The Great Porn Debate - The Coomites vs Anti-Faparians

[A Humble Ewok]

The debate about obscenity, pornography, and its relations to notions of free speech probably goes back to the first dirty drawings on cave walls. Recently within online right wing circles, there has become a strong movement to support the banning pornography, specifically internet pornography, or at the very least greatly limit its ease of access. But even in scenes where the word "Degenerate" fills the same function as "Bigot" among liberals, this notion of banning porn or placing stricter regulations is not without critics. The most common criticism is the potential to violate rights relating to freedom of speech. Another common argument is the possibility of anti-porn legislation being used as cover for more draconian internet censorship.

Andrew Torba, who runs Gab, a twitter alternative who's main selling point is its commitment to free speech, recently announced that all pornography would be banned from Gab, and has gone a days long tirade on twitter about how pornography is bad, is not free speech, and does not go against Gab's core commitment to freespeech. This spergout is what promoted this thread, as Torba is not without support, at least on the position at large.

Here are the rough Bullet Points for both cases

Anti-Porn

• Porn is addictive
• Porn hurts sexual and mental health
• Porn damages relationships
• It is not free speech, and should not be protected as such
• Parents are unable to effectively combat porn's encroachment due to pervasive internet access, and need legislative assistance
• It goes against religious and spiritual dictatum

Anti-Porn Ban/Regulations

• Banning porn would just create an unregulated black market, like with drugs and CP
• Pornographic materials can be considered forms of free expression and speech
• People should be free to decide what to and not to consume
• Pornography is produced by consenting adult/s with consenting buyers/consumers
• More push of big government into people's lives
• Regulations against porn would just be used as a tool of censorship outside of its anti-coomer scope
• Parents should be responsible for parenting their own children, and not rely on government to do their job for them

I'm holding back my own opinion, in hopes of getting a shitshow discussion going on the issue, and so Torba's thread won't dissolve more into Pro and Anti coomer rhetoric. So please, feel more than free to freely express your opinion on the matter. Just don't flash a titty if you do.

 

[BingBong]

porn is terrible. It's one of the most disgusting industries. It exploits young women for their bodies.

 

[Senor Cardgage Mortgage]

To be fair, anything can be addictive and its hard to quit habits regarding anything.

 

[Friendly_AI]

The Internet is for porn.

 

[A Cardboard Box]

The regulation of media that doesn't victimize other people is inherently immoral. Live free or die.

 

[Senor Cardgage Mortgage]

The Internet is for porn.

thank you for reminding me about Avenue Q

 

[Jewthulhu]

Fuck it, might as well give my two cents. Porn is psychologically harmful, addictive, and is a not helping (if not outright accelerating) the degradation of our society. However the thought that the government could effectively regulate it, especially with the myriad of ways available to bypass government censorship online, is really . Regulation will be ineffective, go over poorly, and will probably have unintended consequences outside of its intended scope.
I'm not going to fight to stop porn regulations, but I'm sure not fighting for regulation either. There are better ways to combat porn and the general sex-obsession our culture has.

 

[ProgKing of the North]

Gonna quote myself from the Torba thread

Well even if you convince people it’s bad, you also have to convince people that it’s bad enough to get the government to ban it, something that, at least in the US, is blatantly unconstitutional. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good anyway, all the porn servers would simply move offshore and the NSA isn’t competent enough to catch every single person going to pornhub for a wank.

Tl:dr even with empirical evidence that porn is bad, banning it would just be giving more power to the government for little tangible benefit

(It’s far from the only thing this is true of. If I had a magic button that could make it where automatic weapons had never been invented I’d probably press it, but I don’t support government efforts to ban them)

 

[HeyYou]

Far left feminists and far right moralfags both hate porn, horseshoe theory proven right yet again. Personally, I don't care. This is a free country and I'm sick of daddy government jumping in for everything, and both sides invoke this for shit they don't like.

 

[A Cardboard Box]

Fuck it, might as well give my two cents. Porn is psychologically harmful, addictive, and is a not helping (if not outright accelerating) the degradation of our society. However the thought that the government could effectively regulate it, especially with the myriad of ways available to bypass government censorship online, is really . Regulation will be ineffective, go over poorly, and will probably have unintended consequences outside of its intended scope.
I'm not going to fight to stop porn regulations, but I'm sure not fighting for regulation either. There are better ways to combat porn and the general sex-obsession our culture has.

You sound like a fedora with arms.

 

[Mexican_Wizard_711]

I don't coom
But I do consoom

 

[Systemic Shock]

Eventually, you'll get bored of the porn you usually watch, the most crucial question is how far/low you're willing to go just for porn to be satisfying again? Some people descend, going in to more extreme porn, sometimes going in to child porn. Even if you don't go down to that level, it'll probably hurt to find out what degenerate porn you now watch. Porn is just not worth it, use your imagination if you need to.

As for banning, we regulate drugs, guns and other things that could cause obvious harm. I don't really see porn as free speech as it's a completely different thing.

