Recently the French Parliament signed off on an age verification bill, which attempts to prevent under-18s from viewing adult content. The problem is that like the UK's attempts to do similar things in 2019, there are a whole bunch of issues with the plan. In this video, we explain what the French are trying to achieve and if their plans can overcome the security, censorship and privacy concerns.
Showing posts with label porn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label porn. Show all posts
18 July 2020
26 May 2019
UnHerd: Do men want sex more than women?
The most famous research on the subject is a 2001 meta-analysis by Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Catanese, and Kathleen Vohs, combining the results of 150 earlier studies. You can’t measure “sex drive” directly, so the study looked at a wide range of proxy measures. They found that men had more frequent sexual “thoughts, fantasies, and spontaneous arousal” – for instance, one study they looked at reported that “nearly all the men (91%) but only half the women (52%) experienced sexual desire several times a week or more”.
And men masturbated more frequently. The authors admit that this could be due to social disapproval of female masturbation. But they also argue that male masturbation is discouraged just as much as female – “it’ll make you go blind”, and so on – and point out that boys were more likely to have “discovered it themselves”, meaning it’s not that boys are being “taught” how to do it and girls aren’t. “Anyone who wants to masturbate can probably figure out how to do it,” they say. [...]
Men are more interested in a wider range of sexual practices. Men sacrificed more for sexual pleasure, whether in financial terms – they spent more on pornography – or in terms of risk – they were more willing to have extramarital sex. In general, men have more “favourable attitudes to sex”, being more permissive regarding casual sex and promiscuous sex. And overall, men are less likely to report low sexual desire and more likely to rate their level of sex drive highly. [...]
It also doesn’t necessarily mean that the difference is innate, although the transgender androgen response (if it’s real) sort of hints that it is. There may well be socialisation or cultural effects as well – there is some evidence, for instance, that certain fetishes are affected by how many siblings you have and how old they are. But many of the differences in sex drive are large effects, and most research these days finds that even major events like schooling and parenting have only a modest impact on other aspects of personality, so I would be surprised if socialisation is the only driver.
17 May 2019
The Atlantic: What Is Pornography Doing to Our Sex Lives?
In the past few decades, digital pornography has been blamed for—well, pick a noun and add the word sex. It’s been named as a culprit for both sex addiction and sex abstinence. It’s been blamed for poor sex education, rampant sexual violence, and rising sexual dysfunction. Pornography is practically the Swiss Army knife of social calamity. [...]
The academic literature on pornography is not like that of climate change or gravity, where practically all researchers agree on the big picture. Instead, there is a broad group of academics and advocates who are deeply split on whether pornography amounts to a public-health crisis, or whether it’s an often harmless outlet and a common scapegoat for dissatisfied couples. [...]
The truth, she argues, is that porn is like food. Much of it is harmless. And some of it is bad. But some of it is simply good. Younger people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, growing up in a small town without friends who share their sexual orientation, might discover in pornography a window into their own experience—and the message that there is nothing wrong with their feelings. “They might see pornography almost like a safe space,” Rothman says. “It can be inspiring and really helpful.”
5 April 2019
UnHerd: Just how harmful is porn?
Exactly what percentage of men watch porn isn’t clear, but it’s most of them. In 2009, a University of Montreal researcher tried to do a study on how pornography affects men, and couldn’t find any men in their 20s who hadn’t used it to use as a control group. This study found 98% of men (and 73% of women) had used it in the last six months. This one found 87% of men report using it for sexual purposes, along with 31% of women. [...]
This runs a big risk of creating a database of sexual preferences and porn habits, in the hands of providers with varying abilities to protect it. This sort of thing has happened before: the “dating site for married people”, Ashley Madison, was hacked in 2015. It became something of a feeding frenzy for extortionists, and there were reports of suicides linked to the leak. A lot more people use porn than use skeevy hookup sites for affairs. And it’d be OK for those of us with vanilla proclivities, but for people with unusual or hidden kinks, it could be awful. [...]
I want to be charitable, though. The Government’s impact assessment is embarrassingly bad, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no impact to assess. I spoke to Dr Victoria Nash of the Oxford Internet Institute: she took part in a major review of the evidence in 2015. She said that they found that establishing the evidence of harm is extremely difficult. “There’s a really limited evidence base,” she said. “There are many studies looking at impact on young people but it’s very hard to draw strong conclusions from them.” [...]
