New here.

Welcome!

I'm sorry to hear you didn't find what you were looking for on the other site. There are many different people in these forums and several are older than you. So, before judging us, give the community here a try. You never know what will come of it.

Again, welcome and feel free to hop right into things.

 

Hi Orlando - welcome!:smilewave

Sorry you got upset at being banned form ### - but, as I'm sure you realise there are legal reasons for that. Anyway - at 17 yrs 11mths - you won't have long to wait before you can legally check it out.

Secondly (and more importantly), even tho' this is a site that was designed as a place where people under 18 can safely chat - the people posting here are a mix of all ages and experience.

Have a look around at some of the threads/posts and I'm sure you will see that a lot of them have given really good advice on all sorts of issues.

We also have Mods who range in age from relatively ancient (ermmm - that's me :eek: ) to younger than yourself - so I hope you stick around, join in and see what you can get from the place (even after the 'big 18' comes up).

 

1 month away from 18? there's a pretty high percentage of people older than you here! In fact, it seems to me that quite a few of the people here are also in ###, so even though I havent been there, it sure seems to me like its still helpful to be hanging around her. Another thing I've noticed is that even though you may be older than others, nobody has the same experiances at the same time, and its always nice to hear opinions and thoughts of others!

 

That sucks they sent you a rude email. I think it's so dumb about all the (often extremely US-based) paranoia about people under 18 accessing porn because HELLO, it's not like you can't find it elsewhere on the web. But whatever... people are always so touchy about "innocent children" and the need to protect them. It's gets to be unhealthy; like people get denied access to information that might save their lives because others are so hell-bent on "protecting" them. I think most arguments about "protecting children" are more about the issues of the people advocating the need for protection than they are about the actual safety of the "children" themselves.

But then I've always had issues with how "children" are treated--ever since I was one.

Just thought I'd also comment that I get a bit frustrated with the "relatively ancient" comments that I see a lot from the older people posting because they have such negative connotations. It totally reinforces and legitimses ageism. I don't call the teenaged posters here "relatively nascent" or "pseudo-children." As orlandoh points out, sometimes it's really handy to be able to talk to people with more experience in certain things than you yourself might have, and who really cares if the person with the experience is the same age, older, or even younger than you are.

I don't mean to say that age is meaningless or "age is just a number" but you know quite frankly it gets turned into way more of a deal than it should. So I'm really glad someone is here seeking people who are older to talk to because being older is not a bad thing. And either is being younger. And, ultimately, age is a very relative thing. At 31, I might feel old compared to someone doing their undergrad degree but young compared to someone who's 40. But at 19, someone might feel old compared to someone just starting high school and young compared to someone who's 25. I'm sure you all get the picture--I just find specific examples are the best illustrations at times.

 

It's an interesting argument you present, joey, but you have to consider it from all views. Ultimately in life it is our own responsibility to make our own decisions. We learn from events in our lives; usually mistakes. We gain wisdom through experience, whether it is our own, or somebody else's. This in turn allows us to decide what is best for us. Without this experience, it's a fair call to say that we are incapable of making *certain* decisions either at all, or without guidance.

Now, I'm not going to turn this into a discussion on whether or not porn is good or bad, since it is irrelevant to my main point. I will, however, use it as my prime example.

Not everybody over the age of 18 looks at porn. Why? Probably because they made a conscious decision as to whether or not they want to watch it (ie doesn't tickle their fancy, grossed out about it, religious reason). Now if a 7 year old was exposed to it, there is an extremely high chance that they are not mature enough to make the decision based on personal experience. Now you might ask 'whats the harm in letting them make the choice at the young age?'...Well the choice that this person makes at 7, and at 18, might be different based on experiences they've had, or simply growing in maturity. The point is, that it is in the person's best interest to 'protect' them from such material until they've reached a level of maturity and understanding to make the choice. Since porn can lead to things such as addiction, it is important to be at this maturity level before deciding whether it is right for you.

Granted, most people will see porn before the age of 18, but the laws are set in place for a purpose, and if it only helps a single person then the law meets that purpose.

Obviously, you cannot measure everyone's maturity or ability to make their own choices, then create separate laws for each individual. So the government creates a standard age limit. The age is then used right across the board, as its the fairest way to conduct such things.

While at times the laws seem unfair and useless, they are there for a specific reason. If it truly didn't benefit anyone in anyway, then they most probably wouldn't be in place.

