British MP Calls For Pornography 'Opt-In' 335
Robadob writes "Internet providers should create an 'opt-in' system to prevent children gaining access to pornography, a Conservative MP has said. Claire Perry wants age-checks to be attached to all such material to reduce exposure to it. The mother-of-three, who has prompted a Commons debate on the issue, said internet firms should 'share the responsibility' of protecting children."
Re:Opt-out (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here's a ground-breaking idea: (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything I want to see legislation that just forces porn makers to label and/or tag all porn. That way not only can I avoid what I don't want to see, but I can find the stuff I do want to see. Its win/win for all.
Re:protecting from what? (Score:2, Interesting)
FTFY
Re:How adorable (Score:4, Interesting)
As a child I had a computer (no Internet at the time yet - just games); which was installed in the living room.
And I think that's actually quite good. There's more to the Internet than porn, much more. Children, especially the younger ones, need supervision. I don't think a porn filter is necessary (and then I'd rather have a filter against stuff like mindless bloody violence - but for some reason that's totally OK).
And when I hear about people having actual problems related to Internet use it's never porn, it's games and to a lesser extent chatting and social networks. MMORPGs are infamous, but there are more. They can be addictive, and can really lead to interference with normal life - and study or work. I've never heard about porn doing anything like it.
Story time. (Score:5, Interesting)
I was raised to be fairly sexually repressed. No, not religious fundy, anti-sex crusader level. But enough that I would lock up from embarassment at the mention of the subject, and couldn't keep my eyes open in sex-ed class. Really a bit problematic. I couldn't have had this conversation, or even read this thread - my hands would have just trembled too much to handle the laptop touchpad.
Of course I stumbled upon porn from time to time, but it didn't interest me. When I was in secondary school - I forget which age exactly - I stumbled by chance and wikipedia's random button upon FurryMUCK. It's a freeform furry roleplay place. Though intended for non-sexual roleplay, there's also a lot of sex there - it's just confined to clearly delimited places. I enjoyed the place, a lot, and made many friends there over a period of months without ever venturing into the sex-ok places. Still, temptation loomed, as I often saw my new friends venture in. Eventually I followed. It took a long time, but my inhibitions were gradually worn down. I became capable of watching others RP without feeling terrible shame, and eventually took part myself.
I still have the logs. The emotions of that learning experience were quite intense.
It's many years later now. I routinely attend social events that would have been impossible had I not gone through those experiences - it's hard to be social when the mention of sex reduces one to a quivering wreck. I still enjoy sexual roleplay online very frequently, too. It hasn't ruined my life: I hold a steady job, dabble in programming, and watch more television than is healthy just like everyone else. Thanks to my experiencess of pornography and socialising with the extremally sexually-open furry community online, I have been greatly improved as an individual. The repression is just about gone - I've even made some rule-34 artwork of my own. I can participate in debates like this now.
If such an opt-in system as was discussed existed, none of this could have happened. Can you imagine any minor going to their parents to ask 'I want to look at a chat site, but the ISP blocks it as obscene. Can you call them and fix it?' For that matter, even couples without children would have a hard time opting in, as each one would likely react with culturally-ingrained horror that the other would want to 'cheat' on them by looking at porn. The only way most non-single people could find an excuse to enable it would be if it were broad enough to block non-pornographic sites they needed - in which case, what's the point?
Besides all that, there is no practical filter that will stop a moderatly determined person of some skill getting around it. Most children don't know how, but they do know how to google, and they do have friends at school who will share the knowledge.
Re:How adorable (Score:3, Interesting)
Wah... you were really born in the wrong era... in my time, sneakernet used to provide mainly high-res images, printed on glossy paper.
That said I do recall I had some "strip poker" game but it was broken... the part where it got interesting the images were all broken or simply not there.
