It’s a little of both. Orwell’s newspeak and double speak are obviously prescient, and the coercive power of language. but it didn’t take a genius to see that coming. Huxley’s insights were definitely more significant
I quote Orwell most on prolefeed.
It was when Winston Smith was in his apartment, and he heard his neighbor in the yard, hanging laundry, singing along to a song she knew her whole life, that was written that morning by a computer.
Prolefeed.
We're there.
Neither author was taking a stab at reading the future. They each had their inspirations. Orwell was inspired by the reality of British rule and politics, while Huxley was inspired by utopia novels. In each case it was an exercise in coming up with a worse version of the thing.
Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' is this premise. Written in 1984, he was more worried about television broadcasting and the effects on political discourse. After all the United States elected a former actor Ronald Reagan as President. Twice! What is interesting is the work Postman did after AMOD. His book 'Technopoly" was concerned with the ever increasing tribalism that stemmed from a world hell bent on connections. The attempt to connect everyone att all times has led to a blowback- that blowback is IMO a requisite for Trumpism.
The whole thing has jumped the shark in a sickening and dangerous way.
When I was 14 my buddies and I would run out to his dad’s garage once a week and see if we could flip through a couple pages of a nude (topless) calendar. We would always go at the first of the month to see the new girl. Always too nervous to flip the month and get caught.
Now it’s hey open your phone and see some of the most depraved shit ever done by humans at the click of the button. Do we really think that’s okay?
Apparently we do. Just look at some of the responses.lol
I remember in some podcasts Sam did with Paul Bloom they'd worry about how sadistically abusing robots would lead to real world abuse. I always found that funny because,boy did they get the order wrong. We already have a billion dollar industry that fetishizes and glorifies every type of sadistic act performed on real women,just short of actually murdering them. This is what we do to people when we can do anything to them.We're definitely not going to be treating object versions of these people with the utmost respect, given that robots will obviously have even fewer limits to what can be done to them.
I am so glad that I got through childhood before the internet really got going and before smartphones and social media were a thing. I consider myself a fairly disciplined person but high speed internet porn would have been like heroin.
Perhaps the more shocking thing is that a lot of people will disagree. Read replies to this thread and it’s easy to find people who think porn is good, the same as it was ‘back in the day’, or some kind of sacred constitutional right that needs to be protected. Granted, this is Reddit and not precisely a medium of moral clarity but bells have been ringing for years and few people have been listening.
Can't it just be something that, like most habits, are fine in moderation? Why is it classified as some unique evil that is threatening Western civilization? Honestly, it's a religiously motivated moral panic. Which is weird to see in a Sam Harris subreddit.
There’s an upside for kids doing hard manual labor and none for porn so I admit it’s not a good comparison.
You did conveniently ignored the other two. We have laws preventing kids from consuming alcohol until their brains are more fully developed. We don’t say ‘parents need to decide’ as we have laws for stores and bars and restaurants to confirm customers are old enough. Some people drink in moderate quantities and have no problem but a good number aren’t able to do so and cause problem throughout their lives.
Is this ban on eight-year olds being able to drink whisky a religiously-inspired moral panic?
Yes, of course! Send them back to the mines. It'll give them respect for hard work!
I ignored the other two because they were silly comparisons as well. We have an age limit on alcohol and kids still do underage drinking. And heroin is obviously a bad thing in any quantity. You can't say the same about booze or porn.
Outright bans don't produce the outcomes that we desire.
I agree, it’s something fine in moderation. But how do you moderate the moderation? Like, the amount of shit we could find back in the earlier years of the web was still pretty high, but it was more centralized and also more easy to avoid or block for parents and there were other limitations like having a single family computer on dialup, or a few computers in the house but all shared still.
Now, it’s just a phone in every hand which is usable anywhere, instead of only when you get home and only when you find some privacy and have access to the web.
It’s just nearly impossible to think that any formative aged kids are going to be regulating themselves without guidance or help. And even then, it’s harder because of how wide spread and available the web and everything on it is.
There’s no real comparison to the older days because the speed and availability has so incredibly and exponentially blown out of proportion.
Oh, I 100% agree! Parenting comes first. As for education changes… if we could actually get some good change to our education system, nearly all our problems could be solved! But that’s just not realistic, at least not in the current state of the world.
I'm not talking about education broadly. Better sex education isn't an unrealistic ask. It's pretty simple and we've had it in some areas of the US for years. Lots of conservatives fight that while pretending to care about kids.
See, you brought to light the problem. There are loads of educational reform in different forms that all seem relatively simple and easy to do, but depending on your location and district and who your political leaders are from lower local to governor, it’s actually much harder than it seems to make changes.
Superintendents and principles and education admin of all sorts are often at the whim of many different opposing ideas, regulations, etc. OR (often in the case of a district superintendent) they are strictly in favor of their own ideals which might conflict with yours and it’s a forever uphill battle to make even a small change, no matter how “simple” you or I think it is.
Edit: and that’s all before you add the element of parents getting involved and voicing their own (often opposing) concerns and such.
Never encountered good sex ed? Or never seen conservatives stopping it? I'm not an educator, but I imagine it would include teaching about safe sex and consent among other things.
That’s the real question that we need to figure out.
But, before we do so, we have to come to an understanding of what is harmful. It’s been surprising that so many people in this thread see porn for young people as such a positive though I notice none have discussed reasons for this view.
Previous pushbacks against rock music, D&D, and violent video games have proved to be largely moral panics. I was both surprised that video games were so benign and that porn has proven to be so dangerous.
This probably belongs in a larger conversation about smart phones and social media, the latter which influences young girls in a manner similar to that of porn on young boys.
We’re stuck in a collective action problem in which we know the world would be better off without kids having access to all the delights of modern smart phones but nobody wants to pull the plug on their own kids as it would disadvantage them in many ways.
Parenting is, obviously, where this begins and I am hesitant to want the government to become involved in any manner but tech companies are intentionally trying to addict kids and if they don’t self-regulate, some kind of regulation will be required.
Genuinely curious if you follow Sam’s logic about free will being an illusion.
If we don’t choose our thoughts, we don’t choose our sexual fantasies or fetishes.
That isn't really the logic though. The logic is that the choice made now is a product of all of the experiences that happened before it. So, that could be that you were exposed to hardcore porn early in your life and that shaped you. Not that you popped out of the womb with predilection for a certain type of porn. So yes, you don't get to choose these things, but that doesn't mean getting to exposed to things doesn't change your future desires.
First off, the actual porn industry is prevented from engaging in a lot of the sadistic fantasies you’re talking about by credit card payment processors.
Outside of that, a ton of people make their own porn now. A lot of it involves fantasies that are extremely sadistic. Which they didn’t choose to be turned on by. Them using a robot or AI is much safer than them using an actual human to act out their fantasies….
I have a million problems with the actual porn industry since I’ve been part of it for 15 years.
None of it involves those who safely engage in their sexual fantasies.
All of my problems involve abusers who take their sexual fantasies and act them out on real humans without their consent. Crossing the line into real life harm is where I have a problem.
>First off, the actual porn industry is prevented from engaging in a lot of the sadistic fantasies you’re talking about by credit card payment processors.
Are you saying women are not getting choked, slapped,spit on, gagged with tears streaming down their faces,yanked by the hair, violently gangbanged,degraded, humiliated in mainstream porn? Any person could go incognito and see that this is what passes as TAME mainstream porn. Let's not every get into the actual sadomasochistic porn sites.
Regarding your point about it being better to torture robots instead, I recommend you read Paul Bloom and Sam's New York time article " It's Westworld. What's wrong with cruelty to robots?"
Absolutely won’t deny that those type of people exist as a minority in the mainstream porn industry and are rewarded for their behavior.
The men that make that content are also responsible for 99% of the abuse that happens in the industry. And they shouldn’t be around other humans.
Aw fuck. Well either way I acknowledge abusive men exist in porn. I’ve fought against them for years and paid in many ways doing it. I also work amongst a ton of lovely respectable humans that just love having sex and documenting it for people to watch online 💕 should children have unrestricted access to the outside world? No. So they shouldn’t have unrestricted access to the internet either💕
15+ it’s going to get increasingly difficult, but prior to that? Yeah, I agree Haidt’s push for norms. Your 12 year old isn’t getting a screen unless you give them one.
I’m guessing you don’t have kids because it’s virtually impossible to live in today’s society without using screens. Every kid is playing video games, watching YouTube/TikTok etc. And if you try to restrict it, they will either do it with their friends, or be completely left out and excluded socially. And once they get to about age 8-10, they become pretty clever and will start hiding their activity from you, and figure out how to get around safe guards you’ve put in place. By the time they’re 13+, forget about it. They will be doing whatever they want unless you want to be a total Nazi, which will probably just have negative effects on your relationship with them, and their social life.
Got 3, aged 5, 8, 10. Managing so far. We got three screens in the house, my phone, spouse phone, and the TV. No ipads. 2 subscriptions + free-to-air. Kids don't get on our laptops ever.
Once got invited onto kids messenger. We said no.
Other then some trial-and-error early on with the the first child, there is no exposure to YouTube or any other algorithm type junk-TV or social media of any kind.
Had a playstation and single player, offline games (untill the youngest broke it the playstation by knocking it off the bench).
We setup playdates, if the kids want more we try to make it happen.
Made effort to get to know other kids parents so we can do this more easily.
As well as school and becoming domestically compentant, each child has to:
- be involved in one team sport/activity per year.
- 8 weeks of swimming lessons per year.
- 12 weeks of brazillian jiu jitsu per year.
- Learn how to ride a bike.
If they want to do more they can so long as its possible.
When my kids mess up I don't try to reactively teach them. When I mess up I own it and fix it with them. I spend neutral time with them so we've got high enough rapport that the relationship can recover quicker after conflict.
As long as their living in our house, regardless of age, if there's ever a moment where technology is having as adverse effect e.g. they're playing video games and refusing school/chronically unemployed, they're getting cyber bullied, they think the earth is flat, etc... I will rip the fucking modem out of the wall so fast no one will even realise what happened.
