Some Brazilian tribes had fertility festivals with dances meant to arouse the males, because simple nudity wasn't enough to get them interested in sex.
So maybe making nudity less common or accessible only makes it more valuable as a sexual thing.
There's a strong correlation between "women force to cover themselves" and "women's bodies being an object of obsessive desire".
Countries where women MUST cover their bodies as much as possible have more of an incell culture. In countries where it's normal for women sunbathe topless, breasts aren't as sexualised of fetishised.
It's a much bigger question why, such a completely natural and normal thing, like nudity, in the supposed to be educated - at least in basic biology - 2025, be made and exclusive thing.
The intro of the 1986 Once upon a time... Life animation series, that's the best human biology educational program that exists to this very day, starts with scenes many would classify as nudity - but it's also essential to the topic and the education it displays.
Well, many things are natural. Still we have many rules for it.
I.e. naturally stronger animals kill weaker ones. Yet we don't want this happen in the human community.
This is off-topic, but I like pointing out that natural does not mean good, especially to hippies at the supermarket who want to pay more for "organic" foods that "aren't full of chemicals". I sympathise with them, but also wish they'd use more appropriate words, and understand the cost of their luxury beliefs.
Tsunamis, earthquakes, flash floods, tornadoes, locust swarms, plagues are "natural". Amanita muscaria, Dendrobatidae and Boa constrictors are "natural" and will fucking kill you.
I think the better distinction is found in Leviathan, contrasting human society (and its set of social contracts) with the "state of nature" - what human life was like before we formed societies:
> In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
>It's a much bigger question why, such a completely natural and normal thing, like nudity, [...] be made and exclusive thing.
As Nietzsche said, the time has come when we have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years. That's the simple answer, nudity and sexuality (also entirely natural and normal), have been deemed sinful, you're supposed to avert your eyes from it, and so on. It's so deeply ingrained in Western culture even secularized people still haven't shaken it.
It varies though, being German with half of my family having lived in the GDR, it is funny to see in particular Americans when you talk about nude beaches or mixed saunas and the general Freikörperkultur (lit: free body culture) that was so common and still has carried over.
> it is funny to see in particular Americans when you talk about nude beaches or mixed saunas and the general Freikörperkultur (lit: free body culture) that was so common and still has carried over
How is general nudity of adult men considered by those participants? I always assumed that my nakedness would be perceived as a display of mateability, and I am concerned that my penis size relative to other men would reduce my attractiveness to women.
Note: I am not sure how I compare to others in the general population, as I live the typical American lifestyle. Also, I think Germans are statistically one of the greater endowed populations, so maybe this isn't as much an issue for them.
Lots of women understand grower vs shower. So you need to get to grown stage to make that determination. Over the course of a day or two of observation, it will show.
Only if it leads you to sin, right? According to the original, if you can look at a naked body without immediately humping it, you're free to keep looking.
It is even more amazing when you consider that in the USA, it was normal (for boys) to bath in the nude, indoor but sometimes with spectators, and even to have to show their genitals to the teacher or pool attendant.
This has been completely memory-holed despite the fact many people alive today should remember it.
Every civilized culture on earth has norms against public nudity. Objectively there appears to be something more biologically successful about cultures where nudity is reserved for private spaces than those who treat it otherwise
> Every civilized culture on earth has norms against public nudity
Well, not every "civilized culture" has a blanket ban on public nudity, but more of a "there is a time and place you know", like doing sauna naked and swimming naked in rivers/lakes (common in the Nordics at least) or being semi-nude (topless) at public beaches in Spain. Breastfeeding without having to shamefully cover up also seems to be more and more accepted, at least in the countries I frequent (mostly around Europe).
I'm sure there are more examples of "civilized cultures" where it's accepted sometimes to be nude or semi-nude.
A norm is a norm, the normal, the usual. Not the “always”. Every culture has times where nudity is acceptable or encouraged (it’d be ab-norm-al for you to shower or use the bathroom without exposing your genitals).
>Every civilized culture on earth has norms against public nudity
Every civilized society has norms for everything, that's the tautological definition of what being civilized means. It's how civilized people define success. But this is not culture (as per Nietzsche) but just the opposite of it. To think the two are synonymous is exactly what he attributes to Christianity.
The Danish mixed nude beach goer is indeed technically less civilized but no less cultured, free, vital or unburdened by social anxieties about her body or conduct, she's strong-willed exactly to the extent that she's uncivilized.
>It's a much bigger question why, such a completely natural and normal thing, like nudity, in the supposed to be educated - at least in basic biology - 2025, be made and exclusive thing.
Western culture and its morals around sex, gender and nudity are founded on the patriarchal taboos of the Abrahamic religions, whereby human nudity in general, and female nudity in particular (because women are the source of original sin,) is to be considered shameful.
That and we're currently in the midst of a right-wing political reactionary shift against the progressive norms of prior generations (and a moral panic about "groomers" and "pedophiles") which makes censorship of this type far easier.
So China and Japan are abrahamic? India is abrahamic? Every civilization on earth has norms against public nudity. Seems to be something more fundamental than blaming abrahamic religions
The USA has people taking part in the World Naked Bike Rides and the Folsom Street Fair, but the USA has "norms against public nudity". The millions of people going outside each day are not naked or expecting to see others naked. That's a "norm" and it applies to Japan as well; clothed is normal, the exceptions are few and constrained to a few places/situations/events.
A photo of a Japanese public space, would you expect to see a) everyone clothed, b) everyone naked, c) roughly 50:50 as people choose for themselves and going naked is a perfectly acceptable thing to do which nobody thinks is weird ? (a), obviously.
The context of this thread and the linked article implies that we aren't discussing every civilization on Earth. I apologize for not explicitly having stated that, sometimes I forget that this is HN, where nuance and context go to die.
Norms against nudity within Western societies - excluding non-Western societies such as in China, Japan and India - are based on Abrahamic religions.
It is true that other non-Western societies also have norms regarding nudity, but those norms are not the same as in the West, and even within the West and other Christianized nations such norms tend to be more permissive than in the US. To give an example, in the US breastfeeding is considered implicitly sexual and thus allowing it in public spaces is controversial, whereas this is not the case in cultures where any display of the female breast is considered to be pornographic. You can even find cultures where public nudity has little if any taboo at all.
So no, other than the strictly physiological need for humans to provide a layer of physical protection around their bodies by means of garments, there is nothing more fundamental going on here. Norms around nudity are entirely cultural.
Norms against nudity being based on abrahamic religions is still wrong.
It’s like saying norms against murder are based on abrahamic religions because the 10 commandments say so.
Cultures the world over have general norms against nudity in nearly all contexts, and also have norms against murder in nearly all contexts. Clearly the driving force that makes humans have norms against nudity or murder is more fundamental than religion.
Abrahamic religions may add a particular flavor to it, but it’s icing on a big cake
Anthropologically, given that every mass civilization that’s ever existed regulated nudity in public settings, there’s likely some sociological advantage to it that enables communities of people to reach scale and endure.
Do you have a single counter example of a large scale human community (10,000+ people) where public nudity was normal?
Note that I said it's controversial because it's considered implicitly sexual, not that it's illegal. The article you posted literally mentions the social stigma I'm referring to.
> shift against the progressive norms of prior generations (and a moral panic about "groomers" and "pedophiles")
Not altogether an unreasonable concern, considering that the International Lesbian and Gay Association at the United Nations was literally allied to NAMBLA and other pro-pedophilia groups, for 15 years [0].
It's only when the Americans threatened to take away the money that something was done about it.
Why is this discussion always about nudity and sexuality? Would it not be much better if children see people having fun fucking each other than seeing people murder each other in countless ways? Why is it more acceptable to show Wile E. Coyote trying to murder Road Runner by dropping anvils onto him than showing Bugs Bunny and Lola Bunny fuck each other? Ignoring for the moment that children probably find the former much more funny than the later.
Graphic violence generally is considered adult content. Let’s not pretend slapstick comedy is the same as graphic violence. Furthermore, you/kids definitely see cartoons where one character is enamored with another (heart eyes jumping out of sockets) and pursues that character for the entirety of the episode.
Let's take Star Wars. Not "graphic," but a lot of killing going on. Some would argue that making the killing less "graphic" actually desensitizes children to the violence.
Violence is normalised due to gun culture in America. Hollywood plays a part in this too. School shootings which is basically a daily event and a unique bug/feature of American life is a symptom of this.
Sex and procreation which is arguably the complete opposite to murder is ostrasized because of it.
"Graphic violence" meant "violence in images" in my lifetime.
