Slashdot Mirror
Iceland Considers Internet Porn Ban
Onymous Hero writes "With the printing and distribution of pornography already banned in Iceland, further measures to stop internet porn are being considered by Iceland's Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson. From the article: "Iceland is taking a very progressive approach that no other democratic country has tried," said Professor Gail Dines, an expert on pornography and speaker at a recent conference at Reykjavik University. "It is looking a pornography from a new position — from the perspective of the harm it does to the women who appear in it and as a violation of their civil rights.""
This is dumb, as a woman who's various parts are all over the internet I think this is bullshit.
...to the internet proxy industry :-)
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Dilbert is coding protection software to keep minors from viewing porn.
Dogbert: So, you're pitting your intellect against the collective sex drives of every teenager on the planet?
Dilbert: Yes.
Dogbert: Did you know that if you put a little hat on it a snowball can last a long time in hell?
I don't think Icelanders are any more or less sexually moral than any one else. There are indeed abuses of women in porn, and the sex worker trafficing problem is huge.
However, this is a moralist in disguise. He doesn't mention as an example, gay/lesbian porn. He's thinly disguising is contempt for porn in general. Consenting partners, unencumbered and free to make the choice, make porn all of the time. He's just interested in making sure no one watches it, for his sense of moral satisfaction.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Performing in porn is free expression, and banning that expression is an infringement on the civil rights of the participants. The only "harm" resulting from porn is not from the porn itself, but from a society that is reactionary and overly judgmental. This is total bullshit to call this "progressive".
Just another idiotic moral panic. Where's the actual evidence of harm to either porn consumers or producers?
In a democratic nation, evidence of harm is not necessary. "Because we don't fucking like it, we're the majority, and if you don't stop we'll thump you, that's why" is a perfectly acceptable reason.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
In the name of health and safety, children, civil rights and stuff.
Not 'christians', fundies, conservatives or anyone else you've been trained to hate.
The ruling class deciding how you'll live with no help from the church at all.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Professor Gail Dines, an expert on pornography and speaker at a recent conference at Reykjavik University.
How exactly did this gentleman become an expert on pornography?
It is looking a pornography from a new position â" from the perspective of the harm it does to the women who appear in it and as a violation of their civil rights."
What if they unconsciously want to appear in it? Isn't democracy the right to choose your destiny, good or bad?
except for the ones involving more than one person.
They're not banning porn in the name of "old-world belief systems", they're banning it in the name of feminism. I suppose since it's located in Iceland you can consider it to be old-world simply by location, but it's not based on the kind of religious attitudes one normally means by that term. And there's no evidence that he or his supporters aren't sincere about banning porn on feminist grounds rather than religious ones. Iceland is also a very secular country overall, despite having a state church.
A place that has a Phallic museum should not be trying harder than Al-Quida to ban naked women.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's 2013 people.
"Progressive" now means that we'll tell you how to think and what to think.
It's great, I mean - look at all the burden that's taken off the individual!
(On a serious note relevant to the OP: (http://newsroom.unl.edu/blog/?p=1202) "The research, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found in a series of experiments that participants processed images of men and women in very different ways. When presented with images of men, perceivers tended to rely more on "global" cognitive processing, the mental method in which a person is perceived as a whole. Meanwhile, images of women were more often the subject of "local" cognitive processing, or the objectifying perception of something as an assemblage of its various parts." This was happening with both male and female survey subjects.
-Styopa
Of course, Conservatives and religious people will try to remove your freedoms on different grounds.
Sooner or later, any group in power will try to impose their view of the world on everybody else and try to define acceptable behavior according to their model.
And if you have a better system than democracy, we're all ears.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Art and freedom of expression are at risk here. This law is no different than the Taliban imposing extreme sharia law on their hapless victims, it is one small group determining everyone else's choices.
Paternalistic, sexist bullshit. I don't see them whining about the civil rights of men in porn. No, it's only women who need protection.
Only a complete fool would buy this as anything other than a bald faced lie.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
To play at Devil's Advocate here: some women may be in porn against their will, "forced" into it either through unlawful restraint, or "economic difficulty", and therefore need to be "protected" from such a fate.
Now, if unlawfully restrained, clearly a crime has been comitted, and should be prosecuted. I can't see prohibition of pornography as having much effect on such crimes, sadly, as a black market will always exist, and indeed, increase the profit motive for such criminals. Arguably, it would make things worse.
The "economic difficulty" argument is hardly "force", and while it may be sad that a woman might have to resort to pornography, or prostitution, to support herself, clearly it speaks more to the failure of a social safety net, than any "economic force" used "against" her. Personally, I have more respect for prostitutes, porn actresses, and strippers, than those on the welfare dole: the former earn a quite difficult living (often abused in places where these activities are illegal).
