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

[Poem]

Funny how you snipped the part immediately preceding this quote:


So, not actually that widespread, then.

Rachel de Souza - A lot of it is just abuse:

"We find that pornography exposure is widespread and normalised – to the extent that children cannot ‘opt-out’. The average age at which children first see pornography is 13. By age nine, 10% had seen pornography, 27% had seen it by age 11 and half of children who had seen pornography had seen it by age 13."

 

[Myriad]

"Young people tell me their exposure to pornography is widespread and normalised – with the average age at which children first seeing pornography being 13 years old," Dame Rachel de Souza, the current Children’s Commissioner, tells the BBC.

By all accounts, masturbation occurs at a very young age.,

Are you aware of the relationship between porn and masturbation? Do you think people below a certain age should not masturbate? (Why not?And how do you propose to instill and enforce this idea?) Or do you think it's okay if they masturbate but not if they use porn? (Please explain the reasoning in this case, and what you expect them to do instead. The underwear section of the 1955 Sears catalog perhaps? It was good enough for dear old Grandpa.)

By any chance do you subscribe to or participate in the myth that 12-14 year olds (clustering around that mean porn and masturbation onset age you cite) are sweet innocent darlings who care (or should care) only about rainbow unicorns and superheroes?

Discounting such ridiculous infantilization leaves two main legitimate reasons why we don't want adolescents having actual sex. One is because we don't want them getting themselves or others pregnant, and the other is because we don't want them being exploited for sex by peers or by older people. Their accessing generally available porn does not present either risk. Targeted provision of porn to individual minors by adults can contribute to the latter risk, which is why it's already illegal.

Your trivialization of this issue is in line with the very meaning of rape culture.

We've been through this before. Your trivialization of rape, actual rape being actually condoned by actual cultures, is far more egregious than anything anyone in this thread has said about porn. Worse, it displays the inadequacy of your case. I'm opposed to smoking, but I have actual rational arguments for that position, so I don't have to resort to provocative nonsense like calling it "arson culture."

 

[Myriad]

That's disingenuous Lithrael. Porn website owners, users who upload content, consumers and porn advocates are all implicated in this sex abuse scandal. What about:

not taking proper measures to prevent a child being exposed to sexual activities by others

is in any way ambiguous?

Feel free to go ahead and define "proper" in a way that allows a jury in a courtroom to decide whether the measures taken in a given case were or were not "proper." Is a "do not enter if you're under [some number]" sufficient? Is any successful circumvention whatsoever sufficient proof of impropriety? If not, what success rate for attempted unauthorized access is legally permissible?

And while you're at it go ahead and define "sexual activities" with the same level of rigor. Does kissing count? Tongue kissing? How about fondling of genitals while clothed? What about penetrative sex that's clear from the context but occurs off the edge of the picture? Do animals count? (I'm looking at YOU, National Geographic Channel.) How about non-human aliens? How close to the naked woman's hoo-ha can Cthulhu's tentacles come before the prison cell slams shut? How about depictions of sexual activities in text?

Funny true story about the latter. I learned to read at a high school level, and was reading novels, by age seven. Because of their potentially disturbing content I wasn't allowed to see movies like Jaws or The Godfather. But of course no one ever even tried to stop me from reading the books, because reading! Did you know the Jaws novel includes a steamy explicit sexual affair between the shark expert and the police chief's wife? Did you know The Godfather novel includes a whole detailed sub-plot about how Sonny Corlenone's penis is so huge no woman can take him, until he finally meets a woman whose vajayjay is so huge no normal man can satisfy her? For some reason neither of those sub-plots made it into the respective movies. And those were nothing compared to what was in my favorite genre, SF novels. Dystopian futures where sex is forbidden, so the protagonists inevitably discover and explore sex, were all the rage in SF at the time. But surely the ones with rocket ships on the covers were safe; sexy aliens and alien forms of sex, anyone?

So who if anyone was guilty of exposing me, as a child, to sexual activities by others? There weren't any pictures so did that make it okay? My forty years of marital monogamy surely show how damaged I was by these experiences.

 

[Lithrael]

Recently, I'm getting youtube ads that are scenes from some sexy sim game that are literally "you've just walked in on your secretary changing clothes" 'oh!! boss!! what are you doing in here?!?' "what do you do? Watch her?" and personally I find that ◊◊◊◊ being served up to users on whatever algorithmic basis (I watch mentaur pilot and technology connections! wtf!) to be more like 'failing to try not to expose kids to inappropriate sexual situations' than "porn exists on a porn site that asks your age every time."

