The big difference here is that purchasing a porno magazine requires interacting with a clerk who will then verify your age and send you on your way. A better comparison would be banning the sale of all porno magazines unless the buyer registers for a porno card for his/her family (which would then provide unlimited access regardless of age).
I tend to agree that unfiltered access to all sorts of things can have an unhealthy impact on the minds of kids, but this is still the wrong way to handle it.
So I am guessing they will also be banning all the porn on TV, in magazines, books and such as well? I mean 50 Shades of Gray is pure filth and only a depraved mind would choose to read something so disgusting and degrading to women. And to think children can buy this book at their local super market!! HORRENDOUS
</sarcasm> for those who didn't get it.
I am all for protecting kids from the extreme sides of porn but that is something a parent should be doing. You know like how they protect their children from drugs, alcohol, violent movies and games, the stuff kids shouldn't be exposed too.
There are plenty of parental control systems available for computers to prevent accidental exposure (not perfect but good enough) should a parent want a more automated solution. But putting the government in control of picking what is acceptable porn for consenting adults and what is not is not the solution.
I am a 30-something male. I have a wife. I look at porn. Big deal. People act like they don't care about porn but if that were true it wouldn't be such a huge business. Enough people pay for the crappy porn you get on TV for it to be a profitable business for god sake. Literally everybody looks at porn and I would be more worried about those who don't than those who do.
This is a terrible step down a dangerous path and of course it is wrapped up in a "think of the children!" spin.
If you extend this policy to "consuming a video/image/text message," that would be dystopian. But this is about porn. Maybe it'll be a slippery slope but I doubt it.
I wouldn't vote for this policy but I get it. Lots of people don't want kids watching porn. And it's not just social conservativism, people across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.
Hi, kid here. A world where I don't worry about the swat busting into my house at 3AM to arrest me for my playboy collection[0] is preferable to the one where I see pop up ads with double penetration in them when I'm 8. (Which I did, I'm fine.)
[0]: Or the government censors whatever they like with their filtering infrastructure.
I think the argument (and I don't really believe it, so excuse me if I don't present it convincingly) is that certain materials are just harmful to children (and possibly adults). You have a daughter, but I think that with boys/young men you can point to porn and say that it's addictive and has a lot of negative side effects. In that case, it's not about protecting them from knowing about sex, but instead trying to keep things the way they were before internet porn existed (and the porn on the internet certainly seems different than a playboy or something). I think that's a natural tendency in a lot of areas and it may or may not have any substance to it.
As far as your little girl goes, would you really be okay her stumbling onto a site like liveleak and watched dudes' heads be cut off or whatever messed up thing is on there right now? I'm not even sure of how to answer that question, but I don't think it's absurd to think "no".
So I can at least understand why people would want to block this kind of content from kids. Did they go about it in the right way? Doesn't it seem like it would be easy to abuse? It's an understatement to say that governments haven't exactly earned our trust when it comes to technological issues.
Even forest gump has an (IIRC) 15 certificate here in the UK.
The issue is that you don't necessarily control which porn your kids would see first. And there is certainly a disproportional amount of "extreme" content available prominently.
I'm not sure it's necessarily just hysteria, I know people who would happily consume porn themselves but would be very mindful of what they expose their kids too.
Do books and radio that children have ready access to have hardcore and/or illegal pornography.
Schools purchase from book catalogues that are "censored" in this sense and [legal] FTA radio is equally censored. So why shouldn't we allow people to get their internet equally censored.
Parental supervision includes using commercial services that censor hardcore pornography.
My 22 year old son vehemently disagrees. And from what I've read from young men, many agree with him. When I (we?) were kids porn was Playboy or Penthouse or Hustler. Tame by comparison to today. As my son stressed with me, you can find _anything_ via the internet. Anything. ANYTHING. A developing brain can't unsee stuff and it does warp people's perceptions of what is normal.
Having said that, I am deeply suspicious of any move to "protect the children" because it's always used as a cover for a move toward authoritarianism.
I don't know if the Internet is the problem here. When I was a kid me and my friends accidentally found massive amounts of porn-mags in the small woods close to our school. Fun and exciting we thought, not really in a sexual way. doesn't matter.
Should we ban porn mags too? Or should we ban urban areas? Or regulate how you legally can dispose of porn-mags? I've also accidentally seen people being too drunk, and people having heart attacks. As a kid.. how should we protect people from seeing things? it's the wrong line of thinking.
Plus you can always fire up MS Paint and draw stick-boobies/penises and fapping comics for massive lulz among your other 12 year old friends. I don't get the idea that people think porn is hard to access or come by even with the most draconian of locks. Okay, so a kid isn't allowed to use his home computer or watch t.v. (The only way to be sure your kid doesn't watch digital porn at home.) He can find porn at the library/school/friend's house/open wifi as you mention. There is also "nudity" one can find in dictionaries-with-sketches, anatomy books, art books, etc. that kids will nevertheless treat as porn because of the forbidden nature of both.
Porn magazines? How quaint. Speaking of moving the goalposts again, the porn control in the article is a mandated smartphone app.
And no, my country does not require minors to install state-mandated applications on their smartphones. For any reason, porn or otherwise.
Also, pornography isn't degenerate. It's just sex. Exploitative pornagraphy is bad, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it. But we generally prevent minors from accessing it because they're not emotionally equipped to deal with sex stuff - same reason we have age of consent laws. Or do you also think that sex itself is degenerate, and that's why there are laws around teenagers and who they can have sex with?
Yeah, although at least with films you know it is make-believe. The real stuff is also pervasive on social media and that can be terribly damaging for a young person to stumble upon. In my opinion, more so than stumbling upon even hardcore porn. Arbitrary censorship is worse than either totally locking down everything or being completely open. With the latter two you (as a user/consumer) know what to expect and can be prepared.
There is such a thing as innocence, the time in your childhood when you can be carefree and not have to consider the terrors and vices of this world. It's natural to want to extend this gestation period, so that a child can meet serious subjects with a more mature mind. At what age would you have your child consider the implications of two girls one cup? Of being in a child militia? Of walking on broken glass?
The protection (along with education and discipline) is the responsibility of parents, not the government. Successful governments have set up constructs to attempt to aid like minded parents (for example the justice system and public schools).
While the porn filters could be construed as an extension of that aid (attempting to delay/soften the introduction to a controversial and mature topic), the ability to censor is at too great a risk for abuse by those with power or influence.
I can understand being opposed to these laws on the principle of freedom of information and freedom from government interference, but why are you explicitly hoping for specifically children to receive pornographic material? That's a very strange thing to wish.
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