Intellectual Turing Test essays

Part 1: Pro-Porn

In this section, you will see eleven pro-porn statements. Seven of them are by authors who identified as pro-porn, while four of them are by authors who identified as anti-porn.

Your job is to identify which authors are genuinely pro-porn. The order of the statements has been randomized. Each statement has been titled with a randomly generated word, for easier reference.

If you participated, it is fine to vote on your own statement.

Statement: Peanut

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

This is too variable to give a simple answer to. It might be the bulk of their sex lives, it might be a thing they get fun ideas from, it might be a thing that screws them up. There’s no general answer.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Probably mostly based on informed consent, in production, distribution, and consumption. The reasonable concern to have is harm to actual people who exist, such as being filmed without their consent, or getting things they aren’t ready to handle.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

They should apologize for walking-in-on, because that’s rude. Also they should probably have a talk with the kid because, at least in our current world, the kid probably shouldn’t have been able to get the porn and someone could face legal repercussions for this.

Statement: Floor

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Loosely, porn availability makes people’s sex lives more convenient. That’s more important than it sounds, and applies in several ways - more convenient to get turned on at a time it’s reasonable instead of waiting for arousal to strike on its own, more convenient to select from the menu of available sex thoughts and sex acts instead of having to independently invent them all (or get them from children’s movies), more convenient to experience variety in the safety and privacy of one’s own home instead of trying to simultaneously juggle social interactions while figuring out what works for them. Some forms also have direct not-solely-sexual entertainment value (fanfiction, for instance), mixing porn with other genres, though my secondhand understanding is that this is less true of visual porn. From that angle, omitting porn would be sort of like omitting stories about time travel, or stories about people raising children - there are some thematic depths that require specific content.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Normal labor regulations should apply to performers, maybe a few extra because a) normal regulations may be inadequate even for normal labor and b) there’s some plausible public health interest in preventing STI outbreaks. Porn shouldnt be casually presented in any way that’s easy to stumble on or hard to avoid - no trailers in Disney movies, for instance, though a trailer that was itself not pornographic advertising a movie that had sex scenes might be acceptable (if an irregular failure of market segmentation).

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Depends enormously on context. Did this happen because they wanted to download Sailor Moon, and their download was labeled maliciously? Did it happen because their friend pranked them? Did it happen because their sketchy older neighbor sent them a link? Did it happen because they knew of the existence of anime tentacle porn and acquired some to watch? The parent might not know, obviously, but can probably rule some things out and others in based on whether their child is an anime fan, collector of mischievous friends, acquaintance of a sketchy neighbor, or really into octopus documentaries. I’d want to know, most of all, the child’s mood in this situation - horrified fascination? Embarrassment same as if their parent caught them writing their initials and a classmate’s in a heart? In the first case I’d suggest pausing their anime and asking if they really meant to be watching that. In the latter case the parent should excuse themself and maybe ask about it a couple days later.

Statement: Dance

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Porn enables people to explore their sexuality in a safe context. It’s possible to walk away from porn at any time with no awkwardness, no fear of disappointing a parter, no lingering complications. That provides an important space for people to figure out what they want and what they don’t with low stakes, which lets them approach partnered sex with greater self-awareness and confidence. Similarly, if there’s something one person enjoys and their partner doesn’t, the partner might explore porn featuring that thing to figure out what they’re comfortable with in no-pressure situation.

Porn can help people process things they’ve done and things that have happened to them and figure out how to relate to their own experiences.

Porn can educate people about consent and safety practices: a lot of teenagers’ first exposure to various questionable situations is a porny fanfic with an author’s note saying “hey, definitely don’t do this in real life, that’s [rape/a nasty disease risk/etc]”.

Finally, for people whose libidos are lower than they prefer, porn can be a useful aid to partnered sex. Someone who wants to experience loving intimacy with a partner, but has trouble getting physically “in the mood”, might use porn to “warm up” in a low-pressure way and then have more fun in the bedroom.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Porn actors should have the same rights and protections as any other actors. It should be illegal to make or distribute video or photographic porn of someone who doesn’t consent to that (including stuff like revenge porn and clandestine upskirt photos) or of someone under 18 other than yourself. Nobody should be prosecuted for porn of themselves. Text and hand-drawn images are fine. People on AO3 should tag their fic accurately. Also note that this is all in an ideal spherical cow world where laws are enforceable; IRL everything is a mess and difficult.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Handling this sort of situation starts when the kid is a toddler. Any children of mine will grow up with access to lots of information about their bodies and about human sexuality as they become old enough to ask for it, and I will demonstrate trustworthiness and respect so that (I hope) the kids will feel safe coming to me with anything that’s troubling them. I will provide them with lots of resources containing information on safety, consent, physical and emotional issues surrounding sex, and the ways in which porn is unrealistic. And with that foundation laid, if I walk in on my daughter watching anime tentacle porn, I will apologize for not knocking, turn around, and shut the door as I would hope they would do for me. One cannot teach courtesy without modeling it.

Statement: Block

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

positive, helps form desires and self discover, also release tension

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

the production of it should not be allowed to cause harm to minors or non-consenting adults (defining harm is hard but we can get some basic principles in place).

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

“hey, I feel like this content is not appropriate for your age range but also I support you learning things I guess, please ask me excruciatingly awkward questions” / I have no idea

Statement: Law

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

What does porn do to people’s sex lives? Well, that varies with the person. In general, it helps people’s sex lives by giving them more opportunities for a sex life! It gives users more sexual good times and makes them less sexually frustrated, which’re good things in themselves.