You may think that adults shouldn’t be allowed to view porn either, of course. It’s a legitimate viewpoint, although I will point out that there is no evidence that I am aware of that, as was the fear a few years ago, porn use leads to sexual violence. If anything the correlation is the other way around – countries and states with higher porn use experience lower levels of rape and sexual assault. It may be causal, but the author of the study I just linked to says that it’s probably just because countries with liberal porn laws also tend to be more progressive generally. There was also a recently released study which found that once you control for confounding factors, there’s no link between porn consumption and adolescents’ psychological wellbeing, even in girls.
5 February 2019
IFLScience: The UK Is "Banning" Porn. What Does That Actually Mean For You?
It is not exactly clear how the government are going to execute this, but it is unlikely to be just an “I am over 18” tickbox. Some have suggested that it could be a similar deal to online gambling age-verification, whereby users are expected to plug in their credit card details or ID to prove their age. Alternatively, there is also talk of convenience stores selling so-called “porn passes” that would allow access to adult websites with a 16-digit passcode, provided they show the shopkeeper their ID.[...]
Equally, this bank would be a gold mine for anyone hoping to gather up dodgy data for sinister purposes. Remember the data breaches at Ashley Madison in 2015? Hackers stole over 60 gigabytes worth of users’ data from Ashley Madison, an online dating agency marketed to people who wanted to have an affair. The data, which quickly made its way onto the dark web, contained thousands of people’s names, emails, addresses, sexual fantasies, and credit card information.[...]
It will be relatively easy to override all of this using some relatively basic tech wizardry. The UK will be the only jurisdiction where this law applies, but it’s possible to fake your geo-location using a VPN (virtual private network). Equally, it seems a bit optimistic just to assume that prohibition will simply eradicate teenager’s curiosity to experience pornography. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.[...]
In 2014, the same UK government banned “female ejaculation” and “face-sitting” from making an appearance in disturbed porn films (although this was overturned on January 31, 2019). This sparked a fair amount of opposition from people arguing that this was sexist, as male ejaculation and aggressive male-orientated oral sex acts were not included.
13 November 2018
Politico: How the GOP Gave Up on Porn
It was the height of the porn wars. More than abortion or homosexuality, the rising tide of pornography in America was, in the 1970s, becoming central to conservative Americans’ perception of a civilization in decline. For faith leaders, it was an easily exploitable issue; for Falwell, it was a crusade. He fought to remove adult content from convenience stores. He went to court to battle Hustler and Penthouse. And he never forgave Carter—who ended up winning the White House in 1976, carrying the evangelical vote along the way—for his original sin of talking to Hugh Hefner’s publication. “Giving an interview to Playboy magazine was lending the credence and the dignity of the highest office in the land to a salacious, vulgar magazine that did not even deserve the time of his day,” Falwell said in 1981. [...]
From the 1960s through the turn of the century, pornography played a dominant role in the American political argument—its morality and legality, its restrictions and regulations, its implications and unintended consequences. It was treated as a matter of urgency not just by the religious right, which decried the hypersexualizing of society, but by the radical left, which denounced the objectifying of women. Liberal feminists and conservative evangelicals found themselves unexpectedly allied in vilifying the adult entertainment industry. After decades of intensifying conflict, Ronald Reagan convened a Presidential Commission on Pornography in 1985; two years later, Reagan held a press conference to announce his administration’s plan to combat illegal obscenity—and issue a warning to the porn professionals: “Your industry’s days are numbered.” [...]
When it landed, the 1,960-page Meese Report surprised exactly no one: It concluded that pornography was a threat to society and recommended harsher enforcement of obscenity laws. In a particularly memorable passage, the report said the link between porn consumption and violence “requires assumptions not found exclusively in the experimental evidence,” yet concluded, “We see no reason, however, not to make these assumptions … that are plainly justified by our own common sense.” The commission came under immediate criticism for its lack of scholarly rigor; academics whose work was cited by Meese protested the report’s misapplication of their data, and even National Review concluded that the commission “has to some extent found the conclusion it was looking for.” That the report’s findings were by and large empirically unsupported mattered not. Its recommendations allowed the Justice Department to execute what Reagan’s supporters were agitating for: a crackdown on porn. [...]
