this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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It's kinda tragic too. I do agree with the sentiment behind age verification, it is in the kids' best interest that they not be using porn at that age. But there's really no way to effectively enforce this without violating basic rights. There is no good solution. Given that dilemma, all we can do is try to better prepare parents to deal with this in their home.
Is it really that bad if kids see a bit of porn? Like really? I grew up before the internet, but even in my day porn mags and VHS tapes got passed around when I was a teenager. Kids are always going to be curious.
Even so on the internet there are much worse things than porn that are harmful for the development of children. There are various groups of questionable morality like incels, or other mysogynistic groups, alt right stuff like neonazis, christofascists, climate deniers, ... If I had children, I would be much more concerned about them falling into one of those ideological traps than them seeing some titties. Hell, even TikTok is probably more harmful for giving them a dopamine addiction and an increasingly short attention span.
So to me, it seems a bit weird to single out porn. It feels like a convenient scapegoat for parents who don't want to spend time raising their kids and paying attention to what they are looking at on the internet.
I don't have kids either, but my siblings and friends do, and kids today aren't just seeing a little porn. It's not like Playboys in the woods or a single 2 MB image downloaded for hours on dial-up. It's pretty violent sexual activities in video, like strangling or surprise anal sex. Even twenty years ago, my first sexual partners had moves they picked up from porn, but they weren't violent. Talking to young women today, the moves their partners are picking up and have been normalized by porn tend to be violent. Like, I never had a friend in college tell me that her boyfriend slapped her during sex and called her a dirty whore while she cried, but that seems to be a pretty common experience today.
The issue is that even older teens don't have the life experience to contextualize what they see in porn and separate it from how you act in real life. If you're into slapping people, that's fine, but you've got to talk to your partner about it before you do to. If you're getting your sex education from porn, then you don't get the people skills part that's important for successful relationships in real life.
This study touches on a lot of what I'm mentioning here, and they found a correlation between violence in teen relationships and porn viewing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6751001/
So, yeah. I don't know what the solution is. I don't think it's sending a copy of your ID to a porn site, which seems incredibly risky for other reasons. I think sex and relationship education would help a lot, but that only connects with the kids who listen. Obviously there's a parenting component there, but I don't know how many parents are mentally health enough to have those conversations honestly. 🙃 Probably not the ones who wrote this bill.
The simple "Are you over 18? Yes/No" prompt worked just fine. If a kid lies and presses yes, who fucking cares lol. They're not seeing it on accident at that point. We need to stop this puritan society, kids are going to explore this stuff. They always have and they always will.