But even beyond that, it means they can pressure their sexual partners less because they’ve got other means for sexual release. It can prompt people to be more creative, help them experiment in safer and less risky ways than with a partner, and help them figure out which sexual things they enjoy. (This even stretches to sexual orientation; there’re people who’ve figured out they’re gay or bisexual from porn!)

 There’re certainly some harms - whether partners who feel betrayed, or people who’ve exclusively developed tastes impracticable for the real world, or people who’ve become addicted to it in a way that harms the rest of their lives. But porn has done a lot more good.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Porn should be regulated to protect the actors from real harms - whether sexual abuse, STD’s, or coercion. That’s definitely in need of regulation. California’s attempted 2015 regulations were too strict and impracticable, but something in this is needed. (And some parts of it should go beyond just porn films - the film industry in general is rife with sexual harassment and coercion.)

There’re advantages to keeping some porn away from children, but also disadvantages - especially in modern America, where any regulations like that would be abused to keep sexually-active teenagers in the dark as well. So on balance, there shouldn’t be any prohibitions on the consumer end. Of course, people shouldn’t be sexually harassed by seeing explicit porn ads in the middle of unrelated websites, but that isn’t happening at present, so no new regulations are needed there.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

If a ten-year-old is watching porn, this’s probably uncomfortable for the parents, but uncomfortable things aren’t necessarily bad. It’s not a categorically bad thing for her to be watching porn, but it could be a sign of bad things.

So, the thing for her parents to do is to ask why, and to make sure she feels it’s safe to talk with them. If she’s sought it out for curiosity or for budding sexual feelings (10 is the average age of puberty for American girls), okay; just make sure she understands that it’s fantasy (which might be easier than otherwise given anime tentacles). If her friends are talking about it, well, make sure none of them are actually pressuring each other into actions they aren’t comfortable with.

Statement: Core

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Porn has different impacts on different people’s sex lives. I will admit that there are some who are perhaps harmed or disturbed by consuming porn - those people should not use it. For others, though, porn can be something that allows personal exploration and self-expression, something that delves into areas of the psyche that mainstream society often rejects or is unwilling to discuss, and even something that can be helpful as a reference point for discussing and exploring sexuality (and especially kink) with a new partner! I think many people have come across kink material online and thought “oh, I’m *not* a freak, there are other people who experience these things too!” and that can be quite a valuable experience to have!

Further, porn can be a way to do some of this exploration in relative safety, as even things that would be really bad if done in real life can be explored in fiction. There was an infamous case in the 1930s where someone derailed a train on purpose, killing or wounding over a hundred people, thanks to kinking on people screaming and dying - in today’s world, maybe that guy would be writing and reading fic online rather than actually killing anybody!

Ultimately, sexuality can be an important part of the human experience, and porn is one way that people can engage with and relate to their sexuality and hence their experience of the world as a whole, often in a context that’s much safer than other options. This can be quite beneficial to one’s sexuality and sex life.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

This isn’t really one coherent answer as much as several somewhat-related points, hope that’s okay!

  • I think porn made without the consent of those depicted (either to the sex act in question, to that act being recorded, or to the recording being distributed) should be banned. This principle would ban child sexual abuse material or videos of actual (not simulated) rape, and also voyeur footage, “revenge porn”, the distribution of hacked sexts or leaked celebrity sex tapes, and so on. Note though that the level of enforcement and penalty required probably varies from case to case - if someone is systematically abusing children and selling films of it by illegal methods, that is far worse than if someone gets angry after a breakup and decides to share their ex’s sexts to a group chat, though the latter is still quite bad!

  • Reasonable measures should be put into place to protect porn actors and actresses from sexual abuse and exposure to sexually transmitted diseases on the job. I don’t really know what the best way to do this is or whether the government even needs to get involved, but in principle this seems like it might be an opportunity for workplace safety laws if the industry proved unable to self-regulate.

 - In a more sophisticated society, it might be favorable to implement some kind of content warning system for porn in general, though I don’t think that we’re particularly close to getting that today and I’m not sure such should be mandatory. Ao3 is doing far better than mainstream video porn sites in this respect.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

So, I have to say I wouldn’t be *thrilled* to see this, but like… what are you going to do? By that age I’d really want to have had “the talk” – and not just the sex one but also the one about “there are some bad things on the Internet that you might see someday, if you see something like that it’s OK to just close it down and come talk to me if you’re scared or feel bad”. Given that (and the fact that anime tentacle stuff is at least somewhat obscure), if she’s watching this stuff I kind of have to assume she in fact wanted to see it?

So yeah, I don’t think I’d be *happy* about finding this, but again, what am I going to do? If I flip out and try to lock down her Internet usage, that’ll just turn her against me and make it so she is less likely to go to me if she does end up seeing something really bad. If she is really curious about porn or determined to see it, that’s fundamentally her choice, not mine, and honestly she could probably find a way around such restrictions anyway? My job is to be a loving and supportive parent, not to dictate what she watches.

(That said, if she says things that indicate some adult is sending her links to a bunch of porn stuff, my response might look very different - but again I think she’s more likely to tell me about that kind of thing if she sees me as fundamentally a friend and ally rather than a harsh authority figure who will yell at her and flip out if she ever looks at “bad stuff”.)

(also, uh, I might want to figure out a way to politely tell her to lock the door next time.)

