From "I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway. Porn is not content. It’s a substance. And it must be controlled like one, argues 16-year-old Isabel Hogben" (Free Press).
This is one of 2 winners in what was an essay contest for high schoolers. The other winner is "Why I Traded My Smartphone for an Ax/At 15, Caleb Silverberg made the most important decision of his life. He ditched technology and headed to the forest."
You see the common theme: Kids challenged to break away from the screens that captured them at an early age. I note that the young woman, whose mother couldn't rescue her, expects the government to rescue her. The young man rescued himself.
By the way, the observations Hogben makes about on-line porn have been around as long as on-line porn. There's nothing "new" about them. And the idea that porn isn't speech was very well developed by Catharine MacKinnon in the 1980s. I'm not surprised that a 16-year-old doesn't know much about that, but why would she know about what "intimacy" has consisted of in all the various generations? Of course, it's pretty standard to think your generation is different from those that came before and sound, to older ears, like the same thing all over again.
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"I note that the young woman, whose mother couldn't rescue her, expects the government to rescue her. The young man rescued himself."
Tale as old as time. Song as old as rhyme.
There's nothing new about p0rn. See ancient Greek and Hindu art from thousands of years ago. See all sorts of sex cults and holy prostitutes. See the European sex cults of the last several hundred years. See early photography and "vintage p0rn." See the history of home movies, home PCs, early bulletin boards, and the early WWW. All p0rn.
Social media may or may not have mainstreamed...the functional, biological, primal instinct to reproduce. However, social media surely has mainstreamed endless chatter and worry.
Hint for the kids: Stop touching yourself and porn becomes no threat at all
Porn is the reason there is a web.
What’s the age limit on the Girl Scouts? This youngster needs some wholesome activities.
The is so much of a correlary link between the ubiquity of hardcore pornography and the rise of the LGBT movement as to be prima fascia causal. It is very hard to make an argument against there being strong links.
Also, we de facto believe in Western society that women are the controllers and gatekeepers of sex. If so sex in the West is the Titanic, women are the captain, and they have run her full speed into an iceberg at 30 knots. This has been a disaster 60 years in the making, and it won't take 60 years to undo. It will take a lot longer.
"it must be controlled like one"
So, unborn baby removal good, trans surgery good, pot good, fentanyl OK if used in the street--don't control any of that! But tobacco bad, porn bad--slap it down?
"expects the government to rescue her"
The prog syndrome is an early-onset political disease.
"porn isn't speech was very well developed by Catharine MacKinnon in the 1980s"
But some porn is (also) speech, no?
"why would she know about what "intimacy" has consisted of in all the various generations?"
Well, prize-winning essay-writing never depended on actual knowledge.
I don’t like the broad brush but you just have to believe this woman is with her female friends puffing themselves up about what strong and independent women they’re becoming, rejecting the patriarchy, as if there’s any of it left…
They are all Obama Julias is the plot twist…
One difference is previous generations didn't have books about anal sex and "neo-vaginas" in elementary school classrooms.
Endorsed by the ALA.
Is the young woman an only child? Siblings might be the greatest difference between this generation and prior ones.
"I note that the young woman, whose mother couldn't rescue her, expects the government to rescue her. The young man rescued himself."
Tale as old as time. Song as old as rhyme.
Repeal the 19th.
It isn't the porn alone that is the problem. It is the combination of porn and teen hormones that makes a sad situation for teens. When your body will give you an unexpected erection because the wind shifts direction, or will make you suddenly want sex with a classmate because he's wearing a nice shirt that day, it doesn't take porn for kids to make stupid decisions. But porn helps warp the decision making process by misinforming a watcher into having very unrealistic expectations. Pizza delivery guys and step siblings can confirm this.
What amazes me is that with the availability of hardcore free porn, we also have the onlyfans site blowing up.
Want to see the ultimate trans fantasy? Look up Futa on Pornhub.
Why does any parent provide their child with a smart phone? Parents always say it's for emergencies, but a flip phone would be just as effective. Social media would be less intrusive if it didn't travel with the teenager. Monitoring internet use is easier if the child can't access it anywhere at any time.
The ubiquity and easy availability of porn at any age is different. Yes, when I was a pre-teen in the 60’s we found some older kids stash of Playboys in the woods. As a teen I was sometimes able to buy some vintage Playboys at a local store. But readily available PornHub and other porn sites is a whole different animal. I fear that a lot of what we see in young people now is boys (and men) expecting what they see in porn, and girls recoiling in horror at heterosexual sex and what boys expect/demand. “I’m not dating boys (or “I’m not straight,” maybe even “you know I’m really a boy or at least not a girl”) if that’s what I have to do!” And boys not finding girls because of that. And society falling apart in small but growing ways. Little by little until it’s quite fast. We are sliding down the slippery slope. There’s a counter reaction but likely too little too late. Brave New World indeed.
Don't get too amped up over this bullsh*t. Most porn right now is OnlyFans and that's just a social media account with more nudity. It's pathetic but so what.
