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Does 'rape culture' accurately describe (many) societies?

TragicMonkey said:
Because parents aren't parenting sufficiently, and hope to childproof the rest of the universe to make up for their own failure.

Don't want your kids seeing stuff? Monitor their internet usage. Don't give them unfettered access. Don't give them smartphones. Don't put computers in their rooms and ignore them. Pay attention. Raise them.
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And make sure they never have access to their friends phone?
Most children see porn first on X.
 
Poem said:
That may be true - but I'm not following your logic.
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It's that the reason to not allow children access may not apply when discussing whether adults should have access.

At the moment the argument to not allow children access to Pornhub has nothing to do with them potentially seeing illegal performances on the platform, it is that they should not even be allowed to view entirely legal performances.
 
Poem said:
And make sure they never have access to their friends phone?
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Yes. If necessary remove access to the friends. Is the concept of "unsuitable friendships" alien to you? If people care that much about controlling their child's experiences then they put in the effort. Expecting to maintain control without making the effort is as foolish as it is lazy.

Most children see porn first on X.
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I'd like to see some evidence behind that claim. Twitter is just a social media platform; one can find pornography easily with a simple internet search. It does not require particular platforms or applications. Even the stupidest of children can type "boobs" into a search engine.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Yes. If necessary remove access to the friends. Is the concept of "unsuitable friendships" alien to you? If people care that much about controlling their child's experiences then they put in the effort. Expecting to maintain control without making the effort is as foolish as it is lazy.
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Not disagreeing, but the Internet greatly raises the level of effort necessary. Access is easier than ever, and oversight is harder, especially for non tech-savvy parents.
 
If Mike Johnson can manage to monitor his son's activity, so can anyone else.
It's just weird that he wants his son to monitor his.
 
Darat said:
There are many things that are illegal in the UK that the UK hasn't implemented draconian preventative measures against. Can't see why this would be an exception. Most people in the UK are law abiding folk so if it becomes a legal requirement to use age verification to access a website most of us will do so. Of course there will be those that won't.
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I'm a bit perplexed. Are you saying its not currently illegal for children to view porn? If not it certainly should be. And I hope most people don't intentionally allow their kids to see porn.

Great, now all porn sites in the UK, and all sites that host pornographic content but aren't just for porn, use this fancy new foolproof age verification system that prevents UK kids from seeing porn (and it doesn't track people, trust us!). And all the porn sites in "rest of world"? How do you prevent access to them? You ban VPN's, and mandate that government DNS servers are used, and have a commission keep a list of all blocked domain names outside of the UK and block them. AND you block access to VPN's outside of the UK because there's no way of knowing whether they allow connections to unregulated websites.

There is no way of doing this without draconian measures OR its just an "honor system".

ETA: please be aware I am not arguing against the experts that porn is, or at least can be, harmful to children. And children should be restricted. I am however, arguing that there is no non-draconian way for the government to enforce it upon everyone. Give parents free software/tools? Sure sound reasonable. But you are depending on them using it, and their kids friends using it etc. And even then it will never be even close to 100% perfect.
 
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theprestige said:
The direction this thread has taken, I feel like Poem's concern is less about the proliferation of rape culture, and more about the misbehavior of PornHub.
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There is an intersection, I think, although it's merely been implied mostly - that the availability and widespread proliferation of "rapey" videos - simulated or not - leads to "rapey" behaviors. Yes yes, I'm familiar with the already cited mantra that "everyone knows the difference between fantasy and reality"; but if we push past that thought-stopping cliche, I think there's at least some merit to the concern.

In most areas, people readily concede that media messaging has an effect on human behavior. Few people dispute, for instance, that a steady unchallenged diet of Fox News and ONN has an effect on the thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors of the people who consume it. Few dispute that an algorithmically-generated progression of ever-slightly-more extreme content by way of Facebook and YouTube constitutes a "radicalization pipeline" that will turn a relatively even-keeled and nonjudgmental individual into a hardcore extremist who believes committing crimes is justified in order to save the white race from extinction at the hands of blacks and Jews. But when it comes to porn and video games suddenly a lot of people refuse to make that concession. Those things are media, they are extremely popular and contain tropes and messaging just like all visual media, but we want to obstinately refuse that they can have any effect on the people who consume them in the same ways that we readily recognize other visual media can.

