Pornography bans

[fridi]

This is an interesting topic - I've heard some people claim that a ban on pornography would be absurd or unfeasible - but in practice, this may just be wishful thinking or longing (particularly on the part of folks who aren't ambitious enough to find any other means of enjoyment out of life).

If someone was proposing, say a ban on masturbation, sure this would be impossible to enforce, however I don't see that to be necessarily the case with distributed pornography - if someone just wants to argue that it will lead to a black market, then that's probably somewhat true (about this or anything else), but that isn't automatically a completely irrefutable argument against it either.

Old, but case in point:

Iceland Considers Pornography Ban — Why Not United States?
"The production or sale of pornography is prohibited in Iceland. Heavy fines were applied in 2001 and ten years earlier a fine was applied to the first manager of the first private TV station (and the only case to present) in Iceland for showing the Danish "mainstream" Zodiac-films, I Tvillingernes tegn and I Tyrens tegn. In early 2013 there was a draft proposal by Ögmundur Jónasson, the Minister of the Interior, to extend the ban to online pornography to protect children from violent sexual imagery. The plan has been stalled since the change in government during the parliamentary election on 27 April 2013. Since then, there have been no changes to the relevant legislation, and no changes have been formally proposed."

As for the US, because it was already brought up above, and because I know so many of you wouldn't care about any other place, the US already has a ban on internet pornography. It isn't enforced because bureaucrats (and bureaucrats in funny robes) don't want it enforced.

Thoughts?

Comments

[dewline]

That's going to trigger arguments and fights every-damn-where, isn't it? People are still angry and scared about the FOSTA-SESTA legislation brought in by the US during the Trump "administration".

[mikeyxw]

The description of Iceland's ban kind of summarizes the problems. The only person to be charged was the first manager of the first private TV station, which is suspicious. Does anyone think this is because he was the only person in Iceland providing porn or did the guy running a private TV station present a better target for those in power than the guy selling Playboys from his newsstand?

Second, it was only considered to be extended to the internet in 2013? Google became popular more than a decade earlier than that because it was the first search engine where you could search for "Meatloaf recipe" and three of the first five results wouldn't be porn sites. I'd expect any laws would be widely ignored and ineffective. Maybe someone else who is unpopular with the government would be charged, but nothing would really change until those writing the laws become more tech savvy than teenage nerds.

[garote]

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, an Australian porn site (actually a subsidiary of a larger company that owns a handful of them) called "ifeelmyself" is nothing but endless ranks of videos of women who have propped a camera up in their bedroom or living room at home and filmed themselves masturbating to orgasm.

Shameful, corrupting, indecent, destructive, corrosive force unleashed upon the world?

Or sex-positive, educational, inspiring, normalizing force for good pushing back against prudery and moral panic in the world?