alt Hacker NewsAssuming you are really asking, the two largest objections:
- religious/cultural. My beliefs forbid this, it makes people bad/worse in some hard-to-define way, so no one should be allowed to do it. Sometimes with an emphasis that the sellers are luring good people into sin/ruin.
- it harms women. Many of the participants are trafficked or coerced in some way (and further abused). The profits from the industry encourage more of this. It “warps” the mind of men who use it, leading them to mistreat and abuse women.
I see elements of truth in all these, but IMO they are ultimately not compelling, prohibition is unworkable and unduly infringes on willing participants and consumers.
Replies
I would add:
- natalism. Some people worry about inverted demographic pyramids. They want to see more births, so they need more horny guys trying to form relationships instead of being content single. Sometimes there is a racist angle.
- industry. Anything that's "too fun" for young people disincentives education or working.
- addiction. (But people get addicted to shopping or eating dirt too.)
Some arguments against outlawing it include:
- free speech.
- a sizeable fraction of the population wants it to exist.
- better option for economically impoverished women than prostitution.
- societies that suppress it don't really seem better for women, or anyone.
- prohibition of a widely demanded product creates crime (and nothing is easier to smuggle than pure information).
Frankly I believe the whole “warps the mind of men to abuse women” is total nonsense.
I’ve watched plenty of porn in my life, probably a bit more than average. I’ve never done anything out of the norm or unwanted to woman, let alone abuse one.
I think shitty people will be shitty people and it’s just a really easy thing to point at instead of taking responsibility for it. It’s also a convenient plausible sounding correlation for people who already want to ban porn to use.
The "porn harms women" argument really seems to infantilize women and assumes that women can never want or enjoy sex for the sake of sex.
Yeah both of those arguments would work fine for banning religion, but oddly that is shocking to proponents.