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It may seem strange to declare that going forward this blog is going to be entirely focused on eschatology, and then to choose pornography as the very next subject. Most people scoff at the idea that pornography could lead to the end of the world all on it’s own. And I mostly agree with that, but as I said, part of what I want to do is expand the discussion of eschatology vertically to encompass things that aren’t commonly considered, but may represent more subtle threats, and I would argue that pornography might be just such a threat.
In part this is precisely because very few people take it seriously. Everyone understands that if we get hit by a comet, or if the ice caps melt, or if there’s a nuclear war, that even if humanity survives, things will be pretty grim, whereas with pornography, we have the exact opposite situation. There’s a substantial segment of the population who feels that it’s entirely benign, and some who even feel that it’s healthy. As you may have guessed I’m not in either camp, and I’ll explain why.
To start with, if people were certain that some aspect of society was definitely going to end in catastrophe, or worse, end up causing the destruction of that very society. Then they would definitely do something about it. When there’s a clear and present danger, like being invaded by a foreign army, people are pretty good about doing whatever it takes. Unfortunately most dangers are not so obvious, nor so inevitable. Many dangers are subtle, and those which aren’t, are generally improbable. And yet it is from the universe of these subtle and improbable dangers, that catastrophe often emerges. I think we can safely say that no one foresaw that the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand would lead to 40 million deaths (more if you count World War II). And even if we move the causation down a few steps, there were hardly any people who thought war between the Great Powers would cause 40 million deaths. But if we’re going to have any chance of preventing catastrophes, then identifying all the many potential dangers beforehand is a necessary first step.
All of this means that a large part of any study of eschatology has to involve a discussion of catastrophes with a very low probability. As I said, I think it’s extremely unlikely that pornography is going to lead to the end of the world all on it’s own, but I do find it fascinating that numerous people don’t even view it as a danger. This was illustrated by a recent Twitter debate between cultural conservatives and more libertarian conservatives on the topic. I’m sure it doesn’t take much to imagine what that debate was about. The cultural conservatives think that pornography is a huge danger and the government should do more to keep it out of people’s home’s, and the libertarian’s think the pornography is not that big of a deal, and that if you’re worried about it you just need to “parent better”. As you might imagine I’m firmly on the cultural conservatives side. I think that pornography is dangerous and that the danger posed is very subtle and beyond that multi-faceted.
As part of that debate someone linked to an article in the The Dallas Morning News that illustrates all of these attributes, particularly the idea that you just need to “parent better”. The author describes how something was obviously weighing on her daughter. It took some coaxing, but the daughter eventually revealed what it was:
At a friend’s birthday party, they were playing on the little girl’s phone. The girl handed it to my daughter and said, “Boys are disgusting.” My daughter clicked on a male classmate’s Snapchat story to find a video of him and a few other boys from her class laughing as they watched “rape porn”. She said the woman was bound up, saying “no” as a masked man approached her.
[She] went on to describe a group of boys in her sixth grade class frequently joking about assaulting the girls in the parking lot. She said if any of the girls aren’t sitting with their legs closed, the boys will ask if they want to get pregnant. And if the girls’ legs are crossed, boys from this group often walk by and say, “Spread ‘em.”
To begin with we need to ask if the story is true. I see no reason do doubt that, it doesn’t strike me as being implausible. The behavior described in the last paragraph seems a little over the top and caricatured, but not so much that it seems unrealistic. Perhaps some parts of it are exaggerated, maybe the boys only joked about assault once or twice. Or maybe if we’re really skeptical, it didn’t happen to the author’s daughter it happened to the daughter of a friend, and she was 15. But does anyone doubt that at some point a child was exposed to “rape porn” through some, supposedly benign portal, like Google?
After considering whether the story is true, we have to ask if it’s representative. Again this is hard to say, but every statistic I’ve seen indicates that pornography is ubiqitious, and I’d be very much suprised if most statistics don’t understate the true percentages of teenagers who’ve been exposed to it. Asking a kid if they’ve viewed pornography has the same declaration against interest problem that asking about drugs has. Which is to say, you can definitely trust that everyone who says they have viewed it is telling the truth, but you should definitely carry some doubt about everyone who says that they haven’t. But regardless of whether it’s 28% of 11-12 year olds, or closer to 50% or 80%, does anyone doubt that children are being inadvertently exposed to really upsetting pornography all the time?
