• @jballs@sh.itjust.works
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    401 month ago

    I was an active user of pornhub when I was 14 years old

    I was a teenager before the modern internet, so at 14 I got my porn from BBSes and friends sharing floppy disks. There was plenty of awful/illegal shit on BBSes. But they weren’t regulated, so no one did anything about it.

    You cannot ban teenagers from accessing porn. Full stop.

    You can ban teenagers from using safe sites that follow the rules. That will force teenagers off responsible sites like PornHub and move them to shady sites that don’t follow rules and have shit like child pornography.

    • Jay
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      101 month ago

      I grew up in the 1970’s and 80’s. Even then porn wasn’t hard to find.

      • @jballs@sh.itjust.works
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        91 month ago

        Exactly. There’s a reason prostitution is called “the world’s oldest profession”. People have biological needs. Banning kids from using legitimate porn sites isn’t going to undo millions of years of evolution.

        • troglodyte_mignon
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          1 month ago

          There’s a reason prostitution is called “the world’s oldest profession”.

          Yes, it’s because it’s a lazy, overused sentence that people like to quote without thinking. There’s no solid ground to claim that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession.

          People have biological needs.

          Those “biological needs” aren’t porn. You can masturbate without porn. You can fantasize without porn. You can have sex without porn. And so on.

          I’m not saying that this is a good measure, but “teenagers are interested in sex” ⇒ “we shouldn’t restrict what sexual media teenagers have access to” isn’t a very sound argument.

          legitimate porn sites

          “Legitimate” porn sites are all full of things I really wish I hadn’t seen as a middle schooler who was barely starting to get curious about sex. Or even as a high schooler who was decidedly interested in sex, actually.

    • @ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      31 month ago

      That will force teenagers off responsible sites like PornHub and move them to shady sites that don’t follow rules and have shit like child pornography.

      Or to places like 4chan and Xitter, sites that host actual nazi shit in addition to porn. I was ideologically groomed by the far-right, and nazi propaganda is worse than porn IMHO to developing minds. I barely managed to escape.