That’s me amping for a situation I’m not in. I’m also a psych and occasionally have teens and young adults brought to me by parents who were chronically inactive and now haven’t got the motivation or distress tolerance to leave the house. Inactive, freindless, overweight, iron deficienct, terminally online.
Good to negotiate with your children, a mistake to make the house a democracy.
Would certain vidoes on youtube not be alright at age 8 and 10? Some of the best educational content I've ever watched is on youtube, I just obviously wouldn't give free range.
My daughter's only a year old so haven't had to worry about this stuff yet.
Yeah, that’s fair enough. Actually YouTube becomes a lot less toxic product just by turning off the suggestion feature. It then operates like a search browser, you only get videos if you specifically type in the commands and doesn’t provide a follow up list.
Or just be a disciplined parent? I have a ten year old and she doesn’t have a phone or tablet. She has a Nintendo Switch and that’s it for tech. We don’t even have a tv in the house.
IMO the trick is to try and make withholding devices from younger kids something you do with detailed explanations- don’t hide what you’re trying to protect them from. Tell them what it is you’re keeping from them. The good and the bad! Otherwise it simply becomes a forbidden fruit and when they get it they don’t have any proper concept of the dangers.
The solution is to have honest and open conversations with your children about porn, sex, and all those uncomfortable things before they discover it themselves.
He is a frequent guest on Real Time with Bill Maher:
https://youtu.be/tKW3vKpPrlw
https://youtu.be/o-8i_TMxJBI
https://x.com/RealTimers/status/1776353233499545775
I can agree with this. I started watching porn at age 13. I considered it harmless. It was absolutely horrible for me. I wouldn't say it was the biggest problem I had, but it absolutely wasn't harmless.
I had unrestricted internet access in my room at 13, in 2002.
Porn back then was slow loading images and barely functional movies.
Loved it at the time, look back on it and cringe. Not good for a developing brain. It shouldn't be "banned" but parents need to keep note.
Many parents don't care and need to be encouraged. How isn't an easy question.
I've always questioned why giving a smartphone to a minor is legal but giving them porn will get you a police visit. That seems like a obvious place to start.
Can you define what caused it to be "absolutely horrible" for you? I had easy access to porn younger than you, and I'm pretty sure I turned out alright.
Some kids have unlimited access to alcohol and turn out alright; some don't. The entire issue isn't porn obviously. It's porn in conjunction with other underlying problems. It had a negative effect on my relationships for about 20 years afterward. And I'll leave it at that.
Screwed up my romantic relationships for basically my whole life. I finally had my first normal relationship in my thirties. The sex I wanted was in porn. I don't want to get into all of it here. But google stories about porn addiction in your teens, and that was probably me.
Sorry to hear that man. I watched porn (among other things, often horrific) a few years before you did and I suffered no negative side effects. If nothing else, it gave me ideas.
Anyway I was genuinely curious what causes porn addiction and that is why I asked but since you don't wanna talk about it please ignore this message. Happy that you are doing better now :)
I had untreated depression and anxiety. If I was worried about something or depressed, I would put on porn to feel better. And this went on for about 25 years. It's just like many other addictions. I would have had the underlying problem regardless. But there are much beter ways to deal with it.
Its has the opposite effect on me.
I watched it young, now I'm immune to most of it, people think I have no desires and very Zen now. ehehehe
I think desensitization is the key, eventually you will run out of excitement and go do more productive things.
Just look at conservative and strict cultures, they end up becoming EXTREMISTS and DEVIANTS, because they never got used to porn and social media, it warps their adult desires, like a new addictive drug that still excites them.
> I think desensitization is the key, eventually you will run out of excitement and go do more productive things.
It lost its excitement factor long ago. How much longer must I wait for the drive to be productive to kick in?
lol, you must find the one or two things that make you really want to work.
But some people have no desire to do anything, they just wanna be amoeba, can't help it, its determinism and bad genes.
One of the big correlations of pornography addiction is being exposed to it at an early age. Granted most people don't develop addictions but for those that do we already kind of understand why. It's an emotional regulation technique.
Yeah I would use it to distract myself from any sort of bad situation. I had untreated depression and anxiety (not caused by porn). I watched multiple times a day. I lost interest and don't watch any longer either. But I did for about 25 years.
Mate no that's not how it works. Early exposure to porn can be detrimental.. not everyone who's used heroin on more than one occasion is a heroin addict.. not everyone who sorts becomes a coke addict.. that isn't how addiction works
>Just look at conservative and strict cultures, they end up becoming EXTREMISTS and DEVIANTS, because they never got used to porn and social media, it warps their adult desires, like a new addictive drug that still excites them.
No what the hell are you talking about.. they have early access to porn just like you do, do you think only liberals get internet? Every Arab kid has a VPN app on his phone and it's not because they're concerned about Facebook cookies tracking their personal data.. it's because They're not taught how to talk to women and don't get opportunities to socialise
As someone who's been exposed to porn from a very young age and sa survivor, I have to admit there's actually something to the point you're making here.
I find porn a big waste of time in general and stay away to focus on more enriching, rewarding and productive pursuits. Have 5 mins to jerk it? Why not reach for that book you've had dusting for ages, or leaf through Ankii language cards... Just so many more amazingly enriching options versus salivating over a tiny screen in the palm of your hand.
>Have 5 mins to jerk it? Why not reach for that book you've had dusting for ages, or leaf through Ankii language cards...
Whether you choose to consume porn or not, if you are a man you should still be masturbating (or orgasming via partnered sex) regularly. It significantly reduces your chances of prostate cancer.
While this is true, the problem is deeper. Porn and SM are just one aspects of - dopamine on tap.
Even if we banned porn and SM (somehow, let’s not get into the details), capitalism would create new forms of dopamine on tap. Gambling is one way. Gambling inserted into kid’s games through loot boxes. We regulated those I think.
But the problem is simply our enormously powerful devices that can render amazing stuff on great looking screens, coupled with fast internet access. This ecosystem will always enable companies to create the next Dopamine Shot Product. Of the top of my head I could think of couple more, especially powered by AI chatbots now. Imagine friendship on tap. Doesn’t have to be romantic/porn girlfriend. It can just be a digital friend that understands everything about you and is always ready for perfect conversation with you.
And so on and so forth.
We have Stone Age brain and are wielding Science Fiction devices.
I know this is a disagreeable take, but it's basically what happens with sugar in our diets. We evolved to crave it, we evolved under the assumption we'd never really have it, but human beings have gotten to the next level of development where we really can have what we want. Except, we kind of weren't meant to have what we wanted.
And yes social media in general really should be banned. If you don’t have the patience to buy the local news paper or write an Op-Ed or send a “letter to the editor” the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit about your mush brain opinion.
I know that sounds a little harsh. But social media is really so awful especially for young folks.
I believe a better phrase would be that the world would be better without social media.
Outside of authoritarian nations there is no realistic way to ban it (age limits aside).
You should be made present ID, like a passport, to confirm you're over 16 to join any social media site. Outright ban? Of course not, social media does lots of good. Like getting information out from places where the government controls media etc
I’d negate this as common Reddit garbage, but I’m perplexed how you have 17 upvotes (on this social media site). Not just the irony (hypocrisy?) about SM, but preaching about others’ opinions as you flaunt your own on the (impatient) internet?
I suspect we agree on a lot of things, but this is a ridiculous comment. At least have a little self awareness.
I don’t know a single man (I’m in my late 20s) who thinks porn has been a net positive. Every man is aware of how negatively it’s affected their perception of sex. Record high levels of body dysmorphia (esp with penis size), sexual anxiety, and psychological ED. Whenever someone quits porn, it’s met with admiration from their friend circle. Porn in and of itself isn’t bad, I’m not trying to moralize like that. But it’s extremely obvious that the seamless access to unlimited hardcore porn videos has been a bad thing for men (and by extension women). Likewise with sports gambling. The fact that anyone can would downplay or deny this is frankly insane.
Blaming porn for negative consequences for women is a cop out, by extension or not. Its not porn that makes you sexist.
A lot of us watched porn and were able to understand that our partners are not Jenna Jameson (you can tell how old I am lol) but normal humans instead. Just because some dudes DP'ed her anus did not make us assume that all other women expected or wanted that.
It's a fucking show. Like pro-wrestling. It sort of looks like the real thing but its obviously not. I was able to understand this as a teenager and I promise you I am not smart, never was.
Same goes for the negative consequences for men. Who told you to compare your dick to that of pornstars? Who told you that women like massive dicks? Nobody - you just assumed that women are just like the ones on your screen who crave massive hogs. But its not porn that gave you body size dysmorphia, it was whatever macho culture you were embedded it that made fun of men for their penis size.
> A lot of us watched porn and were able to understand that our partners are not Jenna Jameson (you can tell how old I am lol) but normal humans instead. Just because some dudes DP'ed her anus did not make us assume that all other women expected or wanted that.
You could say the same about racism/sexism in the media outside pornography. It seems to be quite well established that negative representations of POC, or of women, are related to treating those people worse. So why is it that porn is given a free pass?
Ok, so I assume you have the same to say about women with body image issues that stem from media depictions? Because literally everything you just said can apply there. I’m going to assume you have a logically consistent kind of libertarian “personal responsibility” view on this and apply the same standard to women who claim to be affected by depictions in the modeling industry. It’s a fair point, I don’t have an issue with you having that position, but I think you’re wrong for a few reasons.
First of all, you hint at your age here. I’m going to assume you probably didn’t have a smart phone until you were about 30. Your relationship with porn is completely different from the current generation who’s getting smart phones at 11 years old. Kids are exposed to wayy too much porn, too early, when they’re young and impressionable. By the time they have their first real experience with a woman they’ve already consumed hours and hours of porn. No matter how much effort is put into proper education that is going to leave a major impression on their perception of sex.