Many people, even those who defend pornography, would basically agree with the first two points (if not the exact details of the example I provided). Which is that children, even those as young as 11, are consuming pornography, and that this consumption is not isolated. But after granting this, many people don’t see any particular harm, and they certainly don’t think that the government needs to do anything about it. Rather, as I mentioned at the beginning, they think that if I or people like me have a problem with it, that we just need to “parent better”. This is a great example of how difficult that is.
This girl wasn’t exposed to “rape porn” because she ended up on Pornhub on the home computer, and it’s the mother’s own fault because she didn’t install content filtering software. She was exposed to it on Instagram. I have no direct knowledge of how common that is on Instagram specifically, but I do know that there are numerous mainstream sites that also host an awful lot of porn (not extreme stuff like in the example, but still) for example Reddit and Imgur. Meaning that a parent can install ironclad content filtering software in their home, but what happens the minute your child goes over to a friends house, or ends up in the presence of a smartphone that doesn’t have filtering software. Or if it ends up on a site like Instagram that isn’t filtered. And of course, no kid has ever figured out how to get around content blocking. The key point being that “rape porn” is easily available on any internet connection unless special, even extraordinary care is taken.
I said that the story would illustrate that pornography is “dangerous and that the danger posed is very subtle and beyond that multi-faceted” and I think it does, but now that we’re through discussing the provence and how difficult it is for even good parents to restrict, it’s time to get into a specific discussion of the subtle and multifaceted danger of porn. For myself, I have a hard time imagining that sixth graders consuming “rape porn” could be viewed as anything other than dangerous, and even if we assume that most childhood consumption of pornography is not so extreme, they’re still viewing stuff which is almost entirely composed of unhealthy examples of sexual relationships, and it would be difficult to argue that they’re not learning from these examples and translating that into expectations. Indeed, there’s broad evidence for that, and it’s also what happened to the boys in the story I provided as an example.
Even if you are making the argument that pornography is harmless for most people, (which I don’t agree with) the same could be said of alcohol and yet we universally restrict that to people over 21. Can we at least agree that pornography requires a certain amount of maturity to handle? More maturity than that possessed by the average 11 year old?
Thus far we have only discussed the obvious dangers, but as I said there are more subtle dangers as well. Many people want to focus on the ways in which pornography degrades women. And indeed there was some of that present in the example I provided. But what about the effect it has on men? I know that there are arguments that it warps their expectations of sex (indeed I already made that argument) but let’s set that aside for the moment. You could imagine that pornography could be an entirely healthy outlet (again I don’t think it is) but if it replaced the need for actual sex with real people that would still be bad.
Back in May of 2018 I did a post about incels, (people, especially men, who are celibate, but not by choice) and at the time I posted a graph showing a large upswing in the men aged 22-35 who reported having no sex in the previous year, and speculated that it was probably connected to pornography. And indeed, in terms of the effort required for gratification, you can hardly compare the two. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, finding someone to actually have sex with requires leaving the house, spending some amount of time at a bar, displaying a certain level of charm while at the bar, and whatever additional logistics might end up being required. And normally a lot more than that. While achieving gratification with pornography doesn’t even require someone to get up out of their chair. This asymmetry is hard to ignore, and it’s equally hard to imagine that it doesn’t carry any additional consequences.
Finally I claimed that the danger from pornography was multi faceted. Which it is. There’s the danger it poses to children, there’s the danger it poses to those who are married (studies indicate it increases the risk of divorce), there’s the danger it poses to people trying to start a relationship, and the danger to those people who will never have a relationship because pornography is easier. But all of those dangers are really only about what is happening right now. Another facet to the potential danger is where things are headed. As I pointed out the last time we were on this subject, we’re only about a dozen years into the era of streaming video, which means that it’s reasonable to assume that the full effects of that innovation are yet to be felt. And I would argue that this is particularly true when it comes to pornographic videos. On top of that there are probably second order and downstream effects. Some of which I’ve already touched on and some of which have yet to be uncovered.
This is where we get to the other reason for bringing up this subject now, so far what I’ve covered is fairly typical of the debate between cultural conservatives and basically everyone else. But in addition to the twitter debates which define every subject these days, including pornography, there are other, deeper, historical reasons for concern, as laid out in the recent article, Why Sexual Morality May be Far More Important than You Ever Thought by Kirk Durston. I would urge you to read the entire article, but if you don’t have time it’s a discussion of the book Sex and Culture by J.D. Unwin, which was published in 1934. At the time Unwin had engaged in an exhaustive survey of past cultures, and as part of that he came to a somewhat startling conclusion:
If total sexual freedom was embraced by a culture, that culture collapsed within three generations…
Obviously this is an extraordinary claim? What are we to do with it?
