How “Rim of the World” Shows Our Culture is Drenched in Smut
I’m not a Netflix subscriber myself. My wife is though–perhaps to the surprise of many, she opened her account in Mexico and it’s actually paid for in Mexico, but still available in the USA (my wife is a Mexican citizen who is a greencard-holding resident alien in the United States). We can still watch US shows, albeit we pick them from a menu listing Spanish-language titles. Within the last week we decided to watch a Netflix-made movie called “Campamento en el fin del mundo,” which is literally “Camp in the End of the World.” Note the title in English is actually “Rim of the World.” The translator took some liberty, but in fact I think the title in Spanish is more interesting to me than the English.
Note I didn’t read any reviews of this Netflix production before watching it. The trailer and poster art made it look like a take on Goonies perhaps. Or maybe a bit like Stranger Things with aliens. Plus, I wondered what “camp at the end of the world would be” (the title caught my attention) so we just went ahead and started watching (in English, claro).
Didn’t check reviews–should have
If I had read the reviews I might not have watched it at all (there’s a lesson here), because it has an overall rating of 5.2 out of ten in one place (IMDb), with a number of very strong negative reactions pulling down an average that would otherwise be higher. The negative reactions include one review entitled “Rim of the Toilet,” which tears into everything about the movie, from sloppy writing to ethnic stereotypes to (most significantly for me) foul and sexually-suggestive language.
Well–it’s not a very good movie, granted. The aliens are ridiculous, the plot has truck-sized holes…and yes there’s some pretty clear ethnic stereotyping. And too much fecal humor and yes, crude language. However, all of that didn’t totally destroy the charm of the movie for me. Some characters were likable and believable. I did continue watching until the end, even though I’m about to complain about this film. The appeal was more like Spy Kids than Goonies, because it cast young teens in the highly improbable role of saviors of the planet (from an alien invasion). With some pretty goofy story gimmicks, but which would be okay for kids except for what I’m going to gripe about.
By the way, I just gave away a piece of the plot. I’m going to give away a bit more, but I won’t call them “spoilers.” You’d be better off avoiding this movie altogether. Not really because of the crude language, occasional fecal humor, unrealistic plot, and ethnic stereotyping. There’s something that bothered me more.
One thing worse than the rest for this run-of-the-mil film
There’s one thing about the show that’s by far worse than everything else. Which was certain sexual references, really pornographic references, thrown out for laughs in this film.
Note this movie isn’t like Cuties from what I now of that movie. From what I hear, Cuties was intended to criticize the hyper-sexualization of young girls…but also wound up promoting the very thing it intended to criticize. Since I haven’t seen it, I can’t say how badly Cuties failed or how exploitatite it was. But from what I understand, that film was intended to be high art. Avant-guarde stuff.
Rim of the World has no such excuse. It’s a run-of-the-mill kid comedy, not particularly original or groundbreaking in any way. With pornographic references thrown in. As if expecting that it’s standard for 13 year olds to already be highly sexualized. Which of course is true in our culture…but more on that in a bit.
What were the objectionable references?
This story shows three young teen boys and a girl, three of whom were at a summer camp in California, on a quest to save the world from an alien invasion by delivering a key handed off to them by an astronaut who just flew in from the International Space Station, which for “reasons” has to be delivered to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
In the bit of the film that took place before an alien invasion distrubed summer camp, a female camp counselor says to one of the boys she wants him to “put it in my box.” She’s referring to putting his cell phone in her cell phone box, but he embarassingly misunderstands the reference as a sexual one (for those who don’t know, “box” in a porn context can mean “vagina”). He doesn’t embarass himself so much that this movie becomes acutal pornography, but the reference would only not be picked up by someone completely innocent of this kind of smut. Which would not be me, sadly. Nor was it, far sadder still, something that most 13 year-olds in the USA would fail to understand.
Later, there’s a sexual reference to “motorboating”–if you don’t know the sexual context of that term, I don’t care to explain. If you hadn’t heard that as a sexual reference before, trust me, it can be. And no, I wasn’t reading into the film something that wasn’t there. It was there, all right.
Also, there’s a scene in which the one girl in the story announces to the boys, “One of you can sleep with me tonight.” She seems to be making the reference a literal one, since there are two beds where they are and she hops in one (and furthermore, she’s from China, so maybe doesn’t understand the nuances of “sleep with”). The boys, realistically enough for our current culture to be sure, interpret what she said as a sexual reference and discuss among themselves who will be the lucky guy–as if presuming sex was included in “sleeping with.” (Which, granted, is not specifically pornographic–still, the expectation of sex fell in line with other sexual references).