Because so many people "learn" words by guessing their meaning from context, it now means what Anthony Burgess called "ultraviolence" in A Clockwork Orange.
Cartoons have already had several re-thinking of what's appropriate as norms have changed.
I’m sure you’ve seen sexual content you wouldn’t want your children to see. A lot of pornography is also for lonely horny men and gives children false and even unhealthy impressions of human sexual experience.
There is of course sexual content that is inappropriate for children but I did not advocate for letting children see any sexual content out there instead of an anvil onto the head of a cartoon character. But I think it would be better if the husband comes home and has sex with his wife instead of shooting her in the back.
There’s violence I don’t want my kids to see either, a “gotcha” involving cartoon violence isn’t approaching the topic in good faith imo. Not really worth discussing further.
It’s more nuanced than sex = good, violence = bad.
I believe if we took that path (children see people having fun fucking each other), we will see more 9yo pregnant girls going to school. Are you ready as a parent?
Pornography has never been easier to access and teen birth rates have been falling for decades.
Once puberty hormones kick in, teenagers are going to start figuring out that there’s something going on. We’re far better off educating them about the risks involved rather than letting them blindly experiment.
Pornography is probably the worst way to accomplish this goal, of course. Comprehensive sexual health education is vastly preferred. But pretending sex doesn’t exist is how you end up with pregnant kids.
Is there any evidence for that? Why would it not be the opposite, why would a less tabooed treatment of sexuality not lead to better informed children with a lower risk of accidentally getting pregnant?
Why would this be the case? I understand that intuitively it makes sense, but does it actually? What evidence do we have that girls are just like... predisposed to be "sluts"?
In cultures where sex is more taboo, they have bigger problems with teen pregnancy and early marriage. In the US, as access to porn has increased teen pregnancy has plummeted.
Making sex shameful doesn't just magically make people not do it. Tell kids "be abstinent, mmkay" doesnt lower teen pregnancy - it increases it.
That’s the whole point of digital id. You won’t be sending a passport scan you’ll be sending a verifiable blob of data that says you’re over 18. Is it incompetent to ask for ID to purchase alcohol? Because that’s all this is, but more privacy respecting…
As far as I know, there isn't a serious implementation of this that is ready for production and that has enough adoption in the affected regions (e.g. UK).
Chrome and Safari are working on browser APIs that seem reasonable, but will only be available around the end of this year. The various region specific identity providers (like GOV.UK One Login) will also need to integrate with those (possibly through Google/Apple Wallet or their own app).
That means one has to use shady 3p age verification services (like Persona) which do who-knows-what with customer data and cost on the order of $1 per verification.
Yes. That “send your passport in” type of id verification is complete BS and everyone knows that. That’s why there is so much work going into modern cryptographic digital identity standards. You should be able to say “I have it on good authority that I’m over 18” and the other party simply computes the hash of that statement and checks that it matches one of the hashed claims in your digital credential.
No I get that people are working on it, I mean does the UK have an implementation of it for the online safety act that just went into effect?
The only things I've seen are friends having to submit a photo of their ID to discord to keep using it, etc. The GP was talking about the British version of this specifically right
The NIST link talks about the EU version of this. IDK specifically if the British govt has their head up their ass or not and I’m sorry if they do. The EU and industry standards all support selective disclosure today (there are at least mature standards drafts) and people are working on incorporating ZPKs. The thing Discord does is how you have to solve this problem if you don’t have digital ID. And unfortunately it will exist for quite a time to fill the gaps until digital ID fully proliferates.
simple answer no.
OFCOM the regulator responsible for ensuring compliance has a nice guide on how you can prove you should be allow to see such filth:
"""
And how will I prove my age?
There’s a number of methods a site or app might use to ask you to confirm your age. They might do this check themselves or use another company to do the check. These methods include:
- Facial age estimation – you show your face via photo or video, and technology analyses it to estimate your age.
- Open banking – you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the site or app.
- Digital identity services – these include digital identity wallets, which can securely store and share information which proves your age in a digital format.
- Credit card age checks – you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card this shows you are over 18.
- Email-based age estimation – you provide your email address, and technology analyses other online services where it has been used – such as banking or utility providers - to estimate your age.
- Mobile network operator age checks – you give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18.
- Photo-ID matching – this is similar to a check when you show a document. For example, you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time – these are compared to confirm if the document is yours.
"""
I think that is the point... Like most things UK government related, this is about what is best for us, and what is best for us, is no porn, and no privacy.
Handing over details to sleazy websites is never going to happen. Everyone is going to use a VPN. That's the point.
Next year, maybe the year after the government will concede that age verification didn't work and more needs to be done. Then they come for your VPN.
The BBC, always the mouthpiece of the UK government is already laying the groundwork [0].
I know how tinfoil hat this sounds, but at this point, its not a conspiracy, its just how the government that created and sold nudge units [1] operates. It's decades of thinking "they won't do that" then watching them do it.
I am planning a blog post soon on this topic and all the ways a "VPN Block" can be bypassed and how even trying could cause internet bills to skyrocket.
Adult content is whatever is deemed to be objectionable and abhorrent to the dominant social group within a culture and that which needs to be censored and hidden from public view. Beyond a desire to "protect the children" from sex, violence, and drugs. It is a desire to hide and suppress dissent around major social issues. It is a desire to label representation of trans liberation and queer lives as adult, obscene. And it is a desire to label realistic representations of history such as Maus and others as unsuitable for children.
This effort is because once labeled adult it is broadly socially acceptable to do anything and everything necessary to hide a concept from public life.
A specific recent example is Itch.io's recent removal of all content labeled adult, stemming from coordinated pressure by Collective Shout. The block has led to the hiding of some content labeled as lgbt, despite not containing adult content or being labeled that way.
Ahhhh. A Graphical Night (Elie Weisel) then. That's considered obscene? It was required reading for me growing up. Understanding the plumbable depths of human cruelty was considered a worthy expenditure of the education system's time... Might be different now though.
Maus was subject to one of the many ongoing book bannings in the United States and was removed from multiple libraries due to containing "adult content."
It's got some depictions of violence that I think parent groups object to, so that kind of obscenity. There's technically nudity in some of the dead bodies I guess?
Puritans chiseled the penises off Greek statues, indeed the lead image of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship is a fig leaf over the penis of Michelangelo's David.
It wouldn't be appropriate to use a form of nudity we now find "acceptable" (statues and paintings), when those media were attacked in their time by the same type of prudes who attack modern media (JPEGs of nude women on websites)
Hard question, and Instagram is getting abused by this. They allowed breastfeeding as a non-porn category, now you have hundreds of OnlyFans account faking breastfeeding. Effectively ruining the progress for everybody.
I'm a new parent who recently stumbled into the world of Instagram breastfeeding pornography. I just wanted to say that the content I saw seemed to be almost universally published by men rather than women pushing their own OnlyFans content.
I know you probably didn't intend it that way but I often see criticism of OnlyFans specifically made when I wouldn't have seen it around traditionally male operated pornography publishing, and sometimes there's a feeling of subtle misogyny creeping in.
There's more than a subtle misogyny to the anti-OF messaging people throw around, not to label the grandparent comment as falling into this issue.
I have seen comments along the lines of "Onlyfans spotted, opinion dismissed," numerous times online under posts/videos completely unrelated to a content creators OF business. The idea that a person is a sex worker and therefore a slut (in a derogatory rather than reclaimed sense) and therefore they and their opinions are worthless, is the unstated logic of this sentence.
The misogyny drips off of the concept of an Onlyfans lessening someone.
Really? I always saw that as a similar reaction to what you may see here on HN when people dismiss an article because it's written by a party trying to (subtly) push their (possibly semi-related) product. In other words, it's a defense (perhaps unjustified in many cases) against being manipulated by the poster.
The thing is that they singled out the platform known for putting the control in the hands of women rather than making the broader point about guerrilla marketing.
Would you celebrate the choice of entering sex work like, say, that of someone entering medicine or law?
“You’d make such a good porn star!”, we could say encouragingly to a new grad considering between OF and Stanford.
No, we wouldn’t, because despite a weird and deliberate normalizing effort in some corners of the Internet, it’s an intrinsically degrading field run by pimps physical or digital now, and an existential history of abuse and degradation.
Would you celebrate the choice of someone entering the garbage disposal field? Sex work seems to be singled out in these arguments somehow. I would again tie that back to misogyny, in the sense that a man working a demeaning job is seen to only demean himself, but a woman is seen to demean her father and family, let down all of society, and raises these questions of "how would you feel if it was your daughter?"