To begin with we can examine it in the light of the subject we were already discussing, pornography. None of the civilizations Unwin studied had anywhere close to the level of pornography that ours does, for technological reasons if nothing else. Does this mean that ours will collapse faster? Maybe it won’t make any difference. Or, I could actually see some people arguing that it will somehow slow the collapse, but honestly, I can’t take either of the final two arguments seriously. Pornography allows people to engage with their depravities to an extent never before possible. And to return to where I began, while I still don’t think it will cause the end of the world all on it’s own, if we take the Unwin’s conclusion seriously, it certainly might contribute. And indeed a civilization of men (and I use that term loosely) who spend more time closeted in their room in the onanistic enjoyment of pornography than out there getting married, having offspring and working to make the world better for their offspring, doesn’t seem like a healthy civilization by any measurement.
Of course most people aren’t asking whether pornography speeds up the collapse of civilization predicted by Unwin, because they reject his prediction all together. I have a few friends that I can use to take the temperature of the modern world. Friends who are essentially archetypical, intelligent, secular liberals, and all of them considered this prediction to be ludicrous. I’m not surprised by this, but neither do I agree with it, and I think it illustrates one of the key divides in society, one which doesn’t get a lot of airplay.
Many people, including myself, recognize that civilizations do collapse, catastrophe’s do occur, and that to a first approximation certain cultures are present when nations are ascendent and other cultures are generally present when nations are in decline. And while three generations does seem fast. (Unwin’s generations appear to be approximately 33 years, so around 100 total.) The kind of culture where pornography is ubiquitious and sexual restraint lacking does seem to be one of the cultures more often present when a nation is declining than when a nation is ascendent.
On the other side of that divide, we have the people who think that this time it’s different. That progress and technology have allowed us to create a civilization immune from the problems that plagued past civilizations. Or, perhaps more charitably, that, “Yes, this civilization is fragile just like every other civilization, but it’s not going to be brought down by ‘total sexual freedom’. That’s not a problem with our civilization, that’s what makes it awesome!”
After considering all of the foregoing we’re left with a host of questions
How are we supposed to decide between these two competing views of eventual catastrophe and modern exceptionalism?
How seriously should we take Unwin’s prediction?
If the sexual revolution is when our culture embraced “total sexual freedom” does that mean that it’s due to collapse around 2070? And does the current state of the world support that timeline?
How do we know what the effect is going to be of any new technology?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. I have purchased Sex and Culture, and I will read it and let you know (it is massive), but questions like these are at the core of any study of eschatology. And, as I have said, identifying all of the potential dangers is a necessary first step but it’s not sufficient. And most of the time the potential that any given danger will actually come to pass is going to be difficult if not impossible to assess. So what do we do once we think we’ve identified a danger? Well, as I’ve mentioned before it’s far easier to identify the danger than to know what to do about it, though just awareness can be palliative, but if we’re looking to go beyond that, this is also where the precautionary principle kicks in. Another thing that’s going to come up a lot in any discussion of eschatology.
I think I’ll save a full discussion of this principle for another time, but I would think that if there are things which could be easily done to minimize future danger, even if that danger has a very low probability, that we should do them. As one example, the Supreme Court has definitely ruled that you can segregate adult content without running into any free speech issues. One way of doing that would be to create a top level domain, say .xxx and require that all pornography be hosted on one of those domains. I understand that there are some technical challenges here, but it’s still a reasonably straightforward low cost solution to the problem of pornography. Whether you think it’s all bad or whether you would just like to keep 11 year old girls from inadvertently viewing “rape porn”. And yet somehow, to my continued bafflement, there is enormous resistance towards any kind of regulation.
I guess I shouldn’t be baffled. Most people view the current availability of pornography as a minor change in the way the world works. And I understand, that’s an easy position to fall into, progress brings new innovations, society adapts, the world continues. But there’s no guarantee that the world, as we know it, will continue, and lots of reasons to believe that when we’re messing with sex and reproduction, even if it’s just through the avenue of pornography, that we’re messing with something deep rooted and fundamental, possibly in ways we don’t understand. (I didn’t even bring in the idea that pornography is a supernormal stimuli.)
