everyone has a different story to tell and i respect your story, oh yes i do.

some phobias are acquired early in life. little albert and his phobia of furry white things and so on and so forth. other phobias are acquired later in life, however.

one notion is that the initial pairing may occur early in life... but then later pairings serve to reinforce the response. basically... neural circuits that fire together wire together. if one walks out on a swinging bridge and mummy panics and screams then one might pair fear (a response to mummy screaming) and heights (or swinging bridges or whatever). then, later in life as one approaches the height ones fear response kicks in (due to the early association). one might then... have an even more intense panic response at the thought of fainting and falling from the height. later experiences have the power to reinforce (strengthen) the associations.

later experiences also have the power to alter (extinguish) the associations, however. one technique that has been tried with sexual offenders is administering an electric shock when they have a physiological response to minors. the idea is that you show them a picture of an adult and if they have a sexual response (there is measuring stuff on their penis) then that is okay... if they have a sexual response to minors then a shock is administered, however. the idea is to... extinguish the pairing of sexual response to minors.

does it work?????

not particularly. how come? because one thing that is really important is to have that punisher administered EVERY time the sexual response to minors occurs. that simply doesn't happen. when the person runs through fantasies in their head and they aren't followed by a punisher then that undoes the training work. when the sexual response to minors occurs (while watching tv or when released) and the training equipment isn't on them then that undoes the training work. but remember that these training techniques were used on people who were convicted of pedophilia. the most severe cases. how much better would individuals do if they knew a little something about how associations are formed and broken and if they were able to monitor things for themselves.

would society be better off if people didn't have sexual responses to abuses of power? i think so.
would society be better off if people didn't think that women enjoyed rape (something conveyed in porn)? i think so.

the associations may well have already been acquired (in some or even in most) of the people who watch that kind of porn. porn still serves to strengthen the neural associations, however. but, on the other hand, if it is the case that only SOME of the people who watch that kind of porn aren't initially interested in those themes but they come to be due to porn exposure then would that constitute a harm to those people (and the people who they interact with)? i think it would. how many people does that need to be true of before the harms outweigh the benefits of porn? how many associations need to be strengthened?

i'm not trying to say that the strengthening of associations inevitably results in rape or anything like that. I AM saying that the strengthening of associations has a significant impact on peoples conscious beliefs and, even more disturbingly, their tacit beliefs. There are more subtle harms. More subtle harms. But still harms IMHO and harms that should be seriously taken into account when deciding whether to limit peoples freedom.

Of course there won't be major limitations on the porn industry. How come? Same reason there won't be major limitations on the oil industry or the gun industry and so on and so forth. Big business interests... Part of the sickness of society, I say...