Statement: Ridge

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

The only reasonable way to answer a question like this is using distributions and data. I have no data that I’m aware of, so at best, I can answer only based upon my personal experience, which is this: porn acts like an outlet for a drive which can be incredibly destructive if not used carefully. It’s far better for a young person to use porn as a masturabtory aid, than to go out and find a partner to hook up with. Again, this is purely anecdotal, but I would guess that people who consume porn regularly are probably less lonely, and less likely to engage in risky sexual encounters, or relationships that are net harmful primarily because they satisfy sex drives in ways that minimize risks such as getting into a bad relationship and then staying there, or choosing a partner who turns out to be violent, or addicted to drugs, out of immediate desire.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

The only rules here should be around consent. In particular, it should be illegal to produce or distribute images of people who aren’t consisting to be in those, which would include both revenge porn as well as children who can’t consent.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Any answer here is going to depend heavily on the nature of that parent-child relationship. All children are different, and there are very few one-size-fits-all approaches. Chances are the kid will be embarrassed at that situation and will be very hesitant to talk about it at all. In that situation, attempts by parents to pry would likely make the situation worse, so I think what I would do is say, “if you want to talk about it, that’s ok. If not, that’s OK, too.”

It’s basically impossible me to separate visceral reactions from this scenario, from what a reasonable, caring observer would do. My gut intuition here says, ’kids need to have the freedom to explore and understand the world. What is most important is that she is healthy and confident; both of those will come natural from love and trust than they will from puritanical oversight. Reacting too much to any one situation is usually asking for failure. I will just focus my efforts on the stuff i was already planning on focusing on: namely, setting a good example, being emotionally available, and encouraging her to find interests and pursuits that will help her develop and grow as a human being.

Statement: Extract

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Makes them more insular in their sex

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Information campaign on how it hurts the creators & users of Porn

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Explain that this is not age appropriate & restrict access to devices with unfiltered internet access to a more age appropriate time

Statement: Exile

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Like all vices, porn can be consumed in a healthy or unhealthy way. Recognizing that it is fantasy, that it is shot and staged for the medium and that it is not what real life sex is or ought to be is vital. Overconsumption can be a problem, and trying to apply things from porn to real lord is a problem but other than problem-users, it’d be hard to say porn does any one thing to the sex lives of users.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Porn should be created with many of the same workplace safety regulations in place including those specific to such an industry where communicable disease can spread. Regular oversight of working hours and fair pay are a must, as well as regular testing for STIs, with health care costs for diseases acquired through work paid for as worker’s compensation. Workers should have the freedom to and ability to consent or withhold consent from specific acts and production.

Porn should not be easily available to minors, but much of the oversight on that would by the nature of the internet today, mean watchful parents exercising good judgement.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

They should not punish, but have a constructive conversation with their daughter about healthy sexual behavior, limits, and consent, as well as discussion about what is or isn’t developmentally appropriate for the specific child at a specific age. Parents should then be aware of the interest and be careful to monitor her behavior and online activities going forward.

Statement: Sight

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Increased variety of sex?

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Child porn should absolutely be illegal, and actors should get fair wages. Oversight is important for ethical reasons.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Have a calm and reasonable discussion with them about it, explaining what it is.

Statement: Clock

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

In most cases I think it doesn’t have that much of an impact. I think the median case is that it’s fun and this is a mild positive effect.

In some cases I think it improves people’s sex lives by helping them discover things they’re into that they otherwise didn’t know about.

I think there’s an anti-porn narrative that people’s sexual interest will tend to get saturated by porn, more or less, such that they stop being interested in “normal” things or “normal” (non-porn-star) partners; I’m pretty sure there exist people of whom this is true to some extent, but I don’t think it’s the usual case. I think for most people physical IRL sex with real people is just much more interesting than vicariously observing sex they can’t participate in.

I do have a model where - for any given activity that people often enjoy, there will be some percentage of people who will find that activity so overwhelmingly compelling that it causes them to neglect other stuff they care about, in a way they don’t endorse. The percentage of people this is true of, as well as the consequences for those people, will vary between different things of this type. For some kinds of drugs, likelihood of addiction and consequences of addiction are really quite high. For something like social media or video games, likelihood of low-level addiction is kind of high but likelihood of the kind of addiction with really severe consequences isn’t. I think something similar is true of reading really compelling fiction; as a kid I often neglected responsibilities in favor of reading, and I have also sometimes experienced this as an adult and have friends who have as well. I would guess that porn might be in a similar range of ~addictiveness to books or video games. (This is complicated by the fact that for some people, the amount of porn they endorse consuming is zero, so any nonzero amount will be more than they endorse, which isn’t true of e.g. reading scifi. I think that’s kind of more a “map” problem than a “territory” problem, though.)

For teenagers/people new to sexuality, porn may sometimes play a larger role in shaping their ideas about sex. Mainstream video porn often has kinda weird ideas about sexuality, so I could see that having weird, not-great results sometimes; my impression is that e.g. explicit fanfic communities have a much better culture. I do think that teenagers are capable of not believing everything they see, so I think there’s a limit to how much porn can influence teenagers’ explicit beliefs about sex, but I guess it might more strongly influence things that aren’t propositional beliefs, like e.g. beauty standards (in the same way that normal TV influences beauty standards, but visual porn can perhaps reach into areas that normal TV doesn’t, like what people’s genitals “should” look like).

