In one paragraph the politicians claim it is about protecting children. Their supporting evidence is that 40% of college age women report being choked during sex. The implication is that by banning minors from watching porn it will protect college age women.
There are so many issues with this reasoning. The most obvious is that the legislation wouldn’t ban college age men/women from watching porn.
If this law is really about “protecting children” then why are they banning all porn and not just the particular violent videos they object to?
The cited "40% of college age women report being choked during sex" article is an NYT opinion piece where some of the respondents actually say they _wanted_ to be choked during sex, but the author of the opinion piece thinks they're wrong and choking (even if you want to be choked) is bad.
This isn't about protecting children, it's about prudes who don't like the way that other people enjoy sex.
Thank you for posting this. Parent comment is exactly how lies get told on the Internet these days: write a statement that nominally has a speck of truth but with the deliberate intention that it will be misinterpreted by any normal person reading it.
1. It's not just "college aged women". The study was on undergraduates of both sexes.
2. The framing of OP's comment ("these porn laws are dumb when all these women are being choked!") was obviously made to imply that we should somehow stop women from being choked, implying it was nonconsensual.
3. As you point out, the study itself was more about sex practices than people being attacked.
Hardly anything is even bothered to be argued in good faith anymore.
40% is a lot but kink and bdsm is really becoming more mainstream.
I've been into this longer and it's funny to see girls wearing designer dresses with black leather straps and studs and collars etc. Good for them though. I also love being choked, by women in fact (I'm a man)
The cool thing is that these people will shape a society that no longer looks down on such things, as these conservative politicians do. It will take a long time though, in a country where politics is a game for geriatrics.
>it's about prudes who don't like the way the younger generations enjoy sex.
Worth mentioning again that this is California, one of if not the most left/progressive state in the union. Absolutely dominated by Left/Progressive/Democrat politics thanks to how many cities are located in it.
As the old saying goes, one becomes more Right/Conservative/Republican(?) the older they get.
I'll sit back amused at identity politics players' heads imploding if this measure goes ahead further, because they always point and laugh at Texas, Montana, and Right/Conservatives/Republicans, et al. for this very thing.
An SF state assemblyman introduced a bill to limit cars to 10mph over the speed limit. It's just safety nannyism. Not everything is "conservative"/"liberal", and these labels tend to be meaningless. Obamacare was originally Romneycare was originally a Heritage Foundation idea.
> As the old saying goes, one becomes more Right/Conservative/Republican(?) the older they get.
Once again, I'm breaking molds. The older I get, the more liberal I get, at least with the current leanings of today's "conservative" party. Banning books is atrocious to me. Dictating women's health is insulting. Allowing businesses to be considered a person flabbergasts me. Knowingly denying scientific evidence on pollution is not only insulting to me but future generations. The list continues to go on that I honestly do not understand how just because one gets older they are supposed to suddenly think these things are okay.
While they might seem at odds (one observes tradition, the other does not necessarily), they are not mutually exclusive and there is significant political overlap in espousing moderation/caution and freedom ("generosity", "not strict", "open-minded"). Small government is the most obvious form of this overlap.
Conservatism for political contexts can thus be defined as a desire to exercise a minimum (and ideally no) enforcement of powers in order to protect and guarantee people's freedoms, and a general desire to oppose change unless a change can be demonstrably warranted.
As for the saying, the older we get the harder we are set in how we live and conduct ourselves. A man builds stronger and stronger ideals and an identity that defines what is good and evil as far as he is concerned. We become more conservative as we grow older.
Then conservatism is b.s. You'd think environmental conservation would be extremely conservative as it keeps things the way they are. But nope. The party of "individual freedom" is also the party of "don't let people do what they want in bed with consenting adults". It's a fairly arbitrary mix of policy positions adopted on each side, some in line with the principles and some contrary to.
> I honestly do not understand how just because one gets older they are supposed to suddenly think these things are okay.
Well I don't think it is that they "become OK"; I suspect the effect is that at some point over the course of 40 years most people have the click moment where they start earning some money, realise that the politicians are willing to talk about what is in the news but not what actually matters, and start aligning based on economic incentives.
Picking on the US, the government makes up 40% of the economy, and it appears that an entire generation of capital formation just happened in China rather than in the Americas. All the stuff you listed is a concern, but I think there is a pretty good argument that the entire Trump phenomenon is the backlash against decades of fumbled economic policy that the corporate media has not effectively grappled.
The argument is that kids growing up with easy access to high quality video porn internalize what they see as normal sexual behavior, and then inflict it on their partners when they get older.
