re: the "i watch porn" post
i came across nick’s "i watch porn" post on the discovery feed last night.
i agree with the general premise, that adult content is an important bastion of privacy and censorship rights, and that we have a responsibility to cling to those rights without capitulating for the sake of some feigned attempt to keep minors safe.
at the same time, i think these conversations underemphasize the meteoric shifts of adult content in the past decade in a way that makes us even more rigid against guardrails, even when some might be appropriate. i think we do this to the detriment of ourselves, but also to, well, children.
this specifically stuck out to me:
Obviously we don’t want harm to come to any child but I don’t believe the onus should be on the rest of the world to protect and parent kids that aren’t ours.
i would argue that it should be, because kids are part of the rest of the world.
we have a collective interest in the raising and nurturing of children; today’s ten-year-olds will be your neighbors, your attorneys and plumbers, your emergency service operators in twenty years. they are the teachers of tomorrow and so on.
if we prefer interacting with competent, creative, civil humans, we must be part of the mechanism that births them, even if not literally. children who grow up feeling rejected by society will become adults who feel rejected by society.
we fundamentally rely on other people’s kids being engaged in the project of civilization because eventually you and i are going to be too old to fix the roads and make the movies and do the surgeries and paint the sunsets.
after decades we will be bored of the aged, tired ideas of our peers and we will need new, more vibrant minds for our art and politics and technology.
and i get that it’s annoying to kind of argue a hypothetical – one of those kids might cure cancer! – but it feels more grounded than trying to express that children aren’t just, like, pre-grown-ups. they are brand new people.
think about how rich and complex your own inner world is, and then consider that theirs is just beginning to take shape, growing as reality forms around them and then they, in turn, shape the fabric of reality around you.
i think we should all be invested in that.
/
meanwhile, it is even an understatement to say that porn has never been more available. anyone with a smartphone has access to infinitely-scrolling, instantly-loading adult content with zero friction. (hello.)
there is no waiting until midnight for a skinemax rerun, no anticipation as pixels coalesce into a single image, no <1g data cap on your mobile browsing.
my point isn’t that people can watch porn more easily, it’s that they never have to stop watching porn.
all of this as we inch closer to frictionless, personalized hyper-porn deepfakes that any rando can spin up after catching a stranger in the corner of their AI glasses or whatever. (this pondscum piece was what actually got me to join bearblog.)
which is to say that i think our arguments are incomplete when we don’t address that it is different now. and not in the way that porno films are different from pictures are different from written erotica – in a way that has entirely removed any meaningful obstacle for literally any person with an internet connection.
and believe me, i know the kids will find a way; i myself have killed a family computer or two in the process.
but that’s kind of my point: having to figure it out serves a purpose. it lets your access evolve as your interests and understanding do. it allows you time to process and evaluate: did you even like what you just saw?
nick makes a point that people who do and don’t watch porn are all exercising their autonomy, and while that’s true for adults, i don’t know that it’s accurate for young people who seem to have been born in front of a firehose.
/
to be clear, i’m not suggesting that the solution is censorship and anti-privacy initiatives; i will go back to zoom and slack out of spite before i upload my ID to discord. i’m not even necessarily suggesting that there’s a problem –
just that when we talk about accessing adult content, kids being exposed to adult content, and what our communal responsibilities might be about both, i think we have to keep in mind that we are still in extremely new territory.
privacy and autonomy, yes, but maybe there are different ways we can think about both.