Terrorism was suddenly an all-eclipsing concern for Americans across the ideological spectrum. As evangelical Christians grasped what this meant for their porn campaign, their concern turned to frustration and eventually anger. Religious conservatives watched in horror as big porn hitched itself to the rise of big tech, giving obscenity a foothold in corporate America and solidifying the adult industry’s product as culturally tolerable. In December 2003, the magazine published by Christian organization Focus on the Family noted how, in 2000, “conservatives celebrated what they thought marked the end of hard-core’s unchecked reign.” Three years later, the article concluded, “those celebrations have given way to disappointment.” [...]
One might think the #MeToo era, with its fierce backlash against toxic masculinity, would give new energy to the enemies of an industry that traffics heavily in the filmed subjugation of women. Some conservatives have tried to capitalize on this point; earlier this year, Ross Douthat wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Let’s Ban Porn.” Feminists, however, are decidedly less vocal than they were in past decades, split internally over the question of whether filmed sex empowers women or exploits them. “Some have broken with the faith-based organizations, but we haven’t, even though we’re a different breed—progressive, lefty feminists,” says Gail Dines, a prominent anti-porn activist. “For us, this is still all about gender equality. You can’t pick and choose. You either believe that women and men have the right to the same political, social and cultural respect, or you don’t.”
24 August 2018
The Atlantic: My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes
When his father died, Charlie Tyrell realized he knew next to nothing about him. Tyrell and his reticent father hadn’t been close; as a young adult, Tyrell had been waiting for “the strange distance he felt between them to close,” as he describes it in his short documentary, My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes. Now, he wouldn’t have the chance.
Still, Tyrell thought that there must be some skeleton key to his late father’s experience of the world. Greg Tyrell had been something of a modest hoarder—what if, like a mosaic of memory, Charlie could piece together who Greg was through the “weird stuff he had left behind?” “I had this lingering impulse to make a film about him that looked at our relationship. Then, I found [his] porno tapes,” Tyrell told The Atlantic. “I thought it would be an absurd and funny way to approach the subject. It's hard to talk about a deceased loved one without sucking all of the air out of the room. So, by approaching it with a sense of humor, I found a way to invite people into the story in a less weighty way.”
Told through a mixed-media style that combines scrapbook animation, narration performed by David Wain, interviews with Tyrell’s family, and footage of places that were meaningful to Greg, My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes is a spirited cinematic elegy. Through the process of making the film, Tyrell would indeed discover who his father was—particularly, the tragic family history that had caused Greg to behave in a way that seemed impenetrable to his children. What begins as a story about what Tyrell describes as “some of the tackiest video pornography the 1980s had to offer” becomes the story of the courage to extricate oneself from a vicious cycle of abuse.
“It was emotionally draining at times,” Tyrell said. “This was me exposing mine and my family's relationship with our dad. But the process of looking at our relationship and shaping it into a story for a film allowed me to articulate my thoughts and feelings in a way that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.”
20 July 2018
The Atlantic: Americans Have Some Pretty Vanilla Sexual Fantasies
“If you look back to, say, Alfred Kinsey, he was focused much more on people's behaviors rather than their desires. Same with [William] Masters and [Virginia] Johnson. They were focused more on studying the physiological side of sex,” Lehmiller told me in an interview. The last significant scientific publication on the topic dates to 1995, before the popularization of the Internet, which has made pornography, sexual information, and sexual misinformation all much more widely available.[...]
Lehmiller’s findings tell a different story, however. Whether it’s due to generational change, cultural and technological change, or just differences in research methods, Lehmiller finds that the innermost fantasies of Americans appear to have evolved: For example, Lehmiller says he was surprised by how often he found men—not women, as is the stereotype—fantasized about romantic or emotional fulfillment. He asked participants how often they’d had sexual fantasies in which a variety of emotional needs were met: feeling appreciated, receiving approval, feeling desired, feeling irresistible, feeling reassured, feeling sexually competent, and emotionally connecting with a partner. Women reported having these fantasies more often than men did, but the majority of men said they fantasized about meeting these needs at least some of the time. A clear majority of people—more than 70 percent of both men and women—said they rarely or never fantasized about emotionless sex.[...]
