Should we ban pornography?

[Thermodolia]

A lot of the suggestions of how to ban porn will most likely lead to a revolution and eventual execution of those who supported said ban

"WAAAAAAAAA DONT TAKE AWAY MY PORNNNNNNN LET ME DO WHAT MAKES ME FEEEEEEEEEEEL GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD"
Starting a revolution because politicians banned porn... the most western Casus Belli I could think of.

80% to 90% of American men watch porn, 60% to 70% of American women watch porn. To say that there wouldn't be some major problems is naïve.

[Katganistan]

If I ran for office and an atheist, a liberal, an alcoholic or porn addict voted for me I would never take my elected position. I would resign immediately.

There go your hopes for running for office. Because many people in all those categories would probably vote for you -- but of course since no one has to identify as any of them on their ballots, you'd never know.

[Thermodolia]

Drugs are a temporary solution. They do not work for anyone. They make people feel happy, and make them think they need to rely on them so they give drug companies more money.

Holy shit, I thought this kind of dangerous thinking was only found in shitty low budget Christian movies

Who did you think made those things?

[Alvecia]

Holy shit, I thought this kind of dangerous thinking was only found in shitty low budget Christian movies

Who did you think made those things?

I didn't think they knew how to use the internet! They can barely hold a camera straight!

[Topoliani]

It's nice that your anecdote says that worked for you.
Science works for a lot of other people.

Drugs are a temporary solution. They do not work for anyone. They make people feel happy, and make them think they need to rely on them so they give drug companies more money.

Last time I checked, my Cousin got better because he took an Antibiotic for his E Coli

[Entronium]

Who did you think made those things?

I didn't think they knew how to use the internet! They can barely hold a camera straight!

They are begining to evolve......

[Elwher]

Many of the posters here have gotten into the possible damage porn can do to a relationship, and there is some validity to that idea. However, there are at least three reasons why that potential damage is not a valid reason to ban porn.

First, there is a respectable percentage of the population who are not in a relationship. Restricting their ability to view porn is like banning alcohol because it is harmful to alcoholics.

Second, For some people in a relationship porn is a positive factor. It may help set the mood, it may give ideas to enhance the relationship, or it may provide release when one partner is less able or less willing to engage in the sexual portion of the relationship. In these cases, it is helpful to the relationship rather than being damaging to it.

Third, many things are potentially damaging to a relationship, yet are not being considered for a ban. Excessive attention to anything can be damaging to a relationship; video games, alcohol, reading, and careers all come to mind at first thought, and i have no doubt there are many others. If a relationship is strong, it will overcome obstacles and if it is not, all the laws in the world will not make it so.

As to the morality arguments, they are a valid reason why an individual should not watch porn. However, just like any other religious prohibition, they are not a valid reason for civil law intervention. I do not see many people arguing that only kosher foods should be allowed to be sold, even though some religions ban the eating of non-kosher foodstuffs; there is little objective difference between that and banning porn for religious reasons.

[Thermodolia]

Who did you think made those things?

I didn't think they knew how to use the internet! They can barely hold a camera straight!

I bet you $5 that their kids are making amateur porn in the basement with those cameras

[Ifreann]

Alternatively, the sub-cultures which raise most of the people who remain abstinent until marriage promote notions of sexual satisfaction totally divorced from physical pleasure, and thus those people rate their sex lives as satisfying because the acts are reproductive, with no consideration of whether they're enjoyable. And perhaps those people have lower rates of divorce because that same sub-culture taught them that divorce is a crime against the the highest possible moral authority and will be punished with an eternity of torment.

So put simply, those taught that sex isn't about pleasure derive satisfaction from non pleasureable sex, and those taught that divorce is evil don't get divorced as much?

Pretty much. I mean, I don't know if it's actually true, but it's a plausible explanation of the facts we've been given. I figure it'd work with anything. If we spent years teaching people from birth that food is only for nutrition, that eating for pleasure it the foulest degeneracy, we could probably send them to a restaurant that only serves flavourless gruel and they'd give it five stars.

---

Alternatively, the sub-cultures which raise most of the people who remain abstinent until marriage promote notions of sexual satisfaction totally divorced from physical pleasure, and thus those people rate their sex lives as satisfying because the acts are reproductive, with no consideration of whether they're enjoyable. And perhaps those people have lower rates of divorce because that same sub-culture taught them that divorce is a crime against the the highest possible moral authority and will be punished with an eternity of torment.

Or maybe, you know, they're just happier with each other because...

We're talking without sexual satisfaction and divorce rates, not being happy with each other.

---

Or you'll just create an unregulated black market that will make things even worse.