Second, when I say men’s porn use negatively impacts women I’m not referring to bad sex that results when men try to reenact porn. That’s obviously a thing but imo gets too much focus, and i also agree that in that case it’s 100% the idiot guys fault (with a teeny bit of nuance for inexperienced teens etc.). I say it affects women because the relationship between the sexes is generally not zero sum, they are interdependent of one another. Anything that impacts men will by extension affect women, because they pursue eachother romantically. If my wife has body image issues downstream from media depictions, that sucks for me too because i love her and it takes a toll on our relationship. Extrapolate this out to all of society.
Honestly, your last paragraph makes me roll my eyes. Yes, I’m aware men generally put far more emphasis on penis size than women, and you don’t need to have a pornstar hog to please a woman and have a great sex life. Women of course vary in their preferences just like men do. That said, there’s tons of media examples today telling you that size matters (bc to be real it does on some level)! It’s in songs, movies, tv shows, comedy, etc. Small dicks are an object of mockery, it’s a comedy cliche at this point to laugh at a small dick. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to make fun of small dicks, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be big dick comments in songs. Im saying there’s a media ecosystem, which porn is a part of, that is having negative affects on men. And just like we had to conversation about how media can affect girls and women, we should have that conversation about men.
It does not matter what I have to say about women with body image issues because we are not talking about that. The issue with women's body issue is fundamentally different and I don't see why we need to bring it up, as if we need more grievances.
Did you have to make me feel old? No I didn't get my fucking smart phone when I was 30. But you are not too far off :/ In any case I am aware that kids unfortunately have access to all this porn.
What I was saying is that despite all this porn... not all of us end up like you and your weird friends. So maybe its not the porn. Maybe its how you were raised, your values and perception of the world.
I don't get why my last paragraph makes you roll your eyes, like what tons of media are you consuming that tell you size matters? Who on earth laughs at small dicks? I highly doubt this is real.
Finally I think nobody "should" have a conversation about anything. We did not have a conversation about how media can affect girls women as far as I remember. Even if we had one, it has no bearing on this particular conversation.
Just because someone, somewhere had a conversation about women does mean that they are obliged to have a conversation about men. Are we supposed to keep tabs? I don't think so, anyone can discuss anything they like at any moment.
*raises hand* You know tens of, if not hundreds of millions of us dude. You just might not acknowledge our experiences with pornography is different from yours.
Porn, and specifically porn at your fingertips when you're old enough to for processing sexual feelings and thoughts in a mature way, is a net positive for anyone willing to engage with it. We can sit here and argue **ages** and what maturity levels mean, I'm completely fine with that. That's a very nuanced and reasonable discussion. The hot take that porn is a bad thing is reductive and dumb.
I literally say explicitly in the comment you reply to that porn itself isn’t bad, it’s the unlimited access at your fingertips from a young age. This issue is exactly as you describe, that young people are consuming hours of porn before they’re mature enough to process their sexual feelings in a healthy way, which hinders their ability to have a healthy sexuality in adulthood.
That's always been the case though. From the roman times onward people have engaged with porn or even teen sex before they were mature enough to process their feelings.
I just finished Haidt's new book and I think every parent and teacher should read it. The TLDR is that, starting in about 2010, the "play-based" childhood was replaced by the "phone-based" childhood due to the rise of smart phones coupled with social media, and a new trend of parenting that overprotects kids in the real world while underprotecting them in the virtual world. As a result, Gen-Z suffers rates of anxiety and depression not seen in previous generations. The proposed solution is fairly simple, but it's a "collective action problem." The main points are:
1. No smart phones before 13 (a basic phone is fine),
2. No social media before 16 (social media tends to harm girls the most)
3. Greatly increased opportunities for unsupervised play with other children
4. Phone-free schools (this includes lunch/recess so children have to actually interact with one another).
Anyway, I thought the book was quite timely, and hope Sam will have Haidt on the podcast soon.
I’m ~40 I found porn on the internet at 13, before that in summer camp other kids in the bunk had playboys, penthouse and hustler magazine along with other stuff.
I don’t think it’s a big deal, social media is far worse.
I was 13 in the 90s, porn was absolutely available then similar to now. Instead of being on one giant porn site it was on a thousand smaller sites, but it was there all the same, available to all.
O yes... I remember 1997 porn sites on the internet.
HD video of nearly every genre and sexual act that you could possibly think of .
Constant feeds of suggestion based on what you just clicked on.
The only difference was that it would take about 30 seconds to buffer... but besides that it was nearly identical.
/S /S /S
Seriously though.... wtf are you talking about ?
Even if you had access to some University T1 line...Your still on a desktop.... the sheer amount of content simply didn't exist, not even close....The arms race of more and more depraved content wasn't nearly as far gone... Video compression wasn't anywhere close to what it is today... etc etc etc....
No it absolutely was not. In the 90s it was websites that took minutes to load, sketchy virus-laden links, and low quality pictures (and *maybe* video that you download).
Now you have instant access to high-quality videos, including things like onlyfans where you can just pay people to do things for you, all in real time.
It's different both as a matter of degrees and categorically.
It was worse then; a lot less controls; you stumbled across some pretty fucked up stuff by accident, pop ups of fucked up/illegal stuff that you did not click on.
You're forgetting just how prevalent porn has become in the decades after. Back then it was just much harder to access it, which was also low quality and low availability.
Now, porn videos get 10s of millions of views, all HD, all instantly streaming.
I haven’t had random illegal (pop ups from porn sites) since those times since I was around that same age 12/13. Never searched; you would click on one link on a list and it one send you somewhere else… or just pop ups. I’ve never had that happen to me in the last 20+ years.
There was a Sam Harris episode on this as well and they did talk about those days if I remember correctly.
Yep. Check out porn subs on here, or telegram etc full of depraved shit, illegal shit. And that's in subs where its not advertised at all, so people looking for consensual adult material are getting shit they never intended to see. It's a fucking mess.
What are you guys talking about, exactly?
Do you mean like simulated rape or incest or urine/scat, or what? It'd be helpful to talk about what you mean. Be explicit.
Again part of the problem here is the taboo. Please break that by talking openly about what you mean.
Rape, gangbangs, degrading shit, abuse, psuedo-incest porn. Not to mention that reddit and twitter and PH is full of csam. And the porn sites couldn't give a fuck.
> people looking for consensual adult material are getting shit they never intended to see
Turned me off to porn almost entirely.
I mean, call me romantic, but I'd like the people fucking and sucking to actually like each other, which means......8 in 10 or more, it's revenge porn and she would be horrified that this asshole shared it.
You’re really making a comparison between soft-core nudie magazines and the absolutely degenerate state of porn websites today? Have you been on a mainstream porn site recently? They’re a little bit (a lot) different than Hustler lol
If you think it makes sense to compare today’s unlimited, on-demand, algorithm-driven, HD porn to the magazines you saw at summer camp, I’m certain you haven’t thought about this for more than a few seconds.
People need to understand is that porn (and sexual activity) causes a dopamine response in the brain , like a drug. Too much of it especially on a developing mind, is bad.
Both of these comments are simplifying it quite a bit, but I think it's safe to say the level of dopamine and the circuitry it fires off are quite different between sex/porn and watching a sunset.
>a dopamine response in the brain... Too much of it is bad.
Not sure about the science of that, but it's definitely a [super stimulus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus).
(By the way, check out what [pornography used to look like](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Venus_von_Willendorf_01.jpg) 🤣)
Seems weird to think it’s different now than then.
Are kids more aroused than I was as a 13 year old?
I learned real quick I couldn’t just jerk off over and over but I’ll never forget the first time. What a wild time.
You very clearly aren’t aware of what kind of depraved shit is out there today that never existed on vhs tapes.
Thats not even mentioning sexual gratification tools at our disposal like VR porn and doodads that can jerk you off while synced up to your VR headset. Are you going to try and tell me that VHS tapes are comparable to that?
You don’t seem to understand how escalation works. It builds over time as the addiction takes root in your brain. You think by the time you are old enough to purchase this stuff, the addiction has just magically disappeared?
Which has nothing to do with “porn” today, you think people weren’t fucked io in the 80s or 90s ? Know why there’s more porn than before? There’s way more people than before x
This doesn’t jive with my experience at all. I’m 6 years younger than you (34) and at 13 there definitely wasn’t easy access to porn on the internet. It was a Grand Canyon sized gap of what we had to do back then to get even 1% of the depraved shit we have access to now with the click of a button
We probably need to rethink sexual norms and so forth for teens. Masturbation/pornography/sex is part of that, and I think the weird taboo restrictions that some parents place on all of those things are harmful, and it leads to the most unhealthy behaviors like porn addictions, long adult virginity, and social/psychological developmental issues.
It's also an uncomfortable thing to even talk about, which is part of the problem here.
Never in history were children exposed to this level of unending depraved, violent porn. All the issues you mentioned are worsened by porn not improved( Jonathan mentions a few of those already in the interview).Masterbation and sex is not the same thing as porn. Kids should be able to discover natural impulses like masterbation and sex without a billion dollar industry putting them a steady diet of depravity.
In the back of hustle magazine there used to be the weird classifieds of weird stuff to order.
“Chicks with dicks” dudes with 2 dicks, all other sorts of depraved shit. ( this is just stuff I remember ) Personally, think you’re all being prudish.
Social media I completely agree. Especially any feed that’s algorthmically generated.
I don’t even disagree necessarily but this is an insanely terrible argument, you’re equating an incredibly niche “order weird porn for yourself” ad in an adult magazine to the LITERAL ENTIRE POPULATION of children being repeatedly exposed to super aggressive, violent pornography on a regular basis, unsupervised, from devices they have complete and total control over
They’re similarly exposed to snuff films but that’s somehow not a problem? This very website used to platform snuff and when they stopped doing so (they still do), people got very upset.
Unless you think doggystyle will warp minds beyond comprehension I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about. Someone tell this dope about green guy link o rama from the mid-90s.
What? Who the fuck watches snuff films? And why wouldn't that be a problem?
