- religious/cultural. My beliefs forbid this, it makes people bad/worse in some hard-to-define way, so no one should be allowed to do it. Sometimes with an emphasis that the sellers are luring good people into sin/ruin.
- it harms women. Many of the participants are trafficked or coerced in some way (and further abused). The profits from the industry encourage more of this. It “warps” the mind of men who use it, leading them to mistreat and abuse women.
I see elements of truth in all these, but IMO they are ultimately not compelling, prohibition is unworkable and unduly infringes on willing participants and consumers.
- natalism. Some people worry about inverted demographic pyramids. They want to see more births, so they need more horny guys trying to form relationships instead of being content single. Sometimes there is a racist angle.
- industry. Anything that's "too fun" for young people disincentives education or working.
- addiction. (But people get addicted to shopping or eating dirt too.)
Some arguments against outlawing it include:
- free speech.
- a sizeable fraction of the population wants it to exist.
- better option for economically impoverished women than prostitution.
- societies that suppress it don't really seem better for women, or anyone.
- prohibition of a widely demanded product creates crime (and nothing is easier to smuggle than pure information).
I’ve watched plenty of porn in my life, probably a bit more than average. I’ve never done anything out of the norm or unwanted to woman, let alone abuse one.
I think shitty people will be shitty people and it’s just a really easy thing to point at instead of taking responsibility for it. It’s also a convenient plausible sounding correlation for people who already want to ban porn to use.
Yeah the Dworkin contention that porn turns men into rapists has basically been disproven.
But there’s no reason to say “warps the minds of men” has to lean in that direction. Reading forums of young men who have porn addictions and grew up with HD hardcore porn it seems more like the opposite happened, they become more withdrawn, less likely to engage with women enough to develop social skills, less able to perform sexually irl and subject to porn-induced erectile dysfunction. When it was just magazines and socially stigmatized VHS rentals it was unheard of for college aged men to take viagra, now it’s widespread. Arguably warped minds led to this.
In the days of VHS, Viagra wasn’t a thing.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/article/43/2/204/122225?logi...
Umm, I played plenty of GTA growing up and I’ve never stolen a car. People are actually very good at separating fantasy from reality, believe it or not.
I am all for individual freedoms, but I've read enough about this issue, and seen enough documentaries, that I think the claim is very well-founded. Of course, some porn stars are just willing adults doing something they want to do, but there are many who are not.
People who believe that are not aware how the industry has changed and the standards attached to that.
Additionally, that wasn't the draw of the industry. Using the "porn/stripping" preys on the poor is a far over simplification and a weasly thing to say.
in other words I wouldn't ban oranges because some of the farmers have been found to have been enslaved; instead i'd investigate and penalize the enslavement and crimes taking place.
Similarly : I wouldn't ban pornography on some false pretense that it's to save someone, because quite honestly if I began that boulder rolling it shouldn't stop , every industry victimizes someone; it's a question of stopping and penalizing abuses and preventing victimization, not about regulating broad industries ( a move that worsens human rights violations by moving them into a highly lucrative black market, into the shadows ) .
That said, no, it's not like other industries. The amount of well-documented abuse is much higher. Degree matters.
It's still sold on the high street and advertised everywhere.
The main point of contention becomes what "enough" constitutes. Almost no women in commercial porn is underage as all countries that legally allow its production also require strict proof of age for the people actually having sex.
Women who do not provide fully informed and voluntarily consent are harmed
Porn makes some (or many, or all) men who consume it treat some (or many, or all) women badly
That's one reason why traditionists in power usually crack down on any sort of pornography or alternate sexuality. Sex is a huge driver for human behavior. And established power structures would prefer that the only way for anyone to get sex is via compliance with the existing power structures. It's not something where the establishment is ever going to be able to perfectly control things, but if they can make it more difficult to get any sort of sexual gratification that doesn't align with their preferred social structure that gives the establishment an advantage in holding on to power.