Hence my idea: ban unpaywalled pornography, or otherwise regulate it so damn hard that all of it becomes economically infeasible not to be behind a paywall.

I have four working devices that have cameras and internet connections, and I'm outside the jurisdiction of the American law. If I wanted to do so, I could make porn and put it online and not charge people money to see it, and you can't stop me or subject me to any regulations or taxes.

[Kenmoria]

It's nice that your anecdote says that worked for you.
Science works for a lot of other people.

Drugs are a temporary solution. They do not work for anyone. They make people feel happy, and make them think they need to rely on them so they give drug companies more money.

No. Some drugs are a temporary solution, because they are designed to be, but most aren't meant for that purpose and don't act that way. Numerous clinical studies confirm that drugs do have a massive positive effect on patients well-being and no Christian book or mythology overrules that. Building on this, the many positive effects pornographers can have on self-esteem and other psychological aspects can also not be overruled by any Christian mythos.

[The New California Republic]

It's OK Thermy, we could just set up our own illegal gay porno store if they banned gay porn, disguised as a bookstore or something, just like they did with the speakeasies during Prohibition. We would make a shit ton of money.

Oh, and I could write gay erotic literature and feel like a libertarian hero about it.

And the illegal gay porn syndicate keeps on growing!

[Katganistan]

That's still pretty vague.

What sort of regulations are we talking about here?

Measures to ensure diseases do not spread. Bans on certain types like incest and bestiality. Minimum age to star in a porn video. That type of stuff.

Which are in place, actually.

[Katganistan]

And I can't do anything with it cos I already posted in the thread.

This is why Mods should be aloof.

We're players too.

[Katganistan]

Justification?

As a Catholic, I understand that it violates the moral law. It is a sex act outside of marriage, really, just a video version of prostitution.

But people who are not Catholics don't give a shit about Catholic morality.
And some people who ARE Catholics disagree with you.

[Ifreann]

This is why Mods should be aloof.

We're players too.

She said, twirling her diamond-topped pimp cane.

[Salandriagado]

Or you'll just create an unregulated black market that will make things even worse.

Hence my idea: ban unpaywalled pornography, or otherwise regulate it so damn hard that all of it becomes economically infeasible not to be behind a paywall.

Literally impossible to enforce. As a hint: neither China nor North Korea has managed to keep porn out of their countries. No method less severe than those has any chance of succeeding.

[The New California Republic]

We're players too.

She said, twirling her diamond-topped pimp cane.

I laughed at this more than I should have.

[Katganistan]

And cases that have held that the right to free speech cover more than just the spoken word.

Once again, arguing that freedom of speech goes, in some cases, beyond speech, does not mean that it goes beyond speech in all cases. Some jurisprudence was earlier cited on the specific matter of pornography.

And I'll repeat this for those who didn't read it:

The Supreme Court's consistent position has been that "obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press"Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)). Nevertheless, there has been substantial discussion about empirical evidence justifying this conclusion.

Setting out the scope of the inquiry:

United States v. Roth, 1956, 237 F.2d 796

Roth had been convicted in a district court of distributing material alleged to be "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy and of an indecent character", and had been imprisoned for five years; on appeal, he claimed that the statute he had been convicted under violated the First Amendment.

The judge in this case, Judge Frank, was responsive to social science evidence. (Eight years earlier, in a trademark case, Triangle Publications v. Rohrlich, 167 F.2d 969, he had conducted his own impromptu survey of "adolescent girls and their mothers and sisters" to establish whether there was likelihood of consumer confusion between a magazine and a girdle called "Seventeen" and "Miss Seventeen.") He was of the opinion that Congress could legitimately limit the sale of publications if there was "moderately substantial reliable data" showing that reading or seeing those publications "conduces to seriously harmful sexual conduct on the part of normal adult human beings".

However, in his opinion there was no such data. Judge Frank did not cite a particular study but an overview of contemporary psychological literature that suggested no research evidence either to prove or disprove the assumption that "reading about sexual matters or about violence and brutality leads to anti-social actions." It is notable that violent material and sexual material were not separated out for the purposes of this literature review, which distorts its relevance to the specific issue of whether exposure to obscenity increases delinquency.

Paris Adult Theatre 1 v. Slaton and Stanley v. Georgia: does the question fall within the remit of social science at all?

Despite Judge Frank's call for "thorough-going studies by competent persons which justify the conclusion that normal adults' reading or seeing of the obscene probably induces anti-social conduct", the use of social science evidence to answer this question was not necessarily a given....

In Stanley v. Georgia 394 U.S. 557 (1969), the Supreme Court held that a Georgia statute forbidding possession of obscene material was unconstitutional, distinguishing the holding from Roth on the grounds that the individual in question had not sold or disseminated the allegedly obscene films, but merely possessed them. "If the First Amendment means anything," wrote Justice Marshall for the Court, "it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch."