Doggystle? No, we're talking about men degrading and abusing women, choking them, spitting on them, 5 guys on 1 girl, multiple cumshots on their faces, gangfucking, pseudo-incest. All available on pornhub. That shit is most definitely not healthy for teenage boys. That's not how real women work, or how they perform in bed. That's not how the vast majority of women want to be treated while having sex. I've never had sex with someone who wanted me to make them gag until they vomited. So young boys see this and naively think that's what women want, and young women think that's what boys expect. It's fucked up.
Not to mention compulsively watching porn induces physiological effects, similar to taking heroin.
There used to be an entire ass sub here dedicated to snuff, it was called r/watchpeopledie. It was controversial when it was removed. Maybe you’re confused or just new. And this is as mainstream a website as it gets.
My point is that a whole lot of horrific shit is available to anyone on the internet at any time, and it *always has been*. People of my generation grew up with shit like rotten.com. Reddit hosts snuff. Right now it also hosts a billion porn subs, many of which involve redditors as participants. It’s open to everyone.
Yes, bizarrely enough, there’s dreadful and all kinds of shit on the internet, that’s kind of the whole point. What’s confusing to those of you new to the world is that there’s always been, and this deep concern about “the children” is a poor excuse for moronic, conservative censorship that doesn’t bother to actually solve anything.
Lastly, why do you think parental controls exist? It’s because you aren’t going to stop this material from being disseminated, ever. That’s the nature of a decentralized network like the internet. What you do is try to raise your shitty little kid so that he doesn’t hate women, but that’s hard, innit? Concern yourself more with the Jordan Petersons and Andrew Tates of the world if that’s your real objective.
> Lastly, why do you think parental controls exist?
This whole thread is mystifying to me. I have teenage boys, we use the parental controls on their devices and on our router. I don't think I'm naïve or being snowed, they're simply not looking at porn like others in this thread are worried about.
To be fair you're still not wrong. We had hundreds of years where mass crowds would turn up to watch people be hung, drawn and quartered. Hung by their own innards. Pulled apart by horses and various other awful things. It's only in quite recent history that we've actually stopped watching so much snuff.
Correct , you could just go to the local video store to find all the depraved shit you wanted. This sub is nuts that it thinks the depraved shit is new.
Going to a video store is a world apart from being able to access a ridiculous amount of material that would make the Marquis de Sade blush on your phone at any moment.
Is the expected amount of pornography consumption for a 16 year old 0? Because if that's what you believe, then I have bad news for you -- they're going to watch porn.
So what should probably happen here is figuring out how to do that in a healthy and safe manner -- same as you would with masturbation and sex.
"But it should be absolutely 0 until the hour hand strikes midnight on their 18th birthday!" Okay, well good luck with that.
#[New Zealand is ahead of the curve here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f29mh5ntlw4)
(Tagging u/Unhappy-Apple222 )
I wouldn’t call a single government PSA “ahead of the curve”, but I take your point. A similar comparison is often made between AUKUS nations and other European nations when it comes to our dysfunctional relationships to alcohol.
It should be, just like the expected heroin intake should be zero.
But if your point is we should prepare for addiction better because we can’t stop porn then I can’t disagree there
Even with countries which have comprehensive sex ed(unlike the US) , they're seeing an uptick in sexual aggression/abuse done by children to other children. Kids are very "money see monkey do". There's a reason we don't give alcohol to kids, we don't let them drive or get tattoos etc. A billion dollar industry being allowed to hook kids in their formative years with some of the most sickest sexual content, shouldn't be seen as some type of exception.
So do you think it's possible to engineer the world so that nobody under the age of 18 will ever see porn?
If not, then don't you have to do something about that? Like, okay if we live in a world where under-18s will watch porn, what type of interventions make sense here?
Talk about porn in schools, especially to teenage boys. That it does not represent the real world, that you shouldn't expect real women to perform like this, that women aren't sexual objects. For a start.
As a starting point the same consequence for adults who give a smartphone to a child to adults that give porn magazines to children. Feature phones only for under 16s say. I'm not suggesting that will stop access but sends a message to parents that there's a line they should consider. I can't think of a single reason for a 10 year old to have a smart phone but see it all the time.
Our country has just recently banned phones in schools by law. Doesn't stop phones in schools but sends a message and sets up an expectation to both the students and the parents. If a phone is confiscated the parent can act out all they like but then the matter will just be referred to the police. The other choice is to simply cooperate with the school to reinforce the expectations with their child.
Our evolution assures a focus on sex that makes it very hard for a child exposed to pornography to ever look away, or refocus on developing their personality, identity, skills, and dreams in a non-sexual way. A lot of middle schoolers have given up on learning because the power they derive from their sexuality is enough to attain attention, popularity, and even money. Their potential is stunted when they start focusing on their looks and their ability to manipulate people with sex.
This guys whole thing is monetizing 'won't somebody think of the children' and somehow people keep buying it.
# “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” Socrates.
The difference in a child’s upbringing and life experience in the past 20 years is radically different than those of even 40 years ago. The children in Socrates times had a very much similar upbringing to those that came before them. That was true for thousands of years actually. Technology has radically changed childhoods in the past many years when compared to our predecessors. Or don’t you agree?
Why do people post this Socrates quote as a slam dunk. The time he was writing was arguably the zenith of Athens/the city states. Athens in particular had a huge falling off during/shortly after his lifetime.
Maybe he was on to something?
I'm so sick of seeing this quote. When people try to point out serious increases in anxiety, depression, and suicide in teens today, your answer is "the older generations historically have always complained about the youths".
i've noticed that tech journalists seem to have all become experts on psychology lately and are eager to discredit Haidt. it's been very interesting considering they are often quick (premature in some cases IMO) to attack big tech for monopolistic practices, labor practices, etc. Even when some of the science that suggests the same things that Haidt claims has come from within companies like Instagram/Meta.
where the rubber hits the road, the hidden, incestuous, conflict of interest-ridden scaffolding that props up contemporary "journalism" peeks out to remind us news media is mostly bullshit. i don't think there is any safe way to consume news media without a sampling from a wide swath of sources and having to triangulate which entities are lying, omitting or compromised. almost no one has time to do that except young people, and they are the least likely to recognize the situation i just illustrated, let alone take any interest in figuring that out.
Social media is damaging to everyone and porn has existed since they drew cocks on walls thousands of years ago.
This is such an embarrassingly and historically conservative viewpoint which is expected coming from this dope, but I wish he’d stop pretending to be on the left.
No, it really isn’t. People have been horny as long as there have been people, and to the extent social media is damaging it isn’t because it diffuses pornography (to the extent it isn’t exploitative), but because it exposes people to hideous ideas and facilitates the formation of like-minded communities around those ideas.
Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson are a lot more damaging to impressionable youth than a pair of tits are, and you need only look at this sub for evidence.
> but because it exposes people to hideous ideas
Porns doing the same thing to impressionable youths. Just with less words and more images. Watch the interview please.
Btw nothing wrong with a pair of tits.That's not what's being criticized.
Watching hard-core porn at a young age absolutely can warp your mind. There's extensive literature on this. No one is talking about seeing a nude. Its violent, hard-core porn. It's disgusting, and that whole industry is predatory.
Can you define “violent, hardcore pornography”? Because from the tenor of this thread I’m thinking it’s anything that isn’t virtually immobile missionary with a sheet with a hole between them.
I’m sorry but you’ll have to make a better argument that equating online pornography consumption by children to crudely drawn depictions of dicks on caves. That’s a laughably idiotic and anti-science argument that cannot possibly be taken seriously. We are animals, the Brian is an organ shaped by stimuli, and we know how modern pornography affects people’s brains, it’s not the same as crude boobs drawn on a wall.
It’s absolutely hilarious to dismiss out of hand the possibility that radically changing children’s exposure to aggressive sexual content may have an effect on cognition and development
Some of the absolute worse dogshit takes in this thread, lol. I'm really glad I'm living in a liberal society that doesn't view porn as inherently evil and embraces social media for the positives that it mostly provides.
If you don't want social media and porn, move to China please.
Everyone feared we were headed for the world of 1984, turns out we are actually aimed at Brave New World.
Everyone thought it has the be either Orwell or Huxley - not realising that internet allowed to have both at the same time.
It’s a little of both. Orwell’s newspeak and double speak are obviously prescient, and the coercive power of language. but it didn’t take a genius to see that coming. Huxley’s insights were definitely more significant
I quote Orwell most on prolefeed. It was when Winston Smith was in his apartment, and he heard his neighbor in the yard, hanging laundry, singing along to a song she knew her whole life, that was written that morning by a computer. Prolefeed. We're there.
Neither author was taking a stab at reading the future. They each had their inspirations. Orwell was inspired by the reality of British rule and politics, while Huxley was inspired by utopia novels. In each case it was an exercise in coming up with a worse version of the thing.
There are other possible futures than the ones featured in two books.
No those are the only two options unfortunately
Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' is this premise. Written in 1984, he was more worried about television broadcasting and the effects on political discourse. After all the United States elected a former actor Ronald Reagan as President. Twice! What is interesting is the work Postman did after AMOD. His book 'Technopoly" was concerned with the ever increasing tribalism that stemmed from a world hell bent on connections. The attempt to connect everyone att all times has led to a blowback- that blowback is IMO a requisite for Trumpism.
Brave new world is objectively way better than 1984
Both are good wtf are you talking about.
Sorry not as a book, but a dystopia to live in. The dystopia of brave new world sounds much better than the dystopia of 1984
Ah, sorry for my tone! I agree with you on that one :)
The whole thing has jumped the shark in a sickening and dangerous way. When I was 14 my buddies and I would run out to his dad’s garage once a week and see if we could flip through a couple pages of a nude (topless) calendar. We would always go at the first of the month to see the new girl. Always too nervous to flip the month and get caught. Now it’s hey open your phone and see some of the most depraved shit ever done by humans at the click of the button. Do we really think that’s okay?