The movie was a bit coy about if any thing actually happened or not. The girl says, “I’m glad it was you” when the boy gets in bed with her. But the movie doesn’t show anything happening. They awake in the morning fully clothed, but with odd little smiles, as if sharing a secret. Overall, the movie implied nothing happened…though with little hints that maybe something could have happened.
Avoiding this movie doesn’t explain why it was made in the first place
Avoid this movie. It’s not worth your time. But the fact that this is just one bad movie in an ocean of bad movies misses the point I was making just a bit ago.
This movie is not in any way groundbreaking or original. The dialogue was more smut-stained than what you’d hear in, say, Stranger Things, but that doesn’t count as innovation.
The filmmakers obviously tried to create stereotypical kids with stereotypical situations. They were not pushing the envelope of artistic expression here. They simply drew from what they knew of ordinary life for kids. And that’s just the problem–it wasn’t just that filmmakers made a bad film or they made bad decisions, but that what they put together matches a culture that’s mainstreaming these kinds of references. So that this sort of thing is expected. So that it’s considered normal.
The fact that a program containing the sexual innuendoes it has could be sold as a story idea, plotted, filmed, edited, and marketed–to kids, mind you–that itself is the problem. “What were they thinking?” someone might say. Obviously, not much–but pushing the “easy” button to grind out a mediocre tale picked up a slice of what the filmmakers consider normal for American youth.
We could hope the filmmakers were deluded and simply imagine kids are like this. But I don’t think they were. They actually managed to show something true by means of their not-very-outstanding production. It’s actually standard for 13 year-olds to be exposed to sex through pornography. All anyone needs is a smart phone and the knowledge of how to find sites–which isn’t all that hard.
And another disconcerting thing–all the good ratings this film got on IMDb. Enough to counter the many people who rated the film at one or two. The little demographic chart they share shows older women like the movie more than any other groups. Could that be because they didn’t pick up the sexual references? Maybe.
Porn needs to be restricted; it’s changing us
I’m not going to try to establish in this post the principle that pornography does harm. I’m just going to state that it does and we can discuss that idea in the comments if you want.
But I see an analogy to how cigarette makers used to sell their products to kids back in the day, before laws effectively restricted that. They wanted to get ’em hooked young. To keep them as customers for life.
The porn industry doesn’t have to market to kids in the same way–unsupervised Internet access already takes young people there. Yes, sites tell people if they are not 18 then they can’t enter. But that’s not much of a restriction. And even parental controls have their flaws.
I think a vice tax on porn to end the distribution of free porn would be appropriate. Maybe I’ll talk about that idea more in a future post–but for now, let me just put the idea “out there.”
But as for trying to explain why each generation in the USA is less religious than the last, it isn’t because of properity. That happened here in the mid-20th Century and didn’t change the United States all that much. But ubiquotous entertainment of the 21st Century, including easy-access porn? That has made us an entirely different nation than what we used to be.
Again, I’m not defending in detail the assertion I just made in this post, that porn changed America–I’m simply making my opinion known to the public at large.
Conclusion
I could say a bit more about Rim of the World and much more about porn in our society, though I won’t go into any more detail right now. We can discuss these topics in the comments if you like.
But I’d say this movie simply reflected what our society is like in the inappropriate sexual references it dropped. Porn hits young people early. That’s a sad truth.
So now that you know what I think, what are your thoughts on this subject? Please share them in the comments below.
Welp, if they never showed anything and only made mention of double entendres and motorboating, that’s about as much could be expected of a PG-13-level show. I wonder what the chances are that this one was in development hell and was originally written with older characters? 18ish instead of 13ish? And then it went into hell and they scrapped up the remnants into something they thought was salvageable? (Not that it was.)
I hate to break it to you, Travis, but motorboating is pretty tame. Maybe less so for 13yos, but it is also pretty stupid.
Ah yes, my fuddy-duddiness. Except you lack historical perspective. I’m not just concerned with what is but also the trend.
I was also concerned with the portrayed male expectation of sex and objectifying women. I’d think that might concern you as well…
Historical perspective? History is longer than the Hays Code, bruh. There are sex jokes in Shakespeare and Chaucer.