All that said, I've known a number of women who stripped their way through college, to wind up with a decent education, and successfull careers. (Granted, a large percentage had serious drug habits, but that should not reflect on those that didn't and saw an easy way to separate men from their money for their benefit.)
The bottom line is this: just because some may be criminally or economically forced into activites they'd rather not do, this does not justify prohibiting those who willingly chose to engage in them from doing so.
In Liberty, Rene
True feminists support a woman's right to choose what to do with her body. Denying free sexual expression to women in the name of feminism is the height of hypocrisy.
That's what we call Tyranny of the Majority. It might be legal, but it's never acceptable. It's nothing more than sheer thuggery.
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What do we lose, if porn is banned?
The freedom to choose.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
To play at Devil's Advocate here: some women may be in porn against their will, "forced" into it either through unlawful restraint, or "economic difficulty", and therefore need to be "protected" from such a fate.
How is that any different fro men being "forced" to be a coal miner out of "economic difficulty"? By that argument shouldn't Iceland ban any potentially dangerous or unpleasant job?
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Just leave the gay porn. It's not as if any males were ever exploited to make porn. No. t the frail, fragile little women-folk who need to be protected from their own decision making capability.
I don't think Icelanders are any more or less sexually moral than any one else.
I'd argue that the banning of pornography and stripping makes Iceland significantly less sexually moral than other countries. Prudery is not moral. Freedom, and respecting the rights of people who use that freedom even if you don't like it, That's what real morality looks like.
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Just a quick FYI, people:
This ban is aimed at violent porn, not porn (as in naked people having sex). So, just to be clear, images depicting naked people having sex will be a-ok, whereas images depicting, say, women being raped or abused would not. It's the consenting adults principle, if you will.
How do I know this? Well, first of all, it's in the article: " "We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link to incidences of violent crime," he said. " The "he" here is Ögmundur Jónasson, the Interior Minister. Also, he's discussed this on his homepage (which is in Icelandic, but here's the link: http://www.ogmundur.is/fra-lesendum/nr/6571/) where he specified that his concern is violent porn, NOT porn itself.
That said, I'm pretty skeptical about this being possible in practice, but I'd love to hear Slashdot's opinion about if people here think it is.
I am not a vegetarian werewolf.
The article says this is a "very progressive approach".........which means it can only be for your own good.
It's a rather strange statement, because it is not progressive at all. The people I know who are most opposed to porn and would like it to go away, might shoot someone if they were called progressive.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sure we do -- we lose the right to do things without someone else deciding that it's morally wrong and forcing us not to do it.
Ah, but whose standards? Are you suggesting your standards are so awesome the rest of us should be legally required to adhere to them? Because anybody who suggests something is half way to becoming the problem as they'll want to make it illegal to do anything they disagree with.
Humans have been crass and supportive of outright destructive ideas for millenia. And humans are a diverse group who believe all sorts of stupid shit, believing otherwise is stupid.
And people tend to define "outright destructive ideas" as anything they don't agree with.
The best you can do in society is to try to balance the needs and wants of everybody -- not take one group and make what they think is Divine Immutable Truth and make everybody else follow it.
Who do we pick? The loudest? The most numerous? The ones who have always been in power? The first born male child?
Little old ladies who think a skirt should never be above the knee, people who believe a woman's face should be covered, or that dancing is the work of the devil -- those people are all entitled to their beliefs, but that doesn't confer any obligation on me to adhere to their beliefs. No more than anything that I choose to do that they disagree with confers any obligation on them.
The only obligation here is to shut the fuck up and mind your own business. Freedom of speech says "you can disagree, but you can't stop it" -- and quite frankly, it's a far better situation than a bunch of fanatics trying to make it law that the rest of us live up to what they believe.
I'm not going to adhere to your beliefs just because you want to, and I'm not going to listen to anything you say that says "god told me we can't do this" ... and at that point, you hold your tongue, and I'll hold mine. But if you think your beliefs gives you the right to tell me what I can and can't do -- then your beliefs are shit.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
While I agree with your sentiments, you judge all 300K+ Icelanders by the whims of one moralist minister.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
If porn gets banned, we don't lose anything that will improve our society.
We lose the porn. I like porn, and losing porn would make this society worse for me. Just because *you* don't value porn doesn't make it worthless. This is why we have freedom, because people have different values.
In the name of freedom of speech, expression, etc. we have permitted ourselves to become crass and to support outright destructive ideas, and in fact force them on others
Yes, destructive ideas like censorship are being force on Icelanders. This is a serious problem. Far more serious than porn.
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Is trafficing huge?
I watch Law and Order Special Victims Unit, and yes, it's huge. The entire female population of Russia has been kidnapped and forced into prostitution in New York City.