 

[crocodilian]

I'm disappointed Gab has ended up just as biased and self-serving as Twitter, yet tries to excuse itself because it sits on the other side of a political divide.

"Free speech" is a self-explanatory concept. Good or bad, everyone should be permitted to have a say. In a public forum any idea that's too illogical, fundamentally weak or lacking in support will remain very small, and it's the responsibility of those larger, more appealing voices to ensure everyone else still has the ability to express themselves. There's no exceptions. Even advocates of pornography should be allowed to speak their mind.

If Gab doesn't want to allow porn on their platform for whatever reason (I don't personally agree with that stance), they should still allow artists to maintain a presence there and be allowed to direct followers to personal websites, imageboards, galleries and so-on.

 

[garakfan69]

How is porn addictive?

Every time I consume porn I suddenly completely lose interest in it after a while.

 

[ProgKing of the North]

How is porn addictive?

Every time I consume porn I suddenly completely lose interest in it after a while.

 

[Fagatron]

I'm a gay guy who has had multiple relationships damaged by porn and the influence of "the scene"; giving the impression that if you're not hanging upside down in rope bondage taking twenty dicks one after the other you're doing it wrong and not living a fulfilled life.

Do I think banning it would remove the influence of it? Nope, but making it harder to acquire might do a lot to reduce the influence it holds over several sections of society.

A lot of people today struggle with dating, and there are even people who use Tumblr starfish genders to describe being solely attracted to images of sexual activity rather than engaging in them.

It might do some wonders for getting people to leave their basements; even if only to find a dealer rather than an actual woman with a vagina.

I suppose it comes to a point on what do you value most; should free will steer our society or should we take an effort to steer it one way or the other. I'm not even sure which to pick, mostly because I'm sick of the binary choice today of extreme hedonism or religious dipshits.

I'm sort of with the Christian right on this one that monogamy and chastity outside of it should be the enshrined ideal, but good fucking luck encouraging that I know.

 

[HeyYou]

How is porn addictive?

Every time I consume porn I suddenly completely lose interest in it after a while.

Porn can absolutely be addictive, there are legitimately people out there who masturbate way too much. I knew a dude who would do it 2-3 times per day. However, believing the government has the ability or right to deal with this is insane. Prohibition is a joke of an amendment for a reason.

 

[Where Do You Find Them?]

What really gets me about the whole thing is this idea that there's anything new going on here. That porn being readily available even, unfortunately, to kids is a product of modern technology or that our culture is particularly sex obsessed or that porn has become more hardcore and extreme than it was in the past.

All of these things are bunk. I think this mostly comes from the fact that porn has never been publicly socially acceptable, so historical accounts tend not to mention it, but it was there. We've found tons of it. People imagine the Victorians were particularly uptight but they wrote shitloads of erotica covering all sorts of subjects: incest, bdsm, pissing and shitting, homosexuality, feminization of men. Everything you can find in modern porn we have Victorian examples of and as you go further back in history surviving examples of this stuff get more scarce but no less lurid.

Every society in the history of humanity has been at least a little sex obsessed. It's just part of being human. There's a reason the worlds oldest profession is prostitution. Our society is pretty open about sex but not unusually so. In some ways we're less open than we used to be. Pre-reformation people would just have sex in public. They'd have sex in the same bed their kids were sleeping in (usually only one bed in a house). Our expectations of privacy around sex are actually pretty uptight compared to our ancestors.

Then there's the "loads of studies say it's bad for you" science. It's nowhere near as simple as that. Lots of studies show the opposite. People who do meta-studies often come to the conclusion that it's a total cluster fuck with the porn lobby on one side and the puritanical christians/radfems/whoever else has decided that sex is bad this week on the other obscuring any actual scientific inquiry. The only real answer is we don't know.

Fun fact: The first recorded instance of tentacle porn was 1814.

 

[YayLasagna]

If porn is intrusive in your life, it's up to you to manage it, not the government. Left and Right need to stop pushing for governments to baby them, especially when it reaches to what they touch themselves to.

It's entirely within Gab's prerogative to ban porn and I understand why. Porn is very popular because it's stimulating the basic urge to reproduce and/or feel pleasure, and this opens a floodgate for a site to become almost nothing but about porn.

In regards to it being free speech though...Hell I dunno. It's odd to call people stuffing each other's holes free speech, but it's people's choice to make this kind of content and to publish it on the internet. Pushing for a porn ban to me paints the road to banning what else you can upload.

And yeah no shit porn can be addicting, so can anything else. Human beings are stupid like that.

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

I'll just speak from a parent's point of view regarding ease of access; I can effectively lock a phone or PC down so that pornography is inaccessible from it so that's what I'll do when it becomes needful. I don't need the government to alter the laws or the nature of the internet to accomplish that task and tough shit for anyone who can't figure it out. It's not up to society to take care of your children for you and if you can't figure it out yourself, pay somebody who can.