But that's not actually what I was arguing. My point was that women who produce their own content to sell on OnlyFans are generally treated with a contempt that isn't applied to men who hire women to produce the same content for them.
You experimented with your reduction in language such that it’s a banality now.
However, submitting to pimps is degrading, submitting to the violence and extreme sexual behavior of sex clients is degrading, and at least in most societies, losing one’s social place to perform sex work is also degrading.
Not all sw’ers, sure, some sw’ers are wealthy, sure a few are.
It’s just extreme arguments of the extremely online. Zero parents in this thread are encouraging their daughters to participate in such an industry.
None of the things you're critiquing are intrinsic to sex work and your argument is that it is intrinsically degrading. You made the point that work isn't intrinsically degrading, since you don't consider working in prestigious fields like medicine or law to be, nor do you consider working in physically demanding and less traditionally prestigious fields like garbage collection. I pointed out that sex isn't degrading either, since it isn't, sex is just something people do with each other.
So, since the only things intrinsic to sex work are that you're performing sex as a form of labour it raises the question; Where does the intrinsic degradation lie? In the labour or the sex?
Not every job is glamorous. Would you be proud of your child for becoming a garbage man? "You'd make such a good garbage man!", we could say encouragingly to a new grad considering between sanitization engineering and Stanford.
Probably not, yet society depends on garbagemen to function smoothly. And we should be happy that in the modern era people can pursue unglamorous careers, and be accepted by society, and not suffer from the abuse and degredation of times past. Society is improving. It's only a dwindling number of bigots who look down on people because of their career choices.
Garbage collection is similar to other male trades - they tend to be stable, respectable (although not the level of law/med to be sure but certainly among blue collar work), often well paid for the entry reqs.
Did humans stop abusing one another and I missed it, and all the harms of being used sexually by the world are gone now?
>It's only a dwindling number of bigots who look down on people because of their career choices.
Women have some of the strongest opinions against sw, so you have the floor if you want to attack that half.
Garbage collectors sell their body to a much greater degree than many sex workers. Male-centered fields that sell their body are celebrated, but female-centered ones are degraded. It is, indeed, misogyny.
I would be much safer making porn than being in the army, or even working in a warehouse. It would be less taxing on my body.
I just want less porn and violence exposure on the Internet. I dunno why this turns into a mouth frothing event. That's a pretty reasonable ask in any other context other than the Internet.
I’m sorry… all these comments about societies banning nudity and graphic violence are really skirting the point. In the context of modern age regulation, at a social level, nobody is arguing people at large should not have access to violent and sexual content. This isn’t about religion oppressing women’s sexual freedom. The argument is that children should not have unguided access to adult content. On top of that most parents I know allow children to experience violent and sexual content with supervision. The goal is not to censor society, it’s to draw some reasonable and realistic lines in the sand so parents can introduce sensitive content to children in a way that is empathetic with their child’s context and maturity level.
Now I’m sure even that is arguable, but the conversation should be around that and not superficially related tangents.
The recent payment processor stuff is more "no one should be able to have this at all" than age gating, so I don't think there's a lot of faith this week that people still stick to only hiding it from children.
> Just five pages into the foreword by the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank, the proposal stakes out an uncompromising position that porn should be banned, porn producers and distributors should be sent to prison, and tech companies that circulate it should be shut down.
We shouldn't erase things from the world just because some people have obscure fetishes. I'll keep having balloons at my kid's birthday parties, despite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_fetish
I think you are being voted down but I disagree. I opened the article before the tag was added and although I very much appreciate the author's point, I think the added tag is necessary. Would be hard to argue any form of nudity appearing on my computer screen even it were an artwork I feel. The tag has been added. Society is tricky, nudity on the internet more so.
For those who are now fearful to click the link, its an opinion piece about the given topic, and it's illustrated with a stock photo of a nude pregnant woman. The author's point is that this nudity is not pornography.
So it's not "adult content", but probably "NSFW" unless you work in a maternity hospital.
Just as a comparator, the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy leads with a clothed pregnant woman (unlike the pages on e.g. labia, penis, anus, breast, which lead with a direct shot of the body part), and overall that page has photos or illustrations of 4 clothed and 3 nude women (and a CT scan volume render, does that count as nude or not?)
As an European with non-censored History books in my teenage years, that nudity was... boring. Women just lying in a bench with... dull, bland, faded out colours. I would need far more to get laid.
1) Get any porn site that is going to obey this to instead list themselves in some open way (TXT record in DNS, blockchain, some other form of list)
2) Get any provider in the UK to block access to those lists if the account owner wants it. That's ISPs and phone providers. I'd say it should be opt in, but opt out would be a reasonable compromise.
That way I can be happy that my 12 year old won't accidentality end up on some really shady porn site following a link from a classmate's whatsapp if they aren't at home.
Of course classmates can still share the content on whatsapp, and this isn't going to stop that.
If you want to really tackle the problem - and this would be really controversial -- have lists of "healthy porn", which people could opt in via their ISP to allow, or perhaps allow for a set period. I have no problem with a teenager looking at boobs, there's a big difference between the modern equivalent of FHM or playboy and many kinds of aggressive porn that's just as accessible.
> I'd say it should be opt in, but opt out would be a reasonable compromise.
Currently, it's already opt-out on major UK ISPs. Anyone with the brains to download a free VPN app (which includes kids) can bypass those blocks, though. That's probably why the government moved from putting the blame on ISPs to putting the blame on web hosts.
I think an effective age block is only going to make things worse for teenagers. If all of the responsible, normal porn sites follow the rules and enforce an age gate, the niche/shady websites will be all vulnerable teenagers can access.
I'd rather see a distinction between "normal porn" and "extreme porn" when it comes to content filters, but the UK also tried that when regulating UK porn productions. The list of banned acts included "caning, aggressive whipping, and humilation" (which makes sense to be labeled extreme, IMO), but also "facesitting, female ejaculation and urolagnia", which I feel are more like someone writing laws revealing their personal icks in legal texts.
> Anyone with the brains to download a free VPN app (which includes kids) can bypass those blocks, though.
Well parental controls exist to prevent that from being added. But once you have vpns, you simply connect to another country's end point to bypass this anyway.
> If all of the responsible, normal porn sites follow the rules and enforce an age gate, the niche/shady websites will be all vulnerable teenagers can access.
That's my main worry.
Far better regulation of the generation of porn, which can ensure that the actors are doing it for their own free will, not harmed (any more than many other jobs), etc, would be a far better approach. This of course is easier said than done.
> but also "facesitting, female ejaculation and urolagnia"
It's very hard. Teenagers will teach each other to circumvent any of this within seconds. It's as old as the internet.
But maybe it would be healthier if you discuss this topic with your 12-year-old. The reality is that they'll be able to find any kind of pr0n within seconds when they has access to an unfiltered computer or phone.
At age 12 it's also expected that you start the transition from a child to an adult, so trying to block the outside world isn't preparing them for the freedom they'll encounter at 18-21.
The idea that there is even a definition of 'healthy' porn seems ludicrous to me. That's not 'really' tackling the problem. That's not understanding the problem in the first place.
Speaking of which: there isn't a problem in the first place.
They're really not interested yet now and get annoyed when other kids in the class post it
It's about being able to control and monitoring in the real world, where unlike the 90s the "family computer" isn't the thing in the corner of the living room.
There's 6 more years before they're an adult, 4 more years before they can legally have sex, and typically at least 4 years before they start heavy petting, plenty of time to transition.
Someone on their first driving lesson isn't dropped in the middle of the arc de triumph and told to drive to Rome, it takes a lot of lessons to get that far.
You might want to rethink your perceived timeline for how sexuality works in practice for teenagers if you’re waiting to talk to them on schedule. Source: was a teenager.
[Edit: I've been chronically online for a long time and seen this argument hashed out many times, and this blog post is one of the shallowest considerations of it. For context, the UK's online safety act has just gone into force and Reddit has switched all NSFW-tagged subreddits to require proof of ID for UK visitors. There's a lot of interesting argument to be had about government overreach, subs which are non-pornographic being included, the loss of pseudonymity when tying an account to a real world ID, the people who are "proving" their age with AI generated images, the mass sending of UK PassPort data to 3rd party American companies (not even to Reddit); "but who can say what is or isn't rude? Hah!" is ... basic. Anyone can say. Most people can easily say and be right often enough to be useful. Observing that people disagree on some edge cases is not an argument.].
> "It’s simply too subjective (teenagers will find almost any nudity sexual, no matter its context). How does anyone decide if any nudity is age-appropriate? Especially at scale."
