They are doing neither, and the article itself undermines its premise later when the "serious research" is being quoted. As it cites, most offender get exposed during early teens, back when there were no porn algorithms. However, the rate of child sexual abuse has steadily decreased since the 1990s, down by almost 50%. If the hypothesis of the article was correct then the rate of child sexual abuse should increase, not decrease.
Other research studies, have looked at the rate of pedophilia in the general population, and the conclusions seems to be a fairly static rate of around 2% (like "Prevalence, situation, and perspectives of treatment" from 2020). However since the rate of child sexual abuse has decreased, such studies mostly rely on doing survey and those has for obvious reasons a major problem of sampling and accuracy.
A common theme in the research, just from a very quick look, is that the researcher themselves cite that the is a huge lack of research in this area. They can see the trend, and see the numbers, but there is little to real understanding to what is behind the numbers. We currently has as good chance to blame the Catholic Church as to blame pornhub, and articles like this one are not helping the slightest. At best it just spreading fear in order to generate engagement, and at worst they are abusing their readers by pushing propaganda in order to sway popular opinion about oppressive laws.
> the rate of child sexual abuse has steadily decreased since the 1990s, down by almost 50%.
That's kind of remarkable if true, because the openness of both individuals and institutions to taking reports of it seriously has increased. Before all our modern awareness of stuff like "consent" a lot of reports were dismissed, especially if the pedophile was someone trusted in the community and especially if they came from women. Boys often didn't report at all out of shame.
Usually when there's an increase in awareness you see a phantom increase due to reporting, as has happened with things like rates of homosexuality or with diagnostic categories like autism and ADD/ADHD.
Of course maybe there's less of it today because abusers are getting caught more often. That's possible too.
Edit: this wouldn't surprise me at all given that there appears to be zero relationship between public panics about something and its actual incidence. Street crime, for example, was orders of magnitude worse in the early 1990s vs. today but people were less panicked about it. Public panics are media driven.
There is a categorical difference with your examples for "phantom increase due to reporting". On one side it's something done to you/someone, in particular a serious crime, on the other side it's something about you/someone, in particular not a crime.
This is important, because the risk of getting caught, not necessarily severity of punishment, is the main factor in crime deterrence, as far as I know. I presume, increased vigilance and ease/encouragement of reporting has a significant deterring effect on potential perpetrators. As with all sexual abuse, the vast majority of cases happens in settings where the victim knows/trusts the abuser beforehand, therefore conviction entirely depends on the victim's willingness, prospect and ability to name/accuse the abuser. Coming with the reporting, there is probably also greater awareness and knowledge about the manipulation tactics and situations enabling abuse, helping guardians, friends and authorities to identify concerning dynamics and encounters.
However, I presume, the increased ease of reporting and awareness also indirectly prevents further abuse by subsequently encouraging victims to seek help and work with their trauma. I've heard a significant share of perpetrators have been victims of abuse themselves in the past, so seeking therapy after being victimized may also break the cycle of violence.
I would guess that pedos today are far less likely to commit sexual abuse given that the chances of being caught are high and the repercussions are extreme. In the past this was much less the case.
We should be careful not to equivocate between pedophilia which in the technical jargon of research studies is a sexual attraction to pre-pubertal children and child sexual abuse which loosely is the act of sexually assaulting someone below the legal age of consent. They are two different things. An abuser might not be a pedophile in the technical sense, and a pedophile might not be an abuser.
So rates of pedophilic attractions and use of CSAM could be rising while rates of child sexual abuse is falling. I don't know if that's the case, but we shouldn't confuse the two things.
It's one thing when people actually seek it out. But the idea that someone may get charged for a video they didn't realise contains underage people is chilling. I know one tiny woman who in her 30s still could pass for a highschooler and will probably be carded for many years to come. On the other hand I went to high school with a couple of people who could pass for 25+ year olds easily. Without personally checking someone's id, you just can't know for sure. So even if you'd want to avoid illegal material - how sure are you you're safe?
All commercially produced porn is fastidious about record keeping. Even to the extent that someone underage used a convincing fake ID, relying on that infra would be a pretty strong defense. Truly amateur, unknown source, “teen” content is scary as hell.
Well I don't know about the "porn algorithms", people are free to choose what they want. So if they continuously choose from the "teen" category, I'm guessing some sort of deviation must be at play.
Like if you check the teen category on https://www.pornpics.com/ , many of the girls there seem awfully young with some, practically kids.
