Mog and Chips

(Disclaimer : I’m currently ill and rather dizzy at the moment, so this may not make much sense. I should probably be in bed, but I’ve been sleeping since I came home early and can’t sleep much more.)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8453043.stm

He states that studies show violence has more of an impact on children than porn.

Can you tell me of a study in which children are subjected to porn? You can’t. It’s Forbidden Study. (For good reason.) I may be completely wrong her, but I thought deliberately showing kids porn wouldn’t get approved by any study boards. Like how you can’t set up a feral child study by purposefully abandoning and being cruel to a child because it would probably screw up the rest of their lives, if there’s potential for porn to screw up kids thought processes – no way.

So you’re comparing violence in video games, which has been studied in depth and in lab settings (to be fair, much of it’s from 70s or so with film and there’s more opposition to subjecting kids to it now for experiments than there was then), to porn which you can’t study in such a way, and so the only way you can is by what hits the news or stuff that might get caught by parenting organisations, police, etc.  Sexual crimes generally aren’t done in public, or nearly reported as much as violent crime.

In fairness, I’m sure there’s porn out there that’s perfectly… er… not-potentially-damaging? (teenagers, not kids here) As in that doesn’t push negative values such as descrimination to one sex or the other, or false ‘natural perfection’ that might make people very self consious, and that doesn’t paint a completely unrealistic picture of things (huh? foreplay? what’s that?) If your teenage kid is going to go looking for porn (possibly because their sex-ed wasn’t damn well good enough. Or because they’re actually looking for it, of course) that’s probably the sort you’d rather they stumble across. After all, unlike general behaviour towards other people (ie not re-enacting Street Fighter on random people in a shopping mall because you’ve been taught hurting people is bad) you’re not generally taught anything in regards to, uh… sexual conduct? So that first experience of watching other people doing what now might have more of an impact than say, playing Bully on playstation. You have a base of comparison with the latter. The former, if it’s your only knowledge of such things, could potentially become the base of comparison.

So compare, uh, “proper, upstanding citizen” porn (haha, how much more English can you get?) with violent video games and yeah, Mr Jeremy might have a point. It’s the ‘bad’ porn (sexist, plastic, nightmare fuel fetish stuff, etc) that you really don’t want your young teenagers coming across. And younger kids you probably (forbidden study case in point) would rather them be learning by example family values than sex (Perhaps its my lack of experience in the area, but I’m under the impression that porn doesn’t deal much in the family values department.) Plus there’s the general keeping kids away from sex thing.

But Mr Jeremy, perhaps because the public face of the porn industry would rather be said “proper, upstanding citizen porn” (roffle) declines to mention the nightmare fuel porn, which you most certainly would not want your children seeing.

And there’s the Big Bad, violent porn. Even bigger and badder, violent porn video games (Yes, they exist. The famous ones from Japan, because everyone’s obsessed with the Japanese being schoolgirl rapists and blah, but I’m sure, since the pixellated General Custer’s Last Stand there’s stuff like this in every video game culture.) And the really, really big big big bad of porn involving children – I think we can safely say there’s no decent person that thinks that’s better than violent video games. (Or er, anything, really.)

Lets not forget that generally you’ll watch porn on the internet or download it and not neccessarily have a box set in your DVD collection that the media can pounce on like they can with computer games and violent films, or that the media neccessarily wants to discuss on daytime TV.

Luckily, I will never have to deal with this, because I never intend to have children.

In the end Mr Jeremy has a point – kids shouldn’t be allowed to access potentially damaging moral material (violence and sex, in this case) and the people that have the most power to prevent it are their legal guardians. His way of trying to stand up for his own industry by saying “it’s not as bad as violent video games on children!” when really, children shouldn’t be his audience anyway, is rather bizarre. (You know, as opposed to “it’s not plastic and fake anymore!” or “we don’t support nightmare fuel!”. Maybe taking such a bizarre standpoint is his way of being different from all the other porn marketing type people?)