i originally posted that article because it's something that hit uncomfortably close to home - i sent pictures of myself variously naked to people online, including ones from when i was underage, and i have no real way of confirming that they aren't in circulation i know someone who started camming for money and got kicked out of the house by her mother - she was living in her car for like a year and didn't end up going to college, and hasn't cammed since as far as i know - but everything she posted online is still up it is shockingly easy to find child/underage pornography and nonconsentual pornography online and you don't even have to delve far - you just need to go to communities with a lot of young marginalized people, people like me as a 16 year old, and just sit around
And I have an axe to grind because the entire industry is based on power and exploitation. I have seen it break people and they weren't underage. They had all their choices. There's a dying generation of adult workers who didn't have to deal with anything more scandalous than polaroids when they were kids, and naked polaroids just weren't a thing kids did. Mistakes you made as a kid stayed mistakes you made as a kid. And these people are in power now, and they want you to know that taking your clothes off for money is empowering, is freeing, is young, is liberal is hip is cool is certainly not something you could regret the rest of your life. So what you get are these hipster pearlclutches over how censorship of any kind is obviously the PMRC born again. You get this attitude that spankin' it to Hungarian ambush cams is edgy rather than exploitive. And you get these analyses demonstrating that while porn has gone more amateur it has also gone more violent, more exploitative, more power-hungry and more cruel, obviously it's what the public wants who are you grampa to comment on my teen choke videos. And everyone decries the "regulations" on the "porn industry" without recognizing that the "porn industry" we have now was designed to skirt the regulations and normalcy the former porn industry fought for decades to build up. We all wring our hands over the horrible videos the algorithms serve up for our kids - what the fuck are those exact same algorithms doing to porn? And we're not talking about some bad HTML5 rendition of Peppa Pig or Finger Family or some shit we're talking about real live humans who are valued about the same. Women in porn used to smile.