OK (blog author) has made the case that one cannot decide, the government has gone with "ban by default". If you (blog author) object to that, can you make a case why that's bad? You wrote "apart from 'think of the children' being a classic call to censorship" so you've closed off that route for your objection which may have been a strong one.
If you work then you have given your employer proof of ID for things like showing your right to work in the UK, getting a paycheck, or a criminal record check; so the principle of an employee proving their age seems out of scope for you to object to - at least you haven't made a case that people need to be able to work anonymously. [Although the method of proving one's age is up for argument, it's not this argument].
It boils down to: if you can't decide, do you allow by default or block by default? Government has gone for default-block, blog author seems to be taking the position that default-allow is better but has not made a case why.
By comparison we tried that with digital security - for years computer systems were default-allow and it caused a lot of problems and we've had to reengineer them to have firewalls, ports closed, seperated user accounts, minimal user account permissions, minimal data-execute permissions, minimal employee access to company systems, minimal access from one app into another's data, then in each case grant-as-necessary with proof of identity and audit logging that it happened. Result? Reduced problems, reduced hacks, reduced crime, limited blast radius of mistakes.
It used to be that we made any product and sold it, and over thousands of years we got fed up of saying "okay you can't make bread padded with sawdust", "you can't sell arsenic wallpaper", "you can't sell deathly metabolism boosters as diet pills", "you can't sell public buildings that are a death trap", "you can't say your product was approved by The King if it wasn't" and flipped to say "you can only sell medicine and treatments which are generally recognised as safe, or you prove case-by-case that they are safe", "your advertising must tell the truth". And that's better.
We humans also used to be naked by default, and over time we've switched to being clothed-by-default. Occasionally it results in people having to cover their genitals when they'd rather not, but mostly it's resulted in body protection from sun, heat, cold, brick, concrete, metal, and reduced amount of poop covering communal seats and other surfaces, the ability to carry stuff in pockets and is generally a big win.
Frankly, "here is an edge case hah gotcha" is geek fun for arguing, but a shitty way to decide what to do. If a sorting algorithm sometimes doesn't sort things it's a dealbreaker, but a restaurant which keeps separate raw and cooked fridges, separate chopping boards and knives, and asks the staff to wash their hands with soap before food preparation might have an edge case where they employ someone foreign and dyslexic who cannot read the English sign about hand washing and because of that some customer gets food poisoning is a far far better situation than saying "hah I imagined an edge case therefore let's not have any public health laws, let's just make it a free for all".
anything that needs legal consent or age of majority to do, so all the sexy stuff, voteing, owning , buying and selling property, killing people(in the line of duty), running for political office, etc....someis deemed to be suitable for "viewing" and some not, but all fallunder the same legal umbrella of "age of consent/majority" where traditinional comunities had various ways of inducting, youth, and outsiders into the various "mysteries"
anybody alert may have noted a child saying "YOURE not supposed to talk about that stuff with us around!!!, huff, huff, eye rolls.....adults, sheeesh"
that stuff....
This is a relic mindset from the start of the Internet. The website itself even visually reflects that.
Is there a marginal grey area around adult content? Yes. But beyond that margin is a vast ocean of explicit, intentional adult content.
As someone who grew up in both the decentralized "new" era of the Internet, and now lives in the hyper localized algo driven version of it... It's all shit. And I'd never want my kids to be exposed to it.
That is why parental controls exist. As a close to middle aged adult without any kids, why do I have to hand over my ID to protect YOUR kids?
But that isn't want this is about. The people who don't want porn around aren't doing it because of the kids, they are doing it for some religious/cult belief.
If you look into the history of how law enforcement has protected children in their crusade against porn, you will see countless examples of them being able to protect a child, but instead leave them with their abusers for years to gather evidence.
Traci Lords began filming porn at 14 with a fake ID her kiddie diddling "stepdad" got her. The FBI admitted to knowing she was underage basically from the start, but "allowed her to continue" until she was 18 before attempting to prosecute her - instead of extricating the child from the exploitative pornographers. [1]
The FBI ran child porn sites for years as honey pots, they even bragged about running the largest CP site on the internet. Instead of providing information how they found the users in discovery they would drop charges. [2]
Any young kid with a phone is cooked these days. NSFW content blocking makes such an insignificant dent into that issue that it pretty much rounds down to zero. What it does effectively though, is give the government an excuse to put in place more ways to control what people can read or watch.
I really, truly don't. I was exposed to so much insane traumatizing content in near every setting. I want my kids no where near any of that.
That's the thing with this whole discussion though. both of these asks are totally reasonable
My kids should have freedom to explore | my kids should not be exposed to violence and crude sexual content despite my best efforts to moderate their Internet usage
For sure; viewing adult content is one thing, radicalization causing large political and societal shifts is a much bigger issue. Objectification is one thing, going back to an idealized version of the 50's where women were (in the idealized version) subservient to men is another.
You're absolutely right. The article claims you can't define pornography by deliberately choosing a few borderline examples, and pretending that's all there is.
It's simply not a good way to discuss the online safety act. One could apply the same kind of reasoning to theft: "I took a friend's car without his consent, but I returned it, with a full tank. It would make zero sense for him to denounce me to the police. They wouldn't even think of prosecuting. People borrow things all the time."
No it’s not. It’s just a picture of a naked pregnant woman showering. She’s not in a suggestive pose, having sex, or anything else that would suggest sexual content. There’s nothing inherently sexual about nudity by itself.
If you say “everyone’s idea of what is sexual can be different,” I would agree, which I think is part of the point of posts like this: why does the most restrictive definition of sexual content always seem to be the point of view our lawmakers are protecting?
Edit: she’s not showering, I think. I went back and looked at it, when I read the post from my phone I thought she was showering.
Lots of people think any nudity is sexual, you included it would seem. Others draw a line between "this person is nude" and "this person is nude and sexually suggestive", I'm guessing that includes the author of the post.
Let's be real, everyone feels nudity is inherently sexual, except on HN and probably on reddit where men love to claim that it's not. I don't know if it's virtue-signalling, sexual frustration, or something else. It does sound weird and creepy to me - grown up men who claim that naked women are not arousing, the same men who rally en masse every time pornography censorship is discussed, to complain about freedom of expression, when they are really just afraid they will lose the ability to stare at naked women having sex.
Another, more charitable, explanation, would be that a lot of people around here are asexual. It's possible - but to this extent? I am skeptical.
Plenty of "normal" people outside of HN visit saunas, nudist parks, and nude beaches. It's perfectly alright not to be comfortable with doing so yourself, but other people feel differently.
Then again, there are societies that will shame (and do worse things to) women for showing their hair or skin to strangers.
If you're (un)lucky, your innocent holiday pictures may make the front page of Wikifeet, but that doesn't mean you're a creep for posting your holiday pictures online. There's a spectrum here and claiming to know the absolute truth and branding everyone else as perverts is silly.
Personally, I find the puritan idea that any nudity is sexual to be quite childish and immature.
"let's be real" isn't a strong argument tbh; your argument doesn't apply to a lot of cultures. Ever been to a sauna? Nudist areas? Ever seen South-American, African, Indonesian tribes?
Whether nudity is considered sexual is cultural, not "inherently", and you claiming that "everyone" feels like it is is highlighting your own blinkered world view. You don't speak for "everyone".
Nude beaches are pretty old as a concept? Always a niche community but there's definitely been hippies talking about non sexual nudism for decades and etc
It must have been non sexual at some point in our historical development, before clothes. So I can't really agree that it's inherently so - just that we've culturally made it a sexual thing for basically all of history. That might be close though to functionally be inherent to human society depending on your viewpoint though.
All of this is in your head and projection, especially the part about others being creepy. You think sex and nudity is creepy and people are arguing for easier access to being extra creepy. That’s on you, but your judgments on others is not a healthy truth.
> I don't know if it's virtue-signalling, sexual frustration, or something else.
I think de-sensitization [*] may play a big role here; I'm convinced that the more porn you look at, the higher your threshold goes. I've not consumed any porn for years now (as I write in my other comment), and I find the lady in the picture extremely sexual. Yes, she's not suggesting / soliciting / provoking; she is just standing there. I agree. Yet she's no less sexual for that fact.
[*] edited comment for fixing my wrong use of the term
I think I would agree that she's sexy / attractive depending on terms, but I don't think that makes it a suggestive or sexual photo strictly I guess. I can be turned on by a partner fully clothed and showing a little shoulder, if I'm in the right mood! But that wouldn't make it a sexy outfit, I'm biased by my emotions about her.
