Legal age in Canada is 14 too, as long as 1) you’re not an authority figure and 2) it’s not anal sex.
Legal age in Canada is 14 too, as long as 1) you’re not an authority figure and 2) it’s not anal sex. Of course, it’s illegal to look at a picture of a 14-year-old having sex (although the constitutionality of this is in debate.) In fact, someone who was acquitted of child porn posession recently commented, “It makes no sense that I can’t have a picture of it, but I can have the real thing!” I see his point.
As to prostitution, as George Carlin said: “Selling is legal; fucking is legal! So why isn’t selling fucking legal?!”
What is porn?
Thought wrote:
Um, what “moral fiber” is it that you believe prostitution breaks down? The moral fiber of nerdy guys sitting around sexually frustrated because their social skills aren’t sufficient to solve their sexual needs?
Speaking of which, being a “nice” guy isn’t sufficient to get a guy laid. <overgeneralization mode on> A heterosexual woman may be interested in finding a “nice guy” to settle down with, but it’s not “niceness” that causes her initial attraction. It’s sexual confidence, leadership qualities, physical fitness, and probably a good dose of pheromones. If a guy, despite his best trying, can’t find a woman who’s interested in him, society should not add insult to injury by insisting that he can’t rent a woman either.
tdn said:
Whoops! In rereading it, I think you’re right.
Sentinel, if that’s what you meant, never mind. 
Ever seen any Moche erotic pottery? They were a pre-Incan civilization from the north coast of Peru and, it seems, they really knew how to get it on. T
There was at least one story in the 1001 Arabian Nights that used some, ahem, pretty explicit metaphors, too.
>> Personally, I don’t think you should be able to get sex if you can’t talk someone of the opposite sex into it. Sort of breaks down the moral fiber of our society if money solves everything.
Yeah, but a little money saves a lot of talking.
A guy with limited social skills, or little time for socializing or just unattractive may not have access to the type of woman he likes unless he is paying. Why is it wrong to give her the money directly for the sex and not to take her to dinner etc?
I cannot see why people should not have the freedom to buy and sell this like any other service.
People in Europe definitely have a more relaxed attitude towards nudity and sex and I think they are more natural and better.
Personally, I believe NO porn, even Kiddie or animal should be Illegal to POSSESS. Making it (and I’m not talking about those guys that were “duped” by Traci lords), should, of course, be punished by castration, then life imprisonment with a series of “bubbas”.* But that’s what I feel about any Child Molestors (as opposed to Statutory rape).
*On the days I feel merciful, and if it is a 1st offence,I’ll simply go to: “bailif, take this man out & shoot him”.
I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. 
No, but I’ve seen photos of erotic sculpture in India. Did you know that many Buddhist and Hindu temples have phallic symbols lying about? Did you know that a shankara stone is really a lifelike phallic symbol and not those featureless, smooth rocks they showed in the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?
When the new top-level domains come in, there’s been some talk of forcing porn sites to move to a “.xxx” domain. This would make it trivially easy to keep it off the search engines, to add filters to programs to keep kids out, etc. In essense, the .xxx domain would become the Internet’s red-light district.
Comments? As a Libertarian, I have big problems with any government intrusion in our lives, but this seems like a reasonable compromise. Do whatever you want, just do it behind a .xxx domain.
My problem with porn sites is that they are starting to really obstruct the everyday workings of the net. Doing searches for mundane things can cause a zillion hits for porn sites that stuff their meta tags with common search terms, making it really hard to find the stuff you want. Commercial porn-blocking firewalls keep a lot of non-porn content out (at my office, I can’t access google.com, my favorite search engine, because our porn filter blocks it. It has to because google caches pages, which could theoretically allow people to move porn past the firewall).
Yeah, I’ve come across this idea too. I think it would be great! Pornography would be available to those who want to find it, but it wouldn’t clog up the search engines like it does now. Like you said, it would become incredibly easy to filter, based on domain name rather than content.
The only problem I can foresee is that the overly-puritanical might be tempted to lump every site containing foul language, nudity, or mentions of sex into the .xxx category in order to create a “sterile” Internet. But forcing a site to adopt an .xxx domain is a lot better than outright censorship, in my opinion. We would need a very exclusive definition of pornography to denote only the sites that explicitly sell sexual content for money.
Otherwise, I can’t see why the authors of adult sites would object to the .xxx domain. It wouldn’t stop potential customers.
-JB
I think that pornography should be kept pretty much how it is: freely availible to anyone over the age of consent. I have nothing against pornography whatsoever. Most of it does absolutely nothing for me, but there is stuff that I enjoy a lot. I don’t see how banning it would accomplish anything but to make criminals out of anyone with a libido and a voyeuristic bent, and I certainly don’t buy into the ultra-radical feminist viewpoint that it degrades women. At its worst, it can, but at its best it can be an empowering experience for everyone involved, and that is true for just about everything in this life.
Now, about pornography and kids:
I had written a long and detailed post about my history with pornography, but I scrapped it because I found myself going into more personal details than were strictly necessary. All I am going to say is this. Pornography has the potential to make kids aware of sex as a good thing, and to cultivate a healthy awareness of it and how it works. Not that I’m advocating throwing a copy of Hot ‘n’ Horny Redheads on the kid’s desk and calling it sex education, but I do think that if the softer-core stuff was made availible to kids of younger ages than 18, then we might see a more healthy attitude toward sex around here. Plus, they wouldn’t be going through your stuff to get it. Barring that, could we at least get more realistic diagrams for sex education? Who draws those things? It wasn’t until I discovered Penthouse that I realized that my genitals did not, in fact, look weird. If your tastes run toward the more, ahem, unusual, it might be worth considering the possibility that your child might find it and be unduly influenced. My father didn’t… Not that I blame my kinkiness on my dad’s porn collection (and I certainly don’t blame my sexual orientation on it), but let’s face it. Certain things just should not be seen until one is ready to see them, lest one think that they’re normal. I could have saved myself some embarassment later on…
I’ve always found it both fascinating and revealing that our American culture cosniders depictions of sexual acts pornography and obscene, yet glorifies the most graphic portrayals of physical violence imaginable.
Which is more offensive: Two physically attractive adults having sex or large numbers of people being shot, stabbed, beaten, chain sawed, and so on to death?
Ironic, at best.
I think that part of this dichotomy is that we realize that the violence that we see is fake. It’s not reality, so it is less disturbing. Porn is real people with fake breasts having real sex.
If I saw real murder (and a couple of days ago I thought I did, see my earlier post), I would be very disturbed.
If I put up a site on the new “.xxx” domain, and it wasn’t pornographic, would they make me take it down?
Posted by tdn:
What about pornographic cartoons, drawings, paintings and sculpture? That’s fake people having fake sex, and yet I can get turned on by that. Try watching a hard-core Japanese animated cartoon. And the actors don’t have to worry about disease or pregnancy!
“What about pornographic cartoons, drawings, paintings and sculpture?”
Yeah, like those naked child cupids on Valentines Day?
As long as the participants in porn are consenting adults (let’s not try to address bestiality on this point) I have no problem with porn. As far as “moral limits” go, I decide for myself what I will look at or not look at. I don’t go for S & M or felching or fisting (ouch!) or snowballing or bestiality, but I’m not going to make it so that YOU can’t enjoy it, if that’s your thing.
Do I see all women as sex objects because of porn? No, just THOSE particular women (or, at least, the characters they are portraying - It’s not unusual to see a “model” in several different magazines, for example, using different names).
So fist and felch and snowball to your heart’s content. Just keep the kids out of it.