Notably, the state of Georgia did not raise any social science evidence in support of its prosecution. The Court wrote, "there appears to be little empirical basis" for Georgia's assertion that "exposure to obscene materials may lead to deviant sexual behavior or crimes of sexual violence", citing the same literature review cited by Judge Frank in United States v. Roth, and another article considering behaviour science investigations in this area, "Sex Censorship: The Assumptions of Anti-Obscenity Laws and the Empirical Evidence" (46 Minn.L.Rev. 1009). This second article concludes that that although there is some empirical evidence that sexual cues do lead to sexual behaviour, [color=#FF0000]there is no data on whether it leads to criminal behaviour,[/color] and as the state of empirical evidence was not changed from Roth, the court was justified in citing it in response to Georgia's claimed justification for the statute.

Social science evidence as legislative fact: Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970)

The holding in Stanley v. Georgia prompted Congress to set up a President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, with the aim of establishing, among other things, the relationship of pornography to crime and other antisocial conduct. Its conclusion, based on the empirical research it had both commissioned and reviewed, was that exposure to erotica materials was not a factor in the causation of sex crime or sex delinquency.

This conclusion was based on several empirical studies. A 1970 study (Kupperstein and Wilson) compared the increasing availability of sexual materials in the United States between 1960 and 1969 with juvenile crime statistics for the same period, finding that although the number of juvenile arrests increased dramatically during the period, the number of arrests for sexual offences decreased by four percent, accounting for changes in population. The study's authors conclude that there is no support for the hypothesis that increased availability of pornographic material leads to an increase in sexual crime among juveniles.

A similar study is cited from Denmark (Ben-Vestiste 1970), comparing statistics on reported sex offences from 1958 to 1969. There was a steady decline over this period, despite the fact the Danish Parliament had voted to remove erotic literature from its obscenity statute in June 1967 and to repeal the statute altogether in 1969.

The Commission's legislative recommendations, therefore, were that federal and state legislation concerning the dissemination of sexual materials to consenting adults should be repealed, with some restrictions on what sexual materials could be provided to children. They based the former recommendation on the lack of conclusive evidence linking sexual materials to criminal behaviour, but argued that the paucity of empirical evidence regarding children in particular indicated caution.

....

Although the Supreme Court's position on First Amendment protection of obscene material, as articulated in Roth, has not changed, there is still little conclusive evidence produced in courtrooms concerning the harm done to justify this lack of protection. A possible reason for this lack of notable further developments is that obscenity prosecutions are in a steady decline, from 74 federal prosecutions in 1990 to 34 in 2000 to 6 in 2009 (source: Bureau of Justice Statistics), and it might also be seen from the research compiled here that a significant problem in courts and legislatures using social science evidence in this area is the value-laden nature of the inquiry, and the danger of accusations of "moral bankruptcy".

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/por ... protected/

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/por ... obscenity/

[Salandriagado]

You can legislate the live-action stuff as "protecting the actors and actresses," but any regulation of the animated stuff would be censorship, full stop.

and 90% of the traffic is to "tube" sites that hold both but mostly live action. regulate the live action enough and they'd have to go full-stop paid or they'd have to go full-stop animated.

And then we can levy an extra tax on the production of the animated, just like we do other vices.

You appear to have missed that there are parts of the world that aren't the US, and that a great many websites are hosted in these places.

[Greater Germany]

It is degenerate and mentally unhealthy, but people should have freedom to make their own choices as long as they're not hurting others. So I voted no, and that people should be educated on the effects of porn.

[The New California Republic]

People should be educated on the effects of porn.

I am acutely aware of the effect that it has on me, I really don't need to be told!

[Salandriagado]

So... how exactly do you deal with visitation rights? Or inheritance issues? Or power of attorney?

Easy. Civil unions for everyone. Marriage is not something the state recognizes and is only something religious institutions carry out.

Basically under this plan if you get married in a church religious ceremony you won't be married in the eyes of the state but must go down to the local court to make it official

We already have this. The only difference is that you've started using a different name for it for no reason at all.

[Greater Germany]

I am acutely aware of the effect that it has on me, I really don't need to be told!

You're a droll one, NCR. Don't you have a dam to capture?

[Salandriagado]

If I ran for office and an atheist, a liberal, an alcoholic or porn addict voted for me I would never take my elected position. I would resign immediately.

Well, we have a guaranteed way of keeping you out of office forever, then.

[Weimarer Reich]

This is still going? Why do people care so much about people using their hands as a date?