Man. I remember us kids trying so hard to get through the 'things you'd know if you were a grownup' questions to load Leisure Suit Larry on the computer we were supposed to be doing matlab on in middle school.

OMG. Memory unlocked. I DO remember being intentionally exposed to pornographic materials as a minor by some ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ online ONCE, and it was in email mailing list days, and it was a very, very pornographic fanfiction about ALF (the sitcom alien puppet) someone posted in the fan-ml for the band Genesis.

People are weird.

 

[Poem]

We've been through this before. Your trivialization of rape, actual rape being actually condoned by actual cultures, is far more egregious than anything anyone in this thread has said about porn. Worse, it displays the inadequacy of your case. I'm opposed to smoking, but I have actual rational arguments for that position, so I don't have to resort to provocative nonsense like calling it "arson culture."

Citation?

 

[Myriad]

Citation?

Sorry, I don't have the authority to issue citations, and trivializing rape (such as you did in the post of yours I quoted previously, where you called my using an analogy to illustrate the importance of distinguishing cause and effect "the essence of rape culture") isn't a misdemeanor anyhow. But regardless, actual rape that takes place in actual cultures that actually condone said rape is the essence of rape culture. Discussing porn in an online forum is not.

 

[Poem]

Sorry, I don't have the authority to issue citations, and trivializing rape (such as you did in the post of yours I quoted previously, where you called my using an analogy to illustrate the importance of distinguishing cause and effect "the essence of rape culture") isn't a misdemeanor anyhow. But regardless, actual rape that takes place in actual cultures that actually condone said rape is the essence of rape culture. Discussing porn in an online forum is not.

Which post?

If we google 'rape culture definition', we get:
a society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse.

Above, I quoted from CEOP - that:

All sexual contact between an adult and a child, online or in person, is sexual abuse; this includes:
not taking proper measures to prevent a child being exposed to sexual activities by others
showing a child images of sexual activity, including photographs, videos or via webcams

Clearly, your definition of rape culture is too narrow; any society that leaves porn effectively lying around for youngsters to see readily fits the definition.

 

[Poem]

Are you aware of the relationship between porn and masturbation?

Yes.

Do you think people below a certain age should not masturbate?

I consider masturbation as normal.

Or do you think it's okay if they masturbate but not if they use porn? (Please explain the reasoning in this case, and what you expect them to do instead. The underwear section of the 1955 Sears catalog perhaps? It was good enough for dear old Grandpa.)

Since showing porn to the underage is illegal then I'm wondering why you have posted this.

By any chance do you subscribe to or participate in the myth that 12-14 year olds (clustering around that mean porn and masturbation onset age you cite) are sweet innocent darlings who care (or should care) only about rainbow unicorns and superheroes?

They aren't sweet (there may be exception) and no, they don't only care about that, A cynical post Myriad.

Discounting such ridiculous infantilization leaves two main legitimate reasons why we don't want adolescents having actual sex. One is because we don't want them getting themselves or others pregnant, and the other is because we don't want them being exploited for sex by peers or by older people. Their accessing generally available porn does not present either risk. Targeted provision of porn to individual minors by adults can contribute to the latter risk, which is why it's already illegal.

That you think that pornographers aren't targeting children is seriously naive. Their business model is as many people watching as much content as possible. Declaring that one must be over 18 to enter their site is about as safe as leaving porn in a room with the door open and no adult monitors.

You are going to have to explain your last sentence - we know for a fact that children (boys) are watching porn and then acting it out for real. We also know that most child sex abuse is carried out by children. Society has looked the other way whilst facilitating this normalization of porn for the underage - with dire consequences.

The Guardian:
In a strongly worded open letter to the largest pornography sites in the UK, a coalition of charities and child safety experts led by Barnardo’s said 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.

 

[Poem]

Feel free to go ahead and define "proper" in a way that allows a jury in a courtroom to decide whether the measures taken in a given case were or were not "proper." Is a "do not enter if you're under [some number]" sufficient? Is any successful circumvention whatsoever sufficient proof of impropriety? If not, what success rate for attempted unauthorized access is legally permissible?