For me the feeling is too uncomfortable to watch those. But I did notice a curious phenomenon, now that I'm approaching 50s. There were all kind of movies I watched as a kid, teenager or young adult and I completely ignored the beauty of the actresses in them, they were at best associated with "mom" if not "granny". But now, that their age in the movie is 10-20 years below my current age, suddenly I discover that they're pretty good looking. Like Elaine from Seinfeld for instance :)
I heard somewhere this saying and I'm afraid it's true: "When a man is in his 20s, he finds beautiful maybe 5-10% of the women of his age. When they're in their 40s, they find about half the 20-somethings beautiful. When they reach 80s, they find all of the young women beautiful." :)
Not even porn algos, regular algos provide a feast for those people. Tiktok, previously musically, youtube, it is all filled with questionable underage content. The worst part though is that if you are into such things, it recommends more to you, and other similar users history and activity gets recommended to you, thus distributing the content. It is no different from how these algos learn you like mountain biking or gardening.
I hate how when an article about how science has discredited the concept of porn addiction wound up getting bounced off the HN frontpage within minutes of appearing on it, then flagged and deaded:
"The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don't believe in authoritarianism. Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged." - Al Goldstein
Any addiction is bad, including porn. Why normalise it? Addictions can be greatly advanced by an algorithm, you can't deny that either. Are porn sites trying to advance porn addiction in their users? Well, the number of views is their money, so it's reasonable to assume they are.
I could agree with only one thing, that porn addiction is not the worst one out there, but blamed the most. For some reason, it's ok for mobile games to make gambling addicts from kids, but no one seems to care about that.
I think the argument is that even very disordered and disregulated consumption of porn doesn't resemble what we typically define to be an "addiction". There's a meaningful difference of degree and of kind between a bad habit that's difficult to shake, even a deeply entrenched one, and medical/psychological addiction, and researchers have repeatedly concluded that porn consumption never reaches the standard of the second.
I don't really believe porn addiction ever really was normalized. The layperson definition of "addiction" is just something that someone is habitually occupied with. The medical definition of "addiction" is more like something that you have a serious dependence to, to the point where it impacts your life and it would cause distress to be without it.
And don't get me wrong, I am not saying that there are not people with a sex or porn addiction, but I think it is woefully uncommon. I'm pretty sure if you take the average person that the Internet classifies as a "gooner" or "porn addict" and took away all of their porn, they would be completely fine. It's the same for those stupid mobile games, too. They get the vast majority of their money from a small minority of people, and even then, not all of those whales are addicted either, some of them are just well off enough and choose to spend their money on frivolous things, no different than people with thousands of vinyl figures (and although I think they have a bad taste in figures, I doubt most of them have a serious problem.)
What I do think was normalized in the late 90s and early 2000s was extrarordinary crudeness and overt sexuality, but I don't think there was really a point at which people were normalizing getting psychologically dependent on pornography. It'd be kind of hard to normalize that since it's more about the specific person than it is the thing they're dependent on.
This also does not mean that social media or algorithms aren't fucking with our brains in other ways. And I'm going to be honest, I have absolutely no idea what the porn algorithms are or what they're doing. I don't use Pornhub or sites like Pornhub (yes, I know, "sure you don't", but I'm serious.) I do use YouTube constantly, and I don't think I'm addicted to YouTube. I'm not addicted to Technology Connections or Practical Engineering. I'm sure the YouTube recommendation algorithm is fucking with my brain, but I wouldn't call anything it's doing an addiction. I'm also sure this is true for a majority of TikTok users, even though it's a ton more... well, what us laypeople would call "addicting".
Betteridge's Law is strong with this one. The lede is buried at after all the sob stories about guys who discovered they were pedophiles because recommendation algorithms are really good as showing you what you want to see. This is all just pretext to the UK government's massive privacy overreach and censorship.
> Along with other countries, the UK is bringing in tighter controls on the porn industry. Porn sites will be required to have age verification processes in place by July to stop children viewing their content, a process that will be monitored by Ofcom under the new Online Safety Act (OSA). But the OSA does not ban or control certain common practices in porn, such as strangulation, sexual fetishisation of incest or the abuse of children acted by adults. The government argues depiction of sexual strangulation is banned but a recent in-depth review of porn by Baroness Bertin, a Conservative peer, warned it is not, in reality, covered by case law. She called for tighter regulation of “legal but harmful pornography like choking, violent and degrading acts … even content that could encourage child sexual abuse”. While headlines picked out the call to ban strangulation, Bertin also demanded clearer rules around “incest, step-incest and ‘teen’ porn”.
I think the people pushing these moral purity bills need a wake-up call about what women find hot. Because this worldview makes no sense once you know that these "violent and degrading acts" are extremely common fetishes among women who play the part of the "victim." It's not men who are reading gothic horror where incest one of the tamer depictions. The problem in the real world is that, despite the public perception otherwise, guys are generally deeply uncomfortable playing out the other side of these
kinds of fantasies.
I'm not saying you're implying this, but I need to be the boring hall monitor to point out that while consensual submissive fantasies are extremely common there is none -- zero -- overlap with actual non-consensual sexual assault which I'd venture to say nobody (to within a rounding error of zero) finds appealing.