If we’re including e.g. explicit fiction that both provokes sexual arousal and explores interesting interpersonal/ethical/psychological/etc. themes, I think this is often actively good for people in the same way that interesting fiction that isn’t about sex can be. Fiction is often really useful for exploring and clarifying worldviews, values, and ways people can be, and sex is a pretty big and important part of many people’s lives, so I think it’s really good for there to be fiction that explores sex in this kind of detail.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

I think basically no forms of porn should be banned for their content. (Possible exception: image/video deepfakes of real people? I’m also somewhat okay with banning drawn/CGI porn portraying children, though I don’t think it’s necessary. Porn can also be subject to more general laws about defamation and privacy and whatnot.)

Some forms of porn should be banned for how they’re made. This includes any visual porn involving real underage children or nonconsenting adults; if it becomes known that someone portrayed in a porn image or video did not consent to be in it, that video should not be legal. General labor regulations should apply.

I also think that people should be able to at any time demand that any porn images/video involving them should be taken down, unless they’ve signed a contract agreeing to have that content be broadcast for a period of X years which isn’t over yet. (I think it’d be pretty reasonable to disallow having X > 10 or so.)

 Porn should also be subject to content warnings, but I probably don’t think the state should enforce that. Other than this and non-porn-specific laws, I don’t think text porn should really be subject to any regulation at all.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

To be honest I don’t know the full answer; if I were actually in this situation I’d want to ask some trusted friends for advice. I can certainly think of a lot of ways a parent can make this situation worse (e.g. by treating this as inherently an emergency; by making the kid feel ashamed of themselves; by taking away the kid’s ability to talk to their friends; by trying to force the kid into a conversation they desperately don’t want to have); all of those can be outperformed by simply apologizing for barging in, closing the door, and never speaking of it again. I don’t think that’s necessarily the best outcome, though; I think ideally it would be good to have some kind of conversation with the kid about healthy ways to relate to sex and porn and fantasies, perhaps? I really do not know what a good way to go about trying to have such a conversation is, though; as I said, I’d probably want to ask some friends for advice.

Part 2: Anti-Porn

In this section, you will see eleven anti-porn statements. Seven of them are by authors who identified as pro-porn, while four of them are by authors who identified as anti-porn.

Your job is to identify which authors are genuinely anti-porn. The order of the statements has been randomized. Each statement has been titled with a randomly generated word, for easier reference.

If you participated, it is fine to vote on your own statement.

Statement: Steep

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

It damages them by isolating their sexuality from actual people, inherently objectifying those depicted and creating an expectation that sexual availability doesn’t need to involve consent. It also tends to harm interactions with real people, who may be less glamorous than porn stars, and whose sexual interactions are unlikely to live up to the expectations created by carefully edited scenes shot over multiple hours.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Banning seems obvious. The production is inherently dehumanizing and harms the victims, even if they are unaware of the harm, and the distribution harms the recipients, so there’s no real benefit to be had here.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Clearly explaining the harms and why this is bad, also finding out how the daughter got access to the porn and filing charges or pursuing prosecution if at all possible.

Statement: Log

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Pornography is deeply negative for people’s sex lives. The use of pornography promotes degrading, objectifying, and misogynistic images of women and is harmful not only to those involved in producing it but also to those who consume such. Porn promotes a view of sexuality that fundamentally reduces the human person into an object for gratifying desires rather than someone who one can see as an individual.

Further, much pornographic material promotes bad sexual practices – bad (or no) consent, sexually violent or aggressive acts, dangerous and irresponsible behavior around sexuality, and so on. Now one can say “oh, it’s just a fantasy,” but fantasizing about things that would be bad in real life is itself bad and should not be done, and risks degrading one’s sexuality further. Many people report a “slippery slope” where they find themselves desensitized to the sorts of porn they used to watch and slowly getting into more and more extreme material -- in some cases things that would have horrified them if they had seen such initially!

Is it possible for there to be positive things that people get out of pornography? Yes, it is -- but it would also be possible to get those positive things without pornography. I know of no cases where a work of art requires pornography to get its message across, and many where the inclusion of pornographic elements obscures or damages a work that could perhaps otherwise be quite good.

Additionally, though I expect this next section will not be very convincing to most non-Catholics, the main purpose of pornography for many is to facilitate masturbation, an act which is itself immoral and harmful to a healthy sex life. The fundamental telos of human sexuality is oriented towards a married couple drawing together in a way that is unitive and procreative (or at least open to life, even if no actual procreation occurs with a given act), and sex acts that deviate from this, like masturbation – or for that matter probably an overwhelming majority of the acts depicted in pornography – are intrinsically wrong.

I am not saying that it is always a shame or a sin to have sexual desire, to be clear – a huge majority of people do have such desires – but the proper place for that desire to be acted upon is sex within marriage and open to life. Porn is a debasement of that desire and shows people a false image of what sexuality should be for, hence harming them and their relation both to sexuality and to other people.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

The government should ban the production and distribution of pornography. This was a common position (at least in the United States) within living memory – we know that it’s been tried and it’s more or less worked fine!

With respect to the regulatory specifics, I’m not entirely sure how this would best work in the Internet era, but I’m sure something could be figured out – if nothing else, the government would be able to prevent many porn sites from existing simply by leaning on credit card companies, payment processors, and Internet service providers/web hosting businesses.

I recognize that this is a radical position in today’s society. Fundamentally speaking, though, if someone were selling tainted food that was dangerous to the body, we would want the government to act to stop them – indeed, inaction would seem bizarre and irresponsible. But for some reason when someone sells pornography – tainted material that is dangerous to the mind and the soul – many are suddenly unwilling to allow the same principle to hold.