Also, I think people underestimate how much has changed. I remember a time when having HBO in the home was a big deal, and the “Playboy Channel” was the stuff of legends, but just a few decades later and now a large number of people see no problem with giving their kid a smartphone that can access stuff that makes the Playboy Channel look like Barney the Dinosaur.
As I’ve said countless times, predicting the future is impossible. And when I say that people often accuse me of hypocritically doing just that by, for example, entertaining the idea that total sexual freedom, and particularly pornography, will bring down civilization within three generations, but isn’t the opposite true as well? That on the other side they’re predicting that total access, at all ages, to the hardest of the hardcore will have no negative effects? Which is really the more implausible position?
I agree that there are lots of open questions and that we don’t know what is going to happen, but lets review the questions I posed above one more time, and add a little bit more thought to each.
How are we supposed to decide between these two competing views of eventual catastrophe and modern exceptionalism? Speaking just of pornography if the choices are “eventual contributor to catastrophe” and “things which make modern civilization immune to catastrophe”. It seems far more at home in the first bucket than in the second.
How seriously should we take Unwin’s prediction? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I intend to take every prediction of civilizational collapse seriously.
If the sexual revolution is when our culture embraced “total sexual freedom” does that mean that it’s due to collapse around 2070? And does the current state of the world support that timeline? Durston certainly thinks it does and his entire article was written in support of that idea. For myself I think three generations seems remarkably specific, but when I look around I don’t see much that would convince me Durston and Unwin are wrong either.
How do we know what the effect is going to be of any new technology? We don’t.
It’s Christmas Eve as I publish this, and I know all of you are wondering, what do I get the eschatologist who has everything? Well how about a recurring donation? It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
1. Debate w/cultural conservatives on pornography? I think at this point the bare min. price of Trump is that cultural conservatives are shut out of this conversation for a generation. I’m serious about that.
2. The .xxx top level domain idea is very, well, 90’s. I think what you might have missed is how effective two sites have been filtering out porn. Youtube and Facebook. Since neither site allows nudity, I understand porn is taken down almost instantly (of course nudity has sparked a lot of Talmudic debates over, say, breast feeding pics). They are so good in fact, machine learning has made it so that nudity is flagged almost the instant it gets uploaded. Likewise there’s a database of known child porn at allows it to be automatically flagged without human moderators even having to review it (which seems to be a pretty taumatic job). These sites have eliminated nudity for business reasons, because they want everyone on the planet to spend as much of their waking hours as possible on them.
3. That being said, ironically, the mission to ban porn is hopeless. One of porn’s early explosions was after WWII when it became affordable (thought a bit expensive) for anyone who wanted to buy an 8mm camera and make home movies. Filming themselves and others having sex was the first thing they did. Today many women in the dating market are aware of the problem of ‘unsolicited dick pics’ and selfies being exchanged in relationships. Of course that’s not ‘rape porn’ but if you can share your own videos from your phone, you can share anything that has been digitized. And digitizing can be as simple as watching an old VHS tape with your cell phone recording. Porn is a bit like insects, you can keep them out of your house with some relatively cheap interventions but you can’t eliminate them from the environment. If people will continue to have eyes and genitals you’re not stopping porn.
4. Interestingly porn critics often took a left wing stance attacking the ‘porn industry’ in the past. Now even at its height, Playboy and Penthouse never were much of an industry. Corn farmers always had more influence and say, for example. Yet today the industry has been all but eliminated. What used to be a system of publishers and studios is now an environment of almost pure competition. It is almost impossible to make money in porn today and to make a lot of money is impossible except for a handful of sites that are essentially using Youtube/Google’s model of aggregating endless free content. Ironically the leftist economic view seems to be backwards, it’s easier to kill a large consolidated industry but impossible to kill one that’s not.
1- I have no doubt that you’re serious, but it’s a weird pound of flesh to demand. For my side, I think Mao and Stalin inflicted 1000x the damage Trump did, does that mean that I should be demanding that communists are shut out of all conversations for 10,000 years?
2- I did not miss Facebook’s effectiveness (Youtube is another matter, There isn’t any hardcore porn, but there’s plenty of pornography (e.g. the Emmanuelle movies) This also takes a fairly enormous staff, and perhaps AI will solve that problem, but even then it only covers the sites that want it. Are you suggesting that the solution would be to restrict kids to only facebook and youtube? That’s a cure that’s nearly as bad as the disease.
