[derleth]

So compare it to the drug trade:

The ancillary crimes happen when the core product is criminalized; that is, you get drive-bys and chemical plant and pharmacy robberies when drug production is illegal such that the only way to compete in the drug world is to commit other crimes to defend your market and get raw materials.

When the product is legitimized, as happened with alcohol in the US in 1933, the criminal element moves out because it can't withstand the scrutiny a legitimate business is put under as a matter of course. Any legitimate brewing or distilling operation is being looked at from too many angles related to food regulations and taxes and OSHA and so on to be able to risk having undocumented workers make bathtub gin in a basement while killing off their competition.

From this, we can predict that outlawing porn, or making some kinds of porn illegal, will only serve to make the production of that porn a nastier, more illegal business which does more overall harm to society.

In short: Crime breeds crime.

[foobarbazqux]

I understand your argument as it applies to drugs, but the problem when it's applied to porn is that while nobody is harmed by growing drugs, some people are harmed in some porn productions. So it's not an accurate analogy. As an extreme, do you believe it would be better if we could sell snuff films legally?

[ewbuoi]

Innocent people's lives are ruined by drugs every day. One example off the top of my head is people coerced into being drug mules and end up getting caught by Customs. If (violent) porn is legal, the producers will be under much greater scrutiny than if they were forced in to the black market.

[foobarbazqux]

I'm not talking about violent porn, I'm talking about non-consensual porn that has no chance of becoming legal to produce. The drug mule problem would go away if we just legalized drugs completely, but the non-consent problem wouldn't go away if we legalized porn completely.

An analogy that comes to mind is the trade in animal parts from endangered species. If we legalize the trade, there is more of an incentive to kill the animals, even if the killing is outlawed.

[derleth]

> I'm talking about non-consensual porn that has no chance of becoming legal to produce.

This can be replaced by simulations using acting and special effects. Porn is about the fantasy anyway.

> An analogy that comes to mind is the trade in animal parts from endangered species. If we legalize the trade, there is more of an incentive to kill the animals, even if the killing is outlawed.

This can also be replaced by simulations, to some extent, but not like porn can be, because it's easier to tell fake ivory from fake porn, for example.

Ultimately, there will always be violence. Some of it will even be recorded for others. But outlawing stuff will just cause more and worse illegal acts to occur.

[foobarbazqux]

Yeah, I don't have nearly such a problem with simulations. You don't have to hurt somebody to make them, you're not embarrassing anybody by distributing them (it's typically illegal to distribute any private photograph that the subject does not want distributed), it's not at all clear that simulations increase the likelihood of acting stuff out in the real world, and they may even have a net positive effect over no porn at all. In my own experience with child sexual abuse, if the perpetrators had had access to simulated porn, it's quite reasonable to think that maybe there wouldn't be as much of a problem.

Although I believe that it's harder to detect fake ivory than it is to detect fake child porn, below a certain age.

And I also believe that legalizing videos of illegal acts encourages the illegal acts, provided the videos are willingly being made by the criminals and they are being used for entertainment as opposed to journalism or analysis. But this is really just a belief, and I do understand that you have the opposite belief.