I like what Second Wave feminists had to say about porn. They can be quite clever. For example -- evolution/biology has made violence an erotic experience for men. Apparently, we get boners on the battlefield (!) and this is why we are drawn to violent, degrading porn.
Parents are helicoptering and micromanaging their kids' lives, but the source of the anxiety is porn? Laughable. That essay is a master class in finding a scapegoat and ignoring the elephant in the room.
There's nothing new about porn these days. As Ann points out, it's been a feminist football for fifty years. The class implications are the same dynamic we see elsewhere, as a certain species of upper-class white progressive women seek to turn their anxieties into public policy.
More broadly, old people have been saying that society is corrupting the young since the ancient Greeks.
the idea that porn isn't speech
Perhaps. But it self-evidently is communication. It communicates information, leading the recipient to form certain (sexual) ideas in their minds (if not certain parts of their bodies).
And you can forget about the old obscenity rules. Current community standards everywhere embrace explicit sexual content, otherwise it would not have millions upon millions of viewers (and self-creators). Even Scalia and Thomas joined in striking down the Communications Decency Act of 1996 on First Amendment grounds.
"Porn is the reason there is a web,"
Not at all, though it certainly led the development of video delivery on the web.
"Want to see the ultimate trans fantasy?"
Actually, no.
So you know me. You know my reputation. Thirteen inches of tough load, I don't treat you gently. That's right. I'm Brock Landers. So I'm going to be nice. So I'm going to be nice. So I'm going to be nice, I'm going to ask you one more time. Where the f*** is Ringo?
"I note that the young woman, whose mother couldn't rescue her, expects the government to rescue her. The young man rescued himself."
Pretty much a description of all current life.
By the way. OnlyFans is porn.
Warning: Do *NOT* look up Futa.
I not qualified to comment knowledgeably about climate change or the war in Ukraine, but this is a subject upon which I can offer some first hand experience and expertise.....They should have MPAA ratings for porn. Some of that stuff is way too far gone for children to watch. On the Adam Carolla podcast, he recently interviewed some porn star. He asked her about double penetrations. She asked if he meant penetration in two orifices at the same time or having two penises in her vagina at the same time. Never have I had a more literal WTF moment. I would guess that any young woman who watched such a scene would start exploring the option of becoming a lesbian. They should have porn sites with suitable fare for children. Children who watch such stuff are not learning about sex as it is practiced anywhere on earth except porn sets....My generation thought that sexual repression led to unhappiness. There's something to that, but perhaps this current generation should explore the possibility that sublimation has its purposes.
I oweCatherine MacKinnon for refining my understanding of free speech. I understood her argument to be that pornography implicitly sent the message that women were to be used as sexual objects by men, and subservient to them. But explicitly asserting that women should be used as sexual objects by men, and be subservient to men is obviously core political speech -- what can be more essentially political than the terms by which one half of the human race should be treated by the other?
How could free speech protect explicit advocacy for a position, but not implicit advocacy for it? The answer is in the idea that implicit advocacy for a position is more persuasive than explicitly stating it (remember the panic over subliminal advertising?). My conclusion is that free speech does not just protect the right to state a position, but the right to state it in the most persuasive way possible. It won't do to allow Nazi ideology to be espoused only if the speaker stutters and drools all over herself, it has to be permissible for it to be espoused by someone with the rhetorical skill of Hitler. It won't do to say that a free press means that disfavored ideas may only be produced by using mimeograph machines, while favored views can be produced with digital electronic printing presses.
The principal that freedom to speak entails freedom to speak in the most persuasive way possible is one that I came to because of MacKinnon (and Dworkin, who always spelled Amerika with a k).
Catharine MacKinnon is and always has been the south end of a horse walking north.
When I was in college 50 years ago, my boyfriend and I and a couple of others thought it would be a laugh to go see a porn movie in downtown Austin. And so we did. it was kind of a hoot, but brought about a weird result: i found it drained every bit of my hubba hubba interest for a good three weeks. I had no interest in sex w my sweetie, a major departure I've never experienced since.
My conclusion: Porn Ruins you for real sex.
Blogger Kate said...
Is the young woman an only child? Siblings might be the greatest difference between this generation and prior ones.
Excellent point.
"Why does any parent provide their child with a smart phone?"
When watching TV dramas about Orthodox Jews in Israel and the US, everyone has phones but they are always flip phones.
Once in a while a character will have a smartphone, but it usually means they are the bad guy or something bad will happen because of it.
Where was her mother? These days I wouldn't rule out mom being busy making content for her Only Fans account.
I'm old enough to remember when women used to refuse to be sex objects.
Porn drives technological advances. It increases the speed w/ which those advances are introduced and the lowering of the technology's cost. Porn producers and consumers are the early adopters that make new technologies quickly, cheaply, and easily available for the rest of us. Thanks?
https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/technology/how-porn-drove-innovation-tech
Catharine MacKinnon was big on helping people to understand what was and was not a consensual relationship in the workplace. Then Bill Clinton met Monica Lewinsky.
I saw a young couple the other day who were wearing what would be considered traditional Amish clothing. But the wife was talking on a flip phone, so they must have been Mennonites.