I think this is why there's a lot of pedantry and "know it when I see it" to the discussion
Tell me you've never been outside the US without saying you've never been outside the US.
Taking just one example, in Finland it is extremely common for people to visit saunas, and from what I've heard, you'd be laughed at if you tried to wear clothes (or even a towel) in the sauna.
One Finn posting online I saw a while back remarked that a lot of the problems Americans have would be resolved if we all saw our grandmas naked regularly.
I agree. Different people have very different thresholds for what is "sexual", so it's incorrect to make a blanket statement that it is not sexual. It's sexual for a decent proportion of people - just the fact that this article was tagged NSFW shows that.
> It's sexual for a decent proportion of people - just the fact that this article was tagged NSFW shows that
I don't think it shows that at all. Any content not suitable for a work computer in the typical office gets a NSFW label, it's literally in the name. An image of some war-time event can be as NSFW as an image of a woman removing her clothes, and at the same time neither images can be sexual.
Yeah it’s certainly not safe for work. Should it be? I mean, ideally yes. In practice? Hell no. I don’t need Karen from accounting coming up with her own reasons why I’m looking at a naked pregnant lady even though I know there is nothing wrong with it.
> It's sexual for a decent proportion of people - just the fact that this article was tagged NSFW shows that.
Most workplaces would find there to be many categories of inappropriate things other than sexual content: violence, profanity, non-sexual imagery of people in unprofessional contexts, etc.
I find the girl licking her gun repulsive. An instant boner killer. I hate guns, and she's a total fake, too. She may be "soliciting" alright, but the whole pose is off-putting.
The criteria by which something is "sexual" may be debated, but there is one thing that is 100% certain: it doesn't revolve around your personal preferences.
I came here for your comment. That stock photo is strikingly sexual; it immediately makes me horny. (I'm a cis-het guy nearing 50 years of age, I have an active and satisfying sex life with my wife, and I've not looked at porn, or engaged in self-pleasing, for several years now. The reason I find the photo sexual is not that "I'm not getting any". I've been getting plenty, thank you very much.) I had had regular sex with my wife during all of her pregnancies; if anything, pregnancy makes women more arousing to me (without it being a "kink" for me).
Is something being arousing enough for it to be sexual? Fully clothed women in fashion magazines can be kinda arousing, but surely that's not pornographic.
Some people suffer/enjoy getting aroused by cars, does that mean every car picture is sexual? Probably not.
While fun to hear about others perspective, "suggestively sexual" usually requires at least some attempt at being suggestive, a pregnant woman just existing probably isn't suggestive, even though you find it so because of your sexual preferences.
I don't know how old you are, but this paragraph from the article felt strikingly accurate (and familiar):
> Every person’s idea of “adult” imagery is different. A young child or an adult won’t automatically think any image including breasts or nudity is sexual, but a horny teenager (generally) will.
I wasn't debating "suggestive". The fine article claimed (and the parent quoted), "Absolutely nothing sexual"; that's what I disagree with.
I agree that the photo is not suggestive; in other words, I fully agree that in the picture, she's not "soliciting" or even "provoking" (even without having any actual intent to participate). That's fine. She doesn't have to be suggestive, or to do anything other than exist and be visible (like this), for me to find her sexually (very) attractive, and to make me horny.
I don't think an image can be defined as sexual based on whether or not it produces an arousal response in you or anyone else. If you looked an image featuring women who are from a culture where partial nudity is normal and not considered sexual, but you have an arousal response, does that make the image sexual?
(slow answer because HN is blocking my throwaway account "AdkamEup" from commenting quickly, so now I've created a new throwaway, and am commenting via a proxy too)
It does, in the one particular context where I would be looking at it.
(I understand that this response of mine is unusable for labelling images, without the context that they are displayed and viewed in. That's fine. I'm indifferent wrt. labeling pictures on the internet, for the purposes of lawmaking.)
Consider this. Assume you have a nice big poster "featuring women who are from a culture where partial nudity is normal and not considered sexual". Assume you take it to your workplace, to an office where several ladies work, and you put it on display on the wall of your cubicle. I think the picture will be defined sexual in that context, and most women at the office will be uncomfortable with it. I, as a man, would get an arousal response, and therefore, in that context, I would also immediately feel uncomfortable with the poster (and I would also request that it be removed). Indeed I very frequently disagree with being exposed to arousing impulses, and I may try to protect my senses from that. Either way, such a picture is sexual, most of the time. It does depend on the context, so I guess I agree that without context, classification is futile (lacking sufficient nuance). Assuming some "default Western context" though, I still claim that the picture you are proposing is sexual. The context where that image is not sexual, is that culture where the picture originates from. But we are not that culture.
Again, I'm neither supporting nor opposing politicians in labeling and/or restricting images. I'm only talking about what the pregnant woman's picture in the fine article makes me feel, and what urges it generates in me.
Sure, I just think it's important to be precise about the language, and this type of distinction is important in a lot of other aspects of life. Generally if an image is intended to evoke a sexual response, we would classify it as pornographic (though not always). An image that wasn't intended to evoke that response may still do so, but that will be context and viewer dependent.
So your argument is that because you happen to find the person attractive, the image itself is sexual? That would quickly lead us to classifying 90% of everything on the internet as sexual, as there is a wide range of stuff that makes people aroused, like people having sexual attraction to cars.
Maybe being able to discern our own perspectives and sexual preferences from a wider labeling of content might be beneficial?
> So your argument is that because you happen to find the person attractive, the image itself is sexual?
Yes, with one tweak: it's because I find the person sexually attractive. It's not the kind of attractive that urges me to start "socializing" with the person, for example; "trust", "friendship" etc are not my first impressions. My first impression is that I'm horny as heck.
> That would quickly lead us to classifying 90% of everything on the internet as sexual, as there is a wide range of stuff that makes people aroused, like people having sexual attraction to cars.
I'm confused by your repeated allusion to "sexually aroused by cars"; I've never heard of that. Other than that however, 90% of everything everywhere (not just on the internet) is sexual. Absolutely everything is advertized with attractive women (clad to various levels of decency, dependent on the medium), precisely because sex is the #1 drive for men, and so "sex sells" (to men). It may be subliminal, or it may be "in your face", but a huge proportion of all ads is sexual.
> Maybe being able to discern our own perspectives and sexual preferences from a wider labeling of content might be beneficial?
Oh definitely. I have absolutely no personal interest in the "content labeling" debate, as I've not been a consumer for several years now. It's just the fine article's qualification of the picture -- which the author tried to use as a representative, for driving the point home, IIUC -- that I disagreed with.
Also, my English could be failing me here (I'm not a native speaker): you seem to use "sexual" and "arousing" as two (at least somewhat) orthogonal concepts. To me, they mean the same thing: "stuff that makes me horny". If I cared about cars, I guess I might call some cars "exciting", but that's not "arousing". Arousal implies excitement, but not the other way around, in my vocabulary.
Of course you can. Viewer reaction is difficult to predict, and exists as a spectrum. Even the same person will have different reactions at different times based on their mood and what else they've been looking at.
That's you though (also you're oversharing a bit lol), everyone will respond differently to the picture, mostly depending on culture and associations. The question then becomes, who gets to decide where the boundary lies? Anthropologists, mixed sauna-goers, nudists, hippies and gynacologists, or prudes, christian/muslim fundamentalists, Victorians and payment providers?
So maybe making nudity less common or accessible only makes it more valuable as a sexual thing.
There's a strong correlation between "women force to cover themselves" and "women's bodies being an object of obsessive desire".
Countries where women MUST cover their bodies as much as possible have more of an incell culture. In countries where it's normal for women sunbathe topless, breasts aren't as sexualised of fetishised.
The intro of the 1986 Once upon a time... Life animation series, that's the best human biology educational program that exists to this very day, starts with scenes many would classify as nudity - but it's also essential to the topic and the education it displays.
I know you’re trying to point out a logical fallacy; but I don’t think it is a good reason to ignore the grandparent commenter’s point.
It’s still a useful word, but it can’t really shoulder the burden of making one argument more rational than the other.
Tsunamis, earthquakes, flash floods, tornadoes, locust swarms, plagues are "natural". Amanita muscaria, Dendrobatidae and Boa constrictors are "natural" and will fucking kill you.
I think the better distinction is found in Leviathan, contrasting human society (and its set of social contracts) with the "state of nature" - what human life was like before we formed societies:
> In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
As Nietzsche said, the time has come when we have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years. That's the simple answer, nudity and sexuality (also entirely natural and normal), have been deemed sinful, you're supposed to avert your eyes from it, and so on. It's so deeply ingrained in Western culture even secularized people still haven't shaken it.
