Online porn should be banned and it’s long overdue

What I’m about to suggest will seem bizarre, if not impossible, but hear me out. The United States should seek to ban hardcore pornography on the Internet. The most obvious reason to do this is that the children are inundated with an avalanche of coal. We learned in a 2019 study by the British Board of Film Classification that 51% of 11-13 year olds had seen pornography online.

This means that tens of millions of very young children are watching hardcore pornography because we as a society, frankly without much thought or discussion, have decided to allow it. This, despite the fact that one can still be arrested for handing a pornographic magazine to a child. These two things make no sense together.

And it’s not just children, pornography has corrosive effects throughout society, including those in front of the camera. And it’s not just pornography either, it’s the internet itself that exacerbates the problem. Porn has been around for centuries, porn movies for decades, but never before has the internet been an endless array of sex material at your fingertips every hour of the day.

For 30 years we have treated the internet as if it is, for whatever reason, untouchable by the state, this includes social media and big tech censorship, as well as pornography. The Internet intersects so much with our daily lives now that this Wild West approach is simply not tenable anymore. There is in fact no reason why an information superhighway cannot or should not have rules of conduct. Rules that protect children from obscenity or prevent important and accurate stories on laptops, for example, from being erased.

SOUTH CAROLINA UNDERCOVER SEX STING BUSTS 11 MEN ACCUSED OF TARGETING MINORS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

And, of course, we have rules regarding child pornography, fraud, identity theft, and defamation, to name a few. But when it comes to pornography, our society has been oddly permissive.

For decades, the internet has looked like something that happens to us, not something we control. Its ubiquity makes it seem beyond our control, but there is no a priori precept that says porn should be widely available, free, without age verification, for anyone of any age to enjoy. consume online.

There are foreseeable objections to banning online pornography, or even limiting access to it. Armchair libertarians, hands up, say there’s nothing we can do to stop young children from watching it. “How can you even define it,” they ask. The Supreme Court has its famously vague “I know it when I see it” standard, but it can certainly be defined, it is not an epistemological dilemma that we must submit to. When it comes to free speech, people are free to do pornography, but they are responsible for the destination.

We’re told that banning porn is impractical, people will find a way around it, and of course that’s true of all laws, we pass them anyway. Finally, we are told that it is up to the parents to decide, as if the children do not go to the library, to school or have no friends. In this « Year of the Parent », we’ve learned that many don’t want to be co-parenting with the state, but they also see the need for state action to protect children, such as banning drag shows for them.

In 1994, when then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani began the transformation of crime and poverty in New York City, one of his first actions was to drive porn theaters out of Times Square. It was no minor policy, what he understood was that these avenues of racing were the public square and pornography was stifling life there. Today, the public square is in our hands and it’s time to demolish the virtual porn cinemas.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE AVIS NEWSLETTER

Porn would still be available in all of its myriad other forms, all of which are far more protective of children.

If banning pornography on the Internet sounds like a radical idea, it is, but let me suggest that we have a radical problem on our hands, and if the method of delivery providing pornography to our children was anything other than ‘Internet, we would have banned it a long time ago.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

If there are more moderate but effective solutions, so much the better. But what is not acceptable is to remain in this helpless sleep in the face of a drastic and harmful change in our society. We shouldn’t learn to live with children having unlimited access to pornography. We should stop it.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT DAVID MARCUS