Pornography and Internet Censorship

[ku]

Are any of you worried about how much pornography there is out there? It's fine to believe in free speech. But consider that 80% of school students have accidentally stumbled upon porn while on the Internet. Consider that many young people are mimicking what they see in pornography on their young friends. Even though Internet censorship is very difficult, don't you think some effort needs to be made? Or will this effort be fruitless?

[Coral Rhedd]

Ku, as awkward as it may be, I think you need to define what you mean when you say pornography. Else how can we agree or disagree?

[Skye]

Or better yet, provide links.

[darth tater]

I am concerned about phornography on the internet, but I would be more concerned about who did the censoring.

 

AOL has a way to limit the kinds of sites that a screen name can access and that access is set by the master screen name (the one who sets up the service).

 

Sure, kids can find a way around most anything, but still, censorship scares me more than phornography.

[atinymonkey]

It's fine to believe in free speech. But consider that 80% of school students have accidentally stumbled upon porn while on the Internet.

 

'Accidentally' stumbled on it?

 

Seriously, internet censorship is impossible. Forget about it.

[Sayonara]

Are any of you overjoyed about how much pornography there is out there?

Fixed.

[Pangloss]

Or better yet, provide links.

 

rofl....

[Phi for All]

Even though Internet censorship is very difficult, don't you think some effort needs to be made? Or will this effort be fruitless?

I don't personally give a fig if your banana ripens from juicy images of melons. It may not be the berry best way to compote oneself, but as darth tater (who happens to be a vegetable) points out, censorship would be much more sour.

 

Pearents of small sprouts should cultivate conversations about prickly subjects to produce understanding. The best defense against weeds is a well-tended garden, not weed-killer.

[Pangloss]

I am only an egg.

[budullewraagh]

phi, you are a genius.

 

frankly, i dont really care; the sites that link to porn tend to be the sites that are questionable in the first place. you cant censor the internet, so theres little one or many can do about this. frankly i dont care because humans do indeed partake in sexual activity. i find sexuality to be beautiful and not to be shunned, but hey, that's just me.

[ecoli]

Are any of you worried about how much pornography there is out there? It's fine to believe in free speech. But consider that 80% of school students have accidentally[/b'] stumbled upon porn while on the Internet.

 

Accident? Are you certain?....

[Mokele]

Yes, when I was in school I accidentally stumbled across porn. Every day. Often several times a day. At a URL I knew by heart. Yes, um, accidentally.

 

On a more pragmatic note, porn has actually been *good* for me. Because neither my parents nor my school had the balls to actually teach sex ed in any meaningful way (beyond "Oooh, it's scary and you'll get diseases"), my main info source was my friends and porn. Once you actually figure out what's fake (very easy), you can actually learn a lot. I'll not get into details, but suffice it to say my GF is very pleased with this learning.

 

Mokele

[budullewraagh]

right on, mokele. it's just human behavior. we see this sort of thing with animals on the discovery channel, so what's so bad about the same sort of thing with humans? granted, we have more fun and all, but it still is a biological process. and porn can be very educational

[AzurePhoenix]

Is porn too easily accessed? Inarguably. Can anything be done? Not as long as the world is divided into nations and we have those stupid laws regarding the human right to privacy. Not now anyway, but, if Operation Chia Pet goes as planned, I will very soon be in a position to reforge the world in the fires of logic and true freedom. Bwa-ha-ha-ha!!! Haha!! Ha.

 

 

Don't get me wrong. I like porn as much as the next person, and I've certainly learned much from it, but there are some things that should be restricted to adult access. Unfortunately, with the internet, it's impossible. So we might as well just deal with it.

[ecoli]

Yeah... I think schools should promote birth/STD control, rather then teaching kids that sex is bad. It's a waste of time, becasue it's frankly not true.

[AzurePhoenix]

Doesn't make a diff. The average kid is as logical as our much-loved Willow-Tree. Doesn't matter what you do, education has little or no effect on teens in this regard. They teach us not to drive recklessly, or smoke, drink or get high, but most of us seem to get smashed nightly anyway. Same with sex and protection. I hate teens....

[boxhead]

practically that is impossible and also against the *rights* of the internet users to freely surf the net if we make few new "rules" of the game.

[Coral Rhedd]

right on, mokele. it's just human behavior. we see this sort of thing with animals on the discovery channel, so what's so bad about the same sort of thing with humans? granted, we have more fun and all, but it still is a biological process. and porn can be very educational

 

You inspire me to tell this true story. When my daughter was five, I did not like to use the television as a babysitter too much but I thought it was okay to let her watch nature shows. I began to have doubts over a couple of incidents. The first involved a guy I was dating. "I don't like Tom," she told me?

 

"Why not?"

 

"Cause he's a man?"

 

"What's wrong with men?"

 

"They decimate."

 

"What do you mean."

 

"They decimated the tiger, and the elephants, and other animals."

 

Sure enough, those nature shows had men decimating left and right. My daughter did not understand that the term "man" meant all humans.

 

Then there was this. I was watching a show about elephant seals with her. It was the mating season. They were showing the whole sex act. You cannot imagine how disgusting was. I was worried that my daughter might be traumatized, so I asked, "What are they doing now?"

 

"Mating."

 

"What do you think about it?"

 

"It's boring. They do it all the time."

 

Now I confess to being a little puzzled. Why is it okay to show animals having sex on television, but not humans?

[budullewraagh]

thats exactly what i was impling. i really dont know why. anybody else have input?

