Age verification doesn’t work

People can't tell the difference in any domain. People copy what they see. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.

Mainstream porn sites show a lot of weird practices (what's up with that strangulation fetish??) and I do think it has a bad influence.

I don't think age verification is a good solution, because we don't become immune to influence at age 18. Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.

I think we should do the opposite: Remove stigma associated with sexuality. Why can't more movies just include everyday sex scenes? Why do we need to make this distinction where you need to go to a different site if you want to see something more explicit than a nipple? Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.

>. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.

Lol what, what makes you think it was caused by James Bond, not countless other anti smoking initiatives?

It's a feedback loop - smoking was advertised as being cool way back when, which led to movie characters smoking to appear cool, which then reinforces the advertising.

When there was a push to regulate smoking in advertising, it cut the original feedback loop which made film/tv characters not use smoking as a sign of being cool. This led to advertising (if it were allowed) to be less effective at portrayal of coolness via smoking.

It's not a simple one-to-one cause and effect.

It’s not that people stopped but that they didn’t start. Smoking was no longer sold as cool so kids didn’t learn of it as a cool thing.

Kids and even adults pick up cues from games, movies, books. War is like CoD and heroic war movies (why do many 18 year olds go to the army expecting glory and come back with trauma and broken dreams?), sex is like in porn, and gangs are like in GTA. Until they gain practical experience and slowly realize some things are vastly different. Maybe a couple will love “porn sex”. Most others will break a leg having shower sex and reconsider the “teachings”.

It was cool to smoke when all the cool guys in the movies were smoking. One of the reasons it’s not cool anymore is that the cool guys in the movies don’t smoke nowadays (although they do it more often now than they did ten years ago; which is worrying).

The correlation between an exposure and initiating smoking is proved: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27043456/

> Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.

Adults can be vulnerable, but I don't think just as vulnerable. Youngsters with no initial idea of how a given thing works have nothing with which to compare and contrast and potentially reject the first idea presented to them. Generally, the younger, the more impressionable.

> Remove stigma associated with sexuality. [...] Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.

I do agree with loosening the stigma. If there are parents that are giving their children unrestricted access to the internet, and those children may expose things to others that have better parental controls, then the straightforward solution is to have some form of earlier sex-ed. Doesn't need to cover everything, but enough to prepare them against the bad influences they'll apparently encounter. "Something steamy on Netflix" may be a positive counterexample to help them reject nonsense fantasies on porn sites.

Characters in movies stopped (or reduced a lot) smoking pretty much across the board.

Vaping took off as a cool thing without a bunch of cool people vaping in movies.

People stopped smoking in movies at the same time a lot of other smoking related things changed. Similarly smokers likely notice people smoking in movies more than non smokers.

Correlation is not causation, vaping didn’t need movies.

I remember a viral twitter photo of Sophie Turner smoking a Juul while filming the last episodes of Game of Thrones

Juul changed the cultural standing of vaping and (for a very brief moment of time) made it "cool" by means of social media celebrity promotion. They were hit with pretty aggressive punishment for this by the US FDA if I'm not mistaken.

Vaping needed social media

Fads long predate social media. Instead social media and vaping came into their own on similar timelines but adoption of vaping just never saw the kind of hockey stick curve you see from a major fad.

Instead it was relatively slow taking ~10 years to hit 25 million users and ~20 years to hit 85 million users keeping it niche vs the ~1,100 million smokers.

Juul was founded in May 22, 2015 well after Vaping was in a fairly flat growth trajectory, and afterwards there wasn’t any kind of noticeable bump in adoption from such efforts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette#/media/Fi...

All the exponential curve stuff happened early on the path from 0 to ~10 of million.