Do you really want to get into a discussion about pr0n more nuanced than “just ban it all”? Non-sarcastic question, because I could totes do that. Of course I’ll be bringing in some feminist memes like Men Are Trash and Throw the Whole Man Out.
We could do a brief history of pr0n, including the Kama Sutra, Arabian Nights, ukiyo-e, all the European art with unnecessarily naked people in it. I’ll throw in a bonus John Berger quote: “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.’
Bonus unsolicited Utube: I ultimately couldn’t watch much of this show because I got dead from secondhand embarrassment and I am disappointed about that
Well, while you might know a particular bit of history better than I do, in general, your knowledge of history seems sketchy to me. From what I can recall you bringing up in the past. And just now. So I suspect I know even the history of sex and porn better than you do. Or at least as well.
As for the “just now,” you deserve a bit of cold, hard reality in the face. Do you really think that the human brain is equally affected by a still photo or painting as it is by video? Do you actually imagine that instant access to any kind of video a person could wish for has no effect on people? Or that this isn’t new and unprecedented?
Wake up, Notleia. You’re acting like a dunce.
Don’t worry, we can talk about nickelodeons, too.
That wasn’t the discussion, bruh, that was just an introduction. I feel like we need some science to back up some points of contention, like whether moving pictures make different impressions than still pictures (it sounds like it tracks, but I would still like some science).
From the feminist jungles in which I’ve traveled, they spend quite a bit of time talking about how pr0n targeted to the male audiences is the most violent and degrading. Pr0n produced by women with a mostly female audience (which is largely text-based or drawn, prob because they can’t get funding for high-budget film pr0n) is generally less violent, less obsessed with skeevy details like jailbaiting, and less exploitative for the workers (which may largely be because so little of it is filmed with real people who are exploitable).
Why is sex and violence so highly correlated in things for male consumption?
Does pr0n have to be violent? What would happen if pr0n was less about inflicting and more about sharing? There’s a lot of stuff on tumblr or AO3 that fits that sort of description. Not that women-oriented pr0n is entirely without problems (cough, omegaverse, cough). But deffo less so than the majority of the industry, which is also male-oriented.
More thoughts: I have to question the expectation that people (or men specifically) cannot escape being fixated by sex and nudity.
It reminds me of some horse training videos I’ve watched lately about working on buddy-sour horses or horses who spook. The mare the trainer used as an example kept pacing by the gate when separated from her herd-buddies. Turns out that helping the horse redirect their attention and break the fixation did loads to help the problem.
So what if a better solution was rather than to be OCD-vigilant about sex and get caught up in fixations about it, to do something more like the Litany Against Fear? Move through and beyond the feelings that sex brings up?
I will face my
fearhorninessI will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the
fearhorniness has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.Since you’re from the South originally, you’ve probably been to an all-you-can-eat buffet, which is more popular there than some other regions, I think (though the whole USA has them).
Ever seen a 500 pound person at a buffet stacking up a plate with food as high as possible? Then wolfing it down and going back for more? And more? And more? I have.
Do you suppose somebody who has a problem like that is actually hungry?
That is in effect what Europe (by analogy) decided back in the 1950s and earlier when it legalized prostitution. That people who have access to legal prostitution would not commit sex crimes, because sex is just a biological need. And if you provide an outlet for that need, all will be fine.
America, on the other hand, with a more “puritanical” tradition, in effect held that people should be married as the ideal outlet for sexuality. The Christian idea certainly is along those lines–that sex is potentially dangerous and can be soul-corrupting. That it can also be very, very good, but belongs in a certain kind of committed union. And goes hand-in-hand with having families and children.
Of course America has loads of illegal prostitution and sex rings. And sex trafficking.
But I’ve read that the Netherlands, long home to legal prostitution, has one of the highest rates of sex trafficking in the world. The appetite for more, for some people, never really ends. And Germany, also home to loads of legal prostitution and even porn on regular broadcast channels, is the number one country of origin, per capita, of people who engage in sexual tourism. Which often involves minors and sex slaves.
The Europeans are wallowing in sex, like the human hogs at the trough of the all-you-can-eat. So is /our/ culture, to be honest. And it’s not OK–we need to take a step back. Such lack of control results in real boys and girls, women and men (but mostly women), being taken as slaves by force to feed the dark edges of that never-ending appetite.