3- I never said that porn should be banned. I’m asking for two things, 1) that “hooks” be put in place (like the .xxx domain) so that parents and similar people can easily implement software and DNS restrictions that allow them to have some degree of control over porn. 2) that people take it more seriously, and not active fight #1.
4- I am aware of the leftist and particularly the feminist critique of Porn, but that doesn’t seem to be much of a factor these days.
1. Mao died in 76, Stalin in 53. I’ll be generous and use Mao. We can let ‘cultural conservatives’ back into the discussion in 43 years. Or I could use the Biblical view of a generation and take 25 years. I’m open minded on this.
2. Facebook’s staff is hardly enormous. When you consider their margins, they could easily hire 100 times the staff for content moderation. But your take does reveal porn’s flexible nature. As you said when you were a kid, “Three’s Company” was almost porn yet no one ever got nude, in fact, taking the show at face value no one had sex. These were the 3 most chaste 20-somethings of the entire 70’s. But you’re right, as nudity bans keep hardcore porn off of Youtube and FB, ‘pinup porn’ circulates that stops shy of the nudity to avoid the AI. Doesn’t this kind of imply that ‘porn will always be with you’?
2.1 I don’t think restricting kids to Youtube/Facebook are magic answers. I would work with the insect analogy. Your kids mostly live inside the house which is free of insects (mostly). You let them go out in the woods (I hope), employing some sensible barriers to the problematic insects of your region. Beyond that you’re setting the wrong goal, turning it into a fetish which creates its own type of porn.
(Suggested viewing, Black Mirror Season 4 episode 2 Arkangel).
3-4. In the example you cited, though, how would those ‘hooks’ work? It seems to me the video being passed around by the kids could have just as easily been copied from an .xxx domain? Or consider how much ‘self-produced’ porn there is.
Part II
“How seriously should we take Unwin’s prediction?”
Interestingly before I heard this podcast episode, I stumbled an article about this scene that was cut out of Toystory 2’s current digital availability….https://youtu.be/zFwsJtqr9Ew
I think we should ponder this scene as we are both somewhat older these days….. In the past we probably thought nothing of this little gag in a children’s movie. Basically just a little joke that the kids probably wouldn’t really understand but the adults sitting through a cartoon with them would get a slightly deeper chuckle. And yet I suspect even though you might fancy yourself skeptical of #metoo you probably ‘edited’ that little joke out of your memory of the movie (if you saw it back then) and are now a bit uneasy seeing it. Taking the scene at face value, you basically have a much older man attempting to seduce two identical sisters at the same time. So you have a threesome, old men sleeping with teen girls, and incest. At least as a gag, this was once acceptable in a children’s cartoon. Have we become a society of ‘complete sexual freedom’ or is sexual freedom more like a window that might get shifted over time in different directions? I don’t think the window is fixed in size and it probably has grown but it’s pretty easy to look at stuff that is ok today that wasn’t when you were a kid and to imagine you were unlucky enough to be a teenager right before ‘complete sexual freedom’ was achieved. I think the reverse error also happens. Some people think being a teen in the 70’s was more or less an endless Woodstock like orgy and if only why were born a decade or two sooner….
Reading a bit about Unwin’s ideas, it seems he had a Freudian ‘sexual frustration’ take on history. Society would limit access to sex, horny men would then sublimate their frustration into everything else thereby creating civilizational goods like technology, art, culture etc. Of course if this is the case wouldn’t early marriage then track with a decline in such goods? People in the 50’s thought it was going a bit far when Jerry Lee Lewis married a 14 year old, but he was only pushing the edge a bit. It wasn’t unheard of for 15 yr olds to get married. As I’m sure you’ll recall, various studies showing married people have sex more often than unmarried, this would mean Unwin’s theory would be for civilization to have been slow in the 50’s, 60’s then picking up speed until maybe the mid 90’s when VHS porn plus the early Internet was rising? How would this be measured?
Unwin’s ideas as well might also be mixing up cause and effect. The relaxing of sexual mores might come from a declining civilization rather than cause it. Imagine you sense the current dynasty is about to collapse after being in power for centuries, well working really hard to win the hand of the provincial governor’s daughter is no longer as important if you are sensing the current governor is going to be deposed not too long from now. Porn and marriage might follow the same pattern. The man going to more porn might be retreating from the marriage rather than creating the cause of the marriage’s decline.