That reticence is, for the most part, reflexive - it's because forty years ago those mediums were challenged by religious zealots who attacked them as immoral and tried to ban them from existence altogether. They claimed censorship was necessary because the content was "damaging" consumers by turning them into liberals, or making them think unmarried sex is okay.

But there could be a pendulum-swinging-too-far component of that knee-jerk defensiveness, where we went from just rejecting the religious zealots' definition of "damage" all the way to insisting as a just-so proposition that people can't be influenced by those types of media in any way at all.

Relevant anecdote, which I freely admit is an anecdote: over the last year or so, I've happened to run across consistent stories by women in a few different contexts that some male partner unexpectedly started grabbing and holding them by the throat during sex - and not only that, but that the male partner seemed surprised and upset when the woman objected to this. One particular woman complained that after her partner promised never to do that again, he did anyway the next time they got intimate, and that was where the relationship ended.

These anecdotes gybe in a way with my own experience - I lost my appetite for porn a few years ago for a couple of reasons but this by far was the largest one - it just started happening, a lot, that in the middle of a video the male actor would suddenly firmly grab his female partner by the throat. Once in a while it would even be obvious that he was squeezing hard enough for her face to turn red or for her to start making gagging noises. It was extremely offputting to me. It wasn't EVERY video, but it was an uncomfortable lot of them, and it was also completely unavoidable because these instances would appear out of nowhere in thoroughly mainstream videos; videos without particularly edgy or quasi-violent titles, or anything else to suggest that I should be expecting something that I'd normally think of as niche S&M content to pop up in the middle of them. So eventually I just stopped watching altogether.

Does there have to be a connection between the mainstreaming of "choking during sex" on sites like PornHub, and women being unexpectedly throttled by their partners more and more lately? No, I suppose there isn't necessarily a correlation. But could there be? Yes, is absolutely possible. If the content was being made to cater to the niche, it would be labeled somehow so that people specifically searching for it could find it. Instead it started appearing unannounced in mainstream content, and then it started appearing unannounced in real life situations.
 
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theprestige said:
Not disagreeing, but the Internet greatly raises the level of effort necessary. Access is easier than ever, and oversight is harder, especially for non tech-savvy parents.
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When my son was about 13 I told him that his mother and I could tell when his browser-history was deleted.

His eyes grew wide and I only saw my own perverted porn searches after that
 
Checkmite said:
There is an intersection, I think, although it's merely been implied mostly - that the availability and widespread proliferation of "rapey" videos - simulated or not - leads to "rapey" behaviors. Yes yes, I'm familiar with the already cited mantra that "everyone knows the difference between fantasy and reality"; but if we push past that thought-stopping cliche, I think there's at least some merit to the concern.
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i believe there's merit to it too, but these types of videos are pretty difficult to find on these sites unless you know where to look. by contrast, i'd look at something like "incest" porn, which they're perfectly fine with and therefore is completely plastered over the front page of every porn site on the planet.
 
lobosrul5 said:
I'm a bit perplexed. Are you saying its not currently illegal for children to view porn? If not it certainly should be. And I hope most people don't intentionally allow their kids to see porn.

Great, now all porn sites in the UK, and all sites that host pornographic content but aren't just for porn, use this fancy new foolproof age verification system that prevents UK kids from seeing porn (and it doesn't track people, trust us!). And all the porn sites in "rest of world"? How do you prevent access to them? You ban VPN's, and mandate that government DNS servers are used, and have a commission keep a list of all blocked domain names outside of the UK and block them. AND you block access to VPN's outside of the UK because there's no way of knowing whether they allow connections to unregulated websites.

There is no way of doing this without draconian measures OR its just an "honor system".