My thoughts are not that sex is bad. But a person can be conditioned to develop a dangerous and ravenous appetite for sex–which starts, usually, with exposure to porn. Our society would be wise to make accessing porn harder.
You know, it’s like how almost everyone used to smoke and think it was no big deal. Billions of people addicted worldwide. But we don’t do so the same way anymore. People still have access, if they really want it, but we discourage people from getting carelessly addicted. That’s how our policy on porn should be.
And it would be nice if movies reflected a culture that actually cared about that issue.
Your 500lb buffet person may be hungry for dopamine rather than calories. Lots of people use food as a self-soothing mechanism, however maladaptive it becomes.
Fixation is profitable. I think it’s more an indictment of capitalism than culture.
Heck, I’ll expand on this. What needs/urges are men (you know the vast majority are men) seeking to fulfill with trafficked victims that they can’t get with just a simple wank or a sechs toy?
The more benign situation is that they’re just looking for a hooker and don’t know she’s trafficked. What are they looking for besides simple release? Having their emotional needs catered to (by a woman)? Do they not have other outlets for emotional caring? Why is that? Is it because they can’t or won’t spend time building a relationship like that with another person?
The less benign situation is that they want to scratch an itch for domination and power. Europe may be more progressive than America in some instances, but they don’t seem to be any more progressive about toxic masculinity than America, except maybe in regards to guns. It still seems the same in regards to a lot of men defining their masculinity as being dominant (often specifically over women).
Pr0n will never be a good thing. Even if all the eViL mEn died off.
What’s your reasoning?
It’s always exploitative.
We’ve pulled up the example that drawn pr0n is possibly non-exploitative.
It never stops there. And in the minds of those who use it, they start seeing those body parts as detached from a human’s existence and worth. Drawn images don’t get around that. It’s inherently exploitative and devaluing.
Next you’re gonna tell us the one about how trying weed will punt you down a slippery slope to selling your last teeth on ebay for another hit of meth.
I don’t think the evidence backs you up on that, bruh.
Lol, k. Show me the evidence that there exist people who ONLY use drawn pr0n, and that said drawn images don’t make them look at those body parts as detached from a real human being’s existence. Have fun arguing against reality, as you often do…
Okay, but that’s not exactly my hypothesis here.
It’s not just about drawn vs live, it’s about your typical mainstream, domineering, exclusively male-gazey pr0n versus a kinder, gentler pr0n with less fixation on penetration. Like Sunstone by shiniez, or in written form, something like this nifty Pride & Prejudice fanfic, parts of which that get into the NSWF zone: https://archiveofourown.org/series/629375
This article (https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/a30171574/pornhub-year-in-review-2019/) prolly comes closest to explaining what I mean.
And I don’t actually expect elimination of objectification, just reduction. Even without pr0n, peeps still objectify peeps. Pr0n doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
And what I’m saying is pr0n is never a good thing, even excluding the male gaze. The burden of proof really lies on you, if you’re trying to say there’s anything truly morally good in pr0n at all.
Because nobody asked, a tumblr sh*tpost:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/780811654131935772/
Well, someone can often know what perverted things mean without being a pervert themselves. Many times it’s easy to figure out meanings based on context and small hints apparent in peoples’ demeanors. And, like, variants of the box joke are kinda common. Pretty much any time someone says ‘put it in’ or discusses putting an object into something else, there’s a chance that a crass joke will be made. Or else a crass interpretation crosses at least one person’s mind, even if they know the situation wasn’t sexual. Some of that’s just them acknowledging a play on words or the fact that people can and often do use those phrases sexually, though.
It’s not automatically an evil thing. Consider that the ends of cables are sometimes called male and female. The male part obviously being the one that sticks out, and the female side being the one that can be plugged into. People can refer to the male and female ends of the cord without thinking about sex, but it’s pretty reasonable to assume the terms originated from how male and female genitalia fit together. I’m sure the chars in Rim of the World actually were making sexual references, but it’s still important to note that people don’t always say things for the reasons we initially assume.
That said, of course porn should NOT be marketed to kids. And porn CAN be exploitative, so I do believe ‘live’ porn (whether filmed or people going to strip clubs) is wrong.
But where are you drawing the line and defining something as porn? Even for legal experts that seemed to be a bit of a struggle, at least in terms of what should be called porn in the eyes of the law. Some things are very obviously porn, but others are a lot more complicated. Like, supposedly foot fetishes are a thing. So maybe a bare foot is shown at a certain angle in a movie and 99% of viewers barely take notice. But then that last 1% gets off on it somehow. Should the show be considered porn just because that 1% has a problem?
