> Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up?
This absolutely is a real problem, especially for younger kids. Have you talked to a teacher? Think things like "a kindergartner runs around grabbing teachers' tits and saying "I want to ..." lines you'd expect from a rape work like 50 Shades of Gray. It is neither in the child's interest nor in the interest of society at large to let that happen. And for every case that's as obviously bad as that one, who knows how many come off as creeps or even manage to appear normal from the outside, while suffering the trauma internally?
Remember, the status quo on the Internet is no control at all. Real-world sex businesses aren't allowed to get away with that, why should the Internet be exempt from laws? Just because the government is slow and incompetent to get started doesn't mean we can stick with "self-regulate, aka no regulation at all".
We can argue about exactly what the law should be, and we can argue how it should be implemented, but there absolutely must be something.
What you're talking about is internalized normalization of abuse. The kid was probably molested. Very unfortunate, but these things happen without porn. I'd talk to experts about this rather than assume "porn did it". And in any case, if a kid is behaving like that, you can then educate them on how to behave properly; the same would be true if the kid was punching other kids in the face. (and by the way, the "porn make kids bad" argument was the one used against violent video games years ago; turns out kids don't mimic everything they see in a screen)
If you absolutely must have a barrier to entry, let it be a credit card or other form of payment (everyone likes free porn, but sex work is real work and deserves to be paid). It's something not a lot of kids have access to (a bank account) and you don't have to track people's identities anymore. (Kids can steal their parents' cards but that's on the parents.)
Knives are useful. What's the the benefit of porn? Before I discovered porn, I just used my imagination and got the same level of "entertainment" as you now must get from porn.
Porn does harm some people, as it's easy to get addicted to it, and there's a lot of bad things happening on the supply side of it. I'm sure porn has also changed how people behave and what people expect in relationships, but it's hard to study such things. The amount of sex we have has decreased recently. I don't know if it's due to porn, but it'd be worth studying. If sexual satisfaction is easily available, there's less reason to seek the real thing.
It's beyond parents to fix these things, at best they can delay the discovery of porn for a few years, but that doesn't fix anything.
What is a benefit of a video game? People can get addicted on gaming, let's ban it. What is a benefit a of a good steak? It is not healthy, let's ban it.
You don't like stuff other people enjoy and then you will go out of your way with ludicrous excuses to destroy it for others. Like a religious bigot.
Well sure, there's entertainment value. But there's plenty of harmful things that people enjoy that we ban because the entertainment value is not worth the downsides. I enjoy driving very fast, but I'm not allowed to do it (except in very limited areas) because the negative effects outweigh the positive ones.
Very well said, and true. However, the post the parent was replying to said, "Are there still adults stupid enough to think that watching porn will mess a kid up?", which represents an unreasonable absolute.
This absolutely is a real problem, especially for younger kids. Have you talked to a teacher? Think things like "a kindergartner runs around grabbing teachers' tits and saying "I want to ..." lines you'd expect from a rape work like 50 Shades of Gray. It is neither in the child's interest nor in the interest of society at large to let that happen. And for every case that's as obviously bad as that one, who knows how many come off as creeps or even manage to appear normal from the outside, while suffering the trauma internally?
Remember, the status quo on the Internet is no control at all. Real-world sex businesses aren't allowed to get away with that, why should the Internet be exempt from laws? Just because the government is slow and incompetent to get started doesn't mean we can stick with "self-regulate, aka no regulation at all".
We can argue about exactly what the law should be, and we can argue how it should be implemented, but there absolutely must be something.