Dave

 

hehe - Joey - of all people, I would have thought you would have seen that my tongue was firmly planted in my cheek as I was gently taking the piss out of myself.:icon_wink Oh, and BTW, that comment was made purely to reinforce (in a light hearted way) the fact that there is a diversity of age and experience here.

As I recall seeing somewhere recently "Growing older is inevitable - maturity is optional" (God forbid that I ever get TOO old or TOTALLY sensible!!)

 

I did actually understand you weren't meaning it in any negative way. But I think--no, actually I know--there can be quite a difference between intent and effect and the highlighting of age differences in EC, whether (as it usually is) in a good-natured manner or not, is not something I think just passes by with no impact.

I think how we talk about what we individually consider "casual" things is quite telling in terms of what we've internalised as "important." And I don't just mean "age:" I think if someone casually tosses off comments regarding how ugly they think they are, no matter how amusing the comments may be I think that points to something deeper going on if those comments are not isolated remarks but rather part of a pattern. Or lonely or any host of other things that get mentioned here in an off-the-cuff kind of way.

I really wasn't meaning to single your comment out--it just happened to be the most recent one. I think it's cool that there is a mix of ages among the people posting here and I don't think it would be as great a "place" if there wasn't. I'm just highly aware of how much age is considered an issue among queer people, especially among queer guys, and especially in the context of the myth of all older guys being "older predatory gay men" and I don't think we should be doing anything, even in jest, to reinforce that. On the contrary, we should be deliberately trying shatter that particular stereotype.

And I think the stereotype is strong enough that referring to people who are past their 20s in terms that have pretty strong negative connotations, even casually and in a non-serious, self-deprecating kind of way, reinforces the myths. What I think would be better is for age to get mentioned when it's relevant and in a neutral way.

And I realise age being a problematic issue is not solely a queer issue: I think most of mainstream Canadian/US/industrialised nations society struggles with it. And (hopefully obviously) it's certainly a notion I have struggled and continue to struggle with. I just thought it was worth making manifest, in this case, the fact that often when age gets touched on in EC, the way it's talked about is pretty stereotypical. And I think it's of concern when we normalise something to such a high degree that we joke about it but don't think about the broader implications of what the jokes we make are actually saying, whether about how we think about the world or how we think about ourselves.

I guess you can tell I'm about to be writing sociological research proposals by now, huh?

 

I think you're maybe arguing MY point when you say it's our own responsibility to make our own decisions. The issue is more about when people actually consider others capable of taking on that responsibility.

And think we're always capable of making decisions. Whether we're capable of making good ones or not is more the issue, to my mind. But I don't agree that there are certain decisions that ALWAYS require guidance--I think often people can muddle through on their own. And it's not like society doesn't provide guidance in various implicit ways that might negate the need to have explicit devices like laws policing certain kinds of things.

Uhm okay... I agree that not everyone over the age of 18 looks at porn. How is that relevant to my frustration with the glut of laws that claim to be about "protecting children?"

I think it's really easy to argue the "children must be protected" point if you go the extreme: i.e. 7-year-olds, or actual "children." But what about if we consider the obvious grey zone, which is to say adolescence? Is it so easy to apply that kind of yes/no test to a 14-year-old? A 16-year-old? I don't think maturity among 7-year-olds varies anywhere near as much as it does among teenagers of similar ages.

And I have to strongly disagree with your notion of porn being addictive, at least in the sense of substance addiction, which I believe is how you're framing it. Porn is not a chemical that affects one's biochemistry directly. I'm not saying that people can't become engrossed by pornography in a way that might be detrimental to their health but I think that's more representative of that person's troubled relationship to sex and sexuality and less about the irresistable nature of pornographic images.

Again I have to disagree. I think a law that helps a single person but harms others is a very, very bad law. In fact in Canada one of the tests for the constitutionality of a law that is being challenged as having a negative impact on people's freedoms is that in its restriction of whatever it has been written to restrict, the government has to prove it to be minimally restrictive of those freedoms guaranteed Canadians in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I.e. our government has to prove the benefit of the law outweighs any negative impact it has. The kind of laws we're talking about, pornography "protection" ones, in this case prevented a poster from accessing a site where he might have gotten help with dealing with issues that were pretty crucial and really had nothing to do with pornography. So the law that theoretically protects the hypothetical 7-year-olds of the world (and I say theoretically because I'm pretty sure a 7-year-old could find porn on the Internet pretty readily, law against it or not) in this case harmed the 17-year-old.