That’s two extremes, and two opposite ends of the spectrum, one being an actual live sex scene being filmed, and the other being a completely benign thing that people happen to take the wrong way. But shows can be anywhere in between. And everyone might have their own idea of where a show falls on that spectrum.
Modesty is important, and people shouldn’t be encouraged to sexualize each other. But dealing with that incorrectly can easily lead to sweeping sexual issues under the rug in a way that hurts more than it helps. I mean, you’re basically acting like sex jokes/references are automatically horrible, so if that’s where the bar is, how are people supposed to address sex in a meaningful way, whether it’s in real life or fiction?
There is a case for crass jokes in stories, and it’s a pretty bad idea to assume they’re always promoting depravity. Within the last year or two I actually realized this a lot more fully after taking time to reexamine Jiraiya’s character arc in the Naruto/Naruto Shippuden series. Jiraiya’s a good person overall. He clearly cares about his friends, village, and even the world as a whole. In his earlier years, after his village is done fighting a war in another nation, he stays behind to take care of and mentor three orphans so they could survive and maybe even help their nation. He was also like an adoptive grandfather to Naruto himself, and Naruto mourned pretty hard after Jiraiya’s death.
But it’s no secret that Jiraiya had his flaws. Mainly, he was a womanizer. There were times when he seemed irresponsible, too. During one mission he and Naruto had some free time, and he holds onto most of Naruto’s money, claiming he didn’t want Naruto to spend it all at once. He also warns Naruto to stay away from certain vices (such as money and women). But when Naruto found Jiraiya later, Jiraiya was drinking and had his arms around a couple women. Naruto sees that Jiraiya used the money he was ‘safe keeping’ and spent it on women.
Just the fact that there were a lot of crass scenes played up for humor made me irritated with the show growing up. It was annoying having to skip things, and I sort of took it as them applauding the behavior or at least not taking it seriously. Reflecting on that now, that might not have been accurate. Sure, it’s meant to be funny, but that’s more about noticing aspects of the situation that are amusing, rather than saying people should actually act like that in real life. Even if the author wasn’t decrying perversion, lots and lots of characters reacted negatively to Jiraiya’s behavior. It’s easy enough to conclude that people aren’t ok with being treated that way. And someone watching the show with their older teen child could point that out.
Like, when Naruto saw that Jiraiya stole his money and spent it on women, Naruto was furious, calling Jiraiya out on his hypocrisy and demanding reimbursement. But then there’s lessons on all sides there. Jiraiya shouldn’t have stolen money or fooled around with women, and Naruto should be more wary when someone offers to ‘take care of’ his money.
The consequences don’t stop there. Obviously at a surface level Jiraiya got beat up for harassment and such, but there were more sobering consequences as well. He really loved Tsunade, the one woman he would have probably been willing to settle down with, but not only did she fall for someone else, it’s reasonable to guess that Jiraiya’s obvious perversion made her think poorly of him on most occasions. It was probably one reason she never took him seriously as a romantic option. If he’s constantly after every woman he sees, why should she believe he’s actually serious about her?
Jiraiya’s not the only one with flawed conduct, though. Naruto wasn’t remotely as bad as Jiraiya, but if I recall correctly, when he was about twelve years old he and another kid were in a bookshop reading some rather inappropriate material. But rather than deride the anime, it’d be better to acknowledge that Naruto’s behavior was wrong, but made a lot of sense in that situation. Naruto was an orphan that was ostracized by a lot of the village. Aside from a kind teacher at school and a couple adults that checked on him now and then, he had little adult supervision in his daily life. He basically grew up like a wild weed. If anything, he would misbehave on purpose, because at that time, negative attention was better than none at all. All that highlights the need for good parental involvement.
As much as I love the Naruto series, I did kind of misjudge it when it came to the crass jokes and situations. Instead of taking it as promotion of/indifference toward depravity, I should have taken note of all the times that depravity was portrayed negatively. Even if the story actually was promoting bad behavior, it’s depicted in such a way that a lot of people still decry the inappropriateness and point out the bad effects it had on the character’s lives.
I’m not saying people need to watch shows depicting sexual depravity. I myself skipped through a lot of it. But analyzing and discussing characters like Jiraiya would be far more useful than complaining that their depravity is noticeable.