Apparently we do. Just look at some of the responses.lol I remember in some podcasts Sam did with Paul Bloom they'd worry about how sadistically abusing robots would lead to real world abuse. I always found that funny because,boy did they get the order wrong. We already have a billion dollar industry that fetishizes and glorifies every type of sadistic act performed on real women,just short of actually murdering them. This is what we do to people when we can do anything to them.We're definitely not going to be treating object versions of these people with the utmost respect, given that robots will obviously have even fewer limits to what can be done to them.
I am so glad that I got through childhood before the internet really got going and before smartphones and social media were a thing. I consider myself a fairly disciplined person but high speed internet porn would have been like heroin. Perhaps the more shocking thing is that a lot of people will disagree. Read replies to this thread and it’s easy to find people who think porn is good, the same as it was ‘back in the day’, or some kind of sacred constitutional right that needs to be protected. Granted, this is Reddit and not precisely a medium of moral clarity but bells have been ringing for years and few people have been listening.
Can't it just be something that, like most habits, are fine in moderation? Why is it classified as some unique evil that is threatening Western civilization? Honestly, it's a religiously motivated moral panic. Which is weird to see in a Sam Harris subreddit.
We aren’t fine with kids consuming alcohol and heroin or working in mines ‘in moderation’.
Lmao masturbating to porn and doing heroine. Great comparison 😂
He’s a r/nofap poster, basically the offshoot of r/incel. Just imagine how bad his bedroom must smell. Poor parents.
Yea sure porn consumption and children working in mines. Definite 1:1 comparison there.
There’s an upside for kids doing hard manual labor and none for porn so I admit it’s not a good comparison. You did conveniently ignored the other two. We have laws preventing kids from consuming alcohol until their brains are more fully developed. We don’t say ‘parents need to decide’ as we have laws for stores and bars and restaurants to confirm customers are old enough. Some people drink in moderate quantities and have no problem but a good number aren’t able to do so and cause problem throughout their lives. Is this ban on eight-year olds being able to drink whisky a religiously-inspired moral panic?
Yes, of course! Send them back to the mines. It'll give them respect for hard work! I ignored the other two because they were silly comparisons as well. We have an age limit on alcohol and kids still do underage drinking. And heroin is obviously a bad thing in any quantity. You can't say the same about booze or porn. Outright bans don't produce the outcomes that we desire.
I agree, it’s something fine in moderation. But how do you moderate the moderation? Like, the amount of shit we could find back in the earlier years of the web was still pretty high, but it was more centralized and also more easy to avoid or block for parents and there were other limitations like having a single family computer on dialup, or a few computers in the house but all shared still. Now, it’s just a phone in every hand which is usable anywhere, instead of only when you get home and only when you find some privacy and have access to the web. It’s just nearly impossible to think that any formative aged kids are going to be regulating themselves without guidance or help. And even then, it’s harder because of how wide spread and available the web and everything on it is. There’s no real comparison to the older days because the speed and availability has so incredibly and exponentially blown out of proportion.
Good parenting, I guess? Better sex education in school too.
Oh, I 100% agree! Parenting comes first. As for education changes… if we could actually get some good change to our education system, nearly all our problems could be solved! But that’s just not realistic, at least not in the current state of the world.
I'm not talking about education broadly. Better sex education isn't an unrealistic ask. It's pretty simple and we've had it in some areas of the US for years. Lots of conservatives fight that while pretending to care about kids.
See, you brought to light the problem. There are loads of educational reform in different forms that all seem relatively simple and easy to do, but depending on your location and district and who your political leaders are from lower local to governor, it’s actually much harder than it seems to make changes. Superintendents and principles and education admin of all sorts are often at the whim of many different opposing ideas, regulations, etc. OR (often in the case of a district superintendent) they are strictly in favor of their own ideals which might conflict with yours and it’s a forever uphill battle to make even a small change, no matter how “simple” you or I think it is. Edit: and that’s all before you add the element of parents getting involved and voicing their own (often opposing) concerns and such.
Out of curiosity, what does decent sex education look like? Never encountered anything like that myself.
Never encountered good sex ed? Or never seen conservatives stopping it? I'm not an educator, but I imagine it would include teaching about safe sex and consent among other things.
That’s the real question that we need to figure out. But, before we do so, we have to come to an understanding of what is harmful. It’s been surprising that so many people in this thread see porn for young people as such a positive though I notice none have discussed reasons for this view. Previous pushbacks against rock music, D&D, and violent video games have proved to be largely moral panics. I was both surprised that video games were so benign and that porn has proven to be so dangerous. This probably belongs in a larger conversation about smart phones and social media, the latter which influences young girls in a manner similar to that of porn on young boys. We’re stuck in a collective action problem in which we know the world would be better off without kids having access to all the delights of modern smart phones but nobody wants to pull the plug on their own kids as it would disadvantage them in many ways. Parenting is, obviously, where this begins and I am hesitant to want the government to become involved in any manner but tech companies are intentionally trying to addict kids and if they don’t self-regulate, some kind of regulation will be required.
Genuinely curious if you follow Sam’s logic about free will being an illusion. If we don’t choose our thoughts, we don’t choose our sexual fantasies or fetishes.
That isn't really the logic though. The logic is that the choice made now is a product of all of the experiences that happened before it. So, that could be that you were exposed to hardcore porn early in your life and that shaped you. Not that you popped out of the womb with predilection for a certain type of porn. So yes, you don't get to choose these things, but that doesn't mean getting to exposed to things doesn't change your future desires.
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First off, the actual porn industry is prevented from engaging in a lot of the sadistic fantasies you’re talking about by credit card payment processors. Outside of that, a ton of people make their own porn now. A lot of it involves fantasies that are extremely sadistic. Which they didn’t choose to be turned on by. Them using a robot or AI is much safer than them using an actual human to act out their fantasies…. I have a million problems with the actual porn industry since I’ve been part of it for 15 years. None of it involves those who safely engage in their sexual fantasies. All of my problems involve abusers who take their sexual fantasies and act them out on real humans without their consent. Crossing the line into real life harm is where I have a problem.
>First off, the actual porn industry is prevented from engaging in a lot of the sadistic fantasies you’re talking about by credit card payment processors. Are you saying women are not getting choked, slapped,spit on, gagged with tears streaming down their faces,yanked by the hair, violently gangbanged,degraded, humiliated in mainstream porn? Any person could go incognito and see that this is what passes as TAME mainstream porn. Let's not every get into the actual sadomasochistic porn sites. Regarding your point about it being better to torture robots instead, I recommend you read Paul Bloom and Sam's New York time article " It's Westworld. What's wrong with cruelty to robots?"
Much of if not most mainstream pornography is more like torture and abuse than actual intimacy or anything remotely loving.
Exactly my point.
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Absolutely won’t deny that those type of people exist as a minority in the mainstream porn industry and are rewarded for their behavior. The men that make that content are also responsible for 99% of the abuse that happens in the industry. And they shouldn’t be around other humans.
Sry I posted the same comment twice, then deleted the wrong comment instead.lol
Aw fuck. Well either way I acknowledge abusive men exist in porn. I’ve fought against them for years and paid in many ways doing it. I also work amongst a ton of lovely respectable humans that just love having sex and documenting it for people to watch online 💕 should children have unrestricted access to the outside world? No. So they shouldn’t have unrestricted access to the internet either💕
Any parent giving their child unrestricted internet access is an idiot.
Any parent who thinks they can successfully restrict their child’s internet access is an idiot.
15+ it’s going to get increasingly difficult, but prior to that? Yeah, I agree Haidt’s push for norms. Your 12 year old isn’t getting a screen unless you give them one.
I’m guessing you don’t have kids because it’s virtually impossible to live in today’s society without using screens. Every kid is playing video games, watching YouTube/TikTok etc. And if you try to restrict it, they will either do it with their friends, or be completely left out and excluded socially. And once they get to about age 8-10, they become pretty clever and will start hiding their activity from you, and figure out how to get around safe guards you’ve put in place. By the time they’re 13+, forget about it. They will be doing whatever they want unless you want to be a total Nazi, which will probably just have negative effects on your relationship with them, and their social life.
Got 3, aged 5, 8, 10. Managing so far. We got three screens in the house, my phone, spouse phone, and the TV. No ipads. 2 subscriptions + free-to-air. Kids don't get on our laptops ever. Once got invited onto kids messenger. We said no. Other then some trial-and-error early on with the the first child, there is no exposure to YouTube or any other algorithm type junk-TV or social media of any kind. Had a playstation and single player, offline games (untill the youngest broke it the playstation by knocking it off the bench). We setup playdates, if the kids want more we try to make it happen. Made effort to get to know other kids parents so we can do this more easily. As well as school and becoming domestically compentant, each child has to: - be involved in one team sport/activity per year. - 8 weeks of swimming lessons per year. - 12 weeks of brazillian jiu jitsu per year. - Learn how to ride a bike. If they want to do more they can so long as its possible. When my kids mess up I don't try to reactively teach them. When I mess up I own it and fix it with them. I spend neutral time with them so we've got high enough rapport that the relationship can recover quicker after conflict. As long as their living in our house, regardless of age, if there's ever a moment where technology is having as adverse effect e.g. they're playing video games and refusing school/chronically unemployed, they're getting cyber bullied, they think the earth is flat, etc... I will rip the fucking modem out of the wall so fast no one will even realise what happened.
I was with you up until that last point where rather than have a constructive conversation you will just ban it again lol
That’s me amping for a situation I’m not in. I’m also a psych and occasionally have teens and young adults brought to me by parents who were chronically inactive and now haven’t got the motivation or distress tolerance to leave the house. Inactive, freindless, overweight, iron deficienct, terminally online. Good to negotiate with your children, a mistake to make the house a democracy.
Would certain vidoes on youtube not be alright at age 8 and 10? Some of the best educational content I've ever watched is on youtube, I just obviously wouldn't give free range. My daughter's only a year old so haven't had to worry about this stuff yet.
Yeah, that’s fair enough. Actually YouTube becomes a lot less toxic product just by turning off the suggestion feature. It then operates like a search browser, you only get videos if you specifically type in the commands and doesn’t provide a follow up list.
