit bias included), and no participation in the patriarchy, they can’t really claim to know constant consumption of porn has no negative effect.
Kids are going to get exposed to porn no matter what. I do think it has the potential to have some pretty harmful effects on them, but I don’t think the answer to that is the Online Safety Act. I don’t think this will actually stop kids from stumbling across porn, and I think that putting our heads in the sand and pretending it will is just dumb.
I don’t know what would be the best thing to do about this problem, but I do know that the rhetoric around protecting kids is just going to make it less likely that we actually do things that could be useful for supporting kids to have healthy attitudes towards sex.
For instance, I remember that one of the most impactful sites I ever stumbled across as a teenager was an educational website that had loads of pictures of human genitals. Especially as a girl who had already been exposed to porn, it was super useful to see the wide variety of what vulvas can look like.
A depressing number of my peers expressed insecurity over the appearance of their vulvas, and I remember one girl was convinced that she would need to get a labioplasty as an adult because she had more prominent labia minora than she had seen in porn, and didn’t realise that her vulva was well within what is normal.
One of my friends expressed anxiety over having sex, because she had been masturbating using cylindrical objects of various sizes, attempting to work up to what she perceived as the average girth of a penis, based on what she’d seen in porn. She was practicing because she was terrified of the size of penises she had seen in porn, and didn’t realise that wasn’t representative of the average penis size.
As a young adult, once I started having sex, there were a few times when it was abundantly clear that the young man I was with had been heavily influenced by porn, in terms of how they felt they were expected to act.
So many of my peers had their sexual development affected by seeing porn, and better sex education in school could have potentially mitigated some of these harms. However, we won’t get productive change in this area as long as we’re operating under the prudish “won’t someone think of the children” mentality that led to the Online Safety Act. It would be good if we could shield kids from exposure to this stuff, but I don’t think that’s viable. We need to be more realistic if we actually want to protect kids from harm
I’m alright with making the doors to the local porn shop stickier (no pun intended), but in addition I agree that we need a better understanding of intimacy and sexuality as a society. For some reason its an incredibly taboo subject in western society, and that leaves the extreme religious folks as the only ones talking about it.
I wish this type of discussion was happening in our local government town halls rather than in a corner of the internet most won’t ever see.
Stupid fucking backwards law. I was watching cheeks get clapped on the internet from the moment I knew what sex was. It didn’t do me any harm.
As it has been said many times before, it’s totally about control rather than safety.
Love this take. I get a similar one from my mom sometimes when I mention her smoking:
“I smoked around you constantly and you didn’t end up any worse off for it.”
Do you really think that consistent porn usage from a very young age has no harms at all?
Are you really comparing watching something, to the physical action of smoking?
Do you really think watching porn has no effect on a person? Also I was referring to second-hand smoke.
What’s second-hand porn watching? This metaphor doesn’t really work.
Its when you jerk off with one hand whilst porning with the other.
Yes it does. Both are examples of something demonstrably bad, and one person saying, “well it didn’t negatively affect one person, so it must be fine!”
Not only is a sample size of one useless, but unless OP is claiming to be fully well adjusted with great mental health and no negative feelings towards woman(implicit bias included), and no participation in the patriarchy, they can’t really claim to know constant consumption of porn has no negative effect.
All of that existed long before the internet. In fact it was probably worse pre-internet. So the sites could be entirely unrelated.
Kids are going to get exposed to porn no matter what. I do think it has the potential to have some pretty harmful effects on them, but I don’t think the answer to that is the Online Safety Act. I don’t think this will actually stop kids from stumbling across porn, and I think that putting our heads in the sand and pretending it will is just dumb.
I don’t know what would be the best thing to do about this problem, but I do know that the rhetoric around protecting kids is just going to make it less likely that we actually do things that could be useful for supporting kids to have healthy attitudes towards sex.
For instance, I remember that one of the most impactful sites I ever stumbled across as a teenager was an educational website that had loads of pictures of human genitals. Especially as a girl who had already been exposed to porn, it was super useful to see the wide variety of what vulvas can look like.
A depressing number of my peers expressed insecurity over the appearance of their vulvas, and I remember one girl was convinced that she would need to get a labioplasty as an adult because she had more prominent labia minora than she had seen in porn, and didn’t realise that her vulva was well within what is normal.
One of my friends expressed anxiety over having sex, because she had been masturbating using cylindrical objects of various sizes, attempting to work up to what she perceived as the average girth of a penis, based on what she’d seen in porn. She was practicing because she was terrified of the size of penises she had seen in porn, and didn’t realise that wasn’t representative of the average penis size.
As a young adult, once I started having sex, there were a few times when it was abundantly clear that the young man I was with had been heavily influenced by porn, in terms of how they felt they were expected to act.
So many of my peers had their sexual development affected by seeing porn, and better sex education in school could have potentially mitigated some of these harms. However, we won’t get productive change in this area as long as we’re operating under the prudish “won’t someone think of the children” mentality that led to the Online Safety Act. It would be good if we could shield kids from exposure to this stuff, but I don’t think that’s viable. We need to be more realistic if we actually want to protect kids from harm
I’m alright with making the doors to the local porn shop stickier (no pun intended), but in addition I agree that we need a better understanding of intimacy and sexuality as a society. For some reason its an incredibly taboo subject in western society, and that leaves the extreme religious folks as the only ones talking about it.
I wish this type of discussion was happening in our local government town halls rather than in a corner of the internet most won’t ever see.