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Utah Governor: 'Porn Is a Public Health Crisis' (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Utah Governor Gary Herbert said on his Facebook page: "Pornography is a public health crisis. The problem is rampant, yet it thrives in secrecy and silence." He emitted this thought on signing a resolution which says porn is "a public health hazard leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms." In addition, it "perpetuates a sexually toxic environment." The resolution doesn't just stop there. It goes on to say "due to advances in technology and the universal availability of the Internet, young children are exposed to what used to be referred to as hard core, but is now considered mainstream, pornography at an alarming rate." The resolution says pornography "equates violence toward women and children with sex and pain with pleasure, which increases the demand for sex trafficking, prostitution, child sexual abuse images, and child pornography." It requests "the need for education, prevention, research, and policy change at the community and societal level in order to address the pornography epidemic that is harming the people of our state and nation." In the words of Gov. Gary Herbert, "Today's bills will start an open discussion." I couldn't agree more...
which increases the demand for sex trafficking, prostitution, child sexual abuse images, and child pornography
When I look at porn, I don't feel a need to abuse children. And I think most people don't either.
If this governor feels the need to abuse children when watching porn, then by all means he SHOULD stop watching porn.
In fact I strongly believe that anybody who feels watching adult sex leads to wanting sex with children should seek help and should absolutely stop watching porn.
But please governor, stop projecting your own feelings on the rest of humanity.
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Another attempt by the far right to legislate its religious morality.
No. It's an attempt by the far right to distract people from the evil things they are doing. We know beyond any doubt that pornography is not harmful; presidents have been commissioning reports on porn trying to prove otherwise since time was time. In middle school I did a report on Nixon's attempt to prove pornography was harmful because porn was being demonized again at the time...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is not a rational thing on the side of the prohibitionists. They simply claim that "God" told them porn was bad, so it obviously must be the truth.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Ok... hear me out. The Utah governor isn't completely off his rocker, but there are a few health concerns.
a) porn has similar addiction levels as gambling, people who are obsessed with specific kinds of porn that is hard to find may "seek out" ways of acting on it.
b) a lot of porn is not sex-positive, and in fact if they weren't actors and the acting being rather terrible a lot of the acts portrayed would be illegal under assault laws. So the production of porn, typically amateur porn does result in the exploitation of people and is a race to the bottom.
c) live-porn (eg webcams) is rather bad and unsafe, for both the watchers and the people engaging in live webcam porn. People for some reason pay for this with their personal credit cards and then later claim fraud. This leads to porn watchers engaging in financial fraud. Likewise the companies that operate the sites often take huge cuts of the payments and the people doing the streaming get small amounts. This is again, due to the high amounts of fraud. If you thought Youtube paid beans, an adult engaging in webcam porn is more lucrative due to the captive audience and lack of ads, but at the same time the quality is poor because the bandwidth is poor, and because the bandwidth is poor, people just don't care to pay for much of it
d) Porn actors are often paid to engage in unsafe sex, be it "no condoms" to "putting your X in (unsanitary thing)"
e) credit card companies balk at some acts and will stop payment once that line is crossed, Blame VISA. This is why no beastiality/furry content is allowed.
Companies that are involved with porn in a "hands off" level like various comissioned artists or via sites like Patreon tend to have problems with piracy because the payment system can't actively know what the content is. Cause I assure you if VISA ever saw what Patreon Porn furry porn existed they would pull payment processing immediately because their rules don't distinguish between drawings and actual animals. Just like childporn laws.
Which leads me to
f) the most exploited people are children. Cloudflare protects childporn sites (the same site has been running for over a year and keeps posting ads on the *chan sites,) piracy sites, and many other abusive sites. child predators continue to trade child porn like trading cards because these sites won't disappear.
What is going to happen is we're going to go through the same cycle of prohibition like we did with drugs with the end result being that all porn being legalized, regulated and the creation of non-consensual porn (eg rape, revenge porn, bestiality, and preteen porn) will result in prosecution of the creator because the subject of the porn did not consent/can not consent. This will lead to more tracking information being watermarked. Remember the Sony See-through cam? It was really tame what it allowed to exist, but because it existed and filmed subjects weren't consenting, Sony cameras were modified so that they overexposed when the IR filter was mechanically removed when nightshot was on.
g) there is evidence that excessive masturbation results in hair loss, but at worst it just accelerates the inevitable. There are other things that are connected to sex hormones that can be overstimulated, and at worst it just makes it harder to enjoy sex with an actual human, when the "porn" is the only thing that lets them orgasm.
If you think outdoor smoking ban is ridiculous then you don't realize how much air one cigarette can contaminate.
Personally I'd like to see a total ban on all smoking tobacco.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This is just the continuation of the "public health crisis" excuse to ban something people don't agree with. Smoking, Sugary drinks, guns, etc. The slippery slope continues.
Not all nudity is porn, however, most nudity that is porn portrays abusive behavior and feeds a need in the viewer that probably is not healthy. I've done a lot of counseling sessions with people whose relationships and lives were ruined by the persons addiction to porn. I have yet to do a single one where sugary drinks, for example, caused it.
I can guarantee you that my BBQ in one summer "contaminates" more air than I did as a smoker when I did so would you also support total bans on BBQ? You should see the billows of smoke I can get that thing to give off when I load it up with wood and choke off the air supply. It gives the meat and veggies a wonderful flavor and does tend to add an odor to the entire neighborhood. How about camp fires as they produce lots of smelly smoke?
Time to offend someone
Man do i feel smug while reading this thread. By the time i was 16 i had been to six 8 hour school days dedicated to nothing but sex and all matters surrounding it. Guess there are some upsides to living in "Communist Sweden" ^^.
