00:02:34.720Tumblr, the popular blogging platform, says that it will delete and ban all pornographic content starting this month.
00:02:42.840According to Forbes, on Monday, Tumblr announced in a blog post that adult content will no longer be allowed here, including explicit sexual content and most cases of nudity.
00:02:53.120Starting in two weeks on December 17th, any explicit posts on the platform will be flagged and deleted by algorithms, according to the company.
00:02:59.340The new adult content guidelines outlined by Tumblr say that the kind of content it's looking to ban primarily includes photos, videos, or gifs, not gifs,
00:03:13.640that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples and any content, including photos, videos, gifs, and illustrations that depict sex acts.
00:03:27.080They can't say female nipples because that insinuates that there's some sort of biological component to sexuality, which, of course, they couldn't possibly ever suggest that.
00:03:41.460Forbes goes on, in a decade or so since its founding, Tumblr has served as a major hub for users and communities wishing to share adult content via social media, despite periodic pressure to rein in its content.
00:03:51.100And now it finally will rein in the content.
00:03:53.380Now, this has been met with outrage by many Tumblr users, apparently, who are upset either that they won't be able to access pornography on Tumblr now or they won't be able to share it.
00:04:09.380I didn't know that Tumblr was Porn Central.
00:04:11.720I thought it was just—I honestly don't even know what Tumblr is.
00:04:14.920Tumblr confuses me, and I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old when I'm wearing cardigans and getting confused by Tumblr.
00:04:21.640But really, in all seriousness, this just shows the problem, I think, that parents face, because how in the world do you keep up with this?
00:04:30.840How do you keep track as a parent of where your kids are going, where kids in general are going to access this kind of content?
00:04:47.360How do you stop your kids from being exposed to this kind of stuff?
00:04:50.660And what makes this situation even more difficult is that we, as this generation of parents, we're kind of the guinea pigs, right?
00:05:00.260There isn't a lot of history of parents having to deal with this problem.
00:05:03.780This dynamic where kids from a young age are carrying around in their pockets these little devices that can give them access to everything, any information, any image, any video, and can allow them to communicate with anyone.
00:05:21.980And even if our kids aren't carrying around that device, likely some of their friends will be carrying around that device.
00:05:31.060We can't go back and see how past parental generations dealt with it because they didn't really have to deal with it.
00:05:39.080My parents' generation, I guess, were the first that had to confront this problem, sort of, when the Internet became a household item.
00:05:47.940But for me and my generation, you know, we didn't have the Internet until I was in middle school, and smartphones didn't exist.
00:05:55.640So you had the Internet on one computer in the house, and, you know, you could put the computer somewhere where it was visible and everything, and it was relatively easy to parentally lock this and that and kind of control things that way.
00:06:08.900But this is just a whole new ballgame, and we need to figure it out, even though we're the first ones to have to do that, because the stakes are very high.
00:06:21.020And to highlight just how high the stakes are, I want to call your attention to this.
00:06:27.080A local news channel in Kansas City, KSHB, has a story on their site today, and the story begins, Children's Mercy Hospital,
00:06:36.380Children's Mercy Hospital, says they're seeing a disturbing trend in child sexual assault cases.
00:06:45.640Heidi Olson, the sexual assault nurse examiner, SANE is the acronym, coordinator, says,
00:06:53.120I think that was kind of shocking to us as we were collecting the data, that almost half of our perpetrators are minors.
00:07:01.740Almost half of the perpetrators are minors.
00:07:03.960The SANE program's data shows perpetrators are likely to be between 11 and 15 years old.
00:07:10.720You have 11-year-olds who are committing sexual assaults.
00:07:16.040Jennifer Hansen, a child abuse pediatrician at the hospital, says another thing we're noticing is a lot of these sexual assaults are violent sexual assaults.
00:07:23.020So they include physical violence in addition to sexual violence.
00:07:26.620Last year, Children's Mercy saw 444 kids who were sexually abused within the last five days.
00:07:32.960That number rounds out to around 1,000 a year when they include the children who report sexual assault after five days.
