North Carolina and Montana Just Lost Access To Pornhub (404media.co) 302
Montana and North Carolina have joined a growing list of states that now require identification to view porn, or are blocked from viewing it altogether, as new age verification laws went into effect on January 1. From a report: A year ago, Louisiana paved the way for a wave of age verification laws that target porn sites; eight states have since passed copycat age verification laws of their own. Montana's SB 544 and North Carolina's HB 8 are nearly identical to Louisiana's and other states' laws. The laws' text make unsubstantiated claims about the addictive potential of pornography and its apparent harms to viewers' health. North Carolina's law was passed as part of unrelated legislation that adds a computer science course to high school graduation requirements. Rather than try to make its users jump through hoops to view its content, Pornhub's parent company has blocked viewers in Montana and North Carolina altogether, as it has in other states with similar legislation.
Cat, meet mouse. Mouse, meet cat. (Score:5, Insightful)
Never have I ever witnessed a piece of legislation make a person interested in looking at nekkid people stop looking at nekkid people.
Heck, if these states were smarter about the issue, they'd simply add on some mandatory state tax to use those services. You know, like they did as part of the "catch" for legalizing marijuana. HUGE revenues to be had there.
state regulationed porn? (Score:2)
state regulationed porn?
if they try to tax it like marijuana, beer, casinos. Then they will need to come up with rules and enforcement. But the rules may end going to far and end up in an 1st case in the us supreme court
Re:state regulationed porn? (Score:4, Insightful)
state regulationed porn?
if they try to tax it like marijuana, beer, casinos. Then they will need to come up with rules and enforcement. But the rules may end going to far and end up in an 1st case in the us supreme court
Marijuana, beer, and casinos also require age verification
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Don't forget needing to show ID to buy groceries [cnn.com].
It's so much worse (Score:2, Insightful)
Doesn't matter. Anyone on the right wing that supports this (and I know there are many here on
In a few years demographic changes will make this moot, but it's hard to get these laws repealed once they're on the books. So the damage done in these states will remain.
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this means people will go to less reputable sites for the content. The kind that back criminals, sex traffickers, terrorists & money launderers.
Which sites would those be, you mean pornhub?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/... [theverge.com]
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> this means people will go to less reputable sites for the content
Nah, they'll just use a VPN, heck its built into many browsers now.
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>In a few years demographic changes will make this moot
at that point internet porn will be the absolute least of our worries.
Re:It's so much worse (Score:4, Funny)
I don't see how.
How? HOW? Are you serious? How can you not see what's coming when "the liberals" take over? There's going to be a litter box in every school bathroom. Gender reassignment surgery will be readily available to any 13 year old that wants it, taxpayer funded of course. We'll be aborting 32-week fetuses as fast we can. The Southern border will have been completely removed, and the US will effectively be renamed "Northern Mexico". There won't be a single white male in any position of power. Every gun will have been confiscated and destroyed. We'll all be eating bug-protein-burgers. Christmas will be abolished. It will be illegal to display an American flag. All mention of controversial figures will have been completely removed from history books. The stock market will have long collapsed. I think that about covers it, did I miss any? /s
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Thanks for the /s, It's needed as your hyperbole wasn't even close to the craziest claims I have heard.
Re:It's so much worse (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be implying that future generations will be more liberal?
They have poles out already showing that not only are some of the millennials and Gen Z getting a bit more conservative as they age, BUT...the youngest generation out there coming up (forget their moniker) are starting out more conservative.
Over these past few years, the left, led by a minority of VERY loud extremists have pulled the Democrats so far left that normal people are getting tired of it...and the pendulum seems to be swinging back here now.
Now, if you were just implying that the next couple generations like pr0n more than us older folks do....I still dunno about that.
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UGH...
I have got to start proofreading better....I've been doing this one more and more lately.
POLLS
That's what I meant to say. I'm sure folks of the Polish persuasion feel about pr0n just the same as most everyone else in the world (except muslims).
Re: It's so much worse (Score:2)
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I'm more concerned about the monthly active shooter training drills that grade schoolers have to participate in. That and learning how to apply tourniquets. https://www.newsweek.com/texas... [newsweek.com]
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You're completely misunderstanding. It's about freedom and not having kids exposed to drag queens, not about kids getting slaughtered every other month. This is part of life so the little ones will just have to deal with it. There are more important things to worry about.
