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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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"People as young as 12 have realistic views of the economic viability of sexuality, how dare they."
I don't think you can extrapolate that from this. Recognizing economic hardship and understanding nuanced sexual dynamics in society are very different.
It would be like saying a child understands the military industrial complex and systematic oppression just because they liked GI Joe action figures or want to be in the army. Lots of kids just think helicopters and explosions are cool. Then their opinions change as they get older and begin to understand the actual toll on human life that a war takes.
Somehow I doubt that. More likely they view it like being a YouTuber, streamer, or influencer, when in reality it's primarily video production and marketing. It's not just "film titties get money", you have to actually convince people to subscribe.
It is like being a YouTuber. People think it's easy money and then they make jack-shit with barely any audience all while working their ass off. Only a few get big, most burn out after lots of work and little success.
This is an insane fucking take. Yes 12 year olds should not be feeling a desire to make pornography.
healthier than working construction
It doesn't say they desire to make it, but that they recognise it's a viable way to make a living, which is true. I think this says more about how terrible wage slavery is and how difficult it is to survive on minimum wage, than anything else.
"Pornography" on OF is... a wide term, if we're being honest.
There are a TON of creators there that pretty much just make noise against a microphone, with their fingers, and that's it (ASMR). They may (Or may not) do it in skimpy clothing.
That being said, should 12 year olds be feeling a desire to be a soldier when they grow up? A construction worker? Or, any other line of work where you literally sell your body + useful years of your life doing back breaking work that leaves you on pain meds after the age of 45?
I just conferred with my omnipotent imaginary friend, they said yah, so long as they don't beat their wife, or slaves with anything wider than a ruler. (Or telepathically ask for forgiveness, what luck!)
They also should be able to say “yes, I’m 18” and just access this content. Right?
Are you saying that a child watching porn is equivalent actual child porn?
Cuz it sure sounds like that's what you're saying...
Nah. Just that it’s one aspect of porn and a 12 year olds potential viewpoint on it. If we’re discussing one fucked up fact (this study), I figured we could throw in another related fact.
Remember, we are talking about kids who see it as a future career. Not as a current option. It’s still fucked up. But I didn’t take the article to be saying kids see a career in making porn at their current ages.
I was talking about one way they may be informed on the subject. And that’s what this comment thread is about. Being informed. It started about economics.
My comment was a terribly formed way to try to make that point. In addition, it was me being snarky about people who don’t want anything better than “r u 18?” keeping kids off of porn sites. A recent hot topic. This study shows we may have even more reason to reconsider how we handle porn online.
AND YES, further solutions have a million downsides. That’s why they have been avoided up until now. I’m not saying the way things are going is great (recent laws). I’m just saying that it’s fucked up we don’t have better solutions yet. It’s 2025. And studies like this are just beginning to concretely show the results of online porn.
I know everyone around Lemmy, and in nerd circles loves porn. It’s the invisible hand that picks technological winners and losers and all that.
It’s all a tangled mess. I have no real solutions. And I’m against banning pornography. I mostly find it a bit frustrating there is no nuance. And that after 25-30 years or whatever, the discourse around it still thinks parents are the solution, even though they consistently, pervasively fail. There’s usually not even anything said about how we could make the parent problem better. All we hear is “it’s not my fucking problem. It’s the parent’s problem!”
I mean, parents are the solution here. The problem, is our society, has made that an impossible task by keeping the working class exhausted, and unable to think beyond the next 24 hours.
So let’s fix all of the rest of society, instead of changing how we distribute porn online.
I don’t disagree with you. But I do find that line of discourse to be a dead end, solutions wise.
I mean, yes. Let's stop atomizing humans, so we can start to stand and support each other; rather than locking down access, in a way that has a serious detrimental effect on everyone else, and STILL doesn't solve the problem; and removes an income stream from a load of people.
I mean shit, it takes like what? 10 minutes to download Tor, and start browsing the dark web, where pron of every variety exists, even things highly illegal like live stream of child rape? Yeah, that's loads better than a teen stumbling onto Porn Hub, amirite?
Shit, even before the internet, kids had lots of access to pron. I remember the magazines being passed around in 7th grade. You know what halted the magazine circulation? Parents being parents, and finding them, and then taking them to add to their own stash. You know what didn't help a bit? Checking IDs at time of purchase, because kids weren't buying them at the store anyways.