I take your point that it’s more complicated than it might appear at first. And the TS2 scene is indeed a great example of that. And the Freudian take is interesting as well. As I said I’m going to read it, and I’ll keep my eyes open for that.
As far as the reversal of cause and effect, I’m not entirely sure that’s comforting… Wouldn’t it mean we’re still in decline, and with even less clue about the cause?
I think the shifts in rules are easy to miss. We tend to perceive the things that relax as expanding into ‘anything goes’ but we miss other rules that contract because we mostly agree with the shift at the time even if the change is mostly unconscious.
Consider, for example, 16 Candles and Pretty in Pink. These two movies embody ‘complete sexual freedom’ in a very interesting way. The only people who get to have sex are exceptionally hot and exceptionally rich. Basically we watched Molly Ringwald spent the 80’s unable to have sex because she couldn’t afford to spend a fortune on hair spray and wear designer dresses, at the time that made a lot of sense to us and we were completely insane. To have complete sexual freedom you had to achieve a double 1%. Have a body type only 1% could maintain for any period of time (often with the help of coke and eating disorders) and disposable income of the 1%. All others were side kicks (fat, Asian, nerdy, too scrawny looking etc.).
An alien looking at our culture might not have perceived anything like an expansion into ‘complete sexual freedom’. I think they might shrug and say a few thousand years ago gods, goddesses and a few elite humans had ‘complete sexual freedom’ and culture since then has been depicting fictional worlds that are all basically the same since.
So I think you might have cause and effect mixed up and are mixing up decline with change. If, for example, absurd clothes are not longer a cultural requirement, you’ll ponder how you grew up with a sense of dressing up properly and now people walk around in pajamas. Decline it would be if you assumed the previous standard was still in place. But why assume that? Because it works for you. You invested all your youth into understanding and mastering that standard, after all. Changing it now seems a bit unfair.
I think this is probably your best point:
“Can we at least agree that pornography requires a certain amount of maturity to handle? More maturity than that possessed by the average 11 year old?”
I agree with Boonton that fighting against easily produced content is a losing battle, but it’s digital so clever motivated people might be able to figure out something that reduces its prevalence significantly.
(I imagine an ongoing arms race here.)
The real issue is getting people on board with making any kind of change. In other words, it’s a problem of motivation. If you can compile a compelling story that porn harms kids you’ll get movement/motivation.
And you’ll probably get grudging admission that if it’s bad for the kids it might not be good for the parents. That doesn’t mean they’ll give it up, but they might act more responsible.
Who exactly is it bad for in the example provided? In the example, some girls are heard saying ‘boys are disgusting’ and then seeing a video the boys were passing among each other.
Are you claiming the girls were harmed…by seeing the video? by being aware of the video? by being aware that boys like things like that video? Or the boys were being harmed by their passing along the video to each other? If you want to say all are harmed, are they all being harmed equally?
One might imagine a slightly different case. Some boys are saying ‘girls are tedious’. What’s then revealed is a 50 page fan fiction love story written by a 12 year old girl set in the world of Harry Potter so cotton candy sweet adults need a shot of insulin just to read the summary. I suspect in both these cases you have two different approaches to sexuality that clash together before they create a synthesis of adult sexuality. Not saying let your 11 yr old son indulge in all the ‘rape porn’ Google will give him, but ‘boys are disgusting’ is something parents have heard long before any porn was widely available. It might be a positive that girls do learn ‘boys are disgusting’ , esp. in a culture where boys and girls have access to each other before marriage (as opposed to, say, Saudi culture, which seems more toxic than ours and if the hordes of pornography found in terrorist dens are any indication of, their strict censorship regime seems to accomplish almost nothing in terms of morality).
Tech wise I think the irony here is we can do a good job keeping porn out of Facebook/Youtube (at least a simplistic view that equates nudity with porn, so the 50 page erotic Harry Potter fan fiction story doesn’t get flagged) but at the same time it makes it nearly impossible to keep it out of the entire ecosystem. Facebook/Youtube on some level depend upon large quantities of porn to be available so their machines can learn.
I completely discount the rape porn story because it’s at least third hand to me and has some questionable details. It doesn’t sound like a representative example, and if it were I’d like to see data to demonstrate as much before getting worried about it.