It varies though, being German with half of my family having lived in the GDR, it is funny to see in particular Americans when you talk about nude beaches or mixed saunas and the general Freikörperkultur (lit: free body culture) that was so common and still has carried over.
How is general nudity of adult men considered by those participants? I always assumed that my nakedness would be perceived as a display of mateability, and I am concerned that my penis size relative to other men would reduce my attractiveness to women.
Note: I am not sure how I compare to others in the general population, as I live the typical American lifestyle. Also, I think Germans are statistically one of the greater endowed populations, so maybe this isn't as much an issue for them.
Only if it leads you to sin, right? According to the original, if you can look at a naked body without immediately humping it, you're free to keep looking.
This has been completely memory-holed despite the fact many people alive today should remember it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_swimming_in_US_indoor_poo...
https://www.wbez.org/shows/curious-city/baring-it-all-why-bo...
https://www.npr.org/2006/08/01/5597441/naked-in-high-school-...
Well, not every "civilized culture" has a blanket ban on public nudity, but more of a "there is a time and place you know", like doing sauna naked and swimming naked in rivers/lakes (common in the Nordics at least) or being semi-nude (topless) at public beaches in Spain. Breastfeeding without having to shamefully cover up also seems to be more and more accepted, at least in the countries I frequent (mostly around Europe).
I'm sure there are more examples of "civilized cultures" where it's accepted sometimes to be nude or semi-nude.
Every civilized society has norms for everything, that's the tautological definition of what being civilized means. It's how civilized people define success. But this is not culture (as per Nietzsche) but just the opposite of it. To think the two are synonymous is exactly what he attributes to Christianity.
The Danish mixed nude beach goer is indeed technically less civilized but no less cultured, free, vital or unburdened by social anxieties about her body or conduct, she's strong-willed exactly to the extent that she's uncivilized.
Western culture and its morals around sex, gender and nudity are founded on the patriarchal taboos of the Abrahamic religions, whereby human nudity in general, and female nudity in particular (because women are the source of original sin,) is to be considered shameful.
That and we're currently in the midst of a right-wing political reactionary shift against the progressive norms of prior generations (and a moral panic about "groomers" and "pedophiles") which makes censorship of this type far easier.
A photo of a Japanese public space, would you expect to see a) everyone clothed, b) everyone naked, c) roughly 50:50 as people choose for themselves and going naked is a perfectly acceptable thing to do which nobody thinks is weird ? (a), obviously.
Nudity doesn't only mean people on the street without clothes.
Norms against nudity within Western societies - excluding non-Western societies such as in China, Japan and India - are based on Abrahamic religions.
It is true that other non-Western societies also have norms regarding nudity, but those norms are not the same as in the West, and even within the West and other Christianized nations such norms tend to be more permissive than in the US. To give an example, in the US breastfeeding is considered implicitly sexual and thus allowing it in public spaces is controversial, whereas this is not the case in cultures where any display of the female breast is considered to be pornographic. You can even find cultures where public nudity has little if any taboo at all.
So no, other than the strictly physiological need for humans to provide a layer of physical protection around their bodies by means of garments, there is nothing more fundamental going on here. Norms around nudity are entirely cultural.
It’s like saying norms against murder are based on abrahamic religions because the 10 commandments say so.
Cultures the world over have general norms against nudity in nearly all contexts, and also have norms against murder in nearly all contexts. Clearly the driving force that makes humans have norms against nudity or murder is more fundamental than religion.
Abrahamic religions may add a particular flavor to it, but it’s icing on a big cake
Anthropologically, given that every mass civilization that’s ever existed regulated nudity in public settings, there’s likely some sociological advantage to it that enables communities of people to reach scale and endure.
Do you have a single counter example of a large scale human community (10,000+ people) where public nudity was normal?
No it's not https://thelactationcollection.com/blog/breastfeeding-in-pub...
Not altogether an unreasonable concern, considering that the International Lesbian and Gay Association at the United Nations was literally allied to NAMBLA and other pro-pedophilia groups, for 15 years [0].
It's only when the Americans threatened to take away the money that something was done about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILGA_consultative_status_contr...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footloose
Sex and procreation which is arguably the complete opposite to murder is ostrasized because of it.
Because so many people "learn" words by guessing their meaning from context, it now means what Anthony Burgess called "ultraviolence" in A Clockwork Orange.
Cartoons have already had several re-thinking of what's appropriate as norms have changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven
No, you did.
>Would it not be much better if children see people having fun fucking each other
It’s more nuanced than sex = good, violence = bad.
Once puberty hormones kick in, teenagers are going to start figuring out that there’s something going on. We’re far better off educating them about the risks involved rather than letting them blindly experiment.
Pornography is probably the worst way to accomplish this goal, of course. Comprehensive sexual health education is vastly preferred. But pretending sex doesn’t exist is how you end up with pregnant kids.
In cultures where sex is more taboo, they have bigger problems with teen pregnancy and early marriage. In the US, as access to porn has increased teen pregnancy has plummeted.
Making sex shameful doesn't just magically make people not do it. Tell kids "be abstinent, mmkay" doesnt lower teen pregnancy - it increases it.
Sending passport scans to random sleezy websites that are likely not even under British jurisdiction is beyond insane
Chrome and Safari are working on browser APIs that seem reasonable, but will only be available around the end of this year. The various region specific identity providers (like GOV.UK One Login) will also need to integrate with those (possibly through Google/Apple Wallet or their own app).
That means one has to use shady 3p age verification services (like Persona) which do who-knows-what with customer data and cost on the order of $1 per verification.
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-oauth-selective-d...
https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/presentations/2024/wpec2024...
The only things I've seen are friends having to submit a photo of their ID to discord to keep using it, etc. The GP was talking about the British version of this specifically right
There’s a number of methods a site or app might use to ask you to confirm your age. They might do this check themselves or use another company to do the check. These methods include:
- Facial age estimation – you show your face via photo or video, and technology analyses it to estimate your age.
- Open banking – you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the site or app.
- Digital identity services – these include digital identity wallets, which can securely store and share information which proves your age in a digital format.
- Credit card age checks – you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card this shows you are over 18.
- Email-based age estimation – you provide your email address, and technology analyses other online services where it has been used – such as banking or utility providers - to estimate your age.
- Mobile network operator age checks – you give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18.
- Photo-ID matching – this is similar to a check when you show a document. For example, you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time – these are compared to confirm if the document is yours. """
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/a...
Handing over details to sleazy websites is never going to happen. Everyone is going to use a VPN. That's the point. Next year, maybe the year after the government will concede that age verification didn't work and more needs to be done. Then they come for your VPN.
The BBC, always the mouthpiece of the UK government is already laying the groundwork [0].
I know how tinfoil hat this sounds, but at this point, its not a conspiracy, its just how the government that created and sold nudge units [1] operates. It's decades of thinking "they won't do that" then watching them do it.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k81lj8nvpo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team
edit: spelling
This effort is because once labeled adult it is broadly socially acceptable to do anything and everything necessary to hide a concept from public life.
A specific recent example is Itch.io's recent removal of all content labeled adult, stemming from coordinated pressure by Collective Shout. The block has led to the hiding of some content labeled as lgbt, despite not containing adult content or being labeled that way.
Dare I ask, wtf is Maus representation of history??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_sculptures
It wouldn't be appropriate to use a form of nudity we now find "acceptable" (statues and paintings), when those media were attacked in their time by the same type of prudes who attack modern media (JPEGs of nude women on websites)
I know you probably didn't intend it that way but I often see criticism of OnlyFans specifically made when I wouldn't have seen it around traditionally male operated pornography publishing, and sometimes there's a feeling of subtle misogyny creeping in.
I have seen comments along the lines of "Onlyfans spotted, opinion dismissed," numerous times online under posts/videos completely unrelated to a content creators OF business. The idea that a person is a sex worker and therefore a slut (in a derogatory rather than reclaimed sense) and therefore they and their opinions are worthless, is the unstated logic of this sentence.
The misogyny drips off of the concept of an Onlyfans lessening someone.
“You’d make such a good porn star!”, we could say encouragingly to a new grad considering between OF and Stanford.
No, we wouldn’t, because despite a weird and deliberate normalizing effort in some corners of the Internet, it’s an intrinsically degrading field run by pimps physical or digital now, and an existential history of abuse and degradation.
But that's not actually what I was arguing. My point was that women who produce their own content to sell on OnlyFans are generally treated with a contempt that isn't applied to men who hire women to produce the same content for them.
