A cutoff date is useful for legal purposes; for example, restricting the sale of such material or the admittance to theaters. Certainly it's important to know your child and what they can handle, but kids get into things on their own, so I think it's useful to have some kind of rating system that prevents them from seeing things unless their parents let them. (I'm talking about young children here, not all children under eighteen--by the time you're a teenager you should be able to start making those decisions on your own--but some cutoff date is still useful.) I don't think kids should be shown explicitly violent material, either. Neither explicit violence nor explicit sex is really comparable to explicit tax paying.
I think it's more useful to define porn as something with the intent to arouse because, as you say, different people are aroused by different things. If I have a foot fetish, and I get aroused by a scene where one character rubs another's feet, that doesn't make the scene inherently pornographic. If, however, the scene was written with the intent to arouse people with foot fetishes, it's pornographic even if I don't personally find it arousing.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: #5
Date: 2007-12-03 08:31 pm (UTC)I think it's more useful to define porn as something with the intent to arouse because, as you say, different people are aroused by different things. If I have a foot fetish, and I get aroused by a scene where one character rubs another's feet, that doesn't make the scene inherently pornographic. If, however, the scene was written with the intent to arouse people with foot fetishes, it's pornographic even if I don't personally find it arousing.