The Internet Is for Porn
themargins.substack.com
themargins.substack.com
It's such a primitive and toxic line of thinking. The real explanation is that SV doesn't care about the plight of porn actresses not because they're women, but because people in general mostly care about themselves and their closest ones only. Just see that the SV also doesn't care about the plight of rare earth miners (which SV needs for their electronics), even though they're mostly men. I.e. the gender is not a factor here, and yet article authors try very hard to make it look like it is.
Other then reputation nightmare of doing that kind of business, most of SV would jump in without hesitation. There’s shit tone of money in it, worth of grabbing for them... :)
How would they find out?
In the sense that algorithms do nudge our behaviour in insidious ways, addicted consumers of porn can be seen as victims of a sort. But, to suggest that the social stigma associated with porn usage is equal, much less anywhere near approaching, or in the same order of magnitude of the social stigma that sex workers face, is just so incredibly wrong.
So, perhaps in an aggregate sense, there is more suffering of all the men men who are slightly stigmatized because they watch too much porn. But, none of them feel this as acutely as the single single sex worker who can 1) probably never get a more "legitimate" job again 2) may not be there of her own free will (yes, even if she is getting paid) 3) may not have any support network because her family has cut her off because of what she does (this is common).
The decision finds that the company used manipulation and intimidation to force young women into signing contracts they weren't supposed to understand which were contrary to spoken agreements.
This company was big (maybe still is) and isn't an outlier in the space.
Are men victims of their own biology? How come they're the ones that predominately, are they inherently evil and exploitive, is that what we should believe.
Whoa inventing moral codes is hard, i wonder how long it will take us to figure it out again.
Being monetarily compensated doesn't prevent being a victim, which is the basis of all labor protection legislation beyond “workers must get paid at least a token amount”.
The difference is that when widespread systemic labor abuses are revealed in a manufacturing industry, people who aren't members of the capitalist class or spokespeople for the firms in the industry have no problem recognizing that the factory workers are victims.
She just didn't want to work night shift at 7/11 for $10-$15 an hour. In Fort Worth, I've seen night shift "supervisors" for the convenience store where I usually stop for gas being offered $18-$22, starting salary. With 1 year experience. Yes, that's a shitty job, on a shitty shift, and the pay is nothing to write home about at $36,000 - $44,000 a year, but for someone with nothing more than a high school degree, and clearly a tremendous lack of applicable skills, it isn't terrible.
If these women want to do porn instead of slaving away at Walmart, hey, more power to them. I don't begrudge you your choice, but don't act like there's no alternative. Entirely too many people make the claim that "there are no jobs for me!" when what they mean is, "There aren't any jobs that I want to do, I'm not supposed to be a janitor, I'm supposed to be a TikTok star!!"
That's the big fucking lie our society has told people for the past 40+ years. Most of us, even most of us in high positions in respected companies, are easily replaceable cogs.
A lot of people were very concerned about Apple's future when Steve Jobs died. Looking at the M1 chip, it seems like Tim Cook and Apple will be just fine.
Your contra argument implicitly assumes that tech makes are special kind of males that don't use porn.
Porn doesn't compare favorably to their other opportunities. Full Stop.
If it did compare favorably, they would be putting money and resources in porn.
If you go on reddit you can find many threads discussing cam girls who are suspected to either be underage or be literal sex slaves.
There are actual ethical porn producers of various flavours (also featured on HN quite a few times). Onlyfans is not one of them.
It enjoy being subjected to different views. I hope we can uphold a certain standard for expressing them around here.
its especially a nonsense argument when you note that porn is one of the few industries with a huge pay gap - and in favor of women. its so significant that top tier actresses pay scale has a floor that is higher than the ceiling of the equivalent male talent.
Have you seen Hot Girls Wanted? What was the average salary of female porn talent, annually, again? Less than $40,000 if I recall correctly? If even that much? It might have been $35,000.
That's $17.50 an hour. That's a line worker at an injection molding plant making car parts. And that's a job that gets you health, dental, vision, life, short-term disability, long-term disability insurance, and a few other perks. That's in Arlington, TX. I know that because I have a family member who works there. She also gets every holiday that the corresponding GM assembly plant gets, because after all, why do they need to be at work if GM isn't making cars? And this is a job that is so "demanding", you don't even have to submit a resume. You literally just show up, take a drug test, get 2 hours of training in a classroom, get 4 hours of training on the factory floor, and you start the next day. She did.
If porn actors and actresses had the wherewithal to actually set up all the necessary shit to run their own studios... they wouldn't need to do porn.