Which is one way of dealing with the fact that horrendous videos of monstrous acts are easily accessible on the internet.
Iman said...
What’s the age limit on the Girl Scouts? This youngster needs some wholesome activities.
She's not going to find it in Girl Scouts. American Heritage Girls americanheritagegirls.org or a female troop of Scouts BSA. Scouting.org
We have 5 children- the 4 boys were in Scouts until age 18, 2 Life, 2 Eagle. My wife took our daughter to a few GSA troop meetings, looked at the handbooks, looked at the paid staff, and had enough. Scouts BSA wasn't an option then for girls. They're all successful adults without criminal records or drug use and abuse.
But Scouting is just another tool in the parental toolbox. Sports, activities, travel, and very important in my opinion, setting a good example are other parts.
Lucien, thanks for the info on MacKinnon. I was confused as to how anyone could conclude that porn isn't speech.
And I guess I still don't understand how someone can think that, but now I understand what it was she said.
Well, it isn't the same, Althouse. There is a magnitude difference between the porn freely accessed today vs what was easily available when I was a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I remind people you could rent hard-core porn in the early 1980s on VHS tapes- no seedy theater in NYC needed then.
I don't favor censorship of on-line porn on principle and for pragmatic reasons, but if I had children today, there would be no internet hookup in my home- none whatsoever- and no smart phones either. Get the children to adulthood, and then they can immerse themselves in this sewer on their own initiative.
Years ago, when smart phones were getting started and all the kids had to have them, my son's friend got a group of young boys together. They decided they were all going to only use flip phones because, as my son related to me, "one in the group was getting sucked into online porn." The kid, who was homeschooled, went on to West Point and is a terrific leader (and, despite what you might think from the two factors mentioned, is not a right-winger). Kids do see how dangerous a lot of this crap can be (in my day is was tobacco, pot, and other narcotics) and can band together to reject it. Bravo to the counterculture.
Porn content has changed significantly since the days of print media. The internet has brought it front and center to any available appliance. The thing with porn these days that the purveyors now take advantage of the digital medium in ways no one realizes. Remember when the whole 'subliminal advertising' thing was a thing? Now imagine that in porn. There are levels of hypnosis triggers embedded in porn (specifically tranny porn) that are having an effect on people, making it even more difficult the break free.
I am a bot, signed in to make automatic comments for Meade who is out in the woods somewhere. Probably doing something dangerous, possibly reading a paper copy of Fanny Hill (which he pronounces “FAH-née hill”) or something truly obscene. Not wearing a mask. Not connected to the internet. I repeat: being dangerous.
Catharine MacKinnon? How can anyone cite Catherine McKinnon for anything? It is certainly wrong to say that porn is not free speech, whether the idiotic Catherine McKinnon said so or not.
The correct point is that just because something is a matter of free speech does not mean that it isn't proper to block child access to it, or to relegate it to private spaces, keeping it out of the open public eye.
This is the actual meaning of a right to privacy: a right to do some things in private that can properly be blocked from appearing in the public square. It is actually a right of the majority to ban some things in public.
On the bright side, if you have fucked a young woman lately, they know all sorts of things their grandmothers didn’t know 50 years ago. And they think you need to do them all in every session! You need to gentle them down a bit and they are pretty fun. Just like their grandmothers.
It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Perhaps some in Hollywood with their previous experience in child porn could use that experience to make porn for children This is a field ripe for harvesting by Disney who haven't been doing at all well recently. I think many parents would like to see their children exposed to sunlit Disney porn rather than the stuff that's available on Porn Hub. Mickey and Minnie could get it on in the context of a caring and affectionate relationship. The sex can be explicit but also educational. Such cosplay would also provide useful employment for many in the furry community. The furry community have not been given a fair shake by the LBGQT community. Those who wish to transition to furry mascots should be allowed to do so without mockery or, worse yet, being totally ignored. So it's a twofer. We teach our children how to care whilst at the same time allowing our furries to celebrate their libidos. These are certainly ideas worth considering by all those at Disney interested in our children's welfare. I think a remake of Deep Throat featuring Mickey & Minnie would generate more interest than their current production of Snow White and would be of greater use to our children's development into mature adults.
If you run a liquor or convenience store, you are 100% liable for fines and criminal penalties if someone underage buys booze or cigarettes. Period. Not only that, but the police will often send in underage but older looking kids to see if you are checking ID. Please explain why the EXACT same rules shouldn't apply to online porn and online orders of drugs, weapons, etc.
Make site owners 100% liable and allow parents to have a cause of action if their child access a porn site without their permission, and let hordes of lawyers take care of the problem.
If it's too technically difficult for the sites to prevent children accessing them, well, boo hoo. They can talk to the makers of lawn darts, kinder eggs, and hundreds of other products that were outlawed for various reasons.
cf,
How did you jump from "This is what I experienced", to applying it to the universal 'you'?
My conclusion: Porn causes an increase in female solipsism.
Paraphrasing Paul Simon
Don’t know much about history
Don’t much about biology
All I know is anxiety
And want Big Brother to take care of me
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