00:07:39.640Victims are most likely to be girls around four to eight years old.
00:07:43.880Hansen and Olson say they're noticing kids are being exposed to porn at very young ages, around four or five years old.
00:07:50.780They say a child can develop unrealistic and dangerous ideas about intimate relationships by being exposed to violent graphic porn.
00:08:00.340Hansen says, we know that it's probably multifactorial.
00:08:04.160I think there are lots of things that contribute to this, but that is the question.
00:08:06.980How are we as a society failing in such a way that we have 11-, 12-, and 14-year-old boys committing violent sexual assaults?
00:08:13.780Another person at the hospital says, what we're seeing is more and more kids have sexual behavior problems,
00:08:21.680and more and more kids at the same time have access to porn.
00:08:26.980Pornography is different today than it used to be, so 80% of the 15 most viewed films portray women being hit, spit on, kicked, called degrading names, etc.
00:08:36.520The kinds of behaviors we wouldn't want our children or anyone to engage in.
00:08:40.820All right, I mean, I think it's clear that early exposure to pornography is very harmful for kids.
00:08:53.280These are people who have no concept of human sexuality.
00:09:00.180If a child is somehow being exposed to hardcore pornography at the age of four or five, which at that young of an age, if that's happening, then that is just pure parental neglect.
00:09:16.100I mean, at four or five years old, you should be able to control what your kid is looking at at that young of an age.
00:09:21.440And so, if they're developing a porn habit at that age, then that's just horrible, terrible parenting.
00:09:29.160Now, as kids get older, it's going to be more difficult, especially these days.
00:09:33.560And if the kid goes to school, it's more difficult once you get to be 12, 13, 14 years old.
00:09:39.760But at that young of an age, and whatever leads to it, you've got a kid that young being exposed to this kind of stuff.
00:09:47.700What chance do they have at that point to become a well-rounded, healthy individual?
00:09:54.740What chance does a kid have at the age of four?
00:09:56.960If a kid at the age of four is being exposed to pornography, what chance does he have to become a healthy, normal person?
00:10:05.420If you have an 11-year-old who's committing sexual assault, and they've been looking at porn since the age of four, how can you even—I don't even know what to say about it.
00:10:23.360Kids at that age, they don't have any defenses against this stuff.
00:10:27.420They can't filter what they're seeing.
00:10:29.380So they're learning about sex and love and romance and all of that stuff from porn.
00:10:36.740That is going to be—that is now, for a lot of these kids, their first exposure to sexuality and to the very concept of it, the idea of it, is through hardcore pornography.
00:10:51.580And we just—I don't think we can even barely wrap our heads around the full impact that that's having on our kids.
00:11:07.080You know, we're seeing if you have kids being exposed to this from very young ages, we see what happens when they're 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 years old.
00:11:14.280But fast forward the clock, when they're 30, there's probably—you know, I'm 32.
00:11:21.240There's probably not anyone my age, or there's going to be very few people my age who were being exposed to hardcore pornography when they were 4 or 5, because the Internet hardly existed back then.
00:11:33.860But you take this generation, and then we see them now, what's it going to be like when they're a grown adult man?
00:11:41.000What's it going to be like when they're 30, 35 years old?
00:11:46.440It's just—it warps the mind in ways that we're only now beginning to understand.
00:11:58.500You know, unfortunately, I don't think that—there isn't one single thing.
00:12:02.360There isn't a magic switch that we can flip.
00:12:07.260But I do know that I think parents have to confront this problem.
00:12:13.240And the first thing that we should do as parents is, you know, keep our kids off of the Internet for as long as humanly possible.
00:12:19.520You know, there shouldn't be any concern that, oh, I need to make sure my kid has a smartphone because all of his friends have smartphones, and if he doesn't have one, he's going to be weird.
00:12:33.340Like, that should not be our concern at all, that our kids won't have this gadget that everyone else has, and they'll be left out.