But many Americans’ sexual fantasies remain remarkably tame, especially with regard to whom Americans fantasize about. Nine out of 10 Americans reported they had fantasized about their current partner; just over half said they did so often. “No one else comes close,” Lehmiller writes; only 7 percent reported they fantasized about any famous people—like celebrities, porn stars, or politicians—often. And favorite fantasies about simply trying a new sex act or engaging in a favorite one, statistically speaking, outnumbered favorite fantasies that fall under the category “taboo and forbidden sex” (like fetishism and voyeurism).[...]
That said, of course, it’s worth considering that people’s pornography habits might just be reflecting their desires, not inspiring them; of Lehmiller’s respondents, a vast majority said they had looked for videos that depicted their favorite fantasy, and it’s certainly possible that people who watch pornography do so because they already fantasize about the body types particular to the genre, and not the other way around. “I suspect that the availability of online porn isn’t necessarily changing our deeper underlying sexual desires, but rather is more often just giving us new ways of fulfilling existing desires that we might not necessarily have thought of before,” Lehmiller wrote to me in an email.
IFLScience: This Researcher Discovered Something Very Surprising About How Women Watch Porn
This shouldn't actually be a surprise to those paying attention. Last year, Pornhub (that's fairly SFW, unless your office has banned bar charts) dug a little deeper into their annual review and revealed that over a quarter of their users were women. What's more, when you look at the users watching gay male porn, the audience is 37 percent female. As Pornhub's report notes, that makes women proportionally more likely than men to watch gay male porn by 69 percent (nice.) [...]
But some respondents gave deeper reasons for the preference. Women reported feeling guilty about the female actors in straight porn – something they don't have to worry about for a scene starring only men. For some, this had a distressingly personal meaning – "For a subset of women who are rape and abuse survivors, m/m is one of the few types of sexually explicit media they can enjoy without feeling triggered or re-traumatised," Dr Neville explained.
Perhaps one of the most surprising findings of the study was that over half of the women watching m/m porn also imagine themselves as a man while masturbating. Many described the experience as "empowering" and "exciting" – even feeling sorry for men, who they believed feel less freedom to experiment with their identity in this way.
27 June 2018
Haaretz: Lesbian Love Out, Prostitution In: How Israel Censored Erotic Literature in the 1960s
“The phenomenon reflects the crisis of values in Israeli society at that time and the moral panic accompanying it,” observes Prof. Oded Heilbronner, a historian at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan. [...]
Archival documents from this era show that national institutions held contradictory and confusing positions about the subject question – ranging from the desire to allow a degree of freedom and avoid inessential prohibitions, to the fear of the undesirable moral influence of pornographic literature and the damage it was liable cause. [...]
But when Prof. Heilbronner examined the list of books the committee reviewed, he had trouble discerning any consistent logic behind its decisions and found that it had actually approved many pornographic books for publication. In part, this was because alongside the pornography they depicted messages in the content that “suited the views of some of parts of the establishment,” he notes. [...]
The Committee to Combat Obscene Literature was dissolved in 1967, and a year later the Committee on the Matter of Pornographic Publications was created under the aegis of the Justice Ministry. It took a relatively liberal approach to the phenomenon, and even ruled that it is impossible to prove the claim that pornography has a negative influence or to discern any connection between exposure to lewd materials and corruption of public morals. Moreover, it wrote that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have found that pornographic literature “has a positive role in relieving urges that otherwise could have led to perverted and even criminal activity.”
21 June 2018
Quartz: Porn could have a bigger economic influence on the US than Netflix
In 2012, respondents to an XBIZ poll estimated the industry makes about $5 billion a year. According to Alex Helmy, founder and publisher of adult-entertainment trade publication XBIZ, that figure would likely be over $6 billion if the poll ran again today in 2018.
That said, revenue estimates for the porn industry vary widely. Some believe the industry does not even make $6 billion a year, while others say it makes $10 billion, $15 billion, or even $97 billion. Because most porn firms are privately held, it’s impossible to get a completely accurate estimate, Helmy says. [...]
Despite how frequently people use porn—Pornhub alone claims it racked up 28.5 billion views last year—its economic power remains hidden among the masses. Unlike other forms of entertainment, whose news regularly gets splashed across the front page of consumer publications, rumblings within the adult entertainment industry are typically only followed by niche trade audiences. Due to the taboo shrouding sexual content, a porn company can make hundreds of millions of dollars through monopolistic practices while remaining unknown to most consumers. [...]