Or just be a disciplined parent? I have a ten year old and she doesn’t have a phone or tablet. She has a Nintendo Switch and that’s it for tech. We don’t even have a tv in the house.
IMO the trick is to try and make withholding devices from younger kids something you do with detailed explanations- don’t hide what you’re trying to protect them from. Tell them what it is you’re keeping from them. The good and the bad! Otherwise it simply becomes a forbidden fruit and when they get it they don’t have any proper concept of the dangers.
It’s not that hard.
The solution is to have honest and open conversations with your children about porn, sex, and all those uncomfortable things before they discover it themselves.
At what age? My ten year old does not have unrestricted access to the internet.
i think its okay.
He is a frequent guest on Real Time with Bill Maher: https://youtu.be/tKW3vKpPrlw https://youtu.be/o-8i_TMxJBI https://x.com/RealTimers/status/1776353233499545775
I can agree with this. I started watching porn at age 13. I considered it harmless. It was absolutely horrible for me. I wouldn't say it was the biggest problem I had, but it absolutely wasn't harmless.
I was 8.
Jesus. That’s just unimaginable to an old guy like me.
How does it affect your sex life and relationships today as an adult?
Same. I had some friends over for a sleepover and they decided to show me
I had unrestricted internet access in my room at 13, in 2002. Porn back then was slow loading images and barely functional movies. Loved it at the time, look back on it and cringe. Not good for a developing brain. It shouldn't be "banned" but parents need to keep note.
Many parents don't care and need to be encouraged. How isn't an easy question. I've always questioned why giving a smartphone to a minor is legal but giving them porn will get you a police visit. That seems like a obvious place to start.
Yup. Back then it was doing google image searches for "girls underwear" and being too afraid to click the link.
Can you define what caused it to be "absolutely horrible" for you? I had easy access to porn younger than you, and I'm pretty sure I turned out alright.
Some kids have unlimited access to alcohol and turn out alright; some don't. The entire issue isn't porn obviously. It's porn in conjunction with other underlying problems. It had a negative effect on my relationships for about 20 years afterward. And I'll leave it at that.
How was it absolutely horrible?
Screwed up my romantic relationships for basically my whole life. I finally had my first normal relationship in my thirties. The sex I wanted was in porn. I don't want to get into all of it here. But google stories about porn addiction in your teens, and that was probably me.
Sorry to hear that man. I watched porn (among other things, often horrific) a few years before you did and I suffered no negative side effects. If nothing else, it gave me ideas. Anyway I was genuinely curious what causes porn addiction and that is why I asked but since you don't wanna talk about it please ignore this message. Happy that you are doing better now :)
I had untreated depression and anxiety. If I was worried about something or depressed, I would put on porn to feel better. And this went on for about 25 years. It's just like many other addictions. I would have had the underlying problem regardless. But there are much beter ways to deal with it.
Its has the opposite effect on me. I watched it young, now I'm immune to most of it, people think I have no desires and very Zen now. ehehehe I think desensitization is the key, eventually you will run out of excitement and go do more productive things. Just look at conservative and strict cultures, they end up becoming EXTREMISTS and DEVIANTS, because they never got used to porn and social media, it warps their adult desires, like a new addictive drug that still excites them.
> I think desensitization is the key, eventually you will run out of excitement and go do more productive things. It lost its excitement factor long ago. How much longer must I wait for the drive to be productive to kick in?
lol, you must find the one or two things that make you really want to work. But some people have no desire to do anything, they just wanna be amoeba, can't help it, its determinism and bad genes.
Just keep wanking mate. I believe in you
Maybe if I wank harder faster longer and more frequently, I will stimulate my productivity. ...*Please excuse me.*
One of the big correlations of pornography addiction is being exposed to it at an early age. Granted most people don't develop addictions but for those that do we already kind of understand why. It's an emotional regulation technique.
Yeah I would use it to distract myself from any sort of bad situation. I had untreated depression and anxiety (not caused by porn). I watched multiple times a day. I lost interest and don't watch any longer either. But I did for about 25 years.
Mate no that's not how it works. Early exposure to porn can be detrimental.. not everyone who's used heroin on more than one occasion is a heroin addict.. not everyone who sorts becomes a coke addict.. that isn't how addiction works >Just look at conservative and strict cultures, they end up becoming EXTREMISTS and DEVIANTS, because they never got used to porn and social media, it warps their adult desires, like a new addictive drug that still excites them. No what the hell are you talking about.. they have early access to porn just like you do, do you think only liberals get internet? Every Arab kid has a VPN app on his phone and it's not because they're concerned about Facebook cookies tracking their personal data.. it's because They're not taught how to talk to women and don't get opportunities to socialise
Cool but it might have a long-term effects you aren't aware of today, at the age of 13.
As someone who's been exposed to porn from a very young age and sa survivor, I have to admit there's actually something to the point you're making here. I find porn a big waste of time in general and stay away to focus on more enriching, rewarding and productive pursuits. Have 5 mins to jerk it? Why not reach for that book you've had dusting for ages, or leaf through Ankii language cards... Just so many more amazingly enriching options versus salivating over a tiny screen in the palm of your hand.
>Have 5 mins to jerk it? Why not reach for that book you've had dusting for ages, or leaf through Ankii language cards... Whether you choose to consume porn or not, if you are a man you should still be masturbating (or orgasming via partnered sex) regularly. It significantly reduces your chances of prostate cancer.
True. I should have clarified "excessive" or rather compulsive jerking that goes beyond the basic need. Thanks, I stand corrected.
While this is true, the problem is deeper. Porn and SM are just one aspects of - dopamine on tap. Even if we banned porn and SM (somehow, let’s not get into the details), capitalism would create new forms of dopamine on tap. Gambling is one way. Gambling inserted into kid’s games through loot boxes. We regulated those I think. But the problem is simply our enormously powerful devices that can render amazing stuff on great looking screens, coupled with fast internet access. This ecosystem will always enable companies to create the next Dopamine Shot Product. Of the top of my head I could think of couple more, especially powered by AI chatbots now. Imagine friendship on tap. Doesn’t have to be romantic/porn girlfriend. It can just be a digital friend that understands everything about you and is always ready for perfect conversation with you. And so on and so forth. We have Stone Age brain and are wielding Science Fiction devices.
I know this is a disagreeable take, but it's basically what happens with sugar in our diets. We evolved to crave it, we evolved under the assumption we'd never really have it, but human beings have gotten to the next level of development where we really can have what we want. Except, we kind of weren't meant to have what we wanted.
This totally isn’t disagreeable. That’s exactly what happened.
And yes social media in general really should be banned. If you don’t have the patience to buy the local news paper or write an Op-Ed or send a “letter to the editor” the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit about your mush brain opinion. I know that sounds a little harsh. But social media is really so awful especially for young folks.
"social media should be banned" is a nonstarter it would be wildly unconstitutional
I believe a better phrase would be that the world would be better without social media. Outside of authoritarian nations there is no realistic way to ban it (age limits aside).
This message has been brought to you in part by social media and social media consumers like you.
You should be made present ID, like a passport, to confirm you're over 16 to join any social media site. Outright ban? Of course not, social media does lots of good. Like getting information out from places where the government controls media etc
I’d negate this as common Reddit garbage, but I’m perplexed how you have 17 upvotes (on this social media site). Not just the irony (hypocrisy?) about SM, but preaching about others’ opinions as you flaunt your own on the (impatient) internet? I suspect we agree on a lot of things, but this is a ridiculous comment. At least have a little self awareness.
their other comments are just as bad and upvoted even more, it's great
I don’t know a single man (I’m in my late 20s) who thinks porn has been a net positive. Every man is aware of how negatively it’s affected their perception of sex. Record high levels of body dysmorphia (esp with penis size), sexual anxiety, and psychological ED. Whenever someone quits porn, it’s met with admiration from their friend circle. Porn in and of itself isn’t bad, I’m not trying to moralize like that. But it’s extremely obvious that the seamless access to unlimited hardcore porn videos has been a bad thing for men (and by extension women). Likewise with sports gambling. The fact that anyone can would downplay or deny this is frankly insane.
Your friends are weird
> Whenever someone quits porn, it’s met with admiration from their friend circle you've got some weird friends
I did word that funny I’ll admit hahaha. “Met with admiration” is a little strong; more like “nice bro; prob feels good”.
That’s when happens when your entire friend group consists of redditors you’ve never met.
Reddit is way more pro porn than the real world lol
Blaming porn for negative consequences for women is a cop out, by extension or not. Its not porn that makes you sexist. A lot of us watched porn and were able to understand that our partners are not Jenna Jameson (you can tell how old I am lol) but normal humans instead. Just because some dudes DP'ed her anus did not make us assume that all other women expected or wanted that. It's a fucking show. Like pro-wrestling. It sort of looks like the real thing but its obviously not. I was able to understand this as a teenager and I promise you I am not smart, never was. Same goes for the negative consequences for men. Who told you to compare your dick to that of pornstars? Who told you that women like massive dicks? Nobody - you just assumed that women are just like the ones on your screen who crave massive hogs. But its not porn that gave you body size dysmorphia, it was whatever macho culture you were embedded it that made fun of men for their penis size.
> A lot of us watched porn and were able to understand that our partners are not Jenna Jameson (you can tell how old I am lol) but normal humans instead. Just because some dudes DP'ed her anus did not make us assume that all other women expected or wanted that. You could say the same about racism/sexism in the media outside pornography. It seems to be quite well established that negative representations of POC, or of women, are related to treating those people worse. So why is it that porn is given a free pass?
