Edit - This is a post to the meta group of Blåhaj Lemmy. It is not intended for the entire lemmyverse. If you are not on Blåhaj Lemmy and plan on dropping in to offer your opinion on how we are doing things in a way you don’t agree with, your post will be removed.
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A user on our instance reported a post on lemmynsfw as CSAM. Upon seeing the post, I looked at the community it was part of, and immediately purged all traces of that community from our instance.
I approached the admins of lemmynsfw and they assured me that the models with content in the community were all verified as being over 18. The fact that the community is explicitly focused on making the models appear as if they’re not 18 was fine with them. The fact that both myself and one a member of this instance assumed it was CSAM, was fine with them. I was in fact told that I was body shaming.
I’m sorry for the lack of warning, but a community skirting the line trying to look like CSAM isn’t a line I’m willing to walk. I have defederated lemmynsfw and won’t be reinstating it whilst that community is active.
Reminds me of a lot of the debates around kink at pride/ddlg kink stuff. The latter is really not my thing and makes me uncomfortable, but I recognise that that’s a personal thing between me and my partners that I can’t, and shouldn’t, police among others.
There’s also ethical debates to be had on porn in places like Lemmy/pornhub/etc. – we can’t know that the person has consented to being posted, or that they have recourse to get it taken down and stop it being spreaded if they do not.
Then there’s the realpolitik of, regardless of ethics, whether it’s better to have porn of this type in visible, well moderated communities, or whether it’s better to try to close off ethically dubious posting.
It’s one I don’t really have squared off in my head quite yet. Similarly with kink at pride; I’ve read about the historic importance of kinksters and recognise that, but at the same time I want there to be a space where queer kids can be involved with pride without being exposed to kink. Is that just prudish social norms talking? Idk; I’m still working it through.
For what it’s worth, I feel like while society has become more socially accepting of people being different (imperfectly, but we have), at least in the US we’ve become more and more prudish when it comes to sex itself. Part of the changing era has led to a reduction in exploitation and things that were generally viewed as sketchy, but not all that big of deal (kids inheriting porn mags, sexual harassment, imbalances in power), where now sketchy behavior is quickly called out.
That said, I feel like a lot of hard conversations have been completely avoided because they’d be awkward and uncomfortable and instead we just pretend they aren’t there.
Like in theory, anyone under 18 in the US can’t legally see so much as a titty (unless it’s art), read sexually explicit material, or see a movie or tv show with explicit content. And then, literally nobody wants to talk to teenagers about sex. I watched a reddit thread eat itself alive because a dad was furious that his wife had bought their daughter a dildo after he had confiscated her laptop when catching her looking at them and asked his wife to deal with it. People were calling for her to be reported for sexual abuse, while actual women were being attacked for sharing their own experiences as teens. Things just seem a little crazy.
People are so uncomfortable with the concept that they want to disappear anything that reminds them that 18 isn’t actually a magical division between childhood and adulthood. And then you have this thread, where lemmynsfw was banned because a community sharing “cute” pornstars was a step too far despite being actual professional adults. Idk, it seems exactly like Australia’s whole thing where they started banning pornstars in their late twenties because they have small tits as part of a project to “fight” child porn.
Yeah, this seems very well thought through. For what it’s worth, I’m UK based so will be talking from that perspective. I’m in agreement that sex education is absolutely dire – I can’t see any objection to a dispassionate education in both the cultural and scientific aspects of sex. I don’t even see it as an ‘oh well, if we have to’, since sex forms such an integral part of our cultural identities (of course, including when people fall outside the societal sexual norms).
More broadly on society’s difficulty with dealing with sex (and even the criminal aspects) I’ve read some interesting books on anti-carceral feminism recently that helped give me a different perspective on how I think about sexual crimes and its perpetrators beyond the simple instinctual judgements.