If you’re ever worried about the United States being the only western democracy with a stick up its ass about porn, fret not, we still have our friends in The Mother Country trying to keep up with us.
The Government is to force users of pornographic sites to identify themselves, in an attempt to keep children from using them.
Companies that run the websites will have to put checks in place to ensure that only adults are viewing them, or face having their sites shut down. Those that don’t comply could have advertising banned or be forced to have their pages unavailable in the country. (source)
Why, you ask?
The Government said that the new effort was part of its plans to keep children safe online.
“Just as we do offline, we want to make sure children are prevented from accessing pornographic content online which should only be viewed by adults,” said internet safety and security minister Baroness Shields.(source)
Ah yes, to keep us safe. You know, from WEB PAGES OF DEATH!!!!
I reject any premise that considers porn to be “unsafe” – that is an idiotic presumption. What is going to happen to a child who sees porn? Do their eyes burst into flames? Do they get leukemia? Do they get hit by a bus? Do magic goblin zombies suck their brains out through their ears?
The correct response to someone who plays the “safety” card when it comes to porn is to push them into some train tracks and say “that’s unsafe, not pictures, you blithering idiot”.
That said, I am a parent, and I understand that parents don’t want their kids to watch porn. You know why I don’t want my kids to watch porn? Because I am uptight about talking to them about sex right now. It isn’t their problem, and it isn’t the porn company’s problem. It is my problem. Just because I have a stick up my ass about talking about sex with my kids doesn’t give me the right to jam that stick up the ass of my fellow citizens who might be a little better at parenting than me, does it?
The measure itself is stupid. This Baroness seems to think that by requiring a credit card to access porn sites, it will keep the precious youngsters from watching fuck films. Good luck with that.
When I was a young teenager, I wanted to look at skin mags. I couldn’t buy them because I was under 18. I still got them — quite easily. Do you think there is a 16 year old out there who doesn’t know about prepaid credit cards? Or who can’t find another way to circumvent this? At the very least, even if the UK lost its mind and completely banned porn, there is this place called “the rest of the world,” and they’ll be able to access it. Is the UK really prepared to build an unassailable firewall around its rain-soaked islands in order to ensure that no children get absorbed by the sexual gelatinous cubes of porn movies? (Is there Gelatinous Cube Porn? If it does not exist yet, fix that before we have a Rule 34 violation!)
Every time you hear someone come up with one of these measures, you need to realize that the real mission is to try and ban porn altogether. That comes either from stick-up-their-butt religious zealots or stick-up-their-butt feminists. Nobody else cares enough to try and push through laws about it.
The religious zealots should realize that they’re losing.
When I was a kid, I spanked it to porn. Then, they told me it was time for my Confirmation (I used to be Catholic). Then I thought “if I’m not old enough to legally make a decision about buying magazines with boobs in them, then maybe I’m not old enough to make a decision about my eternal soul.” So I waited until I was 18 to make that decision — figuring that the maturity to look at pictures of boobs was at least equal to the maturity required to made decisions about where my immortal hard drive would be uploaded for all eternity. By the time I was 18, I figured out they were lying about masturbation making me insane and sending me to hell. So, I started questioning everything they told me, and I figured out that their whole religion didn’t make any freakin sense.
So, I suppose, thank goodness for the laws “protecting me” from pornography at that age, because they also protected me from throwing in with a bunch of child raping charlatans. (If only Pope Francis were the Bishop of Rome at that time, I might have stuck around for the Liberation Theology).
As far as the regressive-sex-negative-feminist angle goes (as opposed to sex-positive feminists… who can very much live alongside porn), it is equally absurd and relies upon just as pernicious fiction as anything from the religious zealots. This group’s objection to porn is based in a few foolish theories. They think that if a guy looks at pictures of boobs, he’s going to think that porn is reality and/or be possessed by the testosterone demon and will go out and rape someone.
That is a gross over-simplification of the theory behind the anti-pornography “civil rights” ordinance in Indianapolis that was struck down in American Booksellers v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985). MacKinnon and Dworkin decided that their perpetual victim machine required a porn ban. But, you can’t ban porn outright with the First Amendment hanging around, so they said that porn made us have bad thoughts, thus anyone who made porn was responsible for those bad thoughts. Constitutional? Not so much.
If they paid attention to annoying sexist things like “facts,” they would realize that anyone mature enough to tell that The Terminator is not real is also mature enough to know acting when he sees it in porn. The fact is, porn-tolerance has a positive correlation to a drop in sexual violence. You know when a guy is LEAST likely to rape anyone? Five seconds after he blows a load from whacking it to teletubbies porn or whatever he’s into.
Now yes, I will agree that if you watch porn all the time as a kid, it might give you some madcap up ideas about sex. Back in my day, vaginas had this stuff on them we called “pubic hair.” I had seen girls’ vaginas my whole life, but it was usually while playing my favorite game (then and now) “show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” Having only seen the real thing on girls my age (at the time) which was pre-pubescent, I was under the impression that the vaginas I was seeing were “larval stage” vaginas, and once they went through the pupal stage, the vagina healed over and just became this flat thing. It did not occur to me that it was just public pubic hair.
So, if you imagine my poor little mind with that misunderstanding of female anatomy, you can imagine how many other confused ideas were in my head by the time I actually got into my teenage years and got to the real live thing… my head was a mental petri dish of confusion and bizarre ideas.
You know how long my messed up and confused ideas lasted?
For about 5 minutes after I actually got a test drive with a real live girl.
You see, girls will tell you “no, I don’t like that” or “yeah, that feels good.” If you pay attention, even a little bit, you get to do it again. Just like the monkey getting the grape in the cage.
Now its not all fun and games — you need some ground work to get there. So, here’s how you keep porn from being “dangerous.”
If you have a boy, you need to make sure that he gets along with and loves his mother. You know why? Because she’s a human being, just like that girl he is eventually going to be finger banging in the car. So, if he has developed any kind of healthy relationship with his mother, he will realize that when he finally gets to play with a vagina, he will understand that it is not a disembodied toy … but a rather important part of an actual human being. Thus, he will want that human being to express her preferences, and he’ll be a decent guy. If you’re a parent, and your son disrespects little girls, you straighten his ass out the first chance you get.
My son tried to kiss a little girl one time, and she didn’t want him to. He tried again and she slugged him. He started wailing. Both mothers ran over. Hers ran over to yell at her, and his ran over to comfort him. I said “stay the hell out of it, the sooner he learns this lesson, the better off he and everyone else will be.” Lesson learned. Yeah, you gotta teach your son to respect women. If he also (hopefully much later) wants to jerk off to pictures of them, so what? Build that respect in him, as part of making him a “real man,” and he can jerk off to anything and watch anything and he’s not crossing that line. Fail to teach him that, and he can read nothing but “the selected works of Gloria Steinem,” and he’ll still likely grow up to be a rapist, abuser, or something less horrifying, but still something you don’t want him to be.
There… easy. All the dangers of porn washed away in two paragraphs of instruction. Don’t screw it up, Dads.