 Also, I want to flag that I’m not saying the cops should kick down your door to search your house for Playboy magazines with no warning or warrant or whatever – that’d be ridiculous – nor am I advocating for a theocracy. The government was not a theocracy when porn was illegal some decades ago and doing this would not make it one. I do think that porn is a public bad and that it’s appropriate for the government to take action to protect people from it, however.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Ideally, one would have set up filtering software etc. such that something like this would never happen in the first place.

That’s kind of “fighting the hypothetical”, though – given for the sake of argument that it did happen, maybe with something that slipped through the filters, I think it would unfortunately prove necessary to have a serious talk with her about how there are many things out there that are fundamental degradations of human sexuality, that we should avoid looking at such, that sexuality is a natural thing and it’s okay to be curious about it but that we should be careful not to misuse it outside its proper place, and so on. Depending on the circumstances (ideally she wouldn’t know what it was and had found it by mistake) it might also be a good idea to impose stricter filtering.

 I imagine this situation might be tremendously awkward, but if I could possibly save her from being harmed by pornography in the way that so many have been I would want to do so! I hope that by that age, I would have already had conversations with her that would help her see both that sexuality is something natural and valuable and also that unfortunately there’s a lot of stuff out there in the culture that debases it from its proper place.

 (I want to flag that I’m not a parent and my take here might be very naive – if it ever becomes the case that I look likely to become a parent, I’ll likely want to read up on child psychology and other such things and figure out more systematic responses!)

Statement: Greet

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

I have nothing against masturbation but once you start involving other people in your sex life (not just your imagination, the people themselves), their interaction with the situation has a lot of management ethically required and it’s incumbent on you, not a movie producer, to manage it. So it makes consumers’ sex lives less ethical, as you’re sexually interacting with people you can’t check in with or work out an individual sharing of pleasure with. It also gives a really skewed sample of what kinds of ways people have sex. There’s the obvious fetish content, of course, but also industry fads, and the fact that it’s all oriented around a third party viewer and therefore needs to be visible to a camera - cunnilingus in particular adapts really badly to that.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

I don’t especially want more government involvement here. The government doesn’t have a good track record of distinguishing victims and perpetrators, and a lot of my objection to porn is about corrosive effects on individuals not necessarily different in kind from getting into dumb arguments on Facebook. But I do think there should, ideally, be (without taking a position on how it should get this way) more clarity in movie ratings, age gates on porn websites that aren’t as vulnerable to just lying, and maybe some kind of Pigouvian tax (yeah, that’s government involvement, but I think “apply taxes” is more in their wheelhouse than “define and legislate porn”.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Close her laptop, have a serious conversation about who she thinks was voicing and drawing those characters and what they would think of her watching it and why that presumably didn’t occur to her before. Have a suitably embarrassing transfer of information about appropriate sexual behavior at various stages of development.

Statement: Subway

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

(First off I want to note that the strength of all effects of porn varies between people - some are fine/relatively unaffected, while others are moderately or strongly affected. I expect that the strongest effects will generally be on teenagers who are getting their first significant exposure to sex via porn (unfortunately common).)

In general I expect porn, like all media and indeed all life experience, to implicitly shape people’s expectations/standards/preferences about the world. It’s normal, of course, to be influenced by one’s knowledge environment, including the media one consumes; but while non-porn media can influence people in all kinds of directions, including positive ones (though I certainly also have critiques of the broader mass media environment), I expect the direction of influence from porn to be mostly pretty negative. Also, porn often has more ability than other media to influence people implicitly in its domain because for many people it has less to compete with - kids learn how to make friends both from movies and from real life throughout their entire lives, but when it comes to sex, real life experience is just much harder to come by for most people than Internet porn, so one can end up with a pretty strong porn-centric picture of sex before they ever have a real sexual interaction with another person. (I also suspect that porn influence can end up self-reinforcing through classical conditioning.)

Specific kinds of negative influence I expect porn to have:

1. Internalizing harmful beauty standards, for oneself and one’s partners.

For oneself: one will likely have more anxiety and negative feelings about oneself, feel less comfortable in one’s skin, be more likely to find it hard to relax and feel comfortable with an intimate partner. One will also be more likely to feel pressured to spend a bunch of time on beauty labor.

For one’s partners: this intensifies the dynamic where all the men are interested in like the top 10% most attractive women, which is not a good time for anyone.

(Of course normal television does these things too, but I think it’s worse when the beauty pressure extends to body parts normally covered - for one thing there’s less one can do to even change some such parts, for another thing it’s just an extra level of pressure to feel like you need to be correctly beautiful even in your most intimate moments.)

2. Expectations about sex acts/behaviors

Porn disproportionately caters to men due to their generally higher sex drive, so sex acts men prefer are much better represented, which shapes people’s expectations of actual sex in a male-centric direction, which leads to women feeling pressured to do stuff they’d rather not (and less likely to get stuff they do want). More generally, there’s a sort of “male gaze” problem in porn, a systematic departure from what sex actually looks like in real life / what sex should actually look like in an equitable society.