And simply saying porn is bad doesn’t do enough to solve sexual issues either. If anything it just tempts people to sweep things under the rug.
One time I briefly visited with a person I knew in college. Probably not more than a month or two beforehand, she started dating this one guy. During our visit, she talked about how wonderful she thought her boyfriend was. Then she started talking about some discouragement she had at the beginning of her relationship, some of which stemmed from one of her friends asking ‘what if he’s addicted to porn?’ She acted like her friend was just trying to discourage her by putting doubt in her ear. But dismissing her friend’s question was kind of a bad idea, since it introduced a genuine possibility.
When considering the idea of her boyfriend being addicted to porn, she seemed to find the idea so scary and damning that she had to shove the possibility aside just to make herself feel better. Of course she shouldn’t be overly paranoid about it, but it would have been better if she came to terms with the issue and found a decent way of handling it.
Otherwise, if her boyfriend actually did have an addiction, he might have been put in a situation where he felt forced to hide it at all costs for fear of upsetting her, making her break up with him, etc. So even if he felt ashamed of his addiction, it’s not something he could count on her to understand and help him through. He would just have to hope she never finds out.
And that’s all from her saying ‘porn bad’ without addressing these issues in a nuanced way. It made her act naive in this situation and may have impacted her boyfriend poorly as well.
Exactly how she should have dealt with the situation would depend on a lot. And in the end she would have had to decide whether porn was grounds for a breakup. But she should have at least been more willing to face the possibility instead of hiding from it, even if it was just in terms of thinking about it long enough to get past the initial shock factor.
Porn can be very bad, but a more ‘puritan’ approach to porn and sexuality can cause just as much harm. People shouldn’t be in the unfettered pursuit of porn or depravity, but they need to be comfortable enough with discussing sex that they can solve certain issues. If two people have been dating a long time and are considering marriage, it’s usually better for them to make sure they’re on the same page by talking about what they want from the future sexual aspect of their relationship. Conversation won’t take care of everything, but at least they’d know they’re comfortable discussing sexual issues with each other so there’s a foundation for talking about such difficult topics during marriage.
To respond to just one aspect of your thoughtful and detailed comment, the aspect of what a Puritanical attitude might want to do with porn (ban it all), I would in fact use the force of law to make free porn inaccessible. Or difficult to access. But allow other kinds of porn. The means to restrict porn access would be taxation–porn should be considered a product and not free speech. It should be taxed like alcohol and cigarettes.
Free sites should be taxed to the point where they can’t afford to operate. Porn sites would then become pay-up-front, with the porn taxed as a vice, like cigarettes. With advertisements funded by the porn tax directed to discourage porn use, the same way we do with cigarettes.
I would not intervene in any way in sites or groups where people exchange pictures or videos between themselves for free, for which nobody is paid for their role in any part of the exchange of images. THAT is actually free speech. But when somebody is raking in money, it isn’t speech. It’s a product, one that plenty of evidence shows does harm to people.
It’s a product that shouldn’t be made illegal, but it should be taxed and it should be impossible to get free access to it.
That does sound better than a ‘ban it all’ approach, but there’s still a lot of question marks. What qualifies as a porn site? There’s fanfiction websites with tons of inappropriate content on them, and people can access them for free. But their purpose isn’t to be a porn site, and lots of people upload stuff that’s perfectly clean. The fanfiction archive sites I’ve seen either run off of ads or donations. I personally would be pretty annoyed if they were pushed in the direction of charging for fanfiction, because for the most part I don’t believe it’s ok to directly make money off someone else’s intellectual property without permission(with some exceptions). Nor would I be happy to pay money just to keep uploading content to a fanfiction site when my writing is fairly clean. And I would be pretty annoyed with having to move to a different site(and potentially lose any followers I had on the old site).
A similar situation exists with art sites like deviantArt. There are mature content filters and rating systems on most of these sites, which can help people avoid content they don’t want to see, but it’s still fairly easy for people to find images that are porn(or at least pornish) and not have to pay a cent to see them. And it doesn’t matter that these aren’t actual sex videos. Even if we could say video affects people more, stagnant images still affect many people in ways you wouldn’t expect. It’s enough to get people interested in porn, but then at the same time it wouldn’t really be right or fair to heavily tax these sites when they aren’t trying to be porn sites.