It's kind of like the difference between watching a scary movie or visiting a haunted house attraction vs. actually being chased by a brutal crazed murderer.
I don't disagree which is why playing out a rape fantasy is generally called "consenting non-consent." There are rules, boundaries, safe words, lots of aftercare, just generally good communication all around is a necessary condition.
Haunted House is actually such a good way of explaining it. I'm stealing that!
I don't as an anecdote disagree with some of what you said. There are many things happening in private that you don't hear about in public. Friends aren't telling friends things. And I think it's important that people feel more comfortable/open/vulnerable with people they know rather than projecting what they want people to think.
But I'm a guy and don't claim that I know what women want! Perhaps you're a woman and thus your reply is rooted in lots of experience/evidence?
Yes, I'm a woman posting about my own experience as well as the experiences of my female friends who I could in no way describe as skewing particularly sexually deviant. They all pretty much consider themselves "vanilla" and yet this article would have you believe that they're deeply depraved for wanting to be "taken," choked, dominated, or receive some light degradation.
These things are so normal
that they're not even considered to separate from sex, they're just what you happen to be into— on the level of preferring specific positions.
This strikes me as invidious, an effort to silence. Perhaps I misjudge, so I'll respond in good faith: your prior interlocutor attributes to women what is in fact a common trait of people who've previously been abused.
The misattribution is common; women more often come in for sexual abuse on the one hand, and on the other benefit from much more space in the social narrative to exist as survivors thereof. Men who have been similarly abused tend to respond differently, for that and other reasons.
> I think the people pushing these moral purity bills need a wake-up call about what women find hot. Because this worldview makes no sense once you know that these "violent and degrading acts" are extremely common fetishes among women who play the part of the "victim."
Agreed, every single woman I’ve slept with has expressed a desire to either be restrained, submissive, choked or spanked, and a few have expressed desires for nonconsensual sex fantasies. It’s exceedingly common.
> Because this worldview makes no sense once you know that these "violent and degrading acts" are extremely common fetishes among women who play the part of the "victim."
I’d like to see some evidence for that because it sounds like a projection to me.
Readit News
Other research studies, have looked at the rate of pedophilia in the general population, and the conclusions seems to be a fairly static rate of around 2% (like "Prevalence, situation, and perspectives of treatment" from 2020). However since the rate of child sexual abuse has decreased, such studies mostly rely on doing survey and those has for obvious reasons a major problem of sampling and accuracy.
A common theme in the research, just from a very quick look, is that the researcher themselves cite that the is a huge lack of research in this area. They can see the trend, and see the numbers, but there is little to real understanding to what is behind the numbers. We currently has as good chance to blame the Catholic Church as to blame pornhub, and articles like this one are not helping the slightest. At best it just spreading fear in order to generate engagement, and at worst they are abusing their readers by pushing propaganda in order to sway popular opinion about oppressive laws.
That's kind of remarkable if true, because the openness of both individuals and institutions to taking reports of it seriously has increased. Before all our modern awareness of stuff like "consent" a lot of reports were dismissed, especially if the pedophile was someone trusted in the community and especially if they came from women. Boys often didn't report at all out of shame.
Usually when there's an increase in awareness you see a phantom increase due to reporting, as has happened with things like rates of homosexuality or with diagnostic categories like autism and ADD/ADHD.
Of course maybe there's less of it today because abusers are getting caught more often. That's possible too.
Edit: this wouldn't surprise me at all given that there appears to be zero relationship between public panics about something and its actual incidence. Street crime, for example, was orders of magnitude worse in the early 1990s vs. today but people were less panicked about it. Public panics are media driven.
This is important, because the risk of getting caught, not necessarily severity of punishment, is the main factor in crime deterrence, as far as I know. I presume, increased vigilance and ease/encouragement of reporting has a significant deterring effect on potential perpetrators. As with all sexual abuse, the vast majority of cases happens in settings where the victim knows/trusts the abuser beforehand, therefore conviction entirely depends on the victim's willingness, prospect and ability to name/accuse the abuser. Coming with the reporting, there is probably also greater awareness and knowledge about the manipulation tactics and situations enabling abuse, helping guardians, friends and authorities to identify concerning dynamics and encounters.
However, I presume, the increased ease of reporting and awareness also indirectly prevents further abuse by subsequently encouraging victims to seek help and work with their trauma. I've heard a significant share of perpetrators have been victims of abuse themselves in the past, so seeking therapy after being victimized may also break the cycle of violence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronophilia
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So rates of pedophilic attractions and use of CSAM could be rising while rates of child sexual abuse is falling. I don't know if that's the case, but we shouldn't confuse the two things.
Fake ID is irrelevant in many jurisdictions.