Yet more generally, porn is unlike real sex in various unrealistic ways that teach people bad habits (especially in the case of teenagers who haven’t had a chance to learn better habits in real life). Most legibly, this affects practices around sexual safety and sometimes around consent; more subtly, porn doesn’t really optimize for showing what the interpersonal dynamics of healthy sexual interactions actually look like (e.g. because porn optimizes for selling a fantasy of perfect sex, you won’t really see people say no to any sex act and propose something different, or ask their partner to stop or do something differently - which are actually really crucial sexual scripts to learn). It models bad ways of interacting, which are bad for people’s flourishing.

3. “Hedonic treadmill” for attraction/arousal

It’s common for novel stimuli to be more exciting or arousing than familiar ones. So by watching a lot of porn you can desensitize yourself to sexual stimuli you once found exciting.

Also, sometimes people kind of imprint on things? I’ve talked to people who came of age sexually more or less exclusively with porn and found that their sexuality built itself around kinds of stimuli that they can get from porn but can’t from real life, which was kind of damaging to their ability to enjoy sex.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

This is an area where my belief in free speech butts up uncomfortably against my belief that porn not only is currently bad but will predictably be mostly bad, due to the incentives of its producers.

In a capitalist media ecosystem, media is subject to the same kind of optimization pressure as (for example) fast food. Capitalism is really good at giving people what they want - not necessarily what’s good for them, just what they want in the short term, right now. As food under capitalism trends towards hyperpalatable snacks that are bad for most people’s long-term health, so porn that exists in the real world will inevitably trend towards attraction-superstimulus, optimizing so hard for profit/views/clicks that it will do so at the expense of other considerations like modeling good sexual practices, or not giving people weird sexual complexes that hamper their real-life sex lives, or presenting a gender-balanced view of sex. So when people talk about the notion that porn could in principle be made better, part of my reaction is “Everyone Will Not Just”.

…but, also, when governments censor media for its content, it usually turns out bad. In this case I don’t actually think that central examples of porn have much actual value that would be destroyed by censorship - but I worry about edge cases, gray areas, poor enforcement; I worry about actually valuable sex ed content being banned, for instance, or non-pornographic content that deals with sexual themes or portrays [gasp] same-sex intimacy. (Worth noting that at this time several U.S. states are taking steps to restrict educational access to what I think is good, non-porn content about sex; I don’t really trust my government to do this kind of regulation in a way that doesn’t make things worse.)

A reasonable harm reduction measure might be to somehow make porn be harder for minors to access - except that I’m not sure how you’d do that without massive invasions of privacy. It might also be okay and helpful to mandate content warnings, notes like “this is not intended to resemble real life” before every video? Barring other clever ideas I’m not currently thinking of, there may not be a good way to regulate the content of porn without collateral damage.

 However, I think it’s both much more feasible and really important to regulate the labor conditions of porn actors. I think being in porn is pretty bad for nearly everyone who does it, for a bunch of reasons:

  • Being held to strict beauty standards is often pretty damaging.

  • You can’t afford to be careful about your boundaries; if you said you’d shoot a scene with a particular person at a particular time to have to go ahead and do it no matter how you’re feeling in the moment.

  • Thinking about sex transactionally tends to be bad for people in general.

  • Working in porn is “sticky”, in that once porn videos with you in them exist out in the world, it’s harder to move on to a more respectable career (but also, once you are old enough to be “past your prime” demand for your labor goes down).

  • Capitalism-superstimulus pressures mean that there’s extra demand for young women to do this work - but younger people have generally done less of their own sexual exploration and have less of a sense of their own boundaries and desires, and thus are more likely to be strongly affected by their work.

  • More generally, I think that under capitalism it’s extremely common for people to have unhealthy relationships with their jobs; and for all but the most in-demand workers there’s quite a high risk of having concretely bad relationships with their specific employers, too. When you mix sex with this type of toxic dynamic, you often get really bad results.

So we should regulate labor conditions in porn. How? I’m not an expert, but some thoughts:

  • Increased scrutiny of porn employers regarding regular labor regulations.

  • Higher minimum wage for porn? (I’m less worried here than I’d normally be about preventing positive-sum trades - I think in porn it’s much more common than in most other industries for trades to turn out worse than nothing for the worker, and I don’t think a chilling effect here is necessarily a bad thing.)

  • Require a higher minimum level of provided healthcare for porn workers?

  • Higher minimum age for porn, perhaps?

  • This is too weird to be adopted in real life, but what about a policy like “roll this die; if the die came up 1 or you don’t want to, don’t do your scheduled shoot today” to let people set boundaries in real time without retaliation?

  • Right-to-image laws that let you ask anyone hosting images/video of you to take them down, such that they are required to comply.

Also, of course, we should move towards a world where nobody has to do porn in order to survive.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Honestly in some ways anime is less bad than live-action porn that involves real humans having sex and pretends to be realistic. But I’d still worry about this shaping her sexuality in ways that make it hard for her to have a healthy sexuality later. (for example - will it give her fetishes that make it harder to have a satisfying sex life? will it give her bad instincts around consent?)

Ten years old is young enough that it may make sense to use parental controls that will block this kid of thing; I think it probably depends on the kid. But also, instead of in addition to that, you should have a conversation with her - don’t act judgmental or punish or threaten her, but do bring up ways you think this type of media may have a bad effect on her, and why you think she shouldn’t watch it. Possibly also bring up as a relevant sidenote that live-action porn has additional ethical issues around the treatment of the performers, and that even if she disagrees with the rest of your arguments that may be a good reason to stay away from that.

(If she finds having the conversation painfully intolerable, writing your thoughts down for her to read instead might be a good idea. This is going to be awkward in any case; do try your best to put her at ease insofar as that’s possible.)