00:12:42.160Anyway, if it can—if that—if taking that simple measure can in any way protect our kids from this kind of stuff and from the long-term effects that it has, then it's a small price to pay.
00:12:57.120So we just—I mean, keep your kids off of the Internet as much as you can.
00:13:01.980There's just no reason why a child needs to have a smartphone with Internet access.
00:13:09.860And as I said, I know that even if you take that step and they're going to school and their kids have—and their friends have smartphones with Internet access,
00:13:17.460or they're going to their friend's house and there's a laptop or whatever, you know, that's—the fact that they don't have a smartphone isn't going to stop them from being exposed to something on a different device.
00:13:27.320But that, at least, is one simple step that we can take, and I cannot think of any reason.
00:13:33.620I mean, these parents who, you know, their 9- and 10-year-old kids have smartphones with Internet access.
00:14:44.980Emile Rattlebon told The Washington Post that he feels—or that his feeling about his body and his mind is that he's about 40 or 45, despite being born on March 11, 1949.
00:14:56.780He also claims that he received a checkup from a doctor who told him that his biological age is 45 years.
00:15:02.720Rattlebon said, we can make our own decisions if we want to change our name, if we want to change our gender, so I want to change my age.
00:17:21.280Not only that, but it's also true that we age at different rates biologically.
00:17:26.760So there is some truth to saying that a 69-year-old man might be biologically 45 in the sense that his age hasn't taken the physical toll on him
00:17:37.420that it has for most people who were born around the time that he was.
00:17:43.320And also, it's true that Mr. Rattlebon, while he isn't now 45, he was 45 once.
00:17:50.100So he has at least experienced—he has had the experience of being 45.
00:17:56.440The significance of that is he knows what 45 feels like because he was 45.
00:18:02.500So when he says, I feel like I'm 45, he has a frame of reference.
00:18:18.260Like, it does make a certain amount of sense.
00:18:21.480All of these cases—all of these points, rather—I think make the case for the fluidity of gender much stronger than the fluidity of gender.
00:18:30.620Or, I'm sorry, the fluidity of age, the case for the fluidity of age is much stronger than the case for the fluidity of gender.
00:18:39.560Your gender, your sex, is a fixed thing.
00:18:43.000So if you're a man, you've always been a man, and you would be a man anywhere in the universe.
00:19:03.040So we may look at something like this, a case like this, and we say, oh, it's a slippery slope.
00:19:09.820You know, we've accepted this idea of gender being fluid, and now the next step is people are going to say that age is fluid and race is fluid and so on and so forth.
00:19:21.760No, see, that's not exactly right, because when it comes to making things fluid, and if we're on a slope, right, actually, you know, gender, the fluidity of gender is down here on the slope, but age and race, they're further up on the slope.
00:19:41.760So another way of putting it is, to say that race is fluid or age is fluid, that isn't crazier than saying that gender is fluid.
00:19:52.800That's actually a little bit less crazy.
00:19:55.840So the point I always make about the slippery slope is that it's not actually a slope.
00:20:00.760It's more like we just, as a culture, we went into free fall, and there was no slope at all.
00:20:06.320We just plunged into the abyss of insanity, and along the way, we actually skipped over a few steps.
00:20:13.000If we were following a logical slope, if we were following sort of a logical cultural regression, we would have began by saying, oh, race is fluid.
00:20:25.840You can be whatever race you want, and then we would have said, oh, you know what?
00:20:29.360Actually, age is fluid, too, and then after years, we would have said, oh, maybe gender is fluid also.
00:20:35.440But we skipped ahead to the craziest thing, and now we're just backtracking and covering all the bases we skipped over.
00:20:42.960Because even something like race, yet again, race actually, you can be multiple different races.
00:20:48.120You know, that's possible. Race actually is a fluid thing.
00:20:51.520There's probably, there is not one single person on earth who's just one race, and that's it.
00:20:56.200We're all a mixture of various different things.
00:20:58.540So even that, again, that makes more sense than to say that gender is fluid or that you can change your gender.
00:21:08.240We skipped ahead to the craziest thing.
