The UK moves to make all porn strictly opt-in. Focus: What's your relationship with porn? If you're in the UK, how will you deal with this? Alt-focus: What ramifications does this have? How do you feel about this issue? I have a lot of thoughts about this matter (obviously), but I'm not entirely done sorting them out. This doesn't have to be a serious thread, but try to keep the ridiculous in-fighting to an amusing minimum.
This is a tremendously stupid law and is just an excuse to capture all internet traffic, which is a requirement for this to work at all. Maybe Britain threw this in before their own NSA-style spying is revealed to the world. Now they have a reason besides spying to capture all internet traffic. I'm sure most die hard porn users won't have much trouble circumventing this idiocy, particularly the teenagers that need porn the most. If I lived in the UK, I would just hope that whatever I had to do to get around the filter didn't limit the bandwidth available for me to stream porn. That would suck.
I bet all of this just added another 5 years to Hugh Heffner's and what's his face of Hustler's life.
So I only glanced at the article. Basically your Safe-Search, like with Google images, is always on by default? And you just have to turn it off? I get the broader monitoring implications, but I want to make sure the direct impact and work around is that basic.
Protecting the innocence of children is a fool's errand. As long as children grow up, they will lose their innocence. Why is it fetishized so much? You'd imagine that all children grew up in a family of 2.5 kids with a white picket fence out front and doting, loving parents in the UK, because that must be the situation if the most important thing David Cameron can do is start making legislation like this.
This is basically how I feel about it. I mean, this is quite literally an internet censor (that you can opt out of, but a censor nonetheless). We are talking about government-leveling filtering and censoring of legal information on the internet. Talk about a dangerous precedent. And this is my opinion completely independent of any stated aims of this project. "There has been growing alarm at evidence that a third of children have accessed online pornography by the time they reach ten." Who fucking cares? I wasn't even allowed on the internet when I was 10, except for schoolwork. It's called parenting. And if I had seen porn, I don't think my brain would have exploded. Typical scaremongering bullshit. This, to me, is indicative of a seriously Orwellian mindset.
Censoring internet porn or not, ten year old boys will steal the porn mags they find in their dads room and trade it with their buddies like we all did before the dawn of the internet. Nothing will change and it's funny how prudish overbearing politicians think kids from this date forward will remain "innocent."
Or have to learn how to rip and burn porno and learn scarcity pricing when gouging their friends for it. We had to dub it with two VCRs in my day.
I actually stopped* watching porn a little over a year ago. I always used to scoff at the term "porn addict," but I'm pretty sure I was one. I was watching it every day and the number of videos I watched/downloaded in each sitting was pretty fucking crazy once I thought about it. Having been (mostly) removed from it for a year now, I definitely feel like it was messing with my perception of women and relationships. The porn I do watch now is more on the "sexy" end of the spectrum as opposed to the "interracial midget bukkake" end. *Ok fine, not quite... cut back by about 95% though. As for the ban though, I think it's stupid. I saw a TED talk discussing the psychological effects of regularly watching hardcore porn that made me want to try stopping. Bans in general are pretty dumb ways of addressing problems, I think.
I think that this regulation is unenforceable and that the attempts to enforce it are going to have some pretty unpleasant consequences. However, I feel like the vehemence with which a lot of people are reacting to this has less to do with a love of freedom, and more to do with (mostly men) feeling entitled to see (mostly female) nudity. I have always been pro-porn (especially in theory), but in some weird way, I sympathize with the aims of this measure. If not it's practical application. It's a weird feeling. This whole thing has me unsure of how I feel about my own relationship to porn; I've (obviously) watched enough of it in my day, but maybe I'm participating in something that prejudices entitlement over compassion.
FOCUS: No relationship with porn. I think I'm about the only guy here who doesn't have any porn videos. ALT. FOCUS: Honestly, I have no feelings whatsoever about porn. I've never owned a porn mag, nor a porn dvd. However, on the wider issue of the now-sanctioned Government spying, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest. The U.K. has had a problem with terrorism over the last 50 years, from both internal and external sources, and I reckon the government are going to use this as an excuse to widen monitoring on everything there. That can be the only reason I can think of at the moment for them to pursue this, since U.K. kids seem to be fucking at a younger age than most other places, other than South Africa of course. I think it's a bad thing because anything that the government does to spy on its people or act as an overbearing watchdog is bad, but, now that it has been voted in and signed off by the Queen into law, there's not much anyone can do about it. As an aside, maybe some of the Government ministers have some holdings in the porn industry and have just seen their potential profits skyrocket due to people now having to buy DVDs instead of viewing on RedTube, YouPorn, etc.. - I know many of our government ministers here are corrupt enough to try that (and get away with it).