The porn industry’s adaptability also transfers to how they do business. Similar to the music industry’s woes, piracy cut into porn’s profits. Porn companies adapted by designing new business models around licensing, educational courses, live camming, crowdsourcing, event hosting, and commerce. Porn also has its own trade publications, industry events, talent agents, and lobbyists.
4 June 2018
The Atlantic: Porn’s Uncanny Valley
For the new pornographers like Adam Sutra, technology can erase the material world. In virtual reality, there are no limits, not even when it comes to sex. “If you can meet in your virtual-reality space, anything’s possible,” Adam observed coolly as the man bore down upon the woman, her prerecorded moans filling the air. [...]
Whether or not people get turned on by VR pornography, the technology is changing the places where adult content has traditionally been created. Porn Valley is being displaced by porn’s uncanny valley—an X-rated version of the theory holding that a robotic or simulated entity that appears to be human, but not quite fully human, revolts us. Losing a connection to the material world—the skin and sweat of reality—may also lose what makes porn alluring. [...]
When I moved back to Los Angeles last year, I rented an apartment in the Valley. I wanted to know what had become of the adult-movie business. As it turned out, Porn Valley had changed. Technology had transformed it. A perfect storm had slammed the industry. The Great Recession had hit it hard, a handful of federal obscenity prosecutions during the Bush administration had caused a chilling effect, and widespread digital-content pirating had oversaturated the market and devalued the product, decimating the competition and slashing profits by the double digits. Once upon a time, porn had led technology, adopting VHS over Betamax in the video-format wars of the late ’70s and ’80s. In the new millennium, technology was porn’s undoing. [...]
Adam and his team had spent a year building a virtual porn world “the size of Grand Theft Auto,” but the technology wasn’t perfect yet. No matter. Their population was growing. They were scanning more porn stars and shooting adult performers in motion-capture suits bouncing lustily on top of each other in an array of sexual positions. The results were impressive. Casey’s skin was eerily lifelike, porous and pliant. Their genitals were, well, sufficiently realistic. (“It’s easier to do a hard penis than a vagina,” Adam confided.) There was something disconcerting about the simulacrum of Casey, though, especially in her face, which was weirdly human and disturbingly not, more uncanny valley than Porn Valley.
12 December 2017
The Atlantic: The Ethics of Extreme Porn: Is Some Sex Wrong Even Among Consenting Adults? (MAY 16, 2013)
Rod Dreher agrees. Acknowledging that the Marquis de Sade conceived of humiliating and being humiliated for sexual pleasure long before today's San Franciscans, he posits that such behavior is becoming more acceptable due to the absence of a strong moral framework to push back against it. "You can have whatever you desire," he writes. "If you choose hell, then we will call it good, because it is freely chosen, and brings you pleasure." He worries that "the result is chaos and nihilism" and the idea that "the only way to find transcendence is to yield to one's desires." For Dreher, "affirming human dignity, and walling off the most destructive impulses within individual and collective human beings, requires condemning this pornography and perversity." [...]
Jacobs and Dreher seem to imply (but may or may not believe, were it to come up directly) that consent as a cultural lodestar is a shameful moral abdication, indicative of an age where other, much more important norms have been abandoned. As I see it, the emphasis on consent in today's sexual morality isn't decadence. However incomplete, it is a historic triumph. And growing reverence for consent would gradually make our culture radically more moral. [...]
None of that means one must approve of the acts described in the San Francisco basement. I happen to think it doesn't in fact threaten civilization, that transgressive sex cannot, by definition, become the norm. Others may differ, and I'm just guessing there; but it is to say that, whatever you think of the porn shoot, the scattered, unconsensual sex that went down in the Bay Area that night was more worthy of condemnation, more uncivilized, more destructive and less moral. I hope it is clear that I'm not suggesting my interlocutors are insufficiently horrified by rape. What I am saying is that really grappling with and evaluating consent as a sexual ethos makes it harder to assume, as Dreher seems to, that he's raising his sons in a more sexually depraved society than the one in which he grew up. What to make of the fact that the undeniable rise in pornography has coincided with a startling, steep decline in the rate of forcible rape? If fewer men are raping and fewer women are being raped, isn't there, at minimum, a strong case to be made that young people today are less sexually depraved than before? I realize that doesn't make it any easier for a father to explain extreme porn to his teenager, and deeply sympathize while acknowledging that I'd be confounded by and dread the task myself. [...]