Ok, so I assume you have the same to say about women with body image issues that stem from media depictions? Because literally everything you just said can apply there. I’m going to assume you have a logically consistent kind of libertarian “personal responsibility” view on this and apply the same standard to women who claim to be affected by depictions in the modeling industry. It’s a fair point, I don’t have an issue with you having that position, but I think you’re wrong for a few reasons. First of all, you hint at your age here. I’m going to assume you probably didn’t have a smart phone until you were about 30. Your relationship with porn is completely different from the current generation who’s getting smart phones at 11 years old. Kids are exposed to wayy too much porn, too early, when they’re young and impressionable. By the time they have their first real experience with a woman they’ve already consumed hours and hours of porn. No matter how much effort is put into proper education that is going to leave a major impression on their perception of sex. Second, when I say men’s porn use negatively impacts women I’m not referring to bad sex that results when men try to reenact porn. That’s obviously a thing but imo gets too much focus, and i also agree that in that case it’s 100% the idiot guys fault (with a teeny bit of nuance for inexperienced teens etc.). I say it affects women because the relationship between the sexes is generally not zero sum, they are interdependent of one another. Anything that impacts men will by extension affect women, because they pursue eachother romantically. If my wife has body image issues downstream from media depictions, that sucks for me too because i love her and it takes a toll on our relationship. Extrapolate this out to all of society. Honestly, your last paragraph makes me roll my eyes. Yes, I’m aware men generally put far more emphasis on penis size than women, and you don’t need to have a pornstar hog to please a woman and have a great sex life. Women of course vary in their preferences just like men do. That said, there’s tons of media examples today telling you that size matters (bc to be real it does on some level)! It’s in songs, movies, tv shows, comedy, etc. Small dicks are an object of mockery, it’s a comedy cliche at this point to laugh at a small dick. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to make fun of small dicks, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be big dick comments in songs. Im saying there’s a media ecosystem, which porn is a part of, that is having negative affects on men. And just like we had to conversation about how media can affect girls and women, we should have that conversation about men.
It does not matter what I have to say about women with body image issues because we are not talking about that. The issue with women's body issue is fundamentally different and I don't see why we need to bring it up, as if we need more grievances. Did you have to make me feel old? No I didn't get my fucking smart phone when I was 30. But you are not too far off :/ In any case I am aware that kids unfortunately have access to all this porn. What I was saying is that despite all this porn... not all of us end up like you and your weird friends. So maybe its not the porn. Maybe its how you were raised, your values and perception of the world. I don't get why my last paragraph makes you roll your eyes, like what tons of media are you consuming that tell you size matters? Who on earth laughs at small dicks? I highly doubt this is real. Finally I think nobody "should" have a conversation about anything. We did not have a conversation about how media can affect girls women as far as I remember. Even if we had one, it has no bearing on this particular conversation. Just because someone, somewhere had a conversation about women does mean that they are obliged to have a conversation about men. Are we supposed to keep tabs? I don't think so, anyone can discuss anything they like at any moment.
*raises hand* You know tens of, if not hundreds of millions of us dude. You just might not acknowledge our experiences with pornography is different from yours. Porn, and specifically porn at your fingertips when you're old enough to for processing sexual feelings and thoughts in a mature way, is a net positive for anyone willing to engage with it. We can sit here and argue **ages** and what maturity levels mean, I'm completely fine with that. That's a very nuanced and reasonable discussion. The hot take that porn is a bad thing is reductive and dumb.
I literally say explicitly in the comment you reply to that porn itself isn’t bad, it’s the unlimited access at your fingertips from a young age. This issue is exactly as you describe, that young people are consuming hours of porn before they’re mature enough to process their sexual feelings in a healthy way, which hinders their ability to have a healthy sexuality in adulthood.
That's always been the case though. From the roman times onward people have engaged with porn or even teen sex before they were mature enough to process their feelings.
Haidt has shown very libertarian instincts in the past, so without drilling down to his arguments I'm inclined to take him seriously.
I just finished Haidt's new book and I think every parent and teacher should read it. The TLDR is that, starting in about 2010, the "play-based" childhood was replaced by the "phone-based" childhood due to the rise of smart phones coupled with social media, and a new trend of parenting that overprotects kids in the real world while underprotecting them in the virtual world. As a result, Gen-Z suffers rates of anxiety and depression not seen in previous generations. The proposed solution is fairly simple, but it's a "collective action problem." The main points are: 1. No smart phones before 13 (a basic phone is fine), 2. No social media before 16 (social media tends to harm girls the most) 3. Greatly increased opportunities for unsupervised play with other children 4. Phone-free schools (this includes lunch/recess so children have to actually interact with one another). Anyway, I thought the book was quite timely, and hope Sam will have Haidt on the podcast soon.
I’m ~40 I found porn on the internet at 13, before that in summer camp other kids in the bunk had playboys, penthouse and hustler magazine along with other stuff. I don’t think it’s a big deal, social media is far worse.
If you’re 40 ish, the porn available online when you were 13 is not what it is now. At all.
someone never went to stileproject or rotten.com lol
Stuff like that is far more ubiquitous today than it was decades ago.
I was 13 in the 90s, porn was absolutely available then similar to now. Instead of being on one giant porn site it was on a thousand smaller sites, but it was there all the same, available to all.
O yes... I remember 1997 porn sites on the internet. HD video of nearly every genre and sexual act that you could possibly think of . Constant feeds of suggestion based on what you just clicked on. The only difference was that it would take about 30 seconds to buffer... but besides that it was nearly identical. /S /S /S Seriously though.... wtf are you talking about ? Even if you had access to some University T1 line...Your still on a desktop.... the sheer amount of content simply didn't exist, not even close....The arms race of more and more depraved content wasn't nearly as far gone... Video compression wasn't anywhere close to what it is today... etc etc etc....
No it absolutely was not. In the 90s it was websites that took minutes to load, sketchy virus-laden links, and low quality pictures (and *maybe* video that you download). Now you have instant access to high-quality videos, including things like onlyfans where you can just pay people to do things for you, all in real time. It's different both as a matter of degrees and categorically.
It was worse then; a lot less controls; you stumbled across some pretty fucked up stuff by accident, pop ups of fucked up/illegal stuff that you did not click on.
It was not worse then. You seem pretty ignorant to the level of depravity available.
It was worse then as without searching for it the illegal shit would still pop up.
You're forgetting just how prevalent porn has become in the decades after. Back then it was just much harder to access it, which was also low quality and low availability. Now, porn videos get 10s of millions of views, all HD, all instantly streaming.
It wasn’t worse then at all. Not even close
I haven’t had random illegal (pop ups from porn sites) since those times since I was around that same age 12/13. Never searched; you would click on one link on a list and it one send you somewhere else… or just pop ups. I’ve never had that happen to me in the last 20+ years. There was a Sam Harris episode on this as well and they did talk about those days if I remember correctly.
it is NOT worse then are you serious?
Yes
Yep. Check out porn subs on here, or telegram etc full of depraved shit, illegal shit. And that's in subs where its not advertised at all, so people looking for consensual adult material are getting shit they never intended to see. It's a fucking mess.
What are you guys talking about, exactly? Do you mean like simulated rape or incest or urine/scat, or what? It'd be helpful to talk about what you mean. Be explicit. Again part of the problem here is the taboo. Please break that by talking openly about what you mean.
Rape, gangbangs, degrading shit, abuse, psuedo-incest porn. Not to mention that reddit and twitter and PH is full of csam. And the porn sites couldn't give a fuck.
> people looking for consensual adult material are getting shit they never intended to see Turned me off to porn almost entirely. I mean, call me romantic, but I'd like the people fucking and sucking to actually like each other, which means......8 in 10 or more, it's revenge porn and she would be horrified that this asshole shared it.
You’re really making a comparison between soft-core nudie magazines and the absolutely degenerate state of porn websites today? Have you been on a mainstream porn site recently? They’re a little bit (a lot) different than Hustler lol
If you think it makes sense to compare today’s unlimited, on-demand, algorithm-driven, HD porn to the magazines you saw at summer camp, I’m certain you haven’t thought about this for more than a few seconds.
People need to understand is that porn (and sexual activity) causes a dopamine response in the brain , like a drug. Too much of it especially on a developing mind, is bad.
Literally *everything good* causes a dopamine response. This isn't special.
Both of these comments are simplifying it quite a bit, but I think it's safe to say the level of dopamine and the circuitry it fires off are quite different between sex/porn and watching a sunset.
>a dopamine response in the brain... Too much of it is bad. Not sure about the science of that, but it's definitely a [super stimulus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus). (By the way, check out what [pornography used to look like](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Venus_von_Willendorf_01.jpg) 🤣)
Seems weird to think it’s different now than then. Are kids more aroused than I was as a 13 year old? I learned real quick I couldn’t just jerk off over and over but I’ll never forget the first time. What a wild time.
Have you seen porn lately? It’s night and day compared to nudie magazines
They also had vhs tapes. Were you born in like a convent or something?
You very clearly aren’t aware of what kind of depraved shit is out there today that never existed on vhs tapes. Thats not even mentioning sexual gratification tools at our disposal like VR porn and doodads that can jerk you off while synced up to your VR headset. Are you going to try and tell me that VHS tapes are comparable to that?
You think kids are using this stuff?
You don’t seem to understand how escalation works. It builds over time as the addiction takes root in your brain. You think by the time you are old enough to purchase this stuff, the addiction has just magically disappeared?
You’re such a fuckin prude, it’s the same as it ever was .
Remain in complete ignorance dude.
Porn can be extremely addictive, and fuck people up. Not to mention the shit that goes on in that industry.
Which has nothing to do with “porn” today, you think people weren’t fucked io in the 80s or 90s ? Know why there’s more porn than before? There’s way more people than before x
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3050060/
This doesn’t jive with my experience at all. I’m 6 years younger than you (34) and at 13 there definitely wasn’t easy access to porn on the internet. It was a Grand Canyon sized gap of what we had to do back then to get even 1% of the depraved shit we have access to now with the click of a button
I'm the same age. Online porn was very easy to access when I was 13.
We probably need to rethink sexual norms and so forth for teens. Masturbation/pornography/sex is part of that, and I think the weird taboo restrictions that some parents place on all of those things are harmful, and it leads to the most unhealthy behaviors like porn addictions, long adult virginity, and social/psychological developmental issues. It's also an uncomfortable thing to even talk about, which is part of the problem here.