Re:Claire Perry, way to admit to being a bad mothe (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife and I have discussed this at length and we've come to the conclusion that if my Son is savvy enough to get past all the parental restrictions that we'll put in place, then he's old enough to look at porn. And fair play to him.
Re:I for one... (Score:3, Interesting)
Please walk into my local newsagents. The top shelf is ALL pornography. Sometimes the gits who read it in the shop don't bother to put it back where it came from. Sometimes the tall kids get it down so they can all giggle at it until the security guard comes over. The security mechanism to stop you looking at women in explicit poses is a height limit (when kids are generally taller than I am now) and the hope that someone will challenge them.
Underneath that, on the bottom shelf, are piles of papers. Some barely have photographs in them at all, others have boobs on every page. Quite often they are of celebrities, even sometimes pop stars that kids adore. Nobody ever queries them.
In between you have the "men's magazines" with scantily-clad, oiled ladies baring everything they can legally bare without having to be placed on the top shelf and articles like "How to turn that feminist into a slut". Cosmopolitan sits next door to it with sex-toy reviews and advise on orgasms and sexual positions. Even the Metro (a free London paper handed out on the London underground) has sex-toy reviews in it. When I was 8, someone brought a "Just Seventeen" magazine in from their older sister's stash. We all got in trouble for reading an article about a girl in a club putting her hand down a man's trousers.
Switch on the TV and even excluding the "ten minute Freeview", there are sexual-suggestive channels that broadcast sex chat lines and try to stay within their censorship by clever camera angles and euphemisms. Switch to the music channels and watch Katy Perry or Britney Spears gyrate in skin-tight catsuits and sexually suggestive poses with explicit lyrics (and, just lately, almost every song seems to have a "sshhhh.."ed swearword - i.e. the word is obviously a swear word because it rhymes with the previous line but they can't say it so they suggest it instead - Britney has a song about having a threesome, even). If it's not that, it's gangster-rap talking about the bitches and hoes that they "own".
Walk down the street - in even the quietest British town there's usually an Ann Summers (or similar) shop which, at the rear, has a selection of sex toys. Even when I was a kid they were there and girls told me that they would go into them in little gangs so they could have a giggle at the fake penises. The pound-shop near me has fake rubber boobs, handcuffs, chocolate willies and all manner of similar things. Even the fancy-dress stores are swimming in erotic imagery now - there isn't one that *doesn't* stock a French Maid or Playboy Bunny outfit.
And then go to Spain, or many other European cities, where all this is in EVERY shop and the red-light districts are clearly marked with 50-foot signs advertising sex shops. The only prostitute I've ever seen was actually in Italy, and I live in London.
Now you can say that this is "soft" porn but look at the ubiquity. It's incredibly simple for anyone to stumble across some sexual activity, even if that's just an amorous couple at the local park. The difference is the way you allow your child to absorb that information, the same way as you allow them to absorb other "undesirable" parts of culture for their age.
People swear in front of my child. My child knows that it's a "naughty" word and she's not to use it back. By the time she gets to secondary school I quite expect her to be swearing with her friends but I would hope that she keeps it in context - in fact, I'm more likely to tell her off for using an incorrect or too-obscene word for the situation than I am for swearing at all. However, in front of me, she will not swear. When I was eight, I was told off for calling someone a dildo. I didn't know what it meant, it was just a funny word. I doubt I would have understood if you'd explained it to me.
My child will also, at some point in her life, witness sex in many forms - television, computer games (I've fixed the PC's of parents who didn't realise that the South Park computer racing game was about firing dildos at ea
Re:Claire Perry, way to admit to being a bad mothe (Score:5, Interesting)
When I have kids, I'm convincing them that they can't get their fix of big breasts without proving p!=np. They'll win Field Medals in no time.
I find this plan oddly appealing....
You could probably turn a teen into a network engineer by gradually ramping up the hurdles between them and pornography....
Re:How adorable (Score:3, Interesting)
It's actually pretty easy [bbc.co.uk].