Because two different special interest groups: conservatives on the one hand who are doing the typical conservative thing, also a certain fringe group of feminists who are against sex positivity and overlap with the TERF movement
Over the last two decades we did a huge social experiment where porn availability went from occasional access to highly restricted printed material to every imaginable flavor being anonymously available 24/7 on a handheld device people carry with them every day. If it "causes cancer", so to speak, we should have unquestionable evidence at this point.
The "cancer" would be psychological. There is zero chance, no matter how universal, that we could possibly get unquestionable evidence about that. People still don't believe in ADHD. what makes you think we'd have a snowballs chance in hell that everyone would see mental issues and just nod their head and say "lets ban porn".
We don't even have unquestionable evidence about smoking. Tons of people say things like "I'm more likely to be hit by a car so I'm just going to smoke"
What kind of evidence do you expect to see? I feel like I’ve read about a fair number of problems which this could be related to or even simply aggravate.
There probably hasn’t been enough time for any studies to link a problem straight from widespread porn emergence all the way to damage in childrens’ development, though. Porn wasn’t, like, WIDELY available until maybe 20 years ago. We’ve basically had a single generation to study, and they’re not even done being kids yet for the most part.
Still, the damage seems like an obvious outcome to me.
Everyone I knew in school copied porn images on diskettes downloaded from BBSes. That's a lot longer ago. We copied them like crazy lol. It's not a recent thing.
And it wasn't soft stuff. I remember having pics of the aftermath of bukkake sessions etc. Yet I'm extremely respectful of women especially in bed.
Not that I think porn use is necessarily linked to these things, but rates of people who never marry are on a steep rise, people report dating as being subjectively more difficult, and the WHO considers the loneliness epidemic to be a global health concern. It seems like there's an obvious normalcy bias at play when someone says "X thing can't be bad or we would've noticed during the last n decades".
Same deal when people say plastics can't be that bad of a pollutant because people are fine. Have you looked at people? Half the US is obese.
Plastics and porn or food and sedentary lifestyles and social media might all not be the problem, but "look, things are fine" seems like bad reasoning either way. People are very obviously mentally and physically unwell, the trends there are bad, and the reasons aren't well understood.
Generally I agree. People can live the lives they want if it's not harming others. I tend to think people should be free to buy hard drugs as well despite potential harms (but that we should very harshly punish e.g. needle littering and not give any lenience for harm people cause on those drugs). But I do think those drugs should only be available to adults, and it's sensible to require age verification there. If porn turns out to be harmful, it seems like it's appropriate to restrict it from children in the same way we would for drugs.
That said, that has nothing to do with my point, which was that it's hard to look at trends in things like mental health, physical health, and relationships, and declare that there must not be any problems or we would've noticed by now. I see that argument made about all sorts of speculative problems, and it seems crazy to me.
The choking thing seems like pretty strong evidence to me! I don't want to sound like a prude, but it is in fact risky to choke people, and it doesn't seem like there's a good alternative explanation for how this kink has become so common.
It's usually not actual choking (also called breath play). Usually just a firm grab by the throat. It's pleasurable for me too and most people don't go further than that. Real choking leaves serious bruising. I only know it being practiced by serious BDSM people and only a small subset at that. And always with full consent and safety.
But my point is, what most people call 'choking' isn't choking but just some mild consensual degradation. Which is very pleasurable to people with submissive tendencies, of which there are a lot more than people realise.
As I've mentioned multiple times before on HN, this is because of Barroness Kidron's lobbying campaign [0]
It's her recommendations that became the UK law and multiple state level laws.
I'm actually kinda impressed, because she doesn't have a high net worth nor is she nobility (she was given the Barronness title for her directorial work in 2012).
It goes to show that if you are organized and can hustle and network enough, you can make massive change.
The high net worth helps you push through things that are unpopular. The lack of it suggests there was existing and measurable popular social support for the idea.
Fuck moral panicking pearl-clutchers who add no value except to enshittify the world with censorship, forced reproduction, and other forms of Big Mother control.
Are you a troll? The specific material is immaterial, the principle is far more important. But I guess you are fine with your rights or others being taken away.
> During the filming, the British director cut two children from the documentary because she believed their experiences online had made them too vulnerable to include in the movie. Another videogame-obsessed participant was kicked out of college soon after she finished filming. A fourth was recommended for psychological support.
