Of course, these spaces are only meant for adults. They’ll say as much, and they’ll drop the hammer on anyone who admits to being underage. But the key word there is “admits.” It’s trivially easy for a kid to lie about their age to get into such places - and even if they require some form of verification (such as a scan of an ID), it’s not much less trivial for a kid to use a fake ID, someone else’s ID, or a photoshop of their own ID. And they’re going to do it in huge numbers, because teens are horny and impulsive and don’t know what they’re getting into. There is no way to keep them out that is absolutely guaranteed to work in all circumstances - at least, not one that I can think of.
And now these kids are in an NSFW space, interacting with grown adults in a sexual context. Even if no one knows they’re a kid, even if no one deliberately targets them, the adults in those spaces are having inappropriate sexual interactions with the kids by being in conversations with them about things like kinks, porn preferences, &c. that adults should not be talking with kids about - and thus those adults become complicit in something terrible without realizing it or intending to.
It’s the anonymous and depersonalized nature of these online spaces in particular that makes this such a problem, which sucks, because there are many people who have a legitimate need for such spaces - LGBT people in reactionary environments, people with embarrassing but harmless kinks who might face ostracism or loss of their jobs if those around them found out, etc. But the anonymous nature that offers so many benefits is inextricable from its inherent awful risk to children.
I’m not really sure where I was going with this. It just sucks and it’s a bad situation and I wondered if anyone else had thoughts to share.
If underage people are putting themselves in that situation, it’s kind of on them. If they’re massively underage, it’s on their parents. These are spaces that need to and should exist in a society with healthy views on sex.
Idk, I’m a queer person from one of the oldest generations that grew up with the internet, in the age where everything was pretty anonymous, and even as a young teen it was really easy to discern the limits of my comfort with topics relating to sex and steer clear of things I didn’t feel I could handle. (Mostly in the context of fanfic for me.) I grew up in a reactionary area with a homophobic family and literally only had the internet to learn about queer topics, including queer sex. I don’t think children need to be shielded wholesale from sex-related content that they themselves are willingly seeking out and exploring — I think a lot of the puritanical narratives around “protecting” children are derived from the greater cultural tendency towards reaction and the “parents’ rights” rhetoric that sees children as property. (A topic for another time is how outright puritanical society and especially the internet has gotten in the last decade, in part related to app store, advertisers, and payment processors’ guidelines effectively censoring the web.)
Like you said, if kids are determined, they’ll find a way to circumvent any age verification. If they’re keeping their ages to themselves, they’re unlikely to be a target for diddlers, which seems like a good thing for their safety. It’s a bit of a violation of consent for the adults in those spaces, but I think adults should also be exercising some discretion on the understanding that they don’t actually know the people behind the other accounts either.
On one hand, I see your point, but on the other hand, I can’t help but think back to
CW: CSA
that thread from a year back dealing with the blowback of the time a guy in his 30s got involved with a 15 year old who claimed to be a 19 year old. There was a pretty clear consensus that he was 100% at fault there regardless of his intent with one highly upvoted comment saying he should be killed. Sure, there’s a clear difference between inhabiting an NSFW space with an anonymous person who it turns out is underage and having physical relations with a 15 year old when you’re a grown adult, but at the same time, the thought of putting myself in a situation where there’s any possibility of having anything in common at all with that creep makes my skin crawl. Like, I don’t care how good the odds are, I don’t want to take a gamble on being that guy, you know?
That whole thread has been thoroughly nuked and I was touching grass then so I have zero context for it. I can only reiterate my last point: I think adults should also be exercising some discretion on the understanding that they don’t actually know the people behind the other accounts either. It’s really, really easy to not do creep shit, all you have to do is not be a creep.
Your explanation does help me understand why this place feels way more reactionary about sex compared to before my grass-touching, though, so thanks for outlining what happened there