I also learned that all Russian women are gorgeous, all Russian men are angry, and video games make teenage boys murder people.
The only thing I've noticed to be actually true is that there really are a lot of good looking Russian women. something in the water over there?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They're not banning porn in the name of "old-world belief systems", they're banning it in the name of feminism.
Odd, much of porn is made by women. If they lose their jobs, they will be liberated or something I guess.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Assuming and anti-internet-porn law would be legal and in practical terms enforceable, it's the government's job to weigh the harm being done by the status quo against the harm done by increased regulations, and to take into account the will of the people in the process. Not an easy job.
It's a very easy job. There is no evidence of harm being done by the status quo.
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In my home country, we've legalized weed. And for many years, there were fewer junkies and drug-related crimes in the Netherlands than in surrounding countries. Then we introduced a measure that wouldn't even make it illegal, it's more like a membership required to smoke dope. That spurred crime alright... Within no-time we had street sellers occupying the corners of every street in towns that previously didn't have this issue.
So they reverted to the old system. And the peace returned.
The same goes for prostitution. In Sweden, they're on a moral high horse about prostitution, but there you get Eastern European and Russian girls that are forcibly kept in dodgy apartments as a default, while only a percentage of prostitutes in the Netherlands are actually forced into the business.
My point is that bad stuff will always happen to good people, but draconian measures, prohibition and even harsh punishment have all been proven to exacerbate whatever problem they're aimed at. Time and time again.
As a result I would argue that a ban on porn is just plain obtuse. It is a limitation on the right to free speech and congregation for those that are consenting afficionado's of filmed exhibitionism, it derives all manner of people of a way to release sexual tension and it's just not effective.
I do wonder what would happen to the rape and violent crime statistisc in a society if they went overboard in sexual conservativism.
I do my job because of economic difficulty. I am sure that most do.
If I would not be doing it, I would be pretty hungry.
I rather would be doing something else, but I do my job because of the money.
The real issue is that you cal it 'sad' that they do the job that they do. There is nothing 'sad' in it. It is a job like any other job. I would not want to do it, but then I would not want to be a policeman either. That does not make the policeman 'sad'.
The real problem is the view that the general public has of the job. That people think it is sad and degrading.
Make it legal (and acceptable) and the abuse will stop, because then these people can go to the police and tell them that somebody hit them and something will actually be done about it.
Stop the abuse not by hiding it. Stop the abuse by showing it and embracing the victims. Show them that they are part of humanity.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You believe there are conditions where the minority should rule over the majority? Then you don't believe in democracy. End of story.
I guess you're right. After all, 9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape.
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This is entirely disingenuous. There are innumerable jobs that depend on the resources you were born with, from sports to modeling to soldiering to becoming an astronaut or a scientist. You're trying to make some kind of exception if the sport is sexual, and it doesn't hold up.
These roles in society are not corrupt; they are based upon perfectly natural and reasonable preferences that we have for one another. Would you prefer an ugly, smelly, stupid companion, or a beautiful, naturally pleasant, brilliant one?
Would sports fans prefer an "athelete" who had a poor physique and could not win? Would the actresses in Hollywood be of such great interest to everyone if they were ugly? Would a stupid person make a good scientist? We are what we are, and if someone else were lucky enough to be gifted with some physical resource that they can market, who are you to say this is a bad thing?
It is ridiculous to attempt to make the case that only earned skills and knowledge have value, or, conversely, that those things we are lucky enough to find innate, do not.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I have no expectation that the public space (or anyone else's private space) will be tailored to my liking. The only place I expect things to go my way is inside my home, and to a much more limited extent, within the borders of land I own. If someone wants to make a lot of noise, paint their house like a Dr. Suess story, board up all their windows, or swim butt-ugly naked in the town center fountain, I wish them well. Men can wear skirts and women can wear pants, anyone can marry anyone else or not, and the "acceptable" number of tattoos and piercings, no matter how unlikely or crude, shall be unlimited. I don't agree that it is legitimate that people have the right to regulate anyone else's actions in the public space, unless those actions actually cause direct physical harm or direct financial injury to a non-consenting party.
No. When in doubt, it's best to do nothing and let individuals decide for themselves.
I absolutely can tell you it would lead to a better world. The arguments are many and extremely well founded, from reduction in harm done by evil legislation (such as huge jail sentences, ruined families, lost opportunities), to tax revenues, to personal liberty issues, to healthcare issues such as appetite enhancement, to elimination of it as a viable income source for gangs and cartels, to replacement for alcohol as a much, much safer intoxicant.
You are entitled to your opinion. You are not entitled to my opinion.
You know nothing of the sort. You have an opinion you want to inflict on everyone else. For my part, I absolutely support your choice to not engage with porn on any or all levels. But that's where your liberties end and the liberties of others begin.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.