Statement: Shiver

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Porn affects people’s desires. When someone is repeatedly exposed to something in a sexual context, they start finding it sexy. This can lead to people being interested in rare body types, logistically difficult or unsafe or impossible acts, acts the vast majority of possible sex partners don’t like, etc. This can screw up one’s sex life by leaving one incompatible with the vast majority of people. Porn can also give people an inaccurate impression of what safety precautions are reasonable and normal, or portray situations that would be rape in real life as sexy dubcon that turns out okay in the end. Finally, porn can be addictive, or at least something close to it. Many people have spent hundreds of hours even they consider to be wasted on masturbating and watching pornography, and this is much more common than the same problem without porn so the porn is probably causally involved.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Video porn that really does have no redeeming artistic merit should be illegal to sell, as should any sexual depiction of minors (including drawn/animated/CGI/etc). Text-based pornographic works should definitely be kept out of school libraries and possibly should require proof of age to purchase (though doing this online poses its own thorny privacy issues).

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Don’t interrupt emotionally in the moment. Go away and start a conversation later, when you’re emotionally prepared. Say up front that you’re not mad, just curious, and that you want to be sure the kid is okay. Ask why they were watching that stuff and what they were getting out of it, and point them towards healthier, age-appropriate resources for learning about sexuality. Also, offer to set them up with a psychologist if they want to talk about this sort of thing confidentially with someone other than a parent.

Statement: Landscape

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Makes monogamous sexual partnerships much harder

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Should not be allowed to be sold in places where children can engage with it

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Explain that this is not age appropriate & restrict access to devices with unfiltered internet access to a more age appropriate time

Statement: Black

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Viewed more broadly, porn fits into a category of “approximations of human drives.” Sugar in food, as well as intermittent reward schedules in video games fit into this same category. In short, we are surrounded by evolved mechanisms which mimic our drives in ways that are easier to gratify than the real things. The presence of these imitations is intensely destructive because they don’t actually satisfy our drives, but they can sap our motivation to go out and accomplish things. The only way a person can be satisfied with their live is by learning to channel and control effort towards long term goals, coupled with a constant appreciation for the good they already have.

Note that I’m simply describing healthy dopaminergic and serotonergic systems here and arguing that we should see porn as being yet another mechanism that hijacks dopaminergenic drives without leading to the kinds of environmental changes that reliably produce serotonin release. Progressing in a video game is easier and more predictable than accomplishing things in the real world since the accomplishments are clearly meaningless: all dopamine, no serotonin. So when you play games, you feel better now, but you also feel far worse in the long run. Eating food that feels good now is easier than learning to enjoy the preparation and consumption of healthier food. It also feels far worse in the long run. Porn is yet another item in this same category, but i think it can be far more destructive because providing cheap temporary satisfaction of the sexual urge can lead to permanent loneliness. No partner will ever be as available and desirous of you as the images available to you in pornography. Functional, healthy relationships are probably more important for happiness in life than anything else; i believe ample evidence demonstrates this. Pornography encourages people to see others as tools for the ends of their own pleasure.

It is inconsistent to believe that representation matters in books, that it’s good for kids to see girl engineers and groups of multiracial kids playing, and yet at the same token think it’s not bad for a person brain to consume lots of images that contain the underlying message, “other people are objects who exist for you to look while you pleasure yourself.” I think the media we consume absolutely shapes our beliefs, by informing base rates in the probabilistic predictive models that our brains use. “Base rates about potential relationship partners” are absolutely going to inform your behavior.

What’s worse about porn than addictive video games, junk food, or explicit endorsements of racism, is the high level of social sanction around it, coupled with the more insidious nature of the damage. I think young people today are far more likely to be ruined by cannabis than they are by heroin, because the damage done by heroin is much more obvious; people become withered skeletons with rotting teeth and they die from OD’s. But with cannabis, it’s far more subtle. Just a general lack of drive, a loss of potential. Given the insane potential individual humans have, though, cutting off someone’s potential to be fully realized and functional isn’t that different, in terms of the magnitude of loss t the world, from having them be fully addicted. The difference between a fully realized human being and an ‘ordinary person’ is, i think, far greater than the difference between an ordinary person and someone who dies of a drug addiction - because most ordinary people, i think, are anxious, unhappy, stressed out, and confused, primarily because we are surrounded by cheap approximations of the good, living in a culture that tells us only idiots believe ‘good’ means anything about objective reality.

So if cannabis is bad because the nature of its damage is subtle and all it really does is ensure that even fewer people will realize how enormous their potential is, Pornography is even more subtle than cannabis, because it seems even more harmless. And yet what it does is cultivate unreasonable desires and expectations in people, in the same way that playing guitar hero probably makes you less likely to learn real guitar. The absence of a fulfilling long term relationship can ruin, has ruined MANY good people.

Do you want a generation of shiftless, angry young men, unable to commit, expecting women to be permanently available to them as sexual partners without any understanding of how to navigate a relationship? That is porn’s great gift to us.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

The only thing that should matter here is consent. No amount of laws is going to change this situation. Revenge porn and child porn violate consent so should be crimes. Anything else should be legal as free speech. In general, the question “how should X be regulated” reads to me, like, “how can we use ritualized violence to improve the situation of X.”

