[jakobnissen]

But kids (and adults) are exposed to all kinds of fantasies. War is not like Call of Duty. The Mafia is not like GTA. Monarchy is not like in the fairy tales. Romance is not like Twilight. BDSM is not like 50 Shades of Grey.

For all these things, we rely on people's world experience and common sense to figure it out. I think it's pretty obvious that sex is not like porn, and I don't understand why so many people are convinced that people can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality in this domain specifically.

[jjcob]

People can't tell the difference in any domain. People copy what they see. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.

Mainstream porn sites show a lot of weird practices (what's up with that strangulation fetish??) and I do think it has a bad influence.

I don't think age verification is a good solution, because we don't become immune to influence at age 18. Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.

I think we should do the opposite: Remove stigma associated with sexuality. Why can't more movies just include everyday sex scenes? Why do we need to make this distinction where you need to go to a different site if you want to see something more explicit than a nipple? Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.

[jolmg]

> Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.

Adults can be vulnerable, but I don't think just as vulnerable. Youngsters with no initial idea of how a given thing works have nothing with which to compare and contrast and potentially reject the first idea presented to them. Generally, the younger, the more impressionable.

> Remove stigma associated with sexuality. [...] Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.

I do agree with loosening the stigma. If there are parents that are giving their children unrestricted access to the internet, and those children may expose things to others that have better parental controls, then the straightforward solution is to have some form of earlier sex-ed. Doesn't need to cover everything, but enough to prepare them against the bad influences they'll apparently encounter. "Something steamy on Netflix" may be a positive counterexample to help them reject nonsense fantasies on porn sites.

[high_na_euv]

>. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.

Lol what, what makes you think it was caused by James Bond, not countless other anti smoking initiatives?

[chii]

It's a feedback loop - smoking was advertised as being cool way back when, which led to movie characters smoking to appear cool, which then reinforces the advertising.

When there was a push to regulate smoking in advertising, it cut the original feedback loop which made film/tv characters not use smoking as a sign of being cool. This led to advertising (if it were allowed) to be less effective at portrayal of coolness via smoking.

It's not a simple one-to-one cause and effect.

[Retric]

Vaping took off as a cool thing without a bunch of cool people vaping in movies.

People stopped smoking in movies at the same time a lot of other smoking related things changed. Similarly smokers likely notice people smoking in movies more than non smokers.

[jennyholzer]

I remember a viral twitter photo of Sophie Turner smoking a Juul while filming the last episodes of Game of Thrones

Juul changed the cultural standing of vaping and (for a very brief moment of time) made it "cool" by means of social media celebrity promotion. They were hit with pretty aggressive punishment for this by the US FDA if I'm not mistaken.

[Retric]

Juul was founded in May 22, 2015 well after Vaping was in a fairly flat growth trajectory, and afterwards there wasn’t any kind of noticeable bump in adoption from such efforts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette#/media/Fi...

All the exponential curve stuff happened early on the path from 0 to ~10 of million.

[bgarbiak]

It was cool to smoke when all the cool guys in the movies were smoking. One of the reasons it’s not cool anymore is that the cool guys in the movies don’t smoke nowadays (although they do it more often now than they did ten years ago; which is worrying).

The correlation between an exposure and initiating smoking is proved: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27043456/

[Retric]

Correlation is not causation, vaping didn’t need movies.

[jennyholzer]

Vaping needed social media

[Retric]

Fads long predate social media. Instead social media and vaping came into their own on similar timelines but adoption of vaping just never saw the kind of hockey stick curve you see from a major fad.

Instead it was relatively slow taking ~10 years to hit 25 million users and ~20 years to hit 85 million users keeping it niche vs the ~1,100 million smokers.

[close04]

It’s not that people stopped but that they didn’t start. Smoking was no longer sold as cool so kids didn’t learn of it as a cool thing.

Kids and even adults pick up cues from games, movies, books. War is like CoD and heroic war movies (why do many 18 year olds go to the army expecting glory and come back with trauma and broken dreams?), sex is like in porn, and gangs are like in GTA. Until they gain practical experience and slowly realize some things are vastly different. Maybe a couple will love “porn sex”. Most others will break a leg having shower sex and reconsider the “teachings”.

[WesolyKubeczek]

Characters in movies stopped (or reduced a lot) smoking pretty much across the board.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

It's different. One big part of the reason has already been said in sibling comments: taboo. Kids know that the huge jumps in martial arts movies are impossible because they jump when they play, they have seen their friends and classmates jump, they probably have tried flying kicks when playing so they get an idea of where the limits are. Nothing of this happens with sex, plus often they aren't exposed to anyone talking about it, except of course in porn.

The other part is the huge insecurities people have in this domain. You will meet a lot of people who aren't afraid to tell you that they dance like crap, or have no musical ear, or are in bad shape, etc.; but even if you meet people who talk about sex, no one is going to tell you that they last one minute in bed.

[Cthulhu_]

Taboo exactly; I will freely talk with colleagues and friends about e.g. GTA or action movies; watching movies and playing games is a communal and public thing.

But nobody talks about what they do in the bedroom; nobody goes to a movie theater to watch porn, people are awkward when there's sex scenes in films (and mainstream films have stopped having them altogether it seems), teenagers run away if their parents ever broach the subject, etcetera.

[maccard]

We shouldn’t be giving 6 year olds access to call of duty or GTA either. PEGI ratings (although overzealous) are a god starting point. I wouldn’t withhold an average 10 year old from a 12 rated game, but I wouldn’t give them access to an 18+.

Also, we (usually) talk about these things - video games are not the only source of discourse of violence or conflict, but sex is such a taboo topic that it’s highly likely most or all of someone’s knowledge will come from what they’ve learned on the internet

[DrillShopper]

> PEGI ratings (although overzealous) are a god starting point.

PEGI says FIFA Ultimate Team: Parental Wallet Draining is PEGI 3. Maybe PEGI should clean its house before we defer to it.