Yahoo And Porn: A commentary

gizmo_mathboy writes "Roger Ebert has an interesting commentary on Yahoo!'s recent decisions concerning porn on their site. Who says that a few people can't change a company?"

Comments

Return to moral principles

[PerlStalker]

They're exercising their "freedom" because of the protests they had - not from any moral decision

Perhaps. We can guess at Yahoo!'s true reasons utill we're blue in the face but I suspect that they may have been using these protests as an excuse. People have been complaining about porn on Yahoo! for a long time and Yahoo! didn't seem to care one way or another. Oh well.

I ask you to elaborate on the "moral principles" to which we should return...

I would like to see us return to priciples such as these:

• That the family is the central unit of society and that we should avoid things that tear it apart.
• Honesty seems to be a disapearing trait in some circles. People are taught that "Dishonesty is the best policy" by those that should be the most honest. (Government officials for example.)
• Respect for others as human beings regardless of their background. I admit that this wasn't perfect before.

There are others but this should give you an idea.

what you perceive the dangers of porn to be.

For many people porn is addictive. For one of these people the addiction drives them to more frequent "use" of harder and harder porn. Eventually, (yes this is an extreme case) it can drive that person to having an affair. Now, most people will not get that far. What's more likely is you have one partner sneaking around to get porn while trying to keep it secret from his/her spouse. This can (an probably will) hurt a marriage and lead to other problems.

I believe that long time users of pronography and younger (<21 years) begin to lose respect for people (or maybe just a gender) as people and start treating them as sex objects. This dehumanization can lead to ideas that restrict the "Unalienable rights" of citizens.

Another problem I see has to do more with the porn industry rather than the users of porn. There are people in the industry that are very exploitive of the people (mostly young women) that they use in their publications. (Yes, there are some "good" porn producers who have women flocking to them but they are few compared to the number of producers world wide.)

Re:Not So Much About Porn

[daoine]

Actually, I think the point of it has very little to do with porn, and far more to do with control over content. The problem with moral authority cases is that once a group successfully removes content based on moral decisions, it sets a precedent for others to do so.

It becomes even more interesting when the "moral decisions" of one company conflict with state (but not necessarily national) legislation. What happens when this goes further -- to the "gay/lesbian/pro-life/pro-choice/insert controversial topic here" clubs, some of which have state law protection?

Ironic that Yahoo will post its own bashing...

well ....

[ReidMaynard]

I don't think Yahoo did it to raise "...the moral principles of our society as a whole."

In essance they put the Naughty Bits in the back room.

Besides, since when do fedishes make people dishonest and/or un-loyal ?

Back to body piercing ...