The point in the post I thought was strong was to focus on keeping pornography from children and young teens. That doesn’t require society to scrub porn entirely, so it’s fine that you train your screening system on what’s available to adults. You’re not trying to eliminate all porn, just implement targeted restrictions. It doesn’t have to work perfectly to keep everything out, just well enough to help on the margins.
It’s also unreasonable to expect the industry to lie down while social conservatives regulate them out of existence. They’ll instead fight every step of the way and at best you get minor meaningless changes at the margin. If instead the conservatives strike a deal to step off pushing adult regulations in exchange for keeping the kids safe they might get more cooperation. It’s also a better PR move that plays well with the general public.
I don’t discount the rape story. The porn might have been misread (people do tie each other up without it necessarily being rape after all) but kids have smart phones and smart phones will get you to just about any type of porn there is out there. I can fully accept for the sake of argument that after the statement ‘boys are disgusting’ there was indeed a video that you would not want your kid to see.
I think he was saying given how pervasively available porn is, it’s almost impossible to really screen it and he in fact is looking for some type of scrubbing (like segregating all porn to the xxx domain). I think, however, this ‘targeted restriction’ is pointless in a world where any one person can record what they are seeing and spread it digitally.
I also think there is no industry for ‘social conservatives’ to regulate. Industries make profits which they use to pay lobbyists to shield them from harmful regulations. Porn doesn’t,, at least not since the days of VHS and DVDs. Paradoxically, though, the fact that porn is an industry with no profits means it will be impossible to effectively regulate in a way to shield children. All the players are too small and too numerous. Again it’s the difference between keeping insects out of your house versus out of your town. The first is relatively easy the second would take hundreds of billions.
Have you seen this article?
https://www.amgreatness.com/2019/12/15/a-science-based-case-for-ending-the-porn-epidemic/
It covers much that I’m sure you’re already aware of, but there’s a section near the end where he explores societal collapse and porn.
Sorry, I just saw that your comment was in the queue waiting to be approved. Thanks for the link. I’ll check it out.
“viewing stuff which is almost entirely composed of unhealthy examples of sexual relationships,”
Thinking about this for a few moments. Exactly what genre of fiction is composed of healthy examples? For example, I perused the fiction in November’s ‘books I read’ and there’s The Odyssey, a murder mystery and some urban magical fiction. Leaving aside the last since little was given about the plot, what I note about this more respectable fiction is that it spends a lot of time in extremes that we normally would not want to dwell in. Like do you really want to come home and murder a bunch of men trying to hit on your wife? If you had too, and it was legally justified, you’d probably be in therapy and your wife and kids would be as well as you argue with your home insurance co. about the bill to clean up huge pools of blood.
Come to think of it, almost no fiction is about ‘healthy examples’ of much of anything and if it was, it would be pretty unbearable.
I think there are plenty of examples of healthy relationships “In the Air” so to speak, and that many of books you cite (and which are commonly read) are examples of what not to do. Porn would appear to be in a separate magisterium. Kids get only hints of what healthy sex looks like (parents inviting their kids to watch would immediately change it to unhealthy…) Nor is porn ever an example of what not to do. It’s always aspirational, never instructive.
Also, I’m really unclear on your actual position.
-Is there bad porn?
-Is it bad for everyone? Or just kids?
-If there is there is some bad porn which is bad for some people, do you think it would be worth trying to minimize it’s badness?
-Is the problem that there is bad porn and it might be worth doing something, but given the nature of the internet and technology in general there’s nothing which could be done?
-Or are there things which could be done, but the costs outweigh benefits?
It’s not that fiction is examples of what to do….or what not to do. You correctly point out that Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors is both justified and problematic. Is it an example of what to do or not do? I would say neither, it’s not meant to be an example, it’s meant to be an examination of something extreme that almost no one will every actually experience. Reading it as an example just seems flat. Likewise would you read Breaking Bad as an example of what not to do if you have money issues (become a meth drug lord?)? I guess you can say that but that’s not really the point. Since fiction is not mostly about examples, I would say evaluating porn in those terms is a bit silly. No one uses porn for examples.
I would invert your questions. Are there bad reactions to porn? Yes. Might those bad reactions be avoided/prevented by delaying access to porn or certain types of porn? Yes. But do those reactions come from the individual or the porn? The individual. Question, is the individual seeking out ‘certain types’ of porn because they are seeking the reaction? If so then the porn is just a short term issue. Kind of like taking the car keys from someone whose very drunk. OK short term he isn’t going to drive but long term you shouldn’t have to follow him around taking his keys when he crosses the line. Why is he making it a problem for you?
