“Millions of dollars are pouring into projects to mine asteroids and the moon. And with a space gold rush comes space pirates.” Ahoy mateys!
U.S. teens getting less formal sex education since 2006, via Laura Pate.
This seems like a bad idea.
Clint Olsen shared Hardcore, abundant and free: what is online pornography doing to sexual tastes—and youngsters’ minds?.
Do read the whole thing.
The sharpest fears concern teenagers, now likely to see a vast amount of pornography long before becoming sexually active. Will they fail to understand how unrealistic it is? What are the pneumatic female stars and ever-ready, freakishly endowed male ones doing to their viewers’ body images and self-esteem? Some who work with adolescents, including Meg Kaplan, a psychologist at Columbia University who treats those convicted of sex offences, think it likely that some sexual tastes are formed around puberty. That means ill-timed exposure to unpleasant or bizarre material could cause a lifelong problem.
Denmark, where sex education has been compulsory since 1970, is taking a different approach. Rather than trying to pretend porn does not exist, or stop young people from seeing it, some Danish teachers are starting to discuss it in the classroom. “It’s not a question of introducing pupils to porn,” says Christian Graugaard, a professor of sexology at Aalborg University who would like such lessons to go nationwide. “The overwhelming majority of both girls and boys have already encountered pornographic images in their early teens.” Porn can be used to talk about gender equality, safe sex and the meaning of consent, he says—and about how to have a happy sex life in the future. Since porn is all around them, he thinks, “it’s important young people learn to be critical consumers.”
Porn is neither harmless nor harmful. But it’s very harmful for a person to only know about sex through porn. Porn exists. It cannot be banned. Any attempt to ban it will push it underground, hurting workers and making the dearth of good data on it much worse. We have to fight speech with speech. We need to de-stigmatize porn so that kids know that it’s not real life. That most “amateur” porn isn’t.
Porn isn’t a public health crisis, as the Utah legislature recently resolved. Sexual ignorance and stigma is.
Fuck Gail Dines, who agrees with Utah, but she’s right here:
Parents and educators at every level need to know that if porn is not discussed in a research-based, age-appropriate sexual health curriculum, its effects will surely show up as sexual harassment, dating violence and inadvertent “child pornography” on students’ phones. Pornography can cause lifelong problems if young people are not taught to distinguish between exploitative porn sex and healthy, safe sex.
Bringing this all back around, I look forward to space pirate porn. Also when Elon Musk needs a space mistress, I’m available.
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