You have to understand cameras, optics, lighting, video and sound editing, advertising, search engine optimization, website creation, front-end development, back-end development, etc. and so forth.
The "whole package" stack for a single person, or even a small group of people, wanting to get into porn, is significant. Anyone who has even a few of the skills I listed above, doesn't have to get fucked on camera for money.
Why is it such an extremely hard to believe fact that maybe there are people out there that aren't doing it because they are desperate sluts that are failures of society and are actually doing it because its work that they enjoy.
Why is working at an injection molding plant making car parts such a better job? Seems extremely boring in comparison. The only real argument to make for it is that there are people out there who feel the need to shame people doing that kind of work and don't feel the need to do that for the person making auto parts.
The real comparison is also not the factory job, but the jobs that are like musicians and artists. Most of them know after a certain age they aren't going to get rich doing it but its work they enjoy. Some people get a little older and eventually decide to go for a different line of work but theres people that will shame the sex worker directing or doing scenes on the side (possibly even fire them from their job) but will praise the guy being in a Bob Dylan cover band with a couple of his friends.
Theres exploitation in the system that needs to be fixed but it seems like sites like OnlyFans giving the content creators choice are making steps towards that, as opposed to the others entrenched in the industry that are happy to take advantage of young people, something common in a lot of industries. Politicians, tech companies, other aspects of the entertainment idustry, have been happy to exploit unpaid and underpaid interns straight out of college. Nobody deserves to be exploited because they are young.
Probably because we're biologically programmed to understand that's not the case?
It boils down to a simple, but true, undeniable - and apparently for a lot of people, unpleasant - maxim from biology - Sperm are cheap, eggs are expensive.
There's a reason that male birds evolved colorful plumage and in many cases, elaborate dance displays. There's a reason the males of hundreds of thousands of other species have evolved to impress females of their species.
You may not like it. You may not agree with it. You may not condone it. But you're not going to change it. You don't have the power. The only thing that'll change this is time. Lots and lots of time. People think you can separate genetically reinforced biologically-ingrained biases from culture. You can't. You won't. No one can. It has to progress slowly, over time.
The world that many progressive people want may come to pass one day, but it won't be today, it won't be tomorrow, it won't be 10 years from now, it won't be 100 years from now.
Bookmark this comment and come back whenever you want. See how long it takes for the majority of society to shift. You'll have a very long wait.
I have noticed huge changes in my life.
The bigotry and prejudice about sexual desire and sexual "acting out" may or may not be due to some fantasy about the relative price of sperm and eggs.
In other cultures, other places, other times that bigotry, prejudice, and shaming was/is not a thing.
A equally valid possibility is the shaming of sex work is due to misogyny. It is the powerful men brought down by the "sluts and whores". Hence the shaming.
I have a argument for that: In my country until recently it was a crime to offer sex for money but not pay money for sex. If the underlying cause was "relative cost" not misogyny then that difference would not exist
And don't think we can't move backwards from here... quickly, violently, and for many years, decades, even centuries. Its happened before with humanity. Who knows how many times before we had recorded records to reference?
having said that: gender is a spectrum. it's very fluid. it's true for all animals. including humans. but evolution takes millions of years. not the average human lifespan.
unless. we modify it but it wont be natural selection that we can witness in our lifetimes.
The entirety of the field of evolutionary psychology.
I had a huge post typed up, but I realize that because you immediately went on the attack:
> You clearly have very limited experience with woman.
You're not interested in actually learning anything. You think you already know. You think you've read all the literature. You actually think you're well-informed.
What you want is for people to shut the fuck up and agree with, because you don't want your worldview challenged.
> Claiming that all woman are or are not X (for any X) shows that your view of woman is simple enough to almost be a caricature.
You talk about being a caricature, then immediately go for a statement like this, which is a combination of the worst kind of pedantry and high-functional mental disability...
Here's one for you. Fact: Men are stronger than women. When a biologist says this, they don't mean every man is stronger than every woman. They mean almost all men are stronger than almost all women.
This is one, of many papers in the field: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0265407513487638
So it may not be that they don't care about women. Simply that they don't understand and recognize the harm to women.
I see this article as more of an interesting take on how wealthy Silicon Valley men perceive each other. My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. Banks created that paradigm so of course it would be difficult for any VC firm to justify using non-fiat currency to enrich themselves. To apply gender to this and to arbitrarily add to the list of problems that men created is dubious at best.
If you want tech to create solutions for sex, the sex industry, and sex workers at large then people need to change. Already there are people on this thread attempting to correlate what I assume is BDSM to pedophilia, and echoing the voices I mentioned earlier. Protecting sex workers or even sex enthusiasts will always be an iterative game that requires constant attention. The worst thing we can do is to continue to ignore it and apply moralistic language from either end of the spectrum to the problem.