ETA: please be aware I am not arguing against the experts that porn is, or at least can be, harmful to children. And children should be restricted. I am however, arguing that there is no non-draconian way for the government to enforce it upon everyone. Give parents free software/tools? Sure sound reasonable. But you are depending on them using it, and their kids friends using it etc. And even then it will never be even close to 100% perfect.
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That's really how society operates so I don't think there is any reason not to treat access to porn in the same way. We don't, for instance, insist on all cars obeying the speed limit despite there now being technology that could do that, and that's with something that we know kills and injuries a lot of people every single year.
 
autumn1971 said:
his mother and I could tell when his browser-history was deleted
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Okay? Not every adult has an easy time with computer skills.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

Social issues and public policy aren't about what skilled outliers in the population are anecdotally capable of. They're about average skill levels, what kind of information is generally available and understandable to the majority of the population, what's being normalized. Yes, some parents are privileged with the talent, training, free time or other advantages to easily monitor and guide their children's interaction with online pornography. Congratulations on being one of the few to have been blessed with luck to go along with your hard work.

A lot of parents aren't so fortunate.
 
Darat said:
That's really how society operates so I don't think there is any reason not to treat access to porn in the same way. We don't, for instance, insist on all cars obeying the speed limit despite there now being technology that could do that, and that's with something that we know kills and injuries a lot of people every single year.
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Then I do not know what implementing the age verification system into law does for anyone. Its not practically different than promising you are really over 18 upon going to a pornsite. Now its just a promise not to go to a non-UK pornsite :confused:
 
Poem said:
Is it okay to post a link here to a petition for people to sign? (Shut down Pornhub who still host rape and underage material).
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Let's say you accomplish your goal of shutting down Pornhub. What do you think the result would be?

All those videos and all that traffic would go somewhere else that is likely less moderated and has more unethical content that has more front page visibility.

The whole ID verification thing really only makes it slightly more difficult. Anyone can easily use a VPN to simply access the site as though they're from a state or country without ID verification requirements. Even teens can figure this stuff out or just wait till Dad leaves his phone/ wallet on the counter and the kid uses the info to register an account.

If anything, rather than shutting it down, it would be better to advocate for better moderation and enforcement of violations.
 
Arden Young and Eric Cochran of Sound Investigation speak to Tim Pool about Pronhub.

From Young's X account (re Solomon Friedman):
The owner of PornHub is a defence attorney who defended child sexual predators. His firm, Ethical Capital Partners, acquired Pornhub's parent company earlier this year (ie 2023), and claims to be the leader of compliance in the adult industry.

Tim Pool asks the same question I have - why aren't they in prison? "The worst that happened was that they had to stop doing the thing."

Young and Cochran speak about how they managed to get to speak to Pornhub employees - and the camera they used.
 
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I find it heinous to suggest that there is something nefarious about a lawyer defending someone accused of sexual abuse of children.
It is the principle of the Law that absolutely everyone has the right to counsel. Unless the attorney acts immorally or criminally themselves, they are acting for the benefit of the legal system as a whole.
 
Darat said:
It's that the reason to not allow children access may not apply when discussing whether adults should have access.

At the moment the argument to not allow children access to Pornhub has nothing to do with them potentially seeing illegal performances on the platform, it is that they should not even be allowed to view entirely legal performances.
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The thread asks if porn culture accurately describes society; that Pornhub continues to hosts rape (including underage) and non-consensual videos is just one example of said culture. You mentioned Trump's political popularity despite being accused of rape (or at least forcing digital penetration) - another would be that society effectively makes porn available to young people all the while knowing (it's in the MSM) that it can and does have an influence on their sexual behaviour. Some young people are acting out what they see (as are some adults). Charities said (April 2022):

"...the harm being done to children was so severe that the issue could not wait to be addressed as part of the online safety bill, which has yet to come into effect."

Not addressing this immediately is a choice society is making. And rape culture is the result it would seem.

Would be interested in your answer to this which you may have missed:
Poem said:
Why would MSM shrink from it in consideration of public sensitivities?
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Instead of this ID nonsense, they should do like Leisure Suit Larry did back in the day and make you answer questions about political stuff from 20 years ago. Then at least the kids would get some practice at doing quick research on the internet.

I agree the violent stuff is offputting, prefer places where you'll only get it if you search for it.
 
Lithrael said:
Instead of this ID nonsense, they should do like Leisure Suit Larry did back in the day and make you answer questions about political stuff from 20 years ago. Then at least the kids would get some practice at doing quick research on the internet.

I agree the violent stuff is offputting, prefer places where you'll only get it if you search for it.
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Thank god I had a World Book set to lookup the answers.
 
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