If we just take the example of Pornhub - warning that you must be 18 to enter the site is just about as weak as a warning can be. Sufficient would be not allowing the production of porn until we can guarantee the safety of the underage.

And while you're at it go ahead and define "sexual activities" with the same level of rigor. Does kissing count? Tongue kissing? How about fondling of genitals while clothed? What about penetrative sex that's clear from the context but occurs off the edge of the picture? Do animals count? (I'm looking at YOU, National Geographic Channel.) How about non-human aliens? How close to the naked woman's hoo-ha can Cthulhu's tentacles come before the prison cell slams shut? How about depictions of sexual activities in text?

Funny true story about the latter. I learned to read at a high school level, and was reading novels, by age seven. Because of their potentially disturbing content I wasn't allowed to see movies like Jaws or The Godfather. But of course no one ever even tried to stop me from reading the books, because reading! Did you know the Jaws novel includes a steamy explicit sexual affair between the shark expert and the police chief's wife? Did you know The Godfather novel includes a whole detailed sub-plot about how Sonny Corlenone's penis is so huge no woman can take him, until he finally meets a woman whose vajayjay is so huge no normal man can satisfy her? For some reason neither of those sub-plots made it into the respective movies. And those were nothing compared to what was in my favorite genre, SF novels. Dystopian futures where sex is forbidden, so the protagonists inevitably discover and explore sex, were all the rage in SF at the time. But surely the ones with rocket ships on the covers were safe; sexy aliens and alien forms of sex, anyone?

So who if anyone was guilty of exposing me, as a child, to sexual activities by others? There weren't any pictures so did that make it okay? My forty years of marital monogamy surely show how damaged I was by these experiences.

You are right to point out that there will always be grey areas but using that as a reason not to act right now with regard to porn is not justified.

Read the CEOP page.

 

[Poem]

Jordan Peterson's recent interview with Laila Mickelwait: One Woman's War On Pornhub.

 

[HansMustermann]

Equally we might speculate about those that speak the loudest in support of porn.

Maybe, but my point was that some people think that paying very vocal lip service against X -- whether X is porn, homosexuality, paying prostitutes, pirating games or movies, being attracted to kids, or whatever -- is somehow cleansing or counter-balancing their "sin" of doing X. Or I suppose, active countermeasure against them being suspected of it. Like, the guy most foaming at the mouth against gays, as if he got ass-raped by a gang of wild homosexuals, yeah, it quite often turns out that he paid male prostitutes. Just saying.

Meanwhile, in the case you talk about, at least there's some honesty about it. Yeah, I watch porn. So do 90% of the males. And a third of porn viewers are women (cf, for example PornHub statistics), so dividing two thirds by one third, that makes them half as many viewers as the males. But anyway, I don't make any pretenses or excuses. I don't hide it and never did. If you search way back, I said a decade ago that my favourite Czech saint was Sylvia Saint. Clue is in the name

I also pirated games waaay back in the 80's. In fact, I was one of those guys making cracks for copyright protection. And some trainers at that. I had a second Hercules graphics card and a second monitor, just so I could have the debugger (and some of my own tools) on that, while the game was running on the main card. I knew every copy-protection trick, like the 486 prefetch trick. (And then there was this game which had the debug info left in. Oooh, babyy... That got me harder than Sylvia Saint ever did)

I also drink like a Slav, fart, belch, cuss, tell inappropriate jokes, and I'm an all round ass. Err... I mean, all around.

But the point is, I'm not feeling any need to foam at the mouth against any of that to mask it. That's who I am, or respectively was.

 

[GodMark2]

Are they, though?

It's difficult to imagine a person too young to masturbate getting "hooked on" porn.

It's also difficult to imagine a person old enough to masturbate requiring porn to get "hooked on" masturbation.

Unless, perhaps, it's because they lack all imagination and any ability to visualize. I can see that being a problem, perhaps caused by over-exposure to screen images at the expense of verbal and text narrative earlier in childhood. But not caused by porn; the dependence on porn would then be a result not the cause. In that case, banning porn because too many adolescents use it would be like banning eyeglasses because too many adults use them.

Obligatory XKCD

 

[Myriad]

If we just take the example of Pornhub - warning that you must be 18 to enter the site is just about as weak as a warning can be. Sufficient would be not allowing the production of porn until we can guarantee the safety of the underage.

