A group of 80 college men at Notre Dame University have called for the University to place filters blocking porn sites on the college’s internal wifi system, according to a Daily Beast report, and 10 percent of the approximately 8,600 students on campus have since signed a petition in support of the wifi porn ban.
The call by campus men at Notre Dame for a porn ban comes despite that fact that, according to a recent survey conducted on campus, 63 percent of men there—and 11 percent of Notre Dame women—acknowledged that they have viewed pornography. Those numbers line up with a national survey that showed 64 percent of all college men and 18 percent of college women saying that they spend at least some time every week watching porn.
Notre Dame Student Diversity Council President Alyssa Ngo said that if the proposed Notre Dame porn ban were put in place, it would be designed to filter out the 25 “most popular” porn sites—though Ngo did not say how the relative popularity of the sites would be determined.
The Jesuit-run Catholic University already has a policy in place that bars students and employees from accessing pornographic material on university-run wifi networks, but the new proposal would place a “hard” block on porn sites.
The call for a porn ban at Notre Dame comes at the same time that Starbucks coffee chain has announced that it would block porn from its in-store wifi, and the social media site Tumbler—which had been considered one of the internet’s friendliest sites for homemade porn—banned adult content from the platform.
But the wave of porn bans would appear to run counter to evidence, which according to an article in Scientific American shows little if any connection between porn and increased aggression or negative attitudes toward women.
“If anything, some researchers suggest, exposure to pornography might make some people less likely to commit sexual crimes,” the Scientific American report said.
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