So out of the 11 children she happened to follow, 4 ended up with pretty severe negative outcomes. And yet we’ve had nearly 17 years of smartphones and 20 years of Facebook, and I don’t believe I’ve read anywhere that ~40% of kids have such negative reactions to tech. Either she has enormous bad luck in selecting children for her documentary and selected mostly outliers, selected children who were more predisposed to having problems in the first place, or she is actually the one that has such a negative impact on kids lives.
That’s not to say whether or not such things are bad ideas in the first place, but I wish policy was focused more on what the scientific literature says rather than what a filmmaker who followed some kids around is promoting.
> The bill would require that any data collection would ensure the user’s anonymity and would not be used to create a record of the user’s online activity.
What are the penalties when this is violated (by pretty much every company involved)?
There are plenty of ways to do it such that the verifier doesn't know why they are verifying and the relying party doesn't know who was verified.
As far as I understand, the ISO 18013-5 mobile drivers license standard (which appear to be being implemented across a bunch of US states, including California[0]) seems to allow for each fact that appears on your license to be individually signed so that you could store your ID on your phone, and then when prompted, provide only your birthday or only an "over 18" marker that's signed by the state.
The service provider could then not keep any records except to mark your user as a verified adult so in the future you can just login.
In order for a state to make KYC equitable for all people the legislation should lay out government infrastructure for providing the KYC verification. Having the private market do it is just a way to secretly disenfranchise huge segments of the population giving them no possible recourse for false positive rejections.
This proposal's end results will be banks and other corporations doing the KYC and those types of corporations will mistakenly deny service to tens of thousands of people in order to prevent one actual real positive from making it through.
It's kind of ironic: this state government will freak the fuck out if access to porn is restricted in school libraries, but restricting it on the internet is somehow acceptable?
Where is the consistency here?
If we're going to restrict one, why not restrict the other? Or if we're not going to restrict one, how the fuck would restricting the other ever make sense?
Or maybe they should make school libraries available to the public so I can go pick up some material from one the next time I need to do my business
These laws are the ultimate in stupidity. Starting to feel conspiratorial that VPN companies are just bribing legislators to pass these laws.
Makes much more sense to require sites to adhere to things like "Restricted to Adults" labeling, https://www.rtalabel.org/, so that they can be appropriately blocked by parental filters.
I think there's an obvious slippery slope here, and it's visible in how these sorts of age verification requirements are implemented. Specifically, requiring a government ID to access, creating a log of who/what/where/when.
The slippery slope comes from someone then asking the question: "Well, we already require an ID to allow someone to access porn... so can we require it for other things online where people have less desire for privacy? Why shouldn't we require an ID to post to social media, or participate in online video games (especially those violent ones!)"
The slope I see, is once you set up a system for ID verification and require it for a primary thing people want to keep private, it becomes easier to mandate it in other areas where privacy is less demanded.
Concern about that slope would be a nonissue if the laws mandated adult sites tag themselves as "adult content" for trivial filtering at the household network level, instead of establishing and normalizing the ID verification regime.
Mandates of any kind tend to have inertia: once the mandate is in place, the government/corporate apparatus is in place (and usually generating cash flows), it's often a similar amount of effort to get it removed and restore the status quo. That's part of the "slipperiness" of the slope.
The other part that may or may not be the case, is a tendency to expand the scope of a mandate. This is in part because the companies that derive cash flows will always want to increase them. It's also because the existence of the apparatus is attractive; it's an existing solution that can be coopted to new or expanded ends more easily than coming up with a new solution. And the ease is not just in implementation; it's also that the precedent is set so the opposition may be less powerful.
In this case, I think the recent trend in school board elections and local library funding of banning minors (or everyone) from materials on sex education, sex positivity, LGBTQ stories or discourse, etc. suggests how any age verification program might find public pressure to increase in scope.
Where it gets more dubious is the possibility of expanding the scope beyond minors (to identifying or simply banning everyone) or beyond materials of some (potentially alternative) sexual nature, i.e. to political, religious, foreign or technical subjects.
The Brits are doing way worse things. There's no way to limit porn sites to adults without demanding intrusive information. Most people want privacy when looking at porn, for good reason, and that's incompatible with age limits.
If you ask me, this is just a warmup to a broad attack on internet anonymity. Politicians want it to be literally impossible to be anonymous on the internet, so they can harrass their opposition.
There are so many issues with this reasoning. The most obvious is that the legislation wouldn’t ban college age men/women from watching porn.
If this law is really about “protecting children” then why are they banning all porn and not just the particular violent videos they object to?