But how can anyone tell if someone else is lying? This is where your post confused me. I cannot tell if someone who was raped is lying or not and what those motivations might be. I do know that whenever a woman does accuse a rich man of rape they are called liars more often than not even when they've refused money.
You can't reliably. That is why the justice system has to work on a presumption of innocence until proven otherwise. Those rich guys are probably accused quite regularly, so I can understand people doubting the claims, yet calling them liars right away is of course not the right thing to do.
How about we also recognize that taking part in NF does not make us morally superior to those who stay with PMO. Their choices don't make them weak or cowardly or sexist (there's plenty of misogyny festering over on r/nofap). Don't be some sort of sexual Elliot Ness, punishing others for your own problems.
The question is, can you call a choice a real choice if: -you don't know about alternatives -you don't have access to vital information -you are not aware of the consequences of your actions? There are usually two sides of every coin. You're staying on one side, oblivious or ignorant about the other. Then can you say that you choose to be on said side? Or you just happened to wind up there, and since you don't care about anything else, you just say that you chose it? I don't think so...
As far as the effects of porn on society, we don't even have a complete data-set at this point. I don't think we'll know the full ramifications until the people of my generation have raised the next generation. Internet porn has only been around for a couple of decades tops. It's still a relatively new construct and it's consequences are still being shaped, much less thoroughly known. Do I personally think porn (and by extension PMO) has negtive effects? Darn right I do (partly because of my religious beliefs, but also for a lot of practical reasons too), but we can't be dogmatic about what is really happening. I think of my grandparent's generation and the rise of smoking cigarettes. When it first started getting big people actually thought it was healthy. There were actual studies done (albeit heavily funded by large tobacco companies) that had people believing smoking would help them live longer. Hindsight has shown what bullcrap that was and now we know the deadly consequences of smoking addiction. All that to say, who knows what the media, science, and medical communities will know or say about porn and MO in 20 years? At this point we can't lord our NoFap over people. It's a personal choice and conviction that each person needs to make on their own for their own reasons.