Now happily in this case, there are alternatives like EC. But laws similar to pornography protection ones, like gay "protection" or sex "protection" ones, are used by jurisdictions all over to prevent access to material on sexuality that is life-saving and health-protecting, all in the name of "protecting the children." I'm sure there is software out there that blocks access to EC simply because it deals with sexuality issues. The whole trope of "protecting the children" is used to incite moral panics that have real, measurable deleterious effects on a host of queer and questioning youth, not to mention straight youth that might not be getting proper birth control and STD protection information.

I'm not arguing that to be fair, laws need to be written to apply in a uniform manner. If I were, though, I would point out that maybe laws need to be less absolute and our society more willing in the enforcement of those laws to consider individual circumstances. In fact there are laws, especially age of consent ones and so-called "Romeo and Juliet" ones, that try to do just that--they try to account for a grey zone, especially among adolescents.

What I was arguing against is, I guess, two things: that pornography is as harmful as it is made out to be and that "protect our children"-style thinking is a reasonable basis for actually harming minors by restricting their access to information. My personal opinion is that if removing arbitrary age restrictions on pornography made more accurate and timely information on sexuality and safer sexual practices available to the people that need that info, I'm all for removing those restrictions.

And all this without even getting into the nature of pornography and obscenity and how material gets classified as pornographic or obscene and who gets to make those decisions.

That's funny because at one time, at least here in Canada, homosexual acts committed in private between consenting adults were criminalised, which I would hope you will agree with me seems unfair and useless. That law was in place for a number of years and I'm sure it did benefit certain people. When attempting to think critically about laws, though, I think it's important to ask WHOM the law benefits and whether whom it benefits matches up with whom the government says it will benefit. Assuming that a restriction or allowance is fair and just simply because it has been codified into law is a very, very dangerous practice. Actually, it's circular thinking that results in all laws being unassailable simply because they're laws.

Believing our legal system(s) to be as objective and neutral as they like to make out they are is folly. Just like the Bible, our laws were written by other human beings, and if there's one thing we know about human beings, it's that they are never objective, neutral, or beyond making errors.

 

Hey Joey,

While we may have to agree to disagree on this subject, there are just a few more things I feel I should say

I agree with you here, but the fact is that if there is a law against it (yes I realise you disagree with the laws all together) then you cannot simply create a cut off age that will suit everyone. I think you would be surprised at how greatly the maturity level of 14 year olds, and even 16 year olds vary. Some act twice their age, other act half it. But when a law like this is introduced, an age limit has to be decided. The standard age for laws like this is 18, and having a specific age, say 15, can cause complications. I'll agree that the age of 18 probably isn't the most appropriate age, however it is the one the government has chosen.

Correct, in terms of substance addiction, porn is harmless. However, in terms of psychological effects, porn has the potential to be damaging. I won't go into unnecessary detail, but we can develop an unhealthy fixation with porn. I dont believe that only the people who have 'troubled relationships to sex and sexuality' are at risk of being drawn in.

Additionally, in a lot of cases it can misrepresent what relationships are about. Personally, I believe that relationships are about connecting with someone on an emotional level, and then on a physical level (ie fall in love, then have sex). For someone watching porn (in particular a 14 year old) they are shown that the other member of the relationship is there to fulfill their lustful desires. But again, thats based purely on what I believe, so its fair enough for you to disagree.

I have to disagree that preventing minors from accessing porn harms anyone in a negative way. If someone needed to access a website for advice, but couldnt because the website contained porn and they were underage, then it is the websites fault for having porn. They know they aren't catering for the underage, and could easily remove it - at least from the boards. But then as you mentioned, there are underage versions all over the internet.

There are *so* many websites with information on sexuality and safe sex etc that young people have free access to. Software that is installed on the computer is the parents responsibility, and not directly related to the law.

Sorry - this was a mistake on my behalf. It was supposed to read as: "If it truly didn't benefit anyone, or it harmed anyone in anyway, then they most probably...." And yes, I agree that the Canadian laws were extremely unfair, and didnt actually benefit anyone.

I do believe that the current laws have flaws, however I don't believe they directly harm anyone. The laws are set in place for a reason, and I believe that reason is valid.

You bring across some very good points, so please don't take this post offensively. Its just meant to highlight my personal opinion.

 

Happy 18th birthday orlandoh. Now you can sign up at ### again if you want to!