I seem to remember some studies that suggest that porn watching among teenagers *in the US* does in fact tend to bias them towards more extreme activities likely to induce pain, humiliation, etc.
As I recall though, those same studies suggested a much more practical solution - stop treating sexuality as a taboo subject. It's arguably the single most important biological drive, and as that drive gets activated as teenagers hit puberty they're naturally going to seek out information and stimulation. In the US today, that pretty much means pornographic depictions of often dubious activities*, since depictions of healthy, well-adjusted sexuality are banned from general media, and are insufficiently titillating to be the focus of much porn.
*I should clarify that I have nothing against "dubious activities" between consenting adults. But it makes for very poor education of what a healthy baseline sexual relationship looks like.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The problem is that a lot of smokers think its a good idea to smoke anywhere they are allowed to smoke, regardless of who may be nearby.
Is it always a problem when people do things in the places they are allowed to do them, or just in the case of cigarette smoking?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I've met a few (blessedly few) women of such temperament, even a few friends, and I say go for it woman - be as blatant about it as you like, it makes it all the easier for me to steer clear, and there's certainly no shortage of men trying to buy women's attention with flashy cars, big bankrolls, etc. I say the two groups deserve each other, and may their financially-based relationships bring them as much happiness as money can buy.
If you've been suffering such a stream of repeated encounters with such women to breed the bitterness you're giving voice to, then let me offer a bit of advice: You know all those hot women with well-sculpted bodies, beautiful hair, and flawless makeup that invariably catch your eye? That almost always takes work, a LOT of work, to maintain. Between personal grooming and cosmetics, plus maintenance throughout the day, and regular exercise to maintain that sculpted body, you can easily be talking an hour or two per day. Plus almost completely depriving themselves of the sweet and fatty foods we all love. Assuming they also have a job to pay the bills, and sleep the recommended 8 hours a day, that can be over 1/4 of their daily free time spent on activities geared toward creating an image unnaturally attractive to men. That's ferocious long-term dedication to a "hobby", and you can reasonably expect they want a return on investment. Enjoy their work as you would any other art exhibit, and walk on past.
If you want a woman who will stand beside you as an equal or helpmate instead, then try focusing instead on women who look a bit more like, well, you. Possibly a bit more of a belly because they generally have a metabolism better optimized to storing calories against the lean times than you, Comparable cleanliness and grooming. Not much makeup on a regular basis. Start there, and you'll at least be much more likely to be dealing with a person you can actually relate to, who spends their free time doing things they actually enjoy rather than trying to snag a good "catch", and who is looking for a partner to share their life with, rather than an investor in their beauty.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Seriously, this is a Mormon lawmaker trying to legislate his own morality on others. Let's not pretend there is any credibility to calling this a public health crisis because it isn't.
As an ex-mormon living in Utah I can say that it actually *is* a public health crisis. But, for exactly the *opposite* reasons mr. mormon lawmaker thinks. For decades Utah has found itself in the top-10 list of many bad things: #1 anti-depression pill use per capita of any state. Most teen-age pregnancies.
The thing is, it is the *result*, not the cause. The *cause* is the damned oppressive religion. You get kids that aren't allowed to even talk about their own bodily functions so hormoned up (naturally) and curious that when they do cross the line they are completely unprepared and don't just "sin" away their virginity--but get knocked up. Then they feel mentally and emotionally devastated to have 'failed" themself, their god, their religion, their "cleanliness" that they become depressed. It highly exacerbates the mental states and swings experienced.
You get married men "using" porn (yes, they love the term "using" to spread the bias of their opinion around like it's an illicit drug) because even after marriage discussion of sex is still largely prohibited, and doing anything much more than missionary is discouraged. Hellfire and damnation being at stake, of course. They are still curious--and for most of them their cultured wives aren't willing to risk trying anything "dirty" to have more fun. In short, they get bored and frustrated by whatever is still prohibited to them.
If you think I'm just being anti-religious-biased you probably have not truly been exposed to mormonism enough to know that there is a *huge* body of corroborating evidence. Get on exmormon.org and read "The Double Bind in Mormonism", then go read the forum posts. You may very well be amazed at how bad the experience really can be for a majority of the people.
Legislating this kind of stupid crap is just an extension of the cult's mindset. No different than the silly 2 shot limit at bars (yes, you *cannot* legally mix a long-island tea in a public bar because it has *ghasp* *4* shots).
The saddest fact of the matter is that historically Joseph Smith drank like crazy and sexed up women like crazy. If he were alive today he'd be a registered sex offender. He shared men's wives, stole men's wives, smoked, drank, and was quite a slick talker. This is all documented in their own church archives--but most members still have on the blinders of cognitive dissonance. SLC even supported a brothel for decades in the early years--frequented by members in leadership and non-members alike, and they made their own booze back then too.
Absolutely, and I make no claim to be so. But porn is, by and large, made by and for men, and competes to be as titillating as possible to secure as much of the market as possible, and so it inevitably portrays a very lopsided picture. Go ahead and watch a bunch of it at random, with careful attention to the actors faces - they're rarely good actors after all, and their faces tend to expose their actual feelings if you're not focused on other things. The men are generally enjoying themselves, the women, considerably less frequently. And if a professional with lots of experience is expressing discomfort or distaste, it's a fair bet that it's not something the average woman is really going to enjoy. Some individuals certainly, but it's probably not a good baseline to educate children who have no broader experience to draw upon.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying do away with porn, I'm saying lets stop hiding the averages (and extremes) of what real people choose to engage in behind social taboos. And I'm not just spouting off, I have some female friends who endured some really unpleasant things in their early relationships, simply because they thought it as normal and had no idea they should be demanding better treatment.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.