You could say that fanfiction sites and places like deviantArt wouldn’t fall under the categories you’re talking about because they don’t directly make money, but even if the users uploading fanworks aren’t profiting, the website itself is making money through donations and/or ads. Whether or not they actually profit from it or if it all goes to maintaining the website is hard to say. And even though deviantArt content is user made, and much of it is free, the site still makes money on ads and artwork directly sold through the site. And some users actually have their art business on there and make money off commissions. Some by drawing porn and some by drawing normal stuff.
And what about indie authors that write porn? Even though I don’t believe in writing books that revolve around porn, there are people that make a living by doing so and I can’t imagine taxing them like crazy just because we don’t like what they do. In fact, it will only make them more adamant about normalizing porn and standing against your anti porn stance.
Also, media is both a product AND free speech. I know there’s already a precedent for vice taxes, but with the way things are going in the world I don’t want to encourage people to go further and further down the slope of trying to control and regulate media they like and don’t like. An author/artist/filmaker/whatever is someone that gets paid to make a product. It just happens to be a product that entertains people and acts as a conduit for free speech. So your statement pretty much negated the free speech of every professional author, whether or not they make porn.
I’m not entirely against your idea in theory, but I can foresee a lot of problems, and even if you mean for it to be enacted one way, it could easily play out differently than you imagine. At the very least your taxation idea should make it clear that it only targets porn that’s made by recording/photographing images of real people. And probably leave drawn/animated stuff alone. If people can’t get an easy outlet through the drawn/animated stuff, they may be more likely to turn toward exploiting real people even more. Kinda like how prohibition made people get their fix illegally instead of avoiding alcohol.
And I don’t know how you’re going to make ads against porn get taken more seriously than the mom’s lecture in this clip:
The clip is pretty funny. 🙂
Yeah, the issue would be if a site makes money off things used for sexual gratification. Unfortunately defined via a number of algorithms, which I understand why people wouldn’t like. But AI would get increasingly good at finding the stuff. So Deviant Art would have to police content. It might be sticky in some situations, but mostly it would be easy. Most free porn sites fund themselves by ads that link to pay-to-see porn sites. The free sites would be shut down pretty much by the tax and the pay-to-see would keep going. But they would have a higher burden to verify who their clientele are.
Deviant Art could keep going with all the same content, too, maybe, but might have to charge for services. Or something along those lines. Which would only put a relatively small barrier between having access and not having access. But I think that small barrier is worth it.
It’s roughly equivalent to putting cigarettes behind a counter and requiring a person to be 18 and show an ID to get one–while using the cigarette tax to launch anti-smoking ads. Our society has greatly reduced smoking from 50 years ago. Which is a good thing for everyone.
As far as the privacy issue is concerned, content people put out is already being edited in various ways. Inciting violence, terrorism, and other kinds of speech have been defined as harmful and not allowed. Porn would have to legally be re-defined to be regulated–but a certain type of speech is already regulated.
Erotica, word-based porn, would not be considered pornography.
The reason to reduce the amount of a specific type of visual porn is it has demonstrable affects on the human brain. It is transforming our society all around us, but most people don’t even realize it.
The situation is rather like the lead pipes and drinking vessels the Romans used to use…some Romans actually wondered if lead might be bad for you. But the poison was too slow to be easily seen. Most people just went on, assuming everything must be fine because people weren’t instantly dropping dead…
People are dumb sometimes.
Did we even see the same movie? This review is a standard case of making mountains out of molehill. Are you upset that teen culture is in fact highly sexualuzed and has been for… well, it was definitely the case back as far as the 80s? Or that the movie portrayed this realistically? Or that you noticed it? There have always been kids who mistakenly want to show how “mature” they are by dropping explicit references. I took the the smiles after the “I’m glad it was you” to be an indication of sappy teen puppy love. You’re reading way too much into these scenes.
The movie was campy, ridiculous and a lot of fun. It really wasn’t trying to be anything else.
I’m objecting to a particular level of sexuality in a particular film marketed to a particular age. No, stuff marketed for 13 year olds was not highly sexualized in the 80s.
Feel free to name an example if you can though. I can’t think of any.
Return of the Jedi, with Princess Leia in her kinky slave bikini.
Also, I pointed out three scenes. The one using the word “box” was the one that I found most offensive. The “sleeping with” scene I mentioned didn’t specifically show anything. Though it may have implied something. FYI.