It's the same discussion as gun violence in the US. We can try to regulate firearms as much as we like, and it's STILL not going to put a dent on a problem caused not by unregulated shit, but by the fact that humans are so desperate for things like housing, healthcare, and fighting poverty, it makes more sense to do a drive by then to try to do the "right thing".
Same with the War on Drugs. The drugs aren't the problem. The shitty society pushing people to become addicts, and then to treat addicts like criminals is the problem.
I don’t dispute anything you are saying. I think it can coexist with finding the way we handle things strange.
We should support sex workers and not disparage their profession. It’s real work, right? Then maybe we need to accept that our culture is increasingly showing young people it’s a viable profession. Right? My point in bringing up access to porn, was to point out some uncomfortable inconsistencies in how we are treating/thinking about sex workers. Our relationship with porn and sex work has been evolving over the past 30 years. This article is a result. And, as I said before, it’s a big messy thing. It’s inconsistent. And it’s strange how it’s inconsistent.
If we categorically say that sex work is only a job of desperation, that it should be a last choice option, that seems disrespectful to sex workers.
Nothing about our online “discussion” here is well structured. It has all the cliched problems. And I’m not great at it.
My initial post was nonsense, relative to my full feelings on the subject. It was like a clickbait headline.
Yep
I think that the larger problem is that you probably aren't going to be an erotic actress for your whole life.
Like, what the authors seem to be focusing on is the degree to which teens might see this as an alternative to traditional work or being educated:
So, okay. Say you're a young woman and 20, and you make pretty good money putting on cat ears and licking a microphone or whatever's presently in vogue compared to most other things you could be doing at that age. But...are you going to be doing that at 30? 40? 50? Are you likely to make enough to retire off that in the time that you're successfully doing that? Because if you haven't acquired a skillset in that period for a lifelong career...like, if you forego education for that, that could be a really expensive exchange.
Now, in fairness, I kind of feel like some similar issues also apply to things like being a professional sports player. Short viable career for most sports, high risk of not being able to make it big enough to retire off earnings. But we also haven't had a radical recent shift in the pro sports industry.
I guess maybe pro gamers could be in a similar position. I don't know how many teens plan to do that (though I haven't seen a lot of material agonising about the number of teens who want to become pro gamers). I have seen a lot of material concerned about the wildly-beyond-what-can-be-sustained numbers who want to become social media influencers, though.
EDIT: Regarding influencers:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-influencers-86-of-young-americans-want-to-become-one/
I can't give you a percentage of society that can be viably dedicated to trying to influence others on social media off the cuff, but I am very confident that it is far, far less than that. If anything remotely approaching that level tries to do the field full time and make major tradeoffs for it, that's going to potentially be very costly for society.
There's not really any stigma to being a former sports star, that's one big difference.
I mean, I can imagine a world where there isn't to being a former erotic actress either. Used to be a stigma attached to being a (non-erotic) actor or actress, whereas today, we have very high-prestige actors.
But that world still requires people to have a skillset for their working life
like, that's kinda fundamental.
If you are successful as a content creator, whatever the platform, you have great marketing, communications and branding skills. How transferable do you want the skills to be?
Big if. Most aren't that successful.
I can imagine it too, but that's not the world we live in, and I don't think we will any time soon.
Well, it's hard to predict societal change, I think. I remember commenting that a lot of past futurism seemed to be a lot more accurate on technological change than it was on social change. Gender roles or clothing predictions aren't all that great, though what machines are doing can be at least in the ballpark. So I feel kind of on thin ice here.
But if you look at the article, the stigma doesn't seem to be showing up with the study participants:
If you look at what a lot of musicians do today in music videos, I'd say that it's not terribly far off softcore pornography. I've certainly seen softcore pornography in the past that was less-explicit than what a mainstream musician might be doing in music videos in 2025.
And I think that that's a shift that's been happening for a long time. Selling sexuality was part of what Michael Jackson did in the 1990s or Elvis did in the 1960s.
So my guess is that the trajectory is towards normalization. Can't say with any certainty that the trajectory will continue, though.