The question remains. Are some kinds of sex degrading or immoral even if they're consensual? Unlike many conservatives, I don't particularly trust my disgust instinct. It misled me about Brussels sprouts in childhood, and again in the days before I became a dog-owner about how awful it would be to pick up freshly defecated feces with nothing but a thin plastic bag covering my hand. It really isn't that bad. Who knew? My strong instinct is nevertheless to say yes, some consensual sex acts are immoral. A brother and sister breaking the incest taboo diminishes the norm of presumed nonsexual contact between siblings, a norm that is of tremendous benefit to most of humanity. Or imagine a couple agreeing that it would bring unsurpassed excitement if, mid-coitus, Sally chopped off Harry's arm with a bedside guillotine, with his consent. That certainly transgresses against my sensibilities, though I can't articulate just why in a way that wouldn't encompass other behavior that my instinct would be to refrain from condemning. But if a brother raped a sister? Or if Sally chopped off Harry's arm without his consent?
10 November 2017
The Economist: What porn and listings sites can tell us about Britain’s gay population
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17 December 2016
Dazed: Unravelling porn’s obsession with faux lesbian sex
Money, power and sex are the three pillars of modern life, so it’s no surprise that the porn industry and society at large plays on this relationship like a dog with a bone. The adult industry’s explosion after a fractured sexual revolution in the late 70s and early 80s gave rise to big businesses with even bigger wallets, and a core audience was identified: the straight male who will pay hard cash to get his jollies. “During the 80s the porn industry became institutionalised and big production companies were cashing in on female sexuality,” Dian explains. “Unrealistic standards for women became the norm and it became the bloated industry it is today.” Porn and erotica helps assist a fantasy, so the more you want to be the man with his head in two girls’ crotches, the more money you’ll pay (at least before the internet that is). [...]
The commander of the gaze is unequivocally male even if there’s no man in sight. For Dian, faux lesbian sex is straight male fantasy without the phallic panic of couple-led porn. “Men will explain it to you in different ways,” she says. “Some don’t want another man there because it’s competition, and others will tell you it’s the idea that these women are so sexually excited they will do it with each other and if he walked into the room they would just leap on him. I don’t think they’re really seeing them as lesbian girls but as opportunistic and sexually liberal women who will do anything.”
According to Dian, studies have shown that men aren’t really interested in real, loving sex acts between lesbian-identified women, therefore the power lies within ambiguity. On top of this, woman-on-woman porn is also one of the most popular genres for straight females, perhaps because this elusion of adventure is scrambled up with conflicting social scripts. A distortion of constructed sexual binaries creates a meta-narrative about identity politics in a larger sense; sex becomes so muddled that we’re not sure exactly what or who gets us wet (or hard). “It’s all a manipulation of desire,” adds Dian, “and there is a lot of power in this.”
30 November 2016
The Atlantic: The Hidden Economics of Porn
Humans have been creating images of sex and genitalia for millions of years, but it is only in the past few centuries—since the 1600s, according to historians—that these representations started meeting academics’ preferred definition of pornography, which involves both the violation of taboos and the intention of arousal. The first efforts to make money off of this new endeavor could not have come long after that. [...]
Shira Tarrant: It's hard for several reasons. Official records are hard to come by. Many productions don't even keep official records, and there are very few researchers looking at the economic side of porn, because a lot of times for academics and researchers, pornography is viewed as a sort of LOL, to-the-side kind of thing, rather than the very serious financial and economic matter that it is. This is true for the industry's revenues, but also for pay rates for individual actors. So those numbers get a little fuzzy, even though the industry is willing to say that it's suffering from piracy and after the Great Recession, and things like that. [...]
Making ethical decisions about pornography means knowing where your porn comes from and the labor conditions under which it was made. Those are the sorts of questions that economists are concerned with. If we're willing to be concerned about those issues when it comes to sneakers or food, then we need to transfer those concerns to the adult industry as well. [...]