It doesn't matter if its porn. As others have said, it's just about the government wanting to control the Internet (which theyve always wanted) and essentially what we do. Something this brazen would probably could not take hold here, but Europeans like that kind of thing. They want their governments to tell them everything, so I'm not surprised. Then again, with the NSA stuff, jokes on us anyway.
I would be less bothered by this if I actually trusted these filters to just stop porn and not anything to do with sex. We don't have a porn filter at work because every one we tried would block sexual education resources, which our providers and outreach program need to access.
Basically this. Good luck going to the idiot board unless you opt in for turning off the family filter. Want to find out what that weird rash is on your junk? Sorry, those STD awareness sites are blocked. Hell, with the amount of sex articles on Wikipedia, Wikpedia will probably be blocked.
If the porn factor has anything to do with it, I'd say it's giving people a reason to care. It's easy not to give a shit about erosion of civil liberties if it doesn't affect you, but if it means you can't jack off to easily-available porn? Suddenly people give a shit. The reason people are reacting doesn't really affect the logic of the argument against it.
I agree, and I don't think the ban is a good idea. However, reading people's reactions to it (esp. on Reddit, which is my own damn fault), is kind of turning me off to the idea of porn as a whole. Quite frankly, I've read too much creepy shit. I'll probably shift my views with distance and reflection, but my gut reaction is that the way we consume porn isn't entirely healthy.
Who's "we"? I don't look at porn often, but when I do I don't consider a communal activity. It's a pretty private thing, and if it makes someone uncomfortable then they can easily avoid it. Swap out porn with a vice you like, would you have the same perspective? I mean porn is an interesting thing to characterize. It varies so vastly, it's tough to lump in Playboy with BDSM under the same umbrella. Whatevs, Brits have more important things to worry about, like OMG WHAT DID WILLIAM AND KATE NAME THE BABY?
Again, I don't want to make porn illegal, and I'm not trying to say people shouldn't look at it. Just that I'm reconsidering whether I personally feel comfortable with the way it's consumed. I guess by we I meant, "american porn consumers at large." I said we because I'm a member of that group, and it hardly becomes me to not mention that. I've always been pro-porn, which is why my reaction to this is confusing to me. I'm wondering if I'm a hypocrite, is all. Ehh.
I think any "normal" person has the internal "do I watch too much porn" dialogue from time to time. I certainly do. But then I put it in perspective. I see the people who wait in line for hours to meet porn stars at Exxotica, who tweet at them constantly begging for RTs, who fucking buy them shit from their Amazon wishlists (I mean, seriously, I don't understand that nonsense). Then I look at all the ranges of porn, even pretty mainstream that don't do it for me (BDSM, aggressive anal, weird ass role playing) and then I look at the majority of my consumption and realize that in the grand scheme of sexual things, its pretty vanilla. Who gives a shit if I watch it daily. Its not like I'd gladly beat off to a Brazzers orgy video as opposed to hooking up with a real live female. Now when I used to have 50 GBs of it on my computer in college, you might have raised an eyebrow. But that was just dumb hoarding behavior, like when I didn't throw away any GQs I got for 3+ years. I thought MAYBE I would want to revisit it someday, and high speed internet just made it too easy to download 20 videos at a time. If David Cameron isn't careful, he's going to turn the conservative and proud UK into the European Japan. First step, no porn. Second step, used panty machines on every corner.
I live in the UK (I'm sure you gathered that from my accent and bad teeth), and this is bollocks. There is no way this will pass, it's just Cameron being a massive twat stick and trying to secure the votes of all the fucking Daily Mail readers for next years election. To paraphrase Dr Cox, if they get rid of all the porn, there will only be one website left and it will be called 'bringbacktheporn.com'. Do not concern yourselves with the stupidity of my government-they are a bunch of fucking window lickers.