And we all turned out fine I might add. In fact there's a lot more attention to consent and respect for women than 20 years ago.
Of course not counting the toxic masculine far right but that doesn't have anything to do with porn but everything with hate.
Absolutely not. You might personally feel like (or want to tell yourself that) porn didn't negatively affect you. I can tell you with certainty that porn negatively affected my social and sexual development. (I was literally afraid to physically open my mouth around girls when I was 10 years old because of porn.)
> Of course not counting the toxic masculine far right but that doesn't have anything to do with porn but everything with hate.
There are plenty of pipelines between porn and "toxic masculinity."
Also, access to porn isn't new with the internet. When we cleared out my grandpa's house we had to pry open a desk that was chock full of hustlers.
“Ease of access” and “easy access to the most depraved shit you can think of that’s out there” is what changed. That is what is wrong and why many people feel we need to find some way to control that access.
The Internet didn’t come along until I was well into adulthood. Think about what porn access looked like in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. As a teen we were “lucky” if by some rare miracle a friend stole their dad’s Playboy, Penthouse, or Hustler and stashed it in the woods (couldn’t risk your parents finding it under your mattress) for us dudes to learn the finer points of female anatomy. In a week it would be washed out from the elements with nary a nipple to be seen. Those magazines (even hustler) was soft compared to what a few clicks can find today. Basically you got degrees of nudity back then, but we appreciated it.
Hardcore video was very rare to see as a horny teen kid in the ‘80s. Most porn movies was still pretty well confined to theaters, but advent of VHS meant (again by sheer luck) you had to have a friend whose parents happened to be in to it, who had rented or bought a video, it was in the house and accessible, all the adults had to be gone from the house so you could hurry up and watch a few minutes on the family’s one TV with a VCR. You needed to build in viewing time along with rewind time to hide your tracks.
Now…parents just leave the room for a few minutes and a willing kid with a couple of clicks could be watching something far beyond the most hardcore thing I saw as a teen.
The fact is that as difficult as it was to get, you got a hold of it and watched it. Why would 'ease of access' make any difference if you didn't have easy access and got it anyway?
There could have been years between the opportunities we had. I don’t think you conceptualize just how infrequent the opportunity would present itself.
How would you know whether it has worked or not? Wouldn't the relevant criteria be up to parents themselves?
Sorry, but if you would actually read my post, you would notice that I am not proposing that it should merely "exist", but that it should come enabled by default on all new devices.
I do agree it could be done. I disagree with your characterization that it would be easy/easier, or that the current age verification efforts are entirely nefarious and not actually trying to work the problem.
Over 70% of teenagers <18 today have watched porn [1]. We all know (many from experience) that kids easily get around whatever restrictions adults put on their computers. We all know the memes about "click here if you're 18" being far less effective than "click here if you're not a robot."
Yes, there were other ways of trying to solve the problem. Governments could've mandated explicit websites (which includes a lot of mainstream social media these days) include the RTA rating tag instead of it being a voluntary thing, which social media companies still would've fought; and governments could've also mandated all devices come with parental control software to actually enforce that tag, which still would've been decried as overreach and possibly would've been easily circumventable for anyone who knows what they're doing (including kids).
But at the end of the day, there was a legitimate problem, and governments are trying to solve the problem, ulterior motives aside. It's not legal for people to have sex on the street in broad daylight (and even that would arguably be healthier for society than growing up on staged porn is). This argument is much more about whether it's healthy for generations to be raised on porn than many detractors want to admit.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/raising-kind-kids/20...