00:21:14.280And that's what we do with, that's what we've been doing in general in our culture is we have been, you know, the left.
00:21:21.500I think that tells you something about the victories that the left has achieved, where they have not gone slowly and incrementally.
00:21:31.280They went right for the, you know, they went right for the gold as far as they're concerned.
00:21:36.440They weren't interested in any kind of incremental steps to get them where they wanted to be.
00:21:41.480They went right for, you know, they went right for let's make gender fluid, and they achieved it.
00:21:49.240And now that they have, there's just no way to argue with someone who says, yeah, you know what, I'm 69 technically, but I feel like I'm 45, so I'm going to be 45.
00:21:58.540There's just, there's just no way to argue with them.
00:22:03.920Speaking of crazy, and then there's this.
00:22:07.440An all-male a cappella group at Princeton will no longer perform the song Kiss the Girl from The Little Mermaid because the song delivers a problematic message about consent.
00:22:19.240Um, now this concern was first raised by an editorial in the school's newspaper, the Daily Princetonian.
00:22:26.200The article, now, just before I read some of this, this article is not, I don't think this article is satire.
00:22:36.040This is, this is totally serious, okay?
00:22:38.220The article says, even when gently crooned by an animated crab, the song Kiss the Girl from the Disney hit The Little Mermaid is more misogynistic and dismissive of a consent than it is cute.
00:22:51.000By performing the song multiple times each semester, the tiger tones elevate it to an offensive and violating ritual.
00:22:57.220No matter how great the tradition, this canonical tiger tones tune should be struck from their repertoire.
00:23:04.640Its, its lyrics raise some serious issues.
00:23:07.300The premise of the song, originally sung in the Disney film The Little Mermaid, is that the male Prince Eric, on a beautiful, on a date with the beautiful female Ariel,
00:23:15.840should kiss her without asking for a single word to affirm her consent.
00:23:20.040Despite the fact that an evil sea witch cursed Ariel's voice, taking it away, making verbal consent impossible, the song is clearly problematic from the get-go.
00:23:31.040Removed from its cushioning context of mermaid's magic and PG ratings, the message comes across as even more jarring.
00:23:38.520Lyrics such as, it's possible she wants you to, there's one way to ask her, it don't take a word, not a single word, go on and kiss the girl, kiss the girl.
00:23:47.660And, she won't say a word until you kiss that girl.
00:23:51.660Unambiguously encouraging men to make physical advances on women without obtaining clear consent.
00:23:58.280The song launches a heteronormative attack on women's rights to oppose the romantic and sexual liberties taken by men.
00:24:05.480Further inundating the listener with themes of toxic masculinity.
00:24:08.880In trying to motivate Eric to kiss Ariel, the crab Sebastian makes use of lines such as,
00:24:16.140looks like the boy's too shy, don't be scared, and it's such a shame, too bad, you're going to miss the girl.
00:24:22.340Such expressions imply that not using aggressive physical action to secure Ariel's sexual submission makes Eric weak, an irrefutable scaredy cat.
00:24:31.940Anyway, this is like something that I would write as satire, only it's way better.
00:24:40.560And this is what makes satire impossible now, because I couldn't, that's, I could not, I couldn't write anything,
00:24:46.220I don't think anyone could write anything funnier than that.
00:24:48.440If you wanted to make fun of the left's hyper-politically correct point of view,
00:24:54.600you couldn't write anything more hilarious than what I just read, only that's completely real.
00:24:59.420And it doesn't even make any sense, because from what I remember of that scene,
00:27:15.060You know, if we're going to be offended by this song, we should be offended in the right way.
00:27:18.520And when you think about it in this way, this song and the whole movie is terrifying.
00:27:22.360It is all about a deceitful sea monster trying to seduce a human man and lure him into the depths of the ocean to engage in all manner of debauchery.
00:27:41.740Pretty, it's pretty chilling, actually, when you think about it.
00:27:44.960So I think that, you know, Princeton is on to something here, but they just, they're looking at it from the wrong angle, in my opinion.