Tarrant: I like the comparison that you use—that the algorithm is not unlike algorithms that Amazon or Netflix use, or the ads on Facebook based on your browser history elsewhere. Again, there's that part of their rational brain that turns off and they think that pornography is this whole other kind of experience that is unlike the rest of their consumer history online. It starts with how pornography is keyworded. So, people put in search terms, but those search terms aren't all that original, really. Because where do we learn the search words that we're looking for? It's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. And so porn gets keyworded in very stereotyped, often sexist, often racist ways, and also just with a narrow-minded view of sexuality.
22 November 2016
Motherboard: What Will the Trump Administration Do to Porn?
But wait, you’re probably saying to yourself right now, how can Trump be bad for porn? This is, after all, a man who was featured in a softcore porn video and appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine; a man who happens to be married to a former nude model. Surely those aren’t the actions of someone hellbent on cracking down on the adult industry, right?
Throughout Trump’s campaign, as he was signing anti-porn pledges and representing a party with a national platform declaring porn to be a “public health crisis,” commentators suggested he was probably just pandering to his base rather than expressing a deeply-held belief. Even in the wake of the election, an experienced adult industry attorney assured me there was no way a Trump administration would come after America’s pornographers. [...]
And Pence is just the tip of the iceberg. Other transition team members include Edwin Meese of the infamous Meese Report, the Family Research Council’s Ken Blackwell, and, of course, Rudy Giuliani, who spent his tenure as mayor cleaning up Times Square (i.e. driving out all the porn theaters). “Take anybody who’s been named to the transition team or has been floated as a [cabinet member] and [search for] their name with pornography," said Michael Stabile, the Communications Director for adult industry advocacy group the Free Speech Coalition. The results aren’t pretty.
12 November 2016
The Huffington Post: I Am Gay. I Will Not Be Tortured Again
My childhood best friend Nick McKinney stopped being a friend; he, along with a pack of neighborhood kids rode their bikes into me, threw things at me, called me faggot as I walked home pretending that this was not happening. If there was no empty seat on the schoolbus, I had to squat in the aisles. No one would let me sit next to them, and Betty, the blue-shadowed bus driver, would not drive until I squatted. [...]
I discovered later in life that my grandmother resented post-puberty me because she had a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her first husband, who moved her from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C. just before World War II, turned out to be gay. She grew up in the Catholic church. The church refused to annul the marriage because it refused to accept homosexuality—and so my grandmother had no choice other than to divorce her first husband. As a result, she was excommunicated. She lost it all: church (not faith), husband, her reputation. She married my grandfather, a brilliant man haunted by his own demons and alcoholism, and her life took a direction she never planned it to take. [...]
Mike Pence advocates conversion therapy. Make no mistake: Conversion therapy is torture. It involves electrocuting and drugging LGBT people to make them suffer while looking at homosexual pornography in order to “convert” them to heterosexuality. Not only has it been proven not to convert people, but it causes severe physical and psychological trauma and potentially can result in serious mental disorders. Teenagers have committed suicide in desperate moves to avoid ongoing conversion therapy. In the event a gay man, as an example, were coerced into either believing or pretending that he had been “converted” in order to stop the torture, the best-case scenario would be his entering into a marriage under false pretenses with a woman who otherwise could have found a loving partner.
11 November 2016
Deutsche Welle: Berlin public and corporate Wi-Fi block LGBT-friendly websites
On a recent family shopping trip to the Ikea outlet in Berlin's Schöneberg district, one father noticed something strange. As he went to look up the schedule for an upcoming family picnic hosted by the German Association for Lesbians and Gays (LSVD), he noticed the website was blocked.
Out of curiosity, he tried several other portals for LGBT resources; articles about homophobia, advice columns on coming out. None of them worked. Queer.de, a website that advocates for homosexuals' rights, was similarly blank.
Apparently, the websites were "labeled as pornography and disabled under Germany's child protection laws," said LSVD Director for Berlin and Brandenburg, Jörg Steinert, in an interview with DW. [...]
The source of the issue, however, is likely not an anti-LGBT agenda on the part of the Swedish furniture giant, which itself has taken flak for putting gay families in its ads for decades. The problem is a truly German one: bureaucracy. Certain keywords are automatically blocked by Wi-Fi providers in public places, and unfortunately, the word homosexual has "sex" right there in the middle of it.
Then the business or public office that hosts the Hotspot has the unenviable task of clearing every individual website one by one. It could also mean that reports about themes that have nothing to with pornography, like assault or medical issues, could also be blocked.
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