itch.io

I think I will probably reply to each of your points once more, and then leave the last word to you if you want it.

"You likened porn to prostitution with a money angle. I made a money angle about another thing that involves sex as an attempt to show the absurdity and not to show off my view on marriage or any such things.

Porn is porn, no matter if money is involved. A married couple doing an amateur video is neither paid for the deed nor is the deed something they would only do because of the camera. The video of it, it is still porn. Even if they show it to no one.

Prostitution is prostitution, even if no money was involved or if the non paid participant is not the payer. You could compensate the prostitute by non money gifts or favors or someone else could pay for you.

All quite semantical, so it depends on which definition you use, which kind of semantical stretchings you can use to connect those two. Becomes a prostitute a porn actress the moment her client pays to film the deed and publish it for money? Maybe. But porn actors do not suddenly become prostitutes, just because they get paid. And neither does the film producer become the client by paying.

"

But that attempt to demonstrate the absurdity is built on a false equivalence.   My point in defining marriage was to show that marriage is not at all similar to prostitution, in spite of the fact that both sex and money are involved in both.  Because of that, you haven't demonstrated any absurdity in my likening of prostitution to pornography by likening marriage to prostitution.

We might say that prostitution is merely the exchange of money for sex.  Porn, in most cases, is the exchange of payment for sex, with the added presence of a camera.  Marriage, meanwhile, is all the things I described in my previous post, and more.  Sure, you might say that every film of two people having sex doesn't involve the exchange of money.  Fine, but most modern pornography that is produced by the porn industry and is consumed by people does, and this is what I have been referring to when I draw the comparison between prostitution and porn.

And if you are paid in other ways that aren't money, you are still getting paid for sex.  Money, after all, is a medium of exchange that we use to obtain other things that we want.  So even if you can find certain porn films that didn't involve someone getting paid to have sex on camera, huge swaths of the porn industry are just that.  That is why porn is infinitely closer to prostitution than it is to marriage, AND why I think it should fall under prostitution law as opposed to being protected as speech.

And finally, I do think that by being in a porn film (porn referring to the porn industry, companies that pay people to appear in their films, not a married couple's sex tape), a woman (or man) becomes a prostitute.  She is getting paid to have sex with someone.  I hold to my definition in this case.

"

You seem to misunderstand free speech. Free speech does not mean a platform has to allow "your speech". It means that the government cannot place legal restraints on it. In case of porn it means, the government cannot directly forbid porn itself.

To protect porn as speech could mean that a platform owner could get into legal trouble for removing it (in theory at least).  It seems like madness to prevent a platform from removing porn because of free speech.

Your premise is wrong. Please read this https://www.accessiblelaw.untdallas.edu/post/the-limits-of-free-speech-in-social...

In short social media companies are not state actors and their platforms are not public forums, and therefore they are not subject to the free speech protections

"

This is actually the point I was trying to make.  I was replying to someone who seemed to think itchio's removal of the game was an act of censorship, which would indicate that they might think it was a violation of free speech.  I was explaining to that person why I don't think it was a violation in that quotation using a hypothetical.  Which, by the way, is my main point in this whole debate: that Itchio is allowed to remove something like that.  The rest of the debate (about growing desire, etc.) has been why I think it is good that they did it.

"

No reasonable person truly believes this absolutely.

I might stress that we are talking about fiction. We are not talking about someone expressing their free speech protected opinion that crime x should be not a crime. We are talking about taboos and crimes in a fictional work.

And yes, I absolutely believe that it is not your business or mine to restrict what fiction adults can read/play/watch for recreational purposes. Or to restrict what fiction can exist. It is fiction. That means not real.

"

This circles the wagon back to the point I made elsewhere on this message board: that the fiction you indulge in affects the way you act in real life.  And that willingly engaging in fiction that promotes a certain thing is an implicit endorsement of that thing.  It will affect different people to varying degrees for some people, sure.  But although it is fiction, it has real-world consequences.

Additionally, certain kinds of fiction are objectionable.  Such as fiction that depicts child abuse, or that enables you to pretend to commit a school shooting, or that enables you to pretend to sexually assault someone.  I don't think it unreasonable for people to express outrage over such fiction, and to petition platforms not to list it.  It is reasonable for people to object to living in a community where their neighbors entertain themselves by pretending to engage in violent sex with fictional people who are designed to be similar to their mothers, daughters, wives, and other loved ones.

"Quite a jump to involve csam and proclaiming that non fictional material of real crimes and a game about fictional events with artificial graphics are "exactly equivalent". You are formally wrong. For that, mostly this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence , but this whole issue is about fallacies used by the manipulators to rile up an angry mob to ban games they dislike. They dislike it. Ok. But they do not argue soundly to try to ban it - because they legally can't. It is fiction and even protected by free speech. So they bully platforms and rile up angry mobs."

I will choose to believe you didn't put quotes around "exactly equivalent" in bad faith.  If you read the full sentence, you would see that I literally said: "My point is not that this game and CSAM are exactly equivalent..."  The point was in your "So what." response to content that many would consider disgusting, you indicate that we have to allow basically all forms of fictional entertainment.  In fact, you explicitly said that we must allow all of it (it being "fictional things").  So, by your logic, you would have to say "so what" to people playing (excuse my language) "Baby R@pe Simulator 4" and other extremely objectionable content like that.  I don't think we have to do that.

"To summarize, yeah, that game is not really good taste, because of certain topics. But it is fiction and any discussion about banning it for adults should end right there. The fact that bullying was needed to ban it, should make you think. It says poor things about how society can easily be manipulated. A far greater danger than any imaginary threats of fictional content. There are real world people in power that use those tactics of bullying and making unsound arguments to get their way. But hey, activists are distracted banning games, so they need not fight those real world bads."

Well, I'm glad you find the game not in good taste.  

What you call bullying, I might call people expressing their opinions about something they find objectionable in an effort to persuade a platform to delist the thing the find objectionable.  Which is really just a culture banning objectionable things from polite society.

I disagree that the discussion should automatically end with the medium being fiction for all the reasons I have mentioned throughout this thread.

Finally, pointing at all the "real world bads" and telling people to focus on that instead seems like a distraction to prevent anything from being done about something bad that we can immediately do something about.  It's like if you want to smooth out your back yard, but someone says "why are you bothering to fill in that smaller hole, when you have this much bigger hole over here?"  But my yard can never be truly smooth until the small hole is filled in, and it is much easier to start by filling in the smaller one.