However, submitting to pimps is degrading, submitting to the violence and extreme sexual behavior of sex clients is degrading, and at least in most societies, losing one’s social place to perform sex work is also degrading.
Not all sw’ers, sure, some sw’ers are wealthy, sure a few are.
It’s just extreme arguments of the extremely online. Zero parents in this thread are encouraging their daughters to participate in such an industry.
So, since the only things intrinsic to sex work are that you're performing sex as a form of labour it raises the question; Where does the intrinsic degradation lie? In the labour or the sex?
Probably not, yet society depends on garbagemen to function smoothly. And we should be happy that in the modern era people can pursue unglamorous careers, and be accepted by society, and not suffer from the abuse and degredation of times past. Society is improving. It's only a dwindling number of bigots who look down on people because of their career choices.
Did humans stop abusing one another and I missed it, and all the harms of being used sexually by the world are gone now?
>It's only a dwindling number of bigots who look down on people because of their career choices.
Women have some of the strongest opinions against sw, so you have the floor if you want to attack that half.
https://prostitutescollective.net/independent-a-quarter-of-w...
I would be much safer making porn than being in the army, or even working in a warehouse. It would be less taxing on my body.
Now I’m sure even that is arguable, but the conversation should be around that and not superficially related tangents.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/project-2025-por...
> Just five pages into the foreword by the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank, the proposal stakes out an uncompromising position that porn should be banned, porn producers and distributors should be sent to prison, and tech companies that circulate it should be shut down.
maiesiophilia (pregnancy fetishism), maschalagnia (armpit fetishism)…
We shouldn't erase things from the world just because some people have obscure fetishes. I'll keep having balloons at my kid's birthday parties, despite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_fetish
So it's not "adult content", but probably "NSFW" unless you work in a maternity hospital.
Just as a comparator, the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy leads with a clothed pregnant woman (unlike the pages on e.g. labia, penis, anus, breast, which lead with a direct shot of the body part), and overall that page has photos or illustrations of 4 clothed and 3 nude women (and a CT scan volume render, does that count as nude or not?)
Thing is though, if you can get in trouble for browsing the internet while at work looking at anything at all, you probably shouldn't.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16
I don’t think anyone considered that the Latin syllabus might be a cause for concern.
This picture isn’t sexual at all but it’s still Not Safe For Work in the strictest sense.
I still wouldn’t have opened it in the open space :)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
1) Get any porn site that is going to obey this to instead list themselves in some open way (TXT record in DNS, blockchain, some other form of list)
2) Get any provider in the UK to block access to those lists if the account owner wants it. That's ISPs and phone providers. I'd say it should be opt in, but opt out would be a reasonable compromise.
That way I can be happy that my 12 year old won't accidentality end up on some really shady porn site following a link from a classmate's whatsapp if they aren't at home.
Of course classmates can still share the content on whatsapp, and this isn't going to stop that.
If you want to really tackle the problem - and this would be really controversial -- have lists of "healthy porn", which people could opt in via their ISP to allow, or perhaps allow for a set period. I have no problem with a teenager looking at boobs, there's a big difference between the modern equivalent of FHM or playboy and many kinds of aggressive porn that's just as accessible.
Exists in the form of the "rating"/RTA <meta> tag - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
Currently, it's already opt-out on major UK ISPs. Anyone with the brains to download a free VPN app (which includes kids) can bypass those blocks, though. That's probably why the government moved from putting the blame on ISPs to putting the blame on web hosts.
I think an effective age block is only going to make things worse for teenagers. If all of the responsible, normal porn sites follow the rules and enforce an age gate, the niche/shady websites will be all vulnerable teenagers can access.
I'd rather see a distinction between "normal porn" and "extreme porn" when it comes to content filters, but the UK also tried that when regulating UK porn productions. The list of banned acts included "caning, aggressive whipping, and humilation" (which makes sense to be labeled extreme, IMO), but also "facesitting, female ejaculation and urolagnia", which I feel are more like someone writing laws revealing their personal icks in legal texts.
Well parental controls exist to prevent that from being added. But once you have vpns, you simply connect to another country's end point to bypass this anyway.
> If all of the responsible, normal porn sites follow the rules and enforce an age gate, the niche/shady websites will be all vulnerable teenagers can access.
That's my main worry.
Far better regulation of the generation of porn, which can ensure that the actors are doing it for their own free will, not harmed (any more than many other jobs), etc, would be a far better approach. This of course is easier said than done.
> but also "facesitting, female ejaculation and urolagnia"
It does feel like they are taking the piss.
But maybe it would be healthier if you discuss this topic with your 12-year-old. The reality is that they'll be able to find any kind of pr0n within seconds when they has access to an unfiltered computer or phone.
At age 12 it's also expected that you start the transition from a child to an adult, so trying to block the outside world isn't preparing them for the freedom they'll encounter at 18-21.
The idea that there is even a definition of 'healthy' porn seems ludicrous to me. That's not 'really' tackling the problem. That's not understanding the problem in the first place.
Speaking of which: there isn't a problem in the first place.
It's about being able to control and monitoring in the real world, where unlike the 90s the "family computer" isn't the thing in the corner of the living room.
There's 6 more years before they're an adult, 4 more years before they can legally have sex, and typically at least 4 years before they start heavy petting, plenty of time to transition.
Someone on their first driving lesson isn't dropped in the middle of the arc de triumph and told to drive to Rome, it takes a lot of lessons to get that far.
Healthy is a continual conversation from aged 8 through 18
> "It’s simply too subjective (teenagers will find almost any nudity sexual, no matter its context). How does anyone decide if any nudity is age-appropriate? Especially at scale."
OK (blog author) has made the case that one cannot decide, the government has gone with "ban by default". If you (blog author) object to that, can you make a case why that's bad? You wrote "apart from 'think of the children' being a classic call to censorship" so you've closed off that route for your objection which may have been a strong one.
If you work then you have given your employer proof of ID for things like showing your right to work in the UK, getting a paycheck, or a criminal record check; so the principle of an employee proving their age seems out of scope for you to object to - at least you haven't made a case that people need to be able to work anonymously. [Although the method of proving one's age is up for argument, it's not this argument].
It boils down to: if you can't decide, do you allow by default or block by default? Government has gone for default-block, blog author seems to be taking the position that default-allow is better but has not made a case why.
By comparison we tried that with digital security - for years computer systems were default-allow and it caused a lot of problems and we've had to reengineer them to have firewalls, ports closed, seperated user accounts, minimal user account permissions, minimal data-execute permissions, minimal employee access to company systems, minimal access from one app into another's data, then in each case grant-as-necessary with proof of identity and audit logging that it happened. Result? Reduced problems, reduced hacks, reduced crime, limited blast radius of mistakes.
It used to be that we made any product and sold it, and over thousands of years we got fed up of saying "okay you can't make bread padded with sawdust", "you can't sell arsenic wallpaper", "you can't sell deathly metabolism boosters as diet pills", "you can't sell public buildings that are a death trap", "you can't say your product was approved by The King if it wasn't" and flipped to say "you can only sell medicine and treatments which are generally recognised as safe, or you prove case-by-case that they are safe", "your advertising must tell the truth". And that's better.
We humans also used to be naked by default, and over time we've switched to being clothed-by-default. Occasionally it results in people having to cover their genitals when they'd rather not, but mostly it's resulted in body protection from sun, heat, cold, brick, concrete, metal, and reduced amount of poop covering communal seats and other surfaces, the ability to carry stuff in pockets and is generally a big win.
Frankly, "here is an edge case hah gotcha" is geek fun for arguing, but a shitty way to decide what to do. If a sorting algorithm sometimes doesn't sort things it's a dealbreaker, but a restaurant which keeps separate raw and cooked fridges, separate chopping boards and knives, and asks the staff to wash their hands with soap before food preparation might have an edge case where they employ someone foreign and dyslexic who cannot read the English sign about hand washing and because of that some customer gets food poisoning is a far far better situation than saying "hah I imagined an edge case therefore let's not have any public health laws, let's just make it a free for all".
Is there a marginal grey area around adult content? Yes. But beyond that margin is a vast ocean of explicit, intentional adult content.
As someone who grew up in both the decentralized "new" era of the Internet, and now lives in the hyper localized algo driven version of it... It's all shit. And I'd never want my kids to be exposed to it.
That is why parental controls exist. As a close to middle aged adult without any kids, why do I have to hand over my ID to protect YOUR kids?
But that isn't want this is about. The people who don't want porn around aren't doing it because of the kids, they are doing it for some religious/cult belief.
