The 'Men Of Notre Dame' Demand A Porn Filter That Won't Work To Keep Them From Watching Porn
from the pron dept
A brief review of the many, many stories we've posted on porn filters should leave you with two undeniable conclusions: porn filters are generally terrible at actually keeping dedicated pornography viewers from watching porn and porn filters are generally fantastic at turning the attempt to block porn into an orgy of collateral damage, typically to do with educational sites. This hasn't stopped many organizations and governments from trying to save all the children and the dignity of all the women by putting these filters in place, of course, but it needs to be repeatedly noted that these attempts are routinely futile.
Rare, however, is the group that demands the porn filter to stop themselves from seeing sex acts. Rarer still is the group that does so in as insulting and sanctimonious a way possible. To see that kind of rare gemstone of silly, you apparently have to travel to Notre Dame, where "the men of Notre Dame" have demanded a porn filter from the school.
Read the whole post, if you can stomach it, but the writer kicks the whole thing off with back to back paragraphs that make it clear it's themselves they want to handcuff here.
As the men of Notre Dame, we request that the University implement a filter to make pornography inaccessible on the Notre Dame Wi-Fi networks. This filter would send the unequivocal message that pornography is an affront to human rights and catastrophic to individuals and relationships. We are calling for this action in order to stand up for the dignity of all people, especially women.
Pornography does not come up often in casual conversation, but its effects are everywhere — even on the campus we call home. A survey conducted in 2013 showed that 63 percent of male Notre Dame students have viewed pornography on the university Wi-Fi network. National studies have demonstrated 64 percent of college men and 18 percent of college women spend time viewing online porn each week. In a given month, 86 percent of men interact with pornography.
A couple items of note here. In back to back paragraphs, "the men of Notre Dame" request the filter, and then cite statistics that indicate nearly two-thirds of "the men of Notre Dame" view pornography on the school's wireless network. If these men, these glorious, upstanding, do-right men, want so badly to stop porn from being viewed on school property, it seems they need only to, you know, fucking stop viewing it. Otherwise, it seems clear that this isn't "the men of Notre Dame" requesting a porn filter, but some small subset of those men attempting to force their desires on other people. There's a word for that, I think.
Secondly, this demand to censor the network comes also with the proclamation that they are not just making it on behalf of the "men of Notre Dame" but the "women of Notre Dame." It's quite a bold statement to declare that the women of the student body are apparently so enfeebled that they need these dudes to speak for them, but, as with the call for censorship itself, what's a little condescending paternalism among academic peers?
From there, the post cites all kinds of half-baked statistics that might be true but probably aren't, along with the kinds of scare tactics typically reserved for congressional hearings on the topic of pornography. But it's when "the men of Notre Dame" attempt to law-splain the validity of their request that apparently they turned lazy.
As the Supreme Court stated in Paris Adult Theatre v. Slayton, “A sensitive, key relationship of human existence, central to family life, community welfare and the development of human personality, can be debased and distorted by crass commercial exploitation of sex.”
That is in fact true. That's what the Supreme Court stated in its 1973 ruling on a court case that allowed lower courts to indeed prohibit pornography from being displayed in a public movie theater, even if that theater was restricted to only consenting adults. Also in that narrow 5-4 ruling was the court drawing a distinct line from a previous case, Stanley v. Georgia, which had to do with restricting home viewing of pornography. In that case, SCOTUS struck down a conviction of a man with porn in his home on First Amendment grounds. It seems clear that Stanley is much more analogous than Paris in this case, given that we're talking about a school campus on which students make their home while classes are in session.
So, to summarize: a group purporting to speak for all of the men of Notre Dame, but which clearly doesn't speak for even a majority of them, requests a porn filter that won't work but will cause collateral damage, while citing a court case that doesn't really help their argument and insisting that they speak for women.
Sheesh, maybe the 'men of Notre Dame' should just stick to watching porn....
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Filed Under: censorship, porn, porn filters
Companies: notre dame
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What are they doing?
''Interacting'' with pornography. The euphemism of the day.
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Re: What are they doing?
"turning the attempt to block porn into an orgy of collateral damage"
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Re:
Protip: any time a group that goes out of its way to identify as "men" calls for any action at all, they're almost guaranteed full of shit.
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Masochist Shades...
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Alternate Headline: Jerk-offs Demand Help to Stop Jerking Off, Can’t Stop Jerking Themselves Off Long Enough to Stop Being Jerk-offs
…a bit much, maybe?
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Just don't search for it at Notre Dame
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To ensure that the filters are effective I would suggest blocking access to the entire internet, although it may be appropriate to whitelist specific sites or domains within the Notre Dame network. Administration and most of the engineering departments would probably be OK, but Psychology, Sociology, Theology, History, and Biology would probably questionable.
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I am pretty sure the only message the filter would send is that pornography filters are useless and that the school is willing to cater to a minority of people that want to force their beliefs on everyone else.
