A case for Regulating Porn (what do you think?)

Hey All,

Since joining NF, I've been contemplating a lot about how the porn industry could be regulated, there is a lot of fucked up porn out there that I wish I never saw, and I think there could be made a case that such porn should be illegal or at least strongly moderated.

Spoiler: Possible triggers

I'm talking all sorts of degrading porn, unconsensual or revenge, incest, sexist or racist, promoting drugs or unhealthy behaviors, brainwashing or hypnosis bullshit that makes you develop fucked up fetishes and so on, don't really wanna expand any longer. Some of these things can severely damage your sex life or fuck up with your brain.

There are so many websites, set up by third parties with a lot of sick materials. So I am wondering if the government could mandate some sort of porn licenses, like for liquor stores. Where you would have to apply for a government permit to be able to host a website, create porn or distribute porn in that country. Perhaps we can implement better age verification methods, so that kids don't get exposed to porn and develop unhealthy habits. Perhaps government permits for watching porn. Perhaps we can employ better machine learning models, to filter the web for unauthorized porn or porn sites, or maybe also ban amateur porn (without the explicit consent of all the participants in it, since in most of the cases it is leaked and non-consensual). Perhaps also banning porn from public sites like reddit, and require any website that distributes porn materials be separated from the social media, be registered, monitored and regulated by the government.

One problem with quiting porn is that it is so easily accessible. Imagine an alcoholic trying to quit drinking, holding a bottle of vodka with him all the time (read your phone). It would be so much easier to control your addiction, if every time you wanted to watch porn you had to go to a store to request a porn permit or password to access 18+ material online.

I know there is free speech and freedom of expression in America, so banning porn completely might be a long stretch. But perhaps we could regulate it better? What do you all think about this? What could go wrong, what could be improved?

 

Hmm I see. I am familiar with the UK legislation on this. Note that I am not proposing banning porn altogether, what am suggesting in here is regulating the most extreme genres, and requiring every porn site to register with the government and get a license. Think for example child p is banned in every country, and undoubtedly there is an underground market for this, but most reasonable people would just watch normal porn since it is legal, but wouldn't take the extra effort to look for other fucked up porn fetishes on the dark web.

In addition, by making porn less accessible, for example by requiring a pass code (that can be obtained from a convenience store with an ID), would require people to plan ahead (and not necessarily create an underground market for it). This at least would help people who are trying to quit porn actively (since it would be a hassle for them to do all the effort to get a pass-code), and hence decrease their chance of relapse from since its not so easily available.

This way people can still buy alcohol if they want, but they don't have to sleep every night right next to a bottle (read your phone) by their head.

If this were in place, maybe I would have still ended up watching porn, but very unlikely I would have escalated to more and more fucked up p, and ended up going through the problems that I did.

Also when it comes to kids nowadays, most of the parents arent that technologically literate to know how to set parental controls, so kids will always find ways to look at pixels online.