| Assuming you are really asking, the two largest objections: - 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. |
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| ▲ | failbuffer 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I would add: - 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). | |
| ▲ | throwinthisaway 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Frankly I believe the whole “warps the mind of men to abuse women” is total nonsense. 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. | | |
| ▲ | BobaFloutist 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you change the argument to "can warp the mind of some men", it becomes much harder to falsify. | | |
| ▲ | margalabargala 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Right, but only because it becomes vacuously meaningless. For example, your comment can warp the minds of men. As can mine here. As can a blade of grass waving in the wind. |
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| ▲ | lokar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I can see the argument for a “correlation vs causation “ argument, but I’m not a social scientist. | |
| ▲ | schrodinger 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Agreed. It’s like the argument that video games cause shooters. 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. |
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| ▲ | UltraSane 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The "porn harms women" argument really seems to infantilize women and assumes that women can never want or enjoy sex for the sake of sex. | | |
| ▲ | jonahx an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | This is not the claim. The claim is that, empirically, many (or enough) of the women who end up in porn are underage, trafficked, or psychologically coerced (due to poverty, drug addiction, abuse, etc) such that the choice is not really the free choice of willing participant. 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. | | |
| ▲ | serf 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | but you can apply this argument to almost any product or good on the market and get a similar ratio of 'willing participant' and 'pseudo-slavery' involvement. Across the board. 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 ) . | |
| ▲ | lokar an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’ve seen two arguments: 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 | |
| ▲ | reilly3000 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Admittedly hot take, but I think the existence of ubiquitous porn on-demand does take away power from people who would withhold sex as part of a negotiation in a relationship. | |
| ▲ | UltraSane an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The claim is that, empirically, many (or enough) of the women who end up in porn are underage, trafficked, or psychologically coerced (due to poverty, drug addiction, abuse, etc) such that the choice is not really the free choice of willing participant. 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. |
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| ▲ | lokar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Some argue it harms all women who participate in, but others argue it harms some women who participate, which seems undeniable. | | |
| ▲ | fwip an hour ago | parent [-] | | True, and this is probably true of all work. Retail work has probably harmed many more women than sex work (by virtue of being much more common). |
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