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Whoa there. This letter is only about simple pornography. They haven't gotten into anything like that yet.
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I’ve never understood laws that prohibit private behaviors in a private setting that inflict no harm to anyone who doesn’t consent (particularly when only one person is involved). If you don’t like it, fine, but it’s none of your goddamned business what I do in my home, nor is it my business if you do something I don’t like in your own home. As long as no one is directly harmed, why should I care?
(This obviously excludes abusive behaviors, and I’d also exclude certain behaviors that cause physical self-harm.)
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For people such as religious fundamentalists, it is not enough for them that they choose their own path in life—they must be able to dictate everyone else’s path, too. Only then will everyone will be free of evil influences and whatnot, which means the fundamentalists will no longer be tempted by society into choosing a path of evil (or so they think).
This “Men of Notre Dame” group seems to operate along a similar principle: If they are being tempted to view porn, it must be a failing of society and not of their personal discipline. By removing the temptation of porn altogether, this specific group believes they will no longer be influenced by society into viewing porn.
Yes, it is exactly as fucked up as it sounds. Yes, they could just put the blockers on their own computers and be done with it. But never trust fools like these to reflect on their own weaknesses in a way that puts the responsibility for those weaknesses on themselves.
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This letter is effectively saying porn is abusive, so...
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Re: no harm on anyone else...sure about that??
Second, if I give the idiot who needs that prostitute some porn, he might just not go see that gal....
Third, porn might give people the wrong idea...*everyone* fucks with a broomstick until someone screams, right??? And all girls/guys look like *this*???.
So the analysis is complicated...even for child porn...what if its all CGI/photoshop off the huggies box??? And what if the viewer leaves kids alone as a result of using it???
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Yeah, pretty sure.
So much wrong. Where to begin…
Who said anything about prostitution? Access to porn has no correlation to prostitution at all, but feel free to share any data suggesting otherwise. And I think you're overestimating the allocation of public funds on that last part. I see no way that the treatment of any kind of STD spread via prostitution would directly pull from your own taxes unless your local politician is caught up in a related scandal. And even then, it would be entirely beside the point.
Again, zero correlation. This is a completely nonsensical claim.
I have no idea what kind of porn you are watching, but this point does have me convinced. You should probably step away from it for a while. Just be sure that you don't switch to…well, you know…that claim from above? Getting into politics.
The analysis is actually not complicated at all. Child porn is illegal. CGI/PhotoShop from an existing source? That's a different area of law entirely. And again, it has nothing to do with anything here.
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"sexual assault, sex trafficking and other human rights"
Porn has only remote and often dubious (speculative) links to sexual assault and sex trafficking (unless we're talking specifically about child porn), so I'm not sure what human rights they actually feel are being transgressed.
This is one of the dangers of the topic of human trafficking having become such a hot button, is that it's easy to divert efforts to fight human trafficking into fighting stuff that seems to be related to human trafficking, hence we get laws like FOSTA which actually expose trafficked persons to more harm and risk.
This Men Of Notre Dame thing smacks of the same religious anti-sex bloc that pushes against abortion and birth-control access: they're mostly interested in deterring people from fucking.
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Re: "sexual assault, sex trafficking and other human rights"
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An honor code would avoid more collateral damage
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They must be MBA students
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Stop demanding the world protect you.
You are working towards a degree to prepare you to function in the real world & take on massive debt your job won't make a debt in for a VERY long time.
Do you honestly think any employer will look at this letter as anything more than an admission that the idiots of notre dame are incapable of self control & would be a serious liability if they were to be hired?
Put on your big boy pants, take responsibility for yourself, and try to learn that just because you think its not awesome doesn't mean you have a right to deny it to everyone else.
How dare you think you should be your 'brothers keeper' when you yourself are incapable of controlling your own desires to such a degree that you require an outside force to 'protect' you from your desire to jerk off a lot while watching porn.
Had it been an ask to block it in the library or other school computers, I could get behind it because young men are stupid and some idiots gonna boff the bishop in public eventually.
If you feel that you still need an outside force to control yourselves, please remove yourselves from society. We can't pay people to follow you around telling you to not shoot people, not rape every female you encounter, and every other moral decision you seem incapable of making for yourselves.
In closing...
You fucking morons are college educated at an allegedly good school, what in the actual fuck were you thinking advertising you have no control over your base desires & require someone else to be responsible for holding you to your own personal standards and have no problem forcing your views on everyone else in society because you are incapable of not viewing porn.
Idiots...
No Love,
TAC
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With apologies to Matt Groening
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The real men of Notre Dame
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Re: The real men of Notre Dame
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63% .... ha ha
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National studies
The problem with surveys is that people lie about sensitive stuff. This is why surveys counting show that men average about twice as many sexual partners as women.
But just because there's a high rate of porn consumption doesn't make it necessarily a problem, any more than the high rate of pants-wearing is a problem.
Note that all rampage killers wore pants. Coincidence?
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