Some people might really enjoy a fallacy like action is inaction here, which is telling.
Most porn can be bought with credit cards, at least in the USA. Mainstream payment processing companies like stripe may not be willing to do it but if you go try to buy (legal) porn right now with a credit card you will be able to do it.
I remember this being discussed a number of years ago: https://fetlife.com/help/can-i-use-a-credit-card-to-support-...
You could argue the merits of the website (I am not a member) but at the end of the day if you can only use BitCoin or a bank account then the policies have failed businesses, consumers, and content creators.
I don't know where the lines lie for decency in credit card payments or what they consider acceptable risk, but I would point back to my original assertion. If you cannot pay the best coders, the best business people, then those worries will not be solved.
> Over the last decade, I've spoken to easily over a hundred people in both the financial and adult industries, and asked them for a copy of the official content rules. Everyone says they've heard that there are rules, but nobody seems to have seen them or can even get their hands on them!
https://fetlife.com/groups/311/posts/15046791
(No login wall) https://pastebin.com/FK6Z7gMf
I just checked their payment page and as of today, they accept credit cards.
but it's not as easy as mainstream, and often much more expensive to process and in some cases to even sign up.
Last I looked into ccBill - they were collecting an extra 2 grand up front payment to enable process mastercard.
These systems are taking advantage of niche classes imho.
There is also the threat of getting deplatformed / de-processed? quickly because bad PR - something that a local hardware store would not be worried about.
It's harder to find places to work with you, it's more expensive, and easier to loose your ability to get paid. Sometimes there are things like operation chokepoint that try to make it near impossible for a small independent operator to go out on her own.
Tech isn't all about making money. Silicon Valley probably is.
I don't know if an system that's so exploitative by design can really be called ethical. Or if a company that does it can be called so. You can claim it increases the agency of producers and that's true as far as it goes, but you have to ignore that the music industry also gives a lot of agency to broke wannabes in garage bands.
So after all those years, we have finally found a use case for cryptocurrencies!
I really don't think this is accurate analysis of abortion debate in USA. First, I am not even sure what difference should the middle require in your analysis.
What progress on abortion would you expect to happen had advocates stopped talking?
Well, duh!
Conservatives and progressives/liberals have completely different world views:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)
There may be some underlying biological differences, that then get reinforced culturally (the old nature/nurture debate):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientat...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/the-yuc...
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-...
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/
Political polarization hasn't helped in trying to find a middle path between these views in recent years/decades:
* https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/political-polarization/
* https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/10/01/how-to-understand-g...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization
Especially in the US, where it seems the Right has moved further over than the Left:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/yes-pol...
There are people who buy into politics but not culture though (eg: it is possible for one to be politically liberal but then be more culturally free rather than culturally constrained). These people, in the sense of sex work and the porn industry may be able to produce viable solutions and products, but they'd constantly be on the defensive against both political cultures.
As of 2014, when that Atlantic piece was written, that may have been true. As of 2020, the left has also radicalized itself:
* https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1339984166935359488?s=...
* https://www.thenation.com/article/society/black-votes-repara...
* https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
It used to be that the GOP had little time for people like the John Birch Society. Now there are Qanon 'followers' (?) being elected under the auspices of the GOP party ticket.
Vox's Ezra Klein recently released a book on the matter (I have not yet read it), and going from this review, while there has been a shift on the Left, it is still the case in 2020 that the problem is generally asymmetric, and the majority has been on the right:
* https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/polarization-republi...
After all: there are people on the Right talking about a martial law and a military coup to 'correct' the election results.
> But how much traction do those radicals have on getting elected politicians and on actual policy?
“We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. . . . We lost good members because of that,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who narrowly leads in her reelection bid, said heatedly. “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success . . . we will get f---ing torn apart in 2022.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-democrats-pelo...
> Vox's Ezra Klein recently released a book on the matter (I have not yet read it), and going from this review, while there has been a shift on the Left, it is still the case in 2020 that the problem is generally asymmetric, and the majority has been on the right
Ezra Klein isn't exactly an unbiased source here.
I remember buying porn with CCBill (from my experience, a payment company for porn and shareware) many years ago. I don’t remember there ever being a time when there was a problem purchasing porn.
I think this is a pretty american centric point of view. These debates don't have anywhere near the same back and forth in other countries (thinking of canada in particular) that they do in USA.
I imagine how taboo porn is is also very much a cultural phenomenon that varries a lot place to place.
The debates in the US sound ridiculous to me.
