I am very against the concept of thought crimes=real crimes (the ones that are only thoughts and stay thoughts obviously. like what is the actual transference rate of "thought" crimes in to "real" crimes + what is the purpose of policing thoughts that don't have serious followup into action. wasted effort to the wrong purpose, there are real harms being done to real people not being righted right now, AND we have a class war to fight) and its resultant attitude: ruling/moderation via ick. I find it a common tool of reactionaries to rush people to decide by emotions and shorten critical thinking, and I urge anyone who considers themselves a student of marxism and dialectical materialism to first and foremost consider and question, on the topic of ick especially, who exactly is being harmed, what is the context, and in what way (if even of substance) and why. "I don't like it, I don't like seeing it, therefore I'm being harmed" is never sufficient. "Someone could be harmed by this" and yet we humans get into motor vehicles and fly airplanes every day... ... what is the context, what is the likelihood, every qualia and factor is worth picking over. The fact that most CSA is not committed by strangers but someone the child already knows AND has power over the child is key context in the topic of "protecting children" whereas mainstream media is making "protecting children" out to be both stranger danger and painting queer and/or kinky people as child predators (already truncated the "would be" out of there to intensify scapegoating).

On related note (sorry,,, this is related to my essay/makes sense here, but it's more responding to other comments in this thread), the effects of fiction is outsized and are often nothing more than reflections of societal values of its authors' context: the harm of was not the mass fear that it would inspire copycat serial killers, but rather, the notion that any male would attempt to become or present as a woman is because "he" has evil machinations (transmisogyny)(this isn't something originated, rather magnified); somewhat of an exception, did cause a surge KKK support during its era, but it has much longer repercussions in pervasive racist attitudes towards black men juxtaposed against the "purity" of white women: over a hundred years later and both "white woman tears" and intense racial profiling via policing against black men is a testament to that, more so than KKK membership or activity, but again, both phenomena are not originated by but rather magnified and dispersed via the film). The fear that (misogynistic, cishet) porn <as if it's replacement for proper sexual education> teaches youth to reprise misogynistic sexual roles does two things: 1. it presupposes that anyone and especially young people don't have autonomy or lack critical thinking and only have the capacity to reproduce what they see and 2. acts like misogyny in sexual relationships is either solely due to porn or that porn has an outsized impact here. When clearly, it's society at large that is misogynistic and porn like any other media certainly reflects that and again like any other media has a hand in misogyny continuing to pervade. Blanket statements like "(I don't like porn/porn is bad because) porn demeans women" are dogmatic and insinuates a relationship of essence when it is not the case, a more factual/closer to reality statement would be like "a great majority of porn already produced and currently being produced is misogynistic, but not because porn is inherently misogynistic at its essence, but because it (on the macro scale, overall) reflects sexual attitudes of society at large, which is misogynistic. There is potential for sexual entertainment content to have altered context where misogyny is greatly reduced." (And similarly, there is potential for the production of pornography to be fully* consensual and non-exploitative/or at least just as exploitative as any other form of wage labor.) Like the issue of misogynistic porn isn't that it is sexual content, but that it is misogynistic, and those two things - sexuality and misogyny - aren't irrevocably intertwined.

Something I've noticed as well is that this latest generation of young people seem to be extremely sex-negative and increasingly puritan to the point of intensely policing others if they detect a shred of sexuality... but maybe it's cuz I'm Old now or something. And often it's directed at young women their own age, and just various refractions from the prism of slut-shaming misogyny (ngl, as someone who grew up in 2000s-2010s, and understood the 90s enough, slut shaming variety of misogyny was there too and never really ceased. HOWEVER unfortunately fatphobia + rise of anorexia in young women today has resurged to ~2000s level imo). I think it would be so much better !AND ANTI-MISOGYNISTIC! to teach young people to be NORMAL about sexuality. I don't think porn (especially since a lot of it is already misogynistic) should be a part of that education directly, certainly talking about how porn isn't realistic/reflects certain ideas, but discussion of sexuality overall shouldn't be so policed and "gross" and taboo.

• yes I know there's a lot of debate about ethical porn and if it can ever be fully consensual