These age verification laws that are coming into effect have a lot of people really upset. But can we all agree something that children should not be allowed to? Just have free reign on the internet or scroll p*ornhub non-stop in the most darkest and perverted trenches of the internet? I understand you all think that the parent should be solely responsible for this and that’s true to some effect… But we don’t live in a perfect world in many parents are absolute garbage. Many have absolutely zero technological literacy and when it comes to the parental controls that are in place, many of them are wonky or break or absolute crap and prone to failure.
Is it possible that all of us are catastrophizing a little bit when it comes to what these laws are going to do. Many people act like we are going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly be in the middle of North Korea when it comes to our technological use 🤨 can we all simply agree for a moment that it’s not healthy for kids to be going down porn rabbit holes on the internet? Maybe the laws are not a perfect solution, but you wouldn’t be able to walk into a store and buy a bottle of alcohol without some ID. Why is prn any different?
Fuck no, I don’t agree with that at all. People mature at different rates, and the main reason IMO not to show sexual content to very little kids is that they literally don’t have the capability to understand it having not yet hit puberty. If you’re old enough to be interested in sexuality, you’re old enough that you’re going to start trying to explore it… and it’s a hell of a lot safer to explore it through media than through doing things IRL. I don’t think there’s anything particularly harmful about a ~13+ year old searching for boobs or dicks if they’re interested and want to see them; I did it myself. I may have gotten a few weird ideas about sex from seeing porn online when I was a teenager – that took me a couple years to sort through while growing up – but I never got an STD or got anyone pregnant from looking at porn!
I reached the point of being interested in sexuality around 9th grade – and I seemed to be on the late side compared to my peers based on things I heard from them in 7th and 8th grade. As far as I can recall, the first time I encountered something explicitly sexual was in a novel I found at a library when I was in 6th grade; I was more traumatized by the taboo around sexuality than anything in the book itself (which was a fairly tame sexual fantasy that the main character had involving comparing a girl’s breasts to fruit of various sizes, IIRC). I was not ready for that content yet, and that led to me having a formative conversation with my dad about the subject – i.e. it was ultimately a positive experience for me growing up, even though I was briefly uncomfortable for a bit while I was going through it. When I was a teenager, I was ready to deal with it and sought it out on my own. Speaking as someone who grew up in the goatse/lemonparty/tubgirl era of the internet, if I ran into something that was too extreme, I backed off and said “yeah, that ain’t for me!” I don’t think I would’ve turned out better if I’d been locked out of it.