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Better to die as a child than to grow up and like wearing the wrong kind of shoes.
Re:Cat, meet mouse. Mouse, meet cat. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that there is legal material that is still embarrassing. See for example https://thehill.com/homenews/e... [thehill.com] where a university provost was fired for posting his own completely legal porn videos on a porn site. Think if the issues when some politicians preferences in legal but embarrassing porn are revealed. .
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walking around with a plastic trout on your head everywhere you go would be embarassing too, and might get you dismissed as university provost if you insisted on showing up black tie dinners etc in your trout hat but its not illegal.
Why do believe you have some kind of privacy right in commerce?
The vast majority of the handles decrying regulation of porn here are the same people that scream constantly that we don't have enough financial regulation etc; that people should not be able to give politicians unli
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I wonder if it is unsaid by the proponents of these laws that they want people to be publicly shamed and be subject to id fraud as "punishment" for looking at nekked people.
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Errr.
You have definitely NOT seen pr0n that is commonly out there these days.
What you describe sounds more like what you saw in the 70's....where the on screen talent had so much pubic hair that you'd need a machete to get through it all....
Not clean shaven everywhere like they are today.
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A wise woman once said, "Poor is the man whose pleasure depends on the permission of another."
You know damned well they aren't doing this to protect kids.
If those sites were smart (Score:3)
Now would be a great time for PornHub to acquire a VPN company.
>In North Carolina, Senator Amy Galey, who pushed for the law
Her district is one of the most solidly right-wing districts in the state. So much for "small government staying out of our lives".
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Now would be a great time for PornHub to acquire a VPN company.
>In North Carolina, Senator Amy Galey, who pushed for the law
Her district is one of the most solidly right-wing districts in the state. So much for "small government staying out of our lives".
They are, except when someone may do something they don't like and then they're all for guv'ment to put a stop to it. God forbid something be put to a vote because people may vote teh wrong way so we have to stop them from voting.
Re: If those sites were smart (Score:5, Insightful)
How insightful. So you'd have no issue with age verification requirements for, say, political websites? If you want to read fox news you get to give government ID an go on a list? After all, that speech might "harm" my child if I don't want them to see it.
That's the difference between this and alcohol or tobacco, it's legal speech being regulated and the method of verification is designed to be non anonymous. The goal being to try and shame people into not doing it. Is the tradeoff for that precedent worth it for the great reward of some kid spending slightly more time to see boobies?
Re: If those sites were smart (Score:4, Insightful)
So your positions are:
1) These States are not banning porn to protect children, and you support this.
2) These States could ban porn, which you would also support.
FWIW, it's true that obscenity is not protected by by the First Amendment, you are the one who is being disingenuous in denying it is a goal. There is no political will to determine which Montana Hotwives movies are actually obscene (hard work, I'm sure), but this "for the children" legislation is an easy way to ram such a ban through the backdoor. These are the same states that wouldn't recognize gay marriage and forbid aborting doomed fetuses--not for the well-being of those injured by the law, but because conservatives are deeply invested in controlling others' sexuality.
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but because conservatives are deeply invested in controlling others' sexuality.
For values of "others'" that start and end with "women's." Men's sexuality is a different matter.
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Literally every sentence in your post is factually incorrect:
Nope your argument is just more bunk.
Demonstrably untrue, as the history of censorship efforts by both sides shows.
Pornography is not speech.
The Supreme Court has said otherwise, more than once.
The courts ruled on that a long time ago.
OK, technically, this is true. SCOTUS did rule on it a long time ago. They ruled that pornography is speech, and as such, protected by the 1st amendment.
This is about obscenity and that isn't protected.
While obscenity isn't protected, not all pornography is obscenity, as the Supreme Court has ruled. And this is not about obscenity, which is already illegal under e
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Do you doubt the monkeys that flew out of his butt?
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Oh shut up, this is such disingenuous bullshit.
You really ought to be ashamed of yourself. Nobody banded pornhub, they took their ball and went home because they can't be arsed to check id.
Do think drinking ages and restrictions on cigarette sales that also require id checks, are similar examples of government over-reach?
Yes
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They took their ball and went home because there is no 100% secure way of storing the information, as has been proven countless times over the years. There is no such thing as unhackable, and the first time that happened they'd be sued into oblivion, which is probably the ultimate endgoal of these laws.
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I just always used the cigarette machines to get mine whenever a store wouldn't sell them to me.
Re:If those sites were smart (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think that the modern Republican party gives two shits about "small government" and "states' rights" you clearly are not paying attention, just like they clearly don't give two shits about "fiscal responsibility" any more.
Small government doesn't wedge itself into the exam room with a woman and her gynecologist.
Small government doesn't fly off it's axle when a state or two expresses their constitutional right to govern elections per state laws.
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Not that i disagree with your point about small government, but Senator Galey's district really isn't all that conservative. In the 2020 election Alamance County went for Trump by 53.6% to 45.2%. 69 out of 100 counties had a higher percentage of their votes go to Trump. Guilford County went for Biden by 61% to 37.8%. Versus Guilford County, only 7 counties had a higher percentage of their votes go to Biden.
VPNs for the win... (Score:2)
Politicians are morons. They shouldn't try creating laws about things they have no real knowledge of.
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Politicians are morons. They shouldn't try creating laws about things they have no real knowledge of.
I suspect many politicians are very knowledgeable bout porn...
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I'd be concerned about seeing VPNs as a "solution." If a 17-year-old in Montana uses a VPN whose endpoint is in New York and they access porn, they and the pornserver have still violated the law, haven't they? The VPN doesn't cause the violation to cease to exist. The VPN merely makes it hard for the pornserver to know.
If I were the kind of person who advocated for these new laws, I would set up a "sting" and show that pornserver violated the law, just like how you might send an underage person to try to bu
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Using a VPN is like travelling to a place where you can buy alcohol at 18 instead of 21. This is probably the actual reason Pornhub is just blocking access in these states. They don't want to expose themselves to the liability inherent in trying to verify someone's age, which is hard enough in person, so they just won't do business there. Want porn? You need to travel. Oh, someone is transporting porn into your state and distributing it without age verification? That sounds like a them problem. They're loca
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So... they shouldn't pass any laws at all? Because they sure won't pass any one bribes and kickbacks...
VPN? (Score:2)
I'm guessing mindgeek did the numbers and figured out that enough people are using cheap VPNs nowadays anyway, that any legislation of this kind is less impactful with people just VPN:ing into their site from out of their state, than having some complex age gating system that would have any chance of satisfying the legal requirements.
Kids will just find ways around (Score:2)
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Guaranteed.
Okay, boomer, you clearly didn't go through school recently if you think that backdoors, bypasses, hacks, etc aren't being shared on a massive scale in schools...
But you go ahead thinking that you've solved the juvenile porn access problem if you feel better...
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That's not even true.
Kids live and thrive on peer esteem. You know, my grandpa had a shop where he also sold among other things porn mags. You think I was popular as a kid? You bet I was. I was the guy who can sneak the boobies into our world.
Why would you think any of this changed? How popular do you think a kid can get now if they can bring the boobies back?
And remember, your kids have WAY more time than you on their hands to thwart your attempts to keep them from getting what they want. And in this case,
Brought to you by (Score:5, Insightful)
The party of small limited government
The party of personal responsibility
The my body my choice crowd (only applies to vaccines)
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The party of small limited government
The party of personal responsibility
The my body my choice crowd (only applies to vaccines)
Should children have access to pornography?
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That 'it takes a village' thing has gotten very popular of late. So instead of parenting we have state nannying.
Re:Brought to you by (Score:5, Insightful)
Should adults be denied access to pornography?
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Should children have access to pornography?
Sounds like something parents or guardians should decide, not the state government.
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Yes. They ain't my kids.
Raise your kids yourself if you don't want them to, don't offload it onto me.
Alternatively, just don't have ki... oh, sorry, forgot, you're not allowed not to anymore.
Re:Brought to you by (Score:5, Informative)
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I loved it when people suggested that a counter-protest to the anti-abortion crowd should show up with "My Body, My Choice" signs.
And Texas.... (Score:3)
has lot access to abortion, even when the woman's life can be shown to be in danger.
I wonder if Texans would ave preferred to have lost access to some porn sites instead.
Obi-Wan (Score:2)
I felt a great disturbance in the P0rn, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Won't people in those states... (Score:2)
just go to some site not in the USA for their pron?
(replies can post links to their favorites)
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Pornhub has headquarters in Canada, as does their parent company. The many actual corporations are incorporated in a bunch of different tax haven countries.
what would Republicans actually have to do (Score:3)
to get their easily-duped constituents to actually realize that they're not the party of "small government", but rather just hypocritical bigoted puritanical death cult dictators?
shoot somebody... (Score:2)
Just like alcohol sites? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sites that sell/promote alcohol just have a "are you over 21?" checkbox... why is that sufficient for alcohol and not porn? It's an attempt at censorship, cloaked in "think of the children".
Re:Just like alcohol sites? (Score:5, Insightful)
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yep - as a "public shaming" deterrent from viewing that content... i.e. censorship.
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Sites that sell/promote alcohol just have a "are you over 21?" checkbox... why is that sufficient for alcohol and not porn? It's an attempt at censorship, cloaked in "think of the children".
Porn profits "the wrong people." Alcohol profits "the right people." End of line.
Unsubstantiated? Seriously? (Score:2)
Regarding the addictive potential, this is basic neurochemistry 101 not a puritanical, trumped-up guess.
It's a dopamine hit. It's the same reason people get addicted to slots, gacha pulls, or even likes on Facebook. It is well documented.
For people with a neurodivergent vulnerability to dopamine bursts, it can definitely become an issue and eventually a problem. That's one good reason for an age limit. It's also a good reason for a strictly enforced engagement time limit. These systems should shut people ou
Boosting VPN business (Score:2)
Internet REAL IDENTITY Law (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the fuck is no one talking about the fact this is a backdoor Chinese style "real identity" law?
does Pornhub own shares in a VPN commpany? (Score:2)
just trying to connect the dots
Replubicans... (Score:3)
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Which is to say, indistinguishable from Democrats without a score card. (And historically, the left is far more likely to go after porn than the right. But those days are gone. It's an election year, and that's all any of them care about.)
And here I thought... (Score:3, Insightful)
that the Trump Crime Family (formerly the Grand Oligarchic Party) was all for smaller government and more freedom.
I still think Giz had the best headline ... (Score:3)
Montana and North Carolina Lawmakers Just Came for Pornhub, So Now You Can’t
Story then opened with "After months of edging, Montana and North Carolina lawmakers have finished off Pornhub."
Come on, those are good, right?
Not Virgina? (Score:2)
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Thankful VA has - and at least if the reporting is accurate, I have not tested, Pornhub blocks VA too.
I am sure the state is better for it. Just like it is better for having not elected a prostitute.
I wish they'd told the states to pound sand (Score:3)
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This. Absolutely this. They should have said "We have no offices, no staff, no servers, no infrastructure and no presence in North Carolina or Montana therefore we are not subject to North Carolina or Montana law".
d
Confused (Score:2)
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This is headed for the Supreme Court, which will likely strike it down. But it will take years to get there.
Ok, spill it (Score:2)
What VPN provider paid for this law? Nobody else really benefits from it.
VPN companies are thrilled (Score:2)
Like always.
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Those states are going to be forced back to porn dvds and magazines
Re:Obligatory The Critic quote (Score:4, Funny)
Those states are going to be forced back to porn dvds and magazines
A wise move, creating local jobs transferring videos to DVD-R. :-)
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Those states are going to be forced back to porn dvds and magazines
Why not their imaginations? Damned lazy kids!
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Good thing they kept their collection of vintage erotic daguerrotypes.
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Too bad the Sears catalog with its girdle section is gone. Do they still mail the Victoria's Secret catalog?
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There are websites that, you know, force users to create accounts and use credit cards that serve as excellent age checks.
Chase allows my 12 year old to have a credit card, so simply "you have a credit card so you must be over 18" is not a good way to verify anymore.
Re:Obligatory The Critic quote (Score:5, Funny)
sure, porn has no value, that's why it's a billion dollar industry.
Don't confuse cost and value (Score:2)
sure, porn has no value, that's why it's a billion dollar industry.
The OP didn't say nothing of cost was lost. He said nothing of value was lost.
Re:Obligatory The Critic quote (Score:5, Insightful)
no something of value was lost, you're just being overly myopic. the government has no right to censor what people can or cannot see in their own home. Putting an age restriction/verification is a privacy shit-show and a form of censorship.
First porn, then what? Dissenting views? (of course they'd gussy it up as "fake news" or "misinformation" -- but the result is the same)
Re:Obligatory The Critic quote (Score:5, Insightful)
just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it SHOULD be done.
there's a huge distinction there; mommy has no business sticking her snout into this.
Re:Obligatory The Critic quote (Score:5, Insightful)
no something of value was lost, you're just being overly myopic. the government has no right to censor what people can or cannot see in their own home. Putting an age restriction/verification is a privacy shit-show and a form of censorship.
First porn, then what? Dissenting views? (of course they'd gussy it up as "fake news" or "misinformation" -- but the result is the same)
There are laws requiring age verification to purchase pornographic material in the real world. It is illegal to show pornography to minors. These laws require sites to verify age before showing porn to their visitors. This is a reasonable request, but often poorly implemented. I would imagine most users would not want their real name associated with such sites. Would you trust such a site with an uploaded copy of your drivers license?
It sounds like a reasonable request only until you start to think about the practical problems. It is technologically infeasible to do so in a manner that protects privacy. A video store checking your ID only does so at the time of sale, not at the time of consumption. A website checking your ID needs to do so at the time of sale, which is the same as the time of consumption.
It's one thing to require you to show an ID at a video store, where a disinterested worker glances at you, glances at the ID, checks the year, and sells you some DVDs that you watch a week later. It's quite another to require someone to activate a webcam inside their house and keep it running so that the website can know that the person who hits the play button on these videos is the person whose ID got uploaded.
There's exactly one way to halfway do this that protects privacy, and that is for browsers to provide a three-way handshake between the user, a porn site, and a DMV or passport office in which an activity type identifier (e.g. for porn, drinking, voting, gambling, etc.), an opaque token (nonces), and the user's ultra-coarse location (state level only, as obtained by the browser, not the website) are passed through the browser from the website to the DMV or other similar site, attached to an age verification blob signed by the DMV, passed back, and the signature is verified using the DMV's public key. That way, the DMV doesn't know what site you visited, and the site knows only what state you live in and that you are an adult of legal age for the specified activity.
And even that would be rather easy to get around. Just patch your browser to always report its location as some state with more lax laws. Or use someone else's computer. As soon as you require a website to verify the age of a particular person, rather than the owner of the computer, this becomes an intractable problem.
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If you don't want your kids looking up porn, well you need to parent and prevent that from happening. But that said, I firmly believe that allowing mommy (government, in this case .. just on the off chance it wasn't obvious) to stick her ever lengthening snout into the online affairs of the public is going to lead to the erosion of privacy/anonymity/freedom of speech and expression. 15 years ago this site had all sorts of things to say about China's great firewall.. and here we are, and the preponderance
Re:Obligatory The Critic quote (Score:4, Insightful)
But no one was KEEPING PERMANENT RECORDS of who was buying "Big Jugs" or w/e, and connecting those records to the internet and waiting for hackers to breach their databases. The system only worked because none of that was happening: you flashed your I.D. if asked and the clerk never wrote anything down.
And that difference, my myopic friend, is HUGE.
Re:Obligatory The Critic quote (Score:5, Funny)
And nothing of value was lost.
However something costly and dangerous was lost, Californians relocating to the state. :-)
Re:Obligatory The Critic quote (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd much rather a teenager (or adult), watch Extreme Restraint University, Sexually Broken, Device Bondage, The Upper Floor, or even HuCow, then to think there's something wrong with their sexual desires. I know people growing up who felt ashamed by their mental spank bank, because society, school, church, parents, all said it was wrong, only to find out it wasn't wrong, there's a thriving, consenting, welcoming community around it.
Porn is a resource for learning and experimenting. Sure, some porn might be very dark and illegal, but in that same regard much of it is legal and educational. When you're 16, where are you going to about hard core BDSM? I mean in church, I guess, but do schools cover it?
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its sodomy and it is wrong
You can't reduce the entire spectrum of alternative sexual interest exploration down to "Sodomy". Sure, some people want anal enjoyment, but plenty of people inside the BSDM spectrum, and other alternative sexual interests don't. Let's assume you're a 15-year-old male, and you have images in your head of an attractive math teacher forcing you into sexual submission, is it better you punish yourself emotionally because it's wrong, or, should you find an outlet to explore those ideas safely, and privately?
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Re: Obligatory The Critic quote (Score:3)
If you think pornography is harmful despite every study that tried to prove that EVER finding the opposite or a null result you're anti-science and we don't need you on Slashdot.