I think you’re using the word example in a stricter sense than I am. I’m suggesting more that they’re instructive. And what makes you so certain that “no one uses porn for examples”? That’s not what I hear at all. For example this link:
https://www.popsugar.com/love/Do-Men-Really-Want-Do-Things-See-Porn-42971113
As far as the other thing, you seem to essentially be saying that porn is basically in the same category as alcohol, which we limit to people over 21… Why aren’t we doing the same thing with porn?
I would balk at the word ‘instructive’ as well. Look if I put someone in an unusual situation, let’s say a real bar fight, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried resorting to tactics that are popular in movies (say throwing punches, the old break one end of a bottle and wave it around ). Yet I would say that most movie consumption is not about people ‘instructing’ themselves on how to manage themselves in a bar. I would say most movie consumption is an element of escapism plus a desire to commune with archetypes. By definition escapism is not instructive (although the Star Wars/Star Trek “Technical Manuals” might be a borderline case) and communing with archetypes wouldn’t be archetypes if they are your everyday life.
“As far as the other thing, you seem to essentially be saying that porn is basically in the same category as alcohol, which we limit to people over 21… Why aren’t we doing the same thing with porn?”
Actually we have a porous limitation on alcohol. For example, drunkenness around elders is frowned upon creating social pressure to drink with one’s peers but keep it on the downlow. Again there the issue is less the alcohol as much as what the individual does with it (and European culture here seems to have an edge on us, our 21 policy probably does prevent some alcoholism but it also increases binge drinking which creates other cases and on balance we are probably worse off rather than better).
Anyway you have more or less given the game away. When I pointed out that Facebook and Youtube have gotten to the point that their machine learning can detect and block nudity almost the instant it gets uploaded, you countered that porn doesn’t have to contain nudity. Well if you’re using a broader definition that includes erotic Harry Potter fan fiction, say, how again are we restricting this all to an xxx domain? The honor system?
Interesting site. I hope you are making progress in readin Unwin, its indeed eye-opening.
>If the sexual revolution is when our culture embraced “total sexual freedom” does that mean that it’s due to collapse around 2070?
Probably much earlier. In my calculation I got 2040, using a 70 year span. I wrote a full post on this a few years ago, you can read it here: https://theredarchive.com/post/15434 . That was written in 2014, and – with the events of 2015 happening in Western Europe – I would say we are fully on track to have collapsed by then. The US may hold out a bit longer, for Europe I have little hope.
I am making progress on Unwin, though it’s slow, but I am enjoying it.
I haven’t got to the part where he defines a generation, but the other thing I read said Unwin defined the generation at 33 years, where’s the ~23 years come from?
I read the article, it’s a solid argument. What’s the “Misandry Bubble”?
I really enjoyed listening to this episode of your podcast. To some extent I agree with you. Sexuality is something as important as it is dangerous. Pornography sucks in so many ways. As a pervert, I still dislike pornography. The whole thing just doesn’t look right. But, as I said I am a pervert and I have to say that the main form of pornography I consume is my own imagination. Most of my friends told me the same: imagination is the best, and probably the lewdest. That’s why I don’t fully get any porn-prohibitionism argument except for the nasty aspect of trafficking and more generally how gullible and fragile some borderline mentally ill people (in this case women) are. I think you should reframe your argument as why indulging in any kind of fantasy, even just in our own heads, could lead to bad outcomes. But at this point I’d start thinking about people like me, who even before any contact with pornography already had some freaky stuff inside their head. Maybe it’s not porn. Maybe it’s just us. Some people are just freaky (genetics unfortunately supports this) and generally horrible humans and your perfectly reasonable appeal to purity would be better served by some eugenic policy we still don’t have the know-how to implement, and for that I’m very thankful.
Thanks for the compliment. As to your point, I’m not convinced that imagination is as unconstrained as you assert. Imagine you have some fetish, how difficult is it to imagine that fetish playing out if there are literally no external examples or mentions or anything in your environment. Would you even realize you had a fetish if no one ever brought it up? Would a smoking fetish make any sense before the invention of the cigarette? All of which is to say I think a generally licentious society vastly expands the kinds of things you’d even think to imagine.
But clearly whoever made the first piece of smoking fetish pornography either had it in his imagination first or found a pornographic interest in something most other people would never have associated for pornography (such as an ad for cigarettes).