If you look into the history of how law enforcement has protected children in their crusade against porn, you will see countless examples of them being able to protect a child, but instead leave them with their abusers for years to gather evidence.
Traci Lords began filming porn at 14 with a fake ID her kiddie diddling "stepdad" got her. The FBI admitted to knowing she was underage basically from the start, but "allowed her to continue" until she was 18 before attempting to prosecute her - instead of extricating the child from the exploitative pornographers. [1]
The FBI ran child porn sites for years as honey pots, they even bragged about running the largest CP site on the internet. Instead of providing information how they found the users in discovery they would drop charges. [2]
Anti-porn movement in the US. [3]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traci_Lords:_Underneath_It_All
2: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39180204
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pornography_movement_in_t...
That's the thing with this whole discussion though. both of these asks are totally reasonable My kids should have freedom to explore | my kids should not be exposed to violence and crude sexual content despite my best efforts to moderate their Internet usage
But the responses are overwhelmingly lopsided
Maybe this is an even bigger problem.
It's simply not a good way to discuss the online safety act. One could apply the same kind of reasoning to theft: "I took a friend's car without his consent, but I returned it, with a full tank. It would make zero sense for him to denounce me to the police. They wouldn't even think of prosecuting. People borrow things all the time."
How is this not sexual? The fact that it's a stock photo, or that the woman is pregnant, is irrelevant. It's very clearly a sexual picture.
If you say “everyone’s idea of what is sexual can be different,” I would agree, which I think is part of the point of posts like this: why does the most restrictive definition of sexual content always seem to be the point of view our lawmakers are protecting?
Edit: she’s not showering, I think. I went back and looked at it, when I read the post from my phone I thought she was showering.
Another, more charitable, explanation, would be that a lot of people around here are asexual. It's possible - but to this extent? I am skeptical.
Then again, there are societies that will shame (and do worse things to) women for showing their hair or skin to strangers.
If you're (un)lucky, your innocent holiday pictures may make the front page of Wikifeet, but that doesn't mean you're a creep for posting your holiday pictures online. There's a spectrum here and claiming to know the absolute truth and branding everyone else as perverts is silly.
Personally, I find the puritan idea that any nudity is sexual to be quite childish and immature.
Whether nudity is considered sexual is cultural, not "inherently", and you claiming that "everyone" feels like it is is highlighting your own blinkered world view. You don't speak for "everyone".
It must have been non sexual at some point in our historical development, before clothes. So I can't really agree that it's inherently so - just that we've culturally made it a sexual thing for basically all of history. That might be close though to functionally be inherent to human society depending on your viewpoint though.
I propose you watch 5 minutes of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Jungle with nude Keith Chegwin, and you will be disabused of that notion.
Your argument will be reduced to "everyone feels some kinds of nudity, preferably not featuring Keith Chegwin, are inherently sexual"
I imagine you've been to a locker room before - was that sexual? Of course not. But you're not gay, you might say.
So then it's not nudity - it's your own inclination to sex. If you see the world sexually, you'll sexualize nudity.
I think de-sensitization [*] may play a big role here; I'm convinced that the more porn you look at, the higher your threshold goes. I've not consumed any porn for years now (as I write in my other comment), and I find the lady in the picture extremely sexual. Yes, she's not suggesting / soliciting / provoking; she is just standing there. I agree. Yet she's no less sexual for that fact.
[*] edited comment for fixing my wrong use of the term
I think this is why there's a lot of pedantry and "know it when I see it" to the discussion
Do you think those people found nudity sexual?
How about doctors and nurses that see naked people all the time? Is simple nudity sexual for them?
How about athletes that shower in open showers together. Are they experiencing a sexual experience when they’re showering after practice?
There’s so many counter examples to this that saying nudity is sexual is just silly.
Taking just one example, in Finland it is extremely common for people to visit saunas, and from what I've heard, you'd be laughed at if you tried to wear clothes (or even a towel) in the sauna.
One Finn posting online I saw a while back remarked that a lot of the problems Americans have would be resolved if we all saw our grandmas naked regularly.
I don't think it shows that at all. Any content not suitable for a work computer in the typical office gets a NSFW label, it's literally in the name. An image of some war-time event can be as NSFW as an image of a woman removing her clothes, and at the same time neither images can be sexual.
Most workplaces would find there to be many categories of inappropriate things other than sexual content: violence, profanity, non-sexual imagery of people in unprofessional contexts, etc.
https://www.cpreview.org/articles/2021/8/firearms-and-the-ph...
Is
1) far more sexual
2) far more dangerous than the picture on the linked site
And that's nowhere near the level of say this:
https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-girl-licking-her-gun-...
I came here for your comment. That stock photo is strikingly sexual; it immediately makes me horny. (I'm a cis-het guy nearing 50 years of age, I have an active and satisfying sex life with my wife, and I've not looked at porn, or engaged in self-pleasing, for several years now. The reason I find the photo sexual is not that "I'm not getting any". I've been getting plenty, thank you very much.) I had had regular sex with my wife during all of her pregnancies; if anything, pregnancy makes women more arousing to me (without it being a "kink" for me).
Some people suffer/enjoy getting aroused by cars, does that mean every car picture is sexual? Probably not.
While fun to hear about others perspective, "suggestively sexual" usually requires at least some attempt at being suggestive, a pregnant woman just existing probably isn't suggestive, even though you find it so because of your sexual preferences.
I don't know how old you are, but this paragraph from the article felt strikingly accurate (and familiar):
> Every person’s idea of “adult” imagery is different. A young child or an adult won’t automatically think any image including breasts or nudity is sexual, but a horny teenager (generally) will.
I agree that the photo is not suggestive; in other words, I fully agree that in the picture, she's not "soliciting" or even "provoking" (even without having any actual intent to participate). That's fine. She doesn't have to be suggestive, or to do anything other than exist and be visible (like this), for me to find her sexually (very) attractive, and to make me horny.
It does, in the one particular context where I would be looking at it.
(I understand that this response of mine is unusable for labelling images, without the context that they are displayed and viewed in. That's fine. I'm indifferent wrt. labeling pictures on the internet, for the purposes of lawmaking.)
Consider this. Assume you have a nice big poster "featuring women who are from a culture where partial nudity is normal and not considered sexual". Assume you take it to your workplace, to an office where several ladies work, and you put it on display on the wall of your cubicle. I think the picture will be defined sexual in that context, and most women at the office will be uncomfortable with it. I, as a man, would get an arousal response, and therefore, in that context, I would also immediately feel uncomfortable with the poster (and I would also request that it be removed). Indeed I very frequently disagree with being exposed to arousing impulses, and I may try to protect my senses from that. Either way, such a picture is sexual, most of the time. It does depend on the context, so I guess I agree that without context, classification is futile (lacking sufficient nuance). Assuming some "default Western context" though, I still claim that the picture you are proposing is sexual. The context where that image is not sexual, is that culture where the picture originates from. But we are not that culture.
Again, I'm neither supporting nor opposing politicians in labeling and/or restricting images. I'm only talking about what the pregnant woman's picture in the fine article makes me feel, and what urges it generates in me.
Maybe being able to discern our own perspectives and sexual preferences from a wider labeling of content might be beneficial?
Yes, with one tweak: it's because I find the person sexually attractive. It's not the kind of attractive that urges me to start "socializing" with the person, for example; "trust", "friendship" etc are not my first impressions. My first impression is that I'm horny as heck.
> That would quickly lead us to classifying 90% of everything on the internet as sexual, as there is a wide range of stuff that makes people aroused, like people having sexual attraction to cars.
I'm confused by your repeated allusion to "sexually aroused by cars"; I've never heard of that. Other than that however, 90% of everything everywhere (not just on the internet) is sexual. Absolutely everything is advertized with attractive women (clad to various levels of decency, dependent on the medium), precisely because sex is the #1 drive for men, and so "sex sells" (to men). It may be subliminal, or it may be "in your face", but a huge proportion of all ads is sexual.
> Maybe being able to discern our own perspectives and sexual preferences from a wider labeling of content might be beneficial?
Oh definitely. I have absolutely no personal interest in the "content labeling" debate, as I've not been a consumer for several years now. It's just the fine article's qualification of the picture -- which the author tried to use as a representative, for driving the point home, IIUC -- that I disagreed with.
Also, my English could be failing me here (I'm not a native speaker): you seem to use "sexual" and "arousing" as two (at least somewhat) orthogonal concepts. To me, they mean the same thing: "stuff that makes me horny". If I cared about cars, I guess I might call some cars "exciting", but that's not "arousing". Arousal implies excitement, but not the other way around, in my vocabulary.