It's not reasonable or realistic to try to ban something you can't even define clearly. That's just an invitation for malicious prosecutions, as used to happen to e.g. parents attempting to have infant baby photos processed at film developing chains. It's especially not reasonable to propose banning the production of something there's already an ample supply of on the pretext that doing so would somehow protect anyone from exposure to said supply.

You are right to point out that there will always be grey areas but using that as a reason not to act right now with regard to porn is not justified.

Gray areas that are the entire area (which is the case here as you have not offered any definitions for "proper" or "sexual activities") is absolutely a reason not to act, when the action proposed is establishing legal penalties that cause people to have to defend their property and freedom in court based on the terms of the laws in question. I guarantee if legislation were passed as you've worded it, in short order someone somewhere would be convicted of irresponsibly allowing a child to witness a couple kissing, because in some developmental psychology textbook there's a list of "sexual activities" that includes kissing, and "that's the law." If you think that's far-fetched, look at the successful prosecutions of teens for production of child porn because they took a nude selfie of themselves, or the people with lifetime sex offender designations because they urinated "in public" in an empty alley at night. Authoritarians love vague and/or overly inclusive laws that they can selectively enforce for their own agendas.

Read the CEOP page.

Why? They don't define "sexual activities" either. They do note that consider any form of "sexual touching" as one form of "sexual activity," so apparently kissing does count. Spread the word.

 

[Myriad]

Which post?

If we google 'rape culture definition', we get:
a society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse.

Above, I quoted from CEOP - that:

All sexual contact between an adult and a child, online or in person, is sexual abuse; this includes:
not taking proper measures to prevent a child being exposed to sexual activities by others
showing a child images of sexual activity, including photographs, videos or via webcams

Clearly, your definition of rape culture is too narrow; any society that leaves porn effectively lying around for youngsters to see readily fits the definition.

By the same kind of argument, you proposed making the following illegal:

not taking proper measures to prevent a child being exposed to sexual activities by others

And here is a quote from the National Center for Youth Mental Health:

'Sexual activity' covers a lot of things, from kissing, touching, touching under clothes and touching genitals, to oral sex, sexting, sexual talk or penetration.

Clearly, you are currently advocating allowing a child to see kissing or depictions of kissing a criminal act.

 

[Lithrael]

"Well obviously I wouldn't want the law to be applied like THAT, I only want it to be applied SENSIBLY" strikes again.

 

[Poem]

Sorry, I don't have the authority to issue citations, and trivializing rape (such as you did in the post of yours I quoted previously, where you called my using an analogy to illustrate the importance of distinguishing cause and effect "the essence of rape culture") isn't a misdemeanor anyhow. But regardless, actual rape that takes place in actual cultures that actually condone said rape is the essence of rape culture. Discussing porn in an online forum is not.

Which post?

 

[Myriad]

Which post?

As I said, the one where you called my using an analogy to illustrate the importance of distinguishing cause and effect "the essence of rape culture."

 

[HansMustermann]

It's not reasonable or realistic to try to ban something you can't even define clearly. That's just an invitation for malicious prosecutions, as used to happen to e.g. parents attempting to have infant baby photos processed at film developing chains. It's especially not reasonable to propose banning the production of something there's already an ample supply of on the pretext that doing so would somehow protect anyone from exposure to said supply.

Duly noted, but laws don't work that way. There's a reason for "legalese". They go out of their way to define what applies and what doesn't. Like, at least per Texas law) if you beat up your GF, they can issue a protected citizen order for her, but if you beat up the lady next door, they can't. But if you stalk her, at least as of this year, they can. Go figure.

The same can and already DOES apply for your example of kissing vs other sexual activities. We ALREADY make that kind of distinctions. Like, you don't get prosecuted if you kiss your GF in a park, but if you flip her skirt, pull her panties to the side, and... mmm.... err... wait, what was I talking about?... oh, right... you may well end up on a list.

We already KNOW how to make legal distinctions about that, without having to google random sites.

We also never had problems with making something illegal, just because there's a supply of it. E.g. there's a massive supply of fentanyl, but it's still illegal

 

[junkshop]

On second thoughts, no.

You never saw me, right?

 

[Ziggurat]

Books aren't written in a vacuum; 50 shades is part of the sexual revolution we are undergoing and could seen as part of porn normalization.

50 Shades is porn. It's just porn for women, not porn for men.