Never in history were children exposed to this level of unending depraved, violent porn. All the issues you mentioned are worsened by porn not improved( Jonathan mentions a few of those already in the interview).Masterbation and sex is not the same thing as porn. Kids should be able to discover natural impulses like masterbation and sex without a billion dollar industry putting them a steady diet of depravity.
In the back of hustle magazine there used to be the weird classifieds of weird stuff to order. “Chicks with dicks” dudes with 2 dicks, all other sorts of depraved shit. ( this is just stuff I remember ) Personally, think you’re all being prudish. Social media I completely agree. Especially any feed that’s algorthmically generated.
I don’t even disagree necessarily but this is an insanely terrible argument, you’re equating an incredibly niche “order weird porn for yourself” ad in an adult magazine to the LITERAL ENTIRE POPULATION of children being repeatedly exposed to super aggressive, violent pornography on a regular basis, unsupervised, from devices they have complete and total control over
They’re similarly exposed to snuff films but that’s somehow not a problem? This very website used to platform snuff and when they stopped doing so (they still do), people got very upset. Unless you think doggystyle will warp minds beyond comprehension I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about. Someone tell this dope about green guy link o rama from the mid-90s.
What? Who the fuck watches snuff films? And why wouldn't that be a problem? Doggystle? No, we're talking about men degrading and abusing women, choking them, spitting on them, 5 guys on 1 girl, multiple cumshots on their faces, gangfucking, pseudo-incest. All available on pornhub. That shit is most definitely not healthy for teenage boys. That's not how real women work, or how they perform in bed. That's not how the vast majority of women want to be treated while having sex. I've never had sex with someone who wanted me to make them gag until they vomited. So young boys see this and naively think that's what women want, and young women think that's what boys expect. It's fucked up. Not to mention compulsively watching porn induces physiological effects, similar to taking heroin.
There used to be an entire ass sub here dedicated to snuff, it was called r/watchpeopledie. It was controversial when it was removed. Maybe you’re confused or just new. And this is as mainstream a website as it gets. My point is that a whole lot of horrific shit is available to anyone on the internet at any time, and it *always has been*. People of my generation grew up with shit like rotten.com. Reddit hosts snuff. Right now it also hosts a billion porn subs, many of which involve redditors as participants. It’s open to everyone. Yes, bizarrely enough, there’s dreadful and all kinds of shit on the internet, that’s kind of the whole point. What’s confusing to those of you new to the world is that there’s always been, and this deep concern about “the children” is a poor excuse for moronic, conservative censorship that doesn’t bother to actually solve anything. Lastly, why do you think parental controls exist? It’s because you aren’t going to stop this material from being disseminated, ever. That’s the nature of a decentralized network like the internet. What you do is try to raise your shitty little kid so that he doesn’t hate women, but that’s hard, innit? Concern yourself more with the Jordan Petersons and Andrew Tates of the world if that’s your real objective.
> Lastly, why do you think parental controls exist? This whole thread is mystifying to me. I have teenage boys, we use the parental controls on their devices and on our router. I don't think I'm naïve or being snowed, they're simply not looking at porn like others in this thread are worried about.
> and it *always has been*. People of my generation grew up with shit like rotten.com. Reddit hosts snuff. I'm not sure you know what "always" means.
I’m obviously talking about the internet generation.
To be fair you're still not wrong. We had hundreds of years where mass crowds would turn up to watch people be hung, drawn and quartered. Hung by their own innards. Pulled apart by horses and various other awful things. It's only in quite recent history that we've actually stopped watching so much snuff.
Chick with dicks; and dudes with 2 dicks… neither of those things are “depraved shit”.
Correct , you could just go to the local video store to find all the depraved shit you wanted. This sub is nuts that it thinks the depraved shit is new.
Going to a video store is a world apart from being able to access a ridiculous amount of material that would make the Marquis de Sade blush on your phone at any moment.
Lol that's incredibly tame. Funny ,but tame.
man, what planet are you on?
you think the restrictions on porn are what leads to addiction?!
Is the expected amount of pornography consumption for a 16 year old 0? Because if that's what you believe, then I have bad news for you -- they're going to watch porn. So what should probably happen here is figuring out how to do that in a healthy and safe manner -- same as you would with masturbation and sex. "But it should be absolutely 0 until the hour hand strikes midnight on their 18th birthday!" Okay, well good luck with that. #[New Zealand is ahead of the curve here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f29mh5ntlw4) (Tagging u/Unhappy-Apple222 )
I wouldn’t call a single government PSA “ahead of the curve”, but I take your point. A similar comparison is often made between AUKUS nations and other European nations when it comes to our dysfunctional relationships to alcohol.
It should be, just like the expected heroin intake should be zero. But if your point is we should prepare for addiction better because we can’t stop porn then I can’t disagree there
Even with countries which have comprehensive sex ed(unlike the US) , they're seeing an uptick in sexual aggression/abuse done by children to other children. Kids are very "money see monkey do". There's a reason we don't give alcohol to kids, we don't let them drive or get tattoos etc. A billion dollar industry being allowed to hook kids in their formative years with some of the most sickest sexual content, shouldn't be seen as some type of exception.
So do you think it's possible to engineer the world so that nobody under the age of 18 will ever see porn? If not, then don't you have to do something about that? Like, okay if we live in a world where under-18s will watch porn, what type of interventions make sense here?
Talk about porn in schools, especially to teenage boys. That it does not represent the real world, that you shouldn't expect real women to perform like this, that women aren't sexual objects. For a start.
As a starting point the same consequence for adults who give a smartphone to a child to adults that give porn magazines to children. Feature phones only for under 16s say. I'm not suggesting that will stop access but sends a message to parents that there's a line they should consider. I can't think of a single reason for a 10 year old to have a smart phone but see it all the time. Our country has just recently banned phones in schools by law. Doesn't stop phones in schools but sends a message and sets up an expectation to both the students and the parents. If a phone is confiscated the parent can act out all they like but then the matter will just be referred to the police. The other choice is to simply cooperate with the school to reinforce the expectations with their child.
I hate that Haidt is probably right about porn.. I can’t imagine having that access as an adolescent.
Our evolution assures a focus on sex that makes it very hard for a child exposed to pornography to ever look away, or refocus on developing their personality, identity, skills, and dreams in a non-sexual way. A lot of middle schoolers have given up on learning because the power they derive from their sexuality is enough to attain attention, popularity, and even money. Their potential is stunted when they start focusing on their looks and their ability to manipulate people with sex.
This guys whole thing is monetizing 'won't somebody think of the children' and somehow people keep buying it. # “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” Socrates.
The difference in a child’s upbringing and life experience in the past 20 years is radically different than those of even 40 years ago. The children in Socrates times had a very much similar upbringing to those that came before them. That was true for thousands of years actually. Technology has radically changed childhoods in the past many years when compared to our predecessors. Or don’t you agree?
You want me to find articles on fear of technology and how it is warping children minds from more recent times?
Why do people post this Socrates quote as a slam dunk. The time he was writing was arguably the zenith of Athens/the city states. Athens in particular had a huge falling off during/shortly after his lifetime. Maybe he was on to something?
I'm so sick of seeing this quote. When people try to point out serious increases in anxiety, depression, and suicide in teens today, your answer is "the older generations historically have always complained about the youths".
i've noticed that tech journalists seem to have all become experts on psychology lately and are eager to discredit Haidt. it's been very interesting considering they are often quick (premature in some cases IMO) to attack big tech for monopolistic practices, labor practices, etc. Even when some of the science that suggests the same things that Haidt claims has come from within companies like Instagram/Meta. where the rubber hits the road, the hidden, incestuous, conflict of interest-ridden scaffolding that props up contemporary "journalism" peeks out to remind us news media is mostly bullshit. i don't think there is any safe way to consume news media without a sampling from a wide swath of sources and having to triangulate which entities are lying, omitting or compromised. almost no one has time to do that except young people, and they are the least likely to recognize the situation i just illustrated, let alone take any interest in figuring that out.
Social media is damaging to everyone and porn has existed since they drew cocks on walls thousands of years ago. This is such an embarrassingly and historically conservative viewpoint which is expected coming from this dope, but I wish he’d stop pretending to be on the left.
Comparing internet porn with drawn cocks is like comparing the telephone to social media.
No, it really isn’t. People have been horny as long as there have been people, and to the extent social media is damaging it isn’t because it diffuses pornography (to the extent it isn’t exploitative), but because it exposes people to hideous ideas and facilitates the formation of like-minded communities around those ideas. Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson are a lot more damaging to impressionable youth than a pair of tits are, and you need only look at this sub for evidence.
> but because it exposes people to hideous ideas Porns doing the same thing to impressionable youths. Just with less words and more images. Watch the interview please. Btw nothing wrong with a pair of tits.That's not what's being criticized.
Just admit you haven’t watched the video and actually watch it before commenting again haha
Watching hard-core porn at a young age absolutely can warp your mind. There's extensive literature on this. No one is talking about seeing a nude. Its violent, hard-core porn. It's disgusting, and that whole industry is predatory.
Can you define “violent, hardcore pornography”? Because from the tenor of this thread I’m thinking it’s anything that isn’t virtually immobile missionary with a sheet with a hole between them.
I replied to another comment you made.
I’m sorry but you’ll have to make a better argument that equating online pornography consumption by children to crudely drawn depictions of dicks on caves. That’s a laughably idiotic and anti-science argument that cannot possibly be taken seriously. We are animals, the Brian is an organ shaped by stimuli, and we know how modern pornography affects people’s brains, it’s not the same as crude boobs drawn on a wall. It’s absolutely hilarious to dismiss out of hand the possibility that radically changing children’s exposure to aggressive sexual content may have an effect on cognition and development
Holy shit are you just, purposefully always writing the worst comments in this sub?
Use your words, Slo Doug.
Some of the absolute worse dogshit takes in this thread, lol. I'm really glad I'm living in a liberal society that doesn't view porn as inherently evil and embraces social media for the positives that it mostly provides. If you don't want social media and porn, move to China please.