thinking about it more this might be a "circle the ranks" political decision but. interesting.

[stardust_rifle]

Theory, am open to further data points on this.

While a lot of the personal attributes that people point to determining which "side" you're on in the anti/pro debate (being a survivor, being kinky, age, nationality, religion, being trans) are merely predictive or not actually correlated to any particular side, I think I may (emphasis on MAY) have found something that is absolutely determanitive of what "side" you wind up on.

Again, I am open to correction on this, but I don't think I've ever seen an anti talking about having had good experiences with easily-available internet pornography or a pro having had bad experiences with the same.

Comments

[palominocorn]

I've had "oh my god what the FUCK ahhh ewwww NOPE" experiences, but even at age seven (in ye olde days of porn popups and no good ad blockers) I was capable of like... clicking the close and back buttons?

Even in the wild west of the early internet, the porn wasn't inescapable.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

I've seen profiction folks talk about seeing unwanted and disturbing internet porn/gore, but then using that to explain why that justifies the importance of things like robust sex ed, filterable content/tagging, and parents who don't jump right to punishment when their kids try to approach them with questions/concerns. I suppose how applicable experiences are to "side" depends on how each side is being defined.

[feotakahari]

Yeah, I googled once to find out what all the references to “Bible Black” on TV Tropes were about. That was not a fun time.

[stardust_rifle]

Well, whenever profic people bring up the tagging/blocking issue, they sort of do it in these very general terms without bringing up their own personal experiences. I've just noticed this trend where people who self-identify as "pro-(x)", when bringing up personal experiences with internet pornography, only talk about how it was a net-positive or net-neutral, where as self-identified antis, when bringing up personal experiences of broadly available internet pornography, treat their experience with it as net-negative.

This has been, in this author's experience, so utterly predictive of self-identified allegiance, that I was curious if any pros believed if their experience with broadly available internet pornography was net-negative but were still pros anyway, or any antis who saw their experience as net-neutral/positive but were still antis anyway.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Hmm, yeah that would be interesting: "I really found myself through the things I stumbled into online and it helped me a lot but I believe it's still wrong" or "the depths of the internet have overall been so horrible for me but it should still be available to others."

[yvannairie]

Mmm I don't have examples at hand, but I think this is causation, not correlation -- antis wouldn't talk about the benefits of porn even when they have encountered them because it doesn't suit their narrative (except when it does, and they have a rare example of "good wholesome" porn to uplift), but I have seen plenty of non-antis talk about how access to the bad porn eventually led them to the good porn.

[redthedragon]

I don't know about that one, I've known some hardcore pros who also had bad experiences with internet porn. I think the real question here is who's willing to talk about kids getting into porn and for what reason, and it's much harder to spin "I think porn was bad for me as a kid and also we should keep it easily accessible anyway" into something that people will agree with, whereas "porn was bad for me as a kid" and "porn was fine for me as a kid actually" are both much easier to make into discourse cudgels.

Also like... some (i thought it was most?) of us have had both? What happened to the "omg yeah hahaha when i saw Two Girls One Cup it was disgusting, what do you mean I can't look at the porn I LIKE?" people? It feels like not even three or four years ago that was just an understood part of the internet- some of the things on it are gross and/or disturbing and some aren't.