[AzurePhoenix]

Coral, do you know if your daughter knew what the intention of the mating was? I know when I was little, I understood such things to some extent. At the zoo an older child pointed to the tortoises and said "why's that durdle on top of the little one?" And I loudly responded "They's tortoises, and they's matin', Stupid." He said something along the lines of "what's that" and I told him that that was how the mommy was able to make eggs in her tummy.

I understood what mating was, and that it was the source of babies (never believed in the stork myth, especially after I saw the Marabou species) but it was years before I found out that sex had anything to do with mating. On TV, when the people rolled around in the bed or were pushed against foggy glass, it seemed obvious to my naive little brain that they were playing some sort of game. I never made the connection between natural reproduction and recreational sex. One was science, teh other was a matter for adults, and adults only. I don't know what I'm trying to say, but it's somewhere in there.

[Coral Rhedd]

Coral' date=' do you know if your daughter knew what the intention of the mating was? I know when I was little, I understood such things to some extent.

[/quote']

 

Not when she was five. By the time she was eight, she had figured it out. When she was eight, we watch something called "When Life Begins" I think. It was all about the fertilization of the the egg, the embryo, and human development. I was clear she understood.

 

But I was alway a fairly open sort of Mom.

 

At the zoo an older child pointed to the tortoises and said "why's that durdle on top of the little one?" And I loudly responded "They's tortoises, and they's matin', Stupid." He said something along the lines of "what's that" and I told him that that was how the mommy was able to make eggs in her tummy.

I understood what mating was, and that it was the source of babies (never believed in the stork myth, especially after I saw the Marabou species) but it was years before I found out that sex had anything to do with mating. On TV, when the people rolled around in the bed or were pushed against foggy glass, it seemed obvious to my naive little brain that they were playing some sort of game. I never made the connection between natural reproduction and recreational sex. One was science, teh other was a matter for adults, and adults only. I don't know what I'm trying to say, but it's somewhere in there.

 

I know what you mean. I think sometimes kids don't want to know what they are not ready for. When I was about nine, my mother took a medical book that had lots of illustrations and told me all about sex. She assured me that it was totally unpleasant.

 

When I was 12, I saw our beagles mating in the back yard and I turned to my mother in astonishment. "That's not what people do is it?" She pulled out the medical book and told me the whole thing all over again.

 

By fifteen, I was dipping into whatever fiction I wanted to read. I no longer believed my what my mother had said about sex being unpleasant. Otherwise, why all that moaning and groaning?

[AzurePhoenix]

My parent's never said a word to me. Ever. With my interest in science and young-adult scifi novels, I basically knew more than my parents by the time I was ten (but then again, my parents didn't own a single book, much less a medical one) But everything in my family has a "if you even consider doing such a thing, think through the implications and possible threats, and decide if it's worth becoming the target of cruel mockery and unspoken dissapointment." Science and my parent's attitude desensitized me to the emotional aspects, and for a while made sex little more than a biological fact to me, interesting indeed, but not something worth risking my pride and childhood with. And it worked for a while. Then I fell into the river that is highschool, and sort of settled in with the sexy fish. But by then, I'd educated myself enough to approach sex more responsibly than most teens. That's when I came to understand the moaning and the groaning, and the importance of the words "faster" and "harder". Then came the porn.

[Coral Rhedd]

My parent's never said a word to me. Ever. With my interest in science and young-adult scifi novels, I basically knew more than my parents by the time I was ten (but then again, my parents didn't own a single book, much less a medical one) But everything in my family has a "if you even consider doing such a thing, think through the implications and possible threats, and decide if it's worth becoming the target of cruel mockery and unspoken dissapointment." Science and my parent's attitude desensitized me to the emotional aspects, and for a while made sex little more than a biological fact to me, interesting indeed, but not something worth risking my pride and childhood with. And it worked for a while. Then I fell into the river that is highschool, and sort of settled in with the sexy fish. But by then, I'd educated myself enough to approach sex more responsibly than most teens. That's when I came to understand the moaning and the groaning, and the importance of the words "faster" and "harder". Then[/i'] came the porn.

 

Azure, I have to tell you frankly that I don't think that bodes well for your happiness.

 

This is because what our culture expects of young women is different from what it expects of guys. I am not saying that is right, but just that that is the way it is.

 

When people are different from the culture at large and from their families and their families' values in particular, it is lonely. Every step we take emotionally, intellectually, culturally from our backgrounds estranges us somewhat from "who we are." The problem is "who we are" has gone and disappeared and we can't get home again.

 

I say this as the first person in my family to go to college. Here's what my mother said to me upon graduation: "Well I guess you are too good for us now." She was not joking.

 

Well, I just wrote "gollegs" for "college." I guess it's time for me to turn in.

[AzurePhoenix]

Ouch. And yeah, I did eventually get saddled with a bad rep, that of the Wild Prude. It died though after sophomore year, when I became just one one of the other 49 percent of the 1,500 girls at my school to ADMIT to doing it. Am I proud? Not really, not that I'm ashamed. Why, because porn has desensitized me even further. Not a good thing, I believe.

[Ophiolite]

I am wholly opposed to censorship. One of the prices of freedom is that people are free to be stupid and tasteless. It is a price I am happy to pay because I can generally navigate around stupidity and tastelessness. We do need to provide 'mechanisms' that protect children from the plethora of porn (or cornucopia of copulation, if you prefer), but censorship should not be one of these mechanisms.