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

All children are different, as are all parents. I’m not going to answer how a parent should respond, in the abstract here. But i can answer how I think would be best for me to react:

I don’t want to sever my kids’ trust in me. That’s critical. I need to set a good example for them, and i need to encourage them to develop and grow along natural, healthy lines. Curiosity is natural and healthy, as is sexual arousal. So I think the best thing i might do here is not react to this specific situation (reacting usually makes situations worse) and instead be consistent about both demonstrating a healthy lifestyle, articulating why it works, and telling them openly about my own experiences. Ensuring they have healthy relationships with older peers of mine may help as well; i think a young woman like this would benefit more from hearing her mother talk candidly about her experience with porn than having me talk to her about this stuff.

Reacting out of fear almost always makes situations worse, and in general i think kids will learn best from me setting a good example of a healthy, functional, happy human being. If i’m doing that, tentacle porn won’t be an problem. If i’m not, tentacle porn is the least of my worries.

Statement: Development

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

It means they have less sex.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

It should be highly regulated to keep minors from seeing it, and actors need protections to keep them from being abused.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Calmly explain to them why they shouldn’t watch it.

Statement: Labor

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

People who engage with porn develop habits, mental and physical, which tie their sexual expectations to those of filmed fantasy. It developmentally skews and inhibits a person’s ability to have a healthy relationship with sex and with partners who are not the ideal seen in porn. People take lessons from porn on what does or should feel good or what does or should look “normal” from porn and it affects their self-esteem and ability to judge themselves and others well.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Porn should not be made widely available to the public, if there is a reason it must Stull exist, it should be heavily regulated and taxed. Those who create porn should be registered and sets regularly inspected. It should not be distributed except to people who can electronically verify their age through some official mechanism to prevent porn from being accessed by children or those who have already been proven to be sexually maladjusted, such as those previously convicted of sex crimes.

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

They should take away her internet access, subject to strict parental controls being implemented, and have a long talk with her about healthy and safe sexual habits.

Statement: Hard

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

Porn makes people worse people by influencing their desires to be depraved

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Porn should not be allowed but since there will always be a black market, it should be regulated heavily and taxed heavily

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

Take away their internet access and have the birds and bees talk

Statement: Weigh

What impact does porn have on the sex lives of people who consume it?

I think porn has brought sex more to the forefront of people’s minds, which is a bad thing given how readily it already comes to many people’s minds. Being able to more readily find sexual release without other people involved mitigates some of the harm of this, but nowhere near all. I think this has diminished culture in general, by other non-sexual interests frequently losing out in the competition for people’s attention.

(Also, porn has made many people feel ashamed of watching it, which is a bad thing - though you could argue that’s more caused by people’s attitudes than porn itself.)

Simultaneously, it’s increased trends and comparison between sex lives and sex partners, making sex more a public thing with mass culture instead of a thing that has separate “subcultures” inside each individual relationship. This could help some people out of what would be impoverished “subcultures,” but it hurts others by comparing partners to an ideal actor. This is even worse than normal mass culture, because people are comparing their real-life partners to actors following scripts with the messiness of real life removed, frequently engaging in behavior that can be (unsexily) painful and dangerous in real life. I think this harm is much greater than the benefit, and the benefit could be gotten in less-harmful ways.

How should the production and distribution of porn be regulated?

Despite these problems, I don’t think the government should try to stop porn. Quite aside from constitutional problems (in the US), the Internet is impracticable to censor - as we can see from China’s attempts to censor the Internet broadly, and as we can see from most governments’ sadly-failed attempts to take down child porn. Any attempt to ban porn would merely set the government up for public ridicule, as well as criticism from the people who want porn.

 Plus, I’m dubious about whether it’s the government’s place to go to such extreme measures to protect people from themselves.

But the government should definitely keep people from stumbling across porn by accident, it can keep it away from children as much as practicable, and perhaps it can put small inconveniences in the way of getting to it so it’s not an impulse decision. But I’m not sure how that would work, and it’d definitely be politically impossible at present.

(Also, of course, the government can and should protect porn actors by making sure they’re giving informed consent.)

A parent walks in on their ten-year-old daughter watching anime tentacle porn. How should they handle this?

First off, ask questions and listen! Have a real conversation! The goal isn’t to keep her from porn; she’ll eventually have that opportunity if she wants to see it - even sooner than age eighteen, if the parents aren’t willing to isolate her from society. The goal is for her to understand and agree how it’s a bad idea to seek out porn. It’s important for the parents to not make her feel like they’re her enemies and try to hide things from them.

Maybe she wasn’t even looking for it - in which case her parents should suggest safe search practices and antiviruses. Or maybe she was just curious - in which case, okay, she’s satisfied her curiosity; no need to look again.

Or maybe she’s going through puberty (like the average girl her age) and trying to understand her new feelings - in which case it’s past time for her parents to help her understand things. Or maybe her friends are pushing her to look at it - in which case, her parents should encourage and help her to stand up against peer pressure and maybe get a better friend group.

(Whatever the reason, if she hasn’t had it yet, it’s time to tell her about sex and what it means, in a way appropriate to her individual maturity level. It’s also time to remind her about how self-control is a good thing in general.)

Beyond this… If she seems to understand, and her parents think she’s trustworthy, okay. But if not - well, I haven’t raised kids, but I know rules can help develop self-control. I’d suggest her parents tell her not to look at it again. If she doesn’t seem to listen, maybe an Internet filter would be a good idea, or a rule about Internet use in her room, or a router filter that lets the parents know what sites she’s looking at - but that depends on her and her parents’ technical acumen.