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by closewith 377 days ago
Is your argument that pornography has a lower risk than the median activity of a child?

If so, you are deluded and quite honestly disturbed. I mean this with pity, you should seek counselling.

2 comments

I think the implication here is that horny teenagers are going to do horny teenager things. So it's not fair to compare porn to just any activity, we have to compare it to things like teen pregnancy. Which is WAY down, by the way.
That's complete nonsense. Exposure to pornography during adolescence correlates with increased risk of teen pregnancy, risky sexual behaviours, and sexual assault.
Based on what? Just intuitively, there's significantly less teen pregnancy today than ten years ago and it's been trending down for decades.
> median activity of a child?

Mean, the median is irrelevant here for hopefully obvious reasons.

> you are deluded

You keep saying that word, but facts are facts. If your argument is it’s better for more kids to die, that’s fucked up. Alternatively you could be ignoring reality, but there’s no third option here.

Right — and the facts are that early porn exposure is linked to earlier sex, riskier behaviours, body shame, and higher odds of aggression and coercion, especially when the content is violent. That’s not some moral panic — that’s the current consensus of peer-reviewed studies, UNICEF, and public health bodies. Believing otherwise in the face of that evidence isn’t rational scepticism, it’s delusion. You need to stop pretending kids watching Pornhub is harmless — it isn’t.
Everything has some level of harm, the issue here is comparing relative vs absolute harm. Pointing out a positive doesn’t invalidate other harms, but finding the net effect requires everything to be considered.

Also, there’s significant questions around porn and early sexual activity with evidence in both directions. Unsurprisingly, people be complicated.

Just as an example the “explosion” of access to internet porn would, if the often stated theory of significant impact be correct, presumably have had population level impacts on when people first had sex but 1997 to 2007 showed ~zero changes. “The proportion of high school students who were sexually active has remained steady since 1997” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3064497/

Obviously being a survey the data is suspect but it is still a meaningful datapoint here. Political arguments don’t need to consist with reality but science does.