It's like the US is a first world country full of people from a few centuries ago.
According to the 2010 census Americans over 65 make up under 15% of... well, Americans[0], but currently occupy 147 seats in the House (out of a possible 435) and 48 in the Senate (out of 100), along with executive branches in 15 states (out of 50).[1]
[0] https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf
[1] https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-115th-congres... (note that this was originally posted in 2017, but was later updated for the 116th)
I don’t put those under “should be in Congress”, and constitutionally they’re not allowed to be until 25. So it is 13 percentage points out of 66 percentage points — about 20% of the population with 34% of the seats in the house.
Senators have to be 30 so the over 65 crowd would be an even greater share there.
Given that experience probably gives you _something_, it’s still out of whack but not crazy.
All of that said, personally I believe it’s far too skewed and we should have an age cap in Congress.
This dovetails nicely with another big problem of most political systems: the cursus honorum for politicians is often very slow, meaning that, by the time a person gets to call the shots, the world has already changed significantly. This could simply be considered folklore when the world moved slowly, but we’ve effectively lost that luxury about 100 years ago. And when we go the other way, and elect mid-life people, we end up with revolving-door issues and poor selection criteria (looks over brains etc).
So yeah, age-representation is a big unsolved problem of democratic government.
And then we laugh at people like AOC, because nothing makes us feel better about our ignorance than demeaning smart people who want to fix it for us.
All these senior citizen lawmakers in the usa were pretty young when all this went down, so i dont think age is an explaining factor for the differences.
In Germany we are ruled by old people and conservatives, but they are nothing compared to the US.
The gun control debate is largely settled but I suspect it will start up quite loudly if the EU ever tries to normalize gun laws across member states. The difference between say, the Netherlands (low ownership, very hard to get a license), Austria (moderately regulated and lots of unlicensed ownership), and Finland (very high ownership rate but strictly regulated) is probably wider than any US state, because the US constitution has been interpreted to set a fairly high bar for any regulation.
Let's take major newspapers like _The Times_ or the _Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung_ as examples.
You will not find any article that mentions 2nd amendment rights while not taking side against gun ownership. Every time the American practice is mentioned, it is scoffed at. At least by implication.
A newspaper (especially a privately owned one) not agreeing with you hardly amounts to suppression.
What most countries in EU has is gun ownership license, similar to a driving license, and thus the default right that people without a license has is no rights. Permission is given by the government, and thus the government set the terms.
In the US this power relationship is the other way around. People have a default right to bear arms, and so government have to take away rights in order to enforce gun control.
One could easily imagine a country where driving a car would be part of a constitution, in which case a driving license would be a hot discussion. How, when and where should the government be allowed to step in and remove peoples right to do with their car property as they wish? People from other countries would look at the debate and find it a bit odd.
Somehow, the conversation has stalled here because some people actually believe they're going to protect their freedoms with violence. You know, by fighting against a government equipped with stealth bombers and death drones and navy seals. With their hunting rifles.
I served in the army. The idea that civilians could put up anything of a fight is a fantasy more ridiculous than kung fury. What keeps you safe from "the government" is that soldiers are taught that they are there to serve and that American citizens are off-limits, not that they are somehow quivering in their boots about losing a fight with your cute little club of weekend warriors that play dress-up in the woods with walkie talkies.
Society is held together by people's values and individual adherence to shared rules - aka culture. Kids, like everyone else (eg cops), are acting out cultural norms, being mostly defined by mass media.
Entertainment media mostly consists of easy-to-write fight scenes where the main characters dispose of some endless supply of nameless "bad guys". A few hits or shots, that one is gone, move on to the next one. No scenes showing henchman #17 hugging his kids goodbye that morning, or henchman #31's parents grieving. Just purely transactional force-of-will violence - sound familiar?
Furthermore, news media then glorifies shooting events when they do happen, showering the perpetrator with attention and making sure they go down in infamy - it's actually a quite precocious way to get one's 15 minutes of fame.
And of course there's that other uncomfortable issue of why school environments cause kids to want to kill their peers in the first place!
But there's no straightforward approaches to those, and they're held in place by entrenched incentives (lazy writing, clickbait advertising, ass-covering school administrators), while the people speaking up for the inanimate objects are easy to write off.
Perhaps there is something deeply violent (deeply wrong IMO) in the USA's culture?
B) That's exactly what I'm saying! It's the optics and the structure of political ownership that prevents such a civil war, not deterrence, as the second amendment was designed to implement.
As people outside the US are fond of pointing out, your right to bear arms came from the 2nd _amendment_ so you know, you could always make another amendment.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_...
Hmm, the 3 adult shops I pass on the way