Like if you check the teen category on https://www.pornpics.com/ , many of the girls there seem awfully young with some, practically kids.
For me the feeling is too uncomfortable to watch those. But I did notice a curious phenomenon, now that I'm approaching 50s. There were all kind of movies I watched as a kid, teenager or young adult and I completely ignored the beauty of the actresses in them, they were at best associated with "mom" if not "granny". But now, that their age in the movie is 10-20 years below my current age, suddenly I discover that they're pretty good looking. Like Elaine from Seinfeld for instance :)
I heard somewhere this saying and I'm afraid it's true: "When a man is in his 20s, he finds beautiful maybe 5-10% of the women of his age. When they're in their 40s, they find about half the 20-somethings beautiful. When they reach 80s, they find all of the young women beautiful." :)
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43587448
And yet, this absurd sensationalist dreck will probably stay up here for longer.
I could agree with only one thing, that porn addiction is not the worst one out there, but blamed the most. For some reason, it's ok for mobile games to make gambling addicts from kids, but no one seems to care about that.
And don't get me wrong, I am not saying that there are not people with a sex or porn addiction, but I think it is woefully uncommon. I'm pretty sure if you take the average person that the Internet classifies as a "gooner" or "porn addict" and took away all of their porn, they would be completely fine. It's the same for those stupid mobile games, too. They get the vast majority of their money from a small minority of people, and even then, not all of those whales are addicted either, some of them are just well off enough and choose to spend their money on frivolous things, no different than people with thousands of vinyl figures (and although I think they have a bad taste in figures, I doubt most of them have a serious problem.)
What I do think was normalized in the late 90s and early 2000s was extrarordinary crudeness and overt sexuality, but I don't think there was really a point at which people were normalizing getting psychologically dependent on pornography. It'd be kind of hard to normalize that since it's more about the specific person than it is the thing they're dependent on.
This also does not mean that social media or algorithms aren't fucking with our brains in other ways. And I'm going to be honest, I have absolutely no idea what the porn algorithms are or what they're doing. I don't use Pornhub or sites like Pornhub (yes, I know, "sure you don't", but I'm serious.) I do use YouTube constantly, and I don't think I'm addicted to YouTube. I'm not addicted to Technology Connections or Practical Engineering. I'm sure the YouTube recommendation algorithm is fucking with my brain, but I wouldn't call anything it's doing an addiction. I'm also sure this is true for a majority of TikTok users, even though it's a ton more... well, what us laypeople would call "addicting".
> Along with other countries, the UK is bringing in tighter controls on the porn industry. Porn sites will be required to have age verification processes in place by July to stop children viewing their content, a process that will be monitored by Ofcom under the new Online Safety Act (OSA). But the OSA does not ban or control certain common practices in porn, such as strangulation, sexual fetishisation of incest or the abuse of children acted by adults. The government argues depiction of sexual strangulation is banned but a recent in-depth review of porn by Baroness Bertin, a Conservative peer, warned it is not, in reality, covered by case law. She called for tighter regulation of “legal but harmful pornography like choking, violent and degrading acts … even content that could encourage child sexual abuse”. While headlines picked out the call to ban strangulation, Bertin also demanded clearer rules around “incest, step-incest and ‘teen’ porn”.
I think the people pushing these moral purity bills need a wake-up call about what women find hot. Because this worldview makes no sense once you know that these "violent and degrading acts" are extremely common fetishes among women who play the part of the "victim." It's not men who are reading gothic horror where incest one of the tamer depictions. The problem in the real world is that, despite the public perception otherwise, guys are generally deeply uncomfortable playing out the other side of these kinds of fantasies.
It's kind of like the difference between watching a scary movie or visiting a haunted house attraction vs. actually being chased by a brutal crazed murderer.
Haunted House is actually such a good way of explaining it. I'm stealing that!
I don't as an anecdote disagree with some of what you said. There are many things happening in private that you don't hear about in public. Friends aren't telling friends things. And I think it's important that people feel more comfortable/open/vulnerable with people they know rather than projecting what they want people to think.
But I'm a guy and don't claim that I know what women want! Perhaps you're a woman and thus your reply is rooted in lots of experience/evidence?
These things are so normal that they're not even considered to separate from sex, they're just what you happen to be into— on the level of preferring specific positions.
The misattribution is common; women more often come in for sexual abuse on the one hand, and on the other benefit from much more space in the social narrative to exist as survivors thereof. Men who have been similarly abused tend to respond differently, for that and other reasons.
Agreed, every single woman I’ve slept with has expressed a desire to either be restrained, submissive, choked or spanked, and a few have expressed desires for nonconsensual sex fantasies. It’s exceedingly common.
I’d like to see some evidence for that because it sounds like a projection to me.
I haven't looked at it closely, so I have no idea whether it supports or opposes the hypothesis. Just wanted to give you some data.
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