EU chief calls for a bloc-wide push on an age verification app to protect children online. If enforced, users will have to prove their age to access legally restricted sites.
But please can you tell me how you believe this differs from age-gating the purchase of cigarettes, lottery tickets, age restricted cinema tickets, alcohol, firearms and so many other things we already have age-gating on?
Did you just seriously compare smoking/drinking at 13 to seeing titties online (which is basically mandatory for growing up humans unless you want to develop mental disorders commonly seen in religious people, conservatives, rural Japan, etc. who didn’t have proper childhood)? Seriously?
No definitely not. Smoking at 13 is obviously worse than watching a picture of a naked person. FWIW I grew up in the Nordics which very much has a culture of nakedness (children and old and young all shower in a shared space, all naked, for example). I don’t have a concern at all about nakedness and I agree finding a bag of damp porno mags in a shed is part and parcel of growing up in your teens. No concerns from me.
Having said that, I hope you also will agree that “a couple of titties” is not what most pornography online, today, actually displays. The vast amount of pornography degrades women, and a lot of it glosses over the very real power imbalances and subsequent abuses of a lot of vulnerable people. I haven’t got a single concern with what consenting adults choose to do together - if you’d like to dress in a plastic outfit and be spanked red, go for it! And seeing naked people in communal spaces (beaches, dressing rooms) is super helpful for your development and understanding of what “normal” is (beautiful, flabby, wrinkled, brown, pink, curly and all the wonderful sizes and shapes we all are). Count me in on nakedness!!
But I do have a concern with the adult industry as a whole and I seriously doubt that a 12 year old having unfettered access to what porn today actually portrays is helpful for that person’s development.
All that said, age gating and access to pornography is clearly not the same discussion.
Age gating is a discussion that fundamentally asks “ok, if we age gate products in the real world, like alcohol and tobacco and pornography, why don’t we also age gate it online?”.
If we decided not to age gate pornography - at least “soft pornography”(hard to define, but let’s pretend that we could), I’d be all up for not also age gating this online.
But if we, as a democratic society, decide that some things should be age gated, I’m all for also attempting - indeed ensuring - that these are age gated online.
Of course there a enormous risks of age gating online - I get that showing an ID to a shop keeper is a transaction that’s very hard to log and therefore track at large - that has to be adequately handled. Here, I believe the US proposal is atrocious and an enormous violation of privacy. But, genuinely, when you read the EU implementation, I do not have the same privacy concerns. Don’t forget the EU proposal is authored by the same bodies that forced GDPR onto the world (with ALL the good that this brought for ensuring our PII was protected). The EU isn’t perfect, but largely the EU is of, by and for the people, still, and our collective democracy, with all the faults that it has, is trying to balance all these concerns appropriately. I think the current implementation achieves the right balance and I am frustrated that many who are against the EU proposal haven’t actually read it, then equate it with the US proposal, which is fundamentally different, and equate the democratic EU with the plutocratic US. Like always in the US, almost everything degrades into “how can this make the rich richer”. That is, luckily, not yet the case in the EU.
While there are categories of porn that are degrading to women (this is really subjective by the way as many women don’t see it that way), there are just as many categories for vice versa, whether’s that’s free use, BDSM, dom-play, etc., so it’s hard for me to see this as a women-specific thing.
Alright, let me ask you this - when/where do you think women had/have less respect from men - during the era of porn, or when/where porn is not easily accessible? This of course also applies to countries who are more actively censoring porn in modern age.
Personally, I can’t really explain it, but I prefer categories where women dominate over men. When it comes to sex, I like to be ordered around.
Are you the type of person who would think woman sitting on a man’s face is degrading towards the man, or do you claim it’s only degrading when these intimate things are done towards women?
I grew up playing Postal 2, shoving cats onto my shotgun, pissing on Indians (I’m sorry) and basically terrorizing everyone. Yet, I turned out complete opposite of that.
I think we are veering off topic. I agree that pornography can degrade all genders, not just women, and that much of what appears degrading to an observer is actually just someone’s kink (and power to them).
That said, this is a slightly different discussion to age gating.
Did you just seriously compare smoking/drinking at 13 to seeing titties online (which is basically mandatory for growing up humans unless you want to develop mental disorders commonly seen in religious people, conservatives, rural Japan, etc. who didn’t have proper childhood)? Seriously?
No definitely not. Smoking at 13 is obviously worse than watching a picture of a naked person. FWIW I grew up in the Nordics which very much has a culture of nakedness (children and old and young all shower in a shared space, all naked, for example). I don’t have a concern at all about nakedness and I agree finding a bag of damp porno mags in a shed is part and parcel of growing up in your teens. No concerns from me.
Having said that, I hope you also will agree that “a couple of titties” is not what most pornography online, today, actually displays. The vast amount of pornography degrades women, and a lot of it glosses over the very real power imbalances and subsequent abuses of a lot of vulnerable people. I haven’t got a single concern with what consenting adults choose to do together - if you’d like to dress in a plastic outfit and be spanked red, go for it! And seeing naked people in communal spaces (beaches, dressing rooms) is super helpful for your development and understanding of what “normal” is (beautiful, flabby, wrinkled, brown, pink, curly and all the wonderful sizes and shapes we all are). Count me in on nakedness!!
But I do have a concern with the adult industry as a whole and I seriously doubt that a 12 year old having unfettered access to what porn today actually portrays is helpful for that person’s development.
All that said, age gating and access to pornography is clearly not the same discussion.
Age gating is a discussion that fundamentally asks “ok, if we age gate products in the real world, like alcohol and tobacco and pornography, why don’t we also age gate it online?”.
If we decided not to age gate pornography - at least “soft pornography”(hard to define, but let’s pretend that we could), I’d be all up for not also age gating this online.
But if we, as a democratic society, decide that some things should be age gated, I’m all for also attempting - indeed ensuring - that these are age gated online.
Of course there a enormous risks of age gating online - I get that showing an ID to a shop keeper is a transaction that’s very hard to log and therefore track at large - that has to be adequately handled. Here, I believe the US proposal is atrocious and an enormous violation of privacy. But, genuinely, when you read the EU implementation, I do not have the same privacy concerns. Don’t forget the EU proposal is authored by the same bodies that forced GDPR onto the world (with ALL the good that this brought for ensuring our PII was protected). The EU isn’t perfect, but largely the EU is of, by and for the people, still, and our collective democracy, with all the faults that it has, is trying to balance all these concerns appropriately. I think the current implementation achieves the right balance and I am frustrated that many who are against the EU proposal haven’t actually read it, then equate it with the US proposal, which is fundamentally different, and equate the democratic EU with the plutocratic US. Like always in the US, almost everything degrades into “how can this make the rich richer”. That is, luckily, not yet the case in the EU.
While there are categories of porn that are degrading to women (this is really subjective by the way as many women don’t see it that way), there are just as many categories for vice versa, whether’s that’s free use, BDSM, dom-play, etc., so it’s hard for me to see this as a women-specific thing.
Alright, let me ask you this - when/where do you think women had/have less respect from men - during the era of porn, or when/where porn is not easily accessible? This of course also applies to countries who are more actively censoring porn in modern age.
Personally, I can’t really explain it, but I prefer categories where women dominate over men. When it comes to sex, I like to be ordered around.
Are you the type of person who would think woman sitting on a man’s face is degrading towards the man, or do you claim it’s only degrading when these intimate things are done towards women?
I grew up playing Postal 2, shoving cats onto my shotgun, pissing on Indians (I’m sorry) and basically terrorizing everyone. Yet, I turned out complete opposite of that.
I think we are veering off topic. I agree that pornography can degrade all genders, not just women, and that much of what appears degrading to an observer is actually just someone’s kink (and power to them).
That said, this is a slightly different discussion to age gating.
Is it? The discussion is about whether kids online should be able to access that material and whether it’s protecting, or damaging.