Were those videos? No. Did they depict sex acts? No. It's qualitatively different. I was raised in an extremely liberal household full of Playboy mags, looking at photos of naked women since I was 5 years old. The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe, and probably impossible to find outside an underground video group for sadists. I have no real problem with kids looking at nudes. That is not this. Porn has pushed itself into dementia chasing shock value. Seeing a blowjob photo was something a child could encounter in the early 90s, maybe a very sophisticated child with very early access to all the dark shit on the early internet. If you spent hours figuring out how to find one. But maybe you'd see one or two. Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem. It is a real problem, and it doesn't matter whether it's shown to a child on a website or on a home VCR, it's enormously corrupting and there absolutely is a societal harm in allowing it to happen. The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.

▲ mschuster91 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten, "consentually"? That's a new problem.

That is not that new either, BDSM has been a thing for decades. "Histoire d'O" for example came out in 1975, the literary work it's based on is even older. And the panic back then about these books is exactly the same kind of bullshit we're seeing today.

> The question is how to prevent that harm without depriving adults of their rights and liberties, not whether such a thing is harmful to a child's future ability to form healthy relationships.

Teach your kids about sexuality from early age. That also helps cutting down on cases of sexual abuse - think of all the clergy and sports trainer scandals. A lot of these failed prosecution or went on far too long because the kids lacked the vocabulary to describe what happened to them, or didn't recognize that what they went through was wrong.

The problem is, anything veering into this direction is immediately attacked by Conservatives, religious extremists and the likes.

	▲	lupusreal 7 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You've strayed considerably from your initial argument of contraband playboys being prevalent before the internet. Playboys were prevalent, yes, but not magazines with graphic depictions of violent fetishes. That such magazines existed at all isn't disputed.
	▲	druskacik 7 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> BDSM has been a thing for decades But decades ago it was not possible to reach content like that in a few seconds, using magical device we carry 24/7.
	▲	noduerme 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I was taught about sexuality from a very early age, by very liberal and loving parents, which was extremely unusual even in one of the most liberal places on earth. And that involved seeing sex scenes and nude images and completely open conversations about sex acts, anything I wanted to ask. Above all, they stressed respect, consent and health. Parents now would probably be arrested and their kids end up in foster care for giving their children a similar education. What did not exist in that that time was the avalanche of extreme content that has become mainstream and accessible to the point that it would even overwhelm my own parents' teaching methods, let alone those of most parents who were much less open or equipped to have such conversations. I encountered BDSM porn around the time I was 12, and was groomed over IRC by an adult posing as a minor who wanted to have sex (this was 1992). That person sent me VHS tapes in brown boxes through the mail. I can't stress how extreme and unusual this was at that time, and I'm lucky I had the parents I had. My rationale for thinking that this is a problem is that (1) most parents do not prepare their kids for this, and (2) such a thing becoming commonplace is a massive societal burden that will result in psychological damage not just to individual kids, but to their own offspring and to society as a whole. Letting children see nude pix in Playboy and explaining to them how sex works has been considered taboo and borderline abuse since I was a kid in the 80s, but my parents did it anyway. I agree with you that educating your kids is the best way to protect them from real abuse. But in this context, the outside world has to be considered all groomers and abusers. The world is full of pedophiles and people who want to take advantage of others. Porn sites and the infiltration of extreme BDSM into the mainstream are examples of this. I stress that it's fine for adults and no adult should have their private lives pried into by any government. I'm just saying that there is a real problem, societally, with allowing kids to be exposed to the lusts of random people on the internet, and that problem will compound over time until you have a society like Russia or Appalachia where everyone is raped at 12 and rapes children when they're adults. In other words, a death spiral.

▲ throwaway2037 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

    > The violence of what is today mainstram porn would have been extremely fringe

I want to push back against some of this comment. I would argue that for non-boomers, today's mainstream porn is most likely OnlyFans, where women have greater control than ever over adult content being created.

    > Seeing a woman being gang raped, choked and beaten

This is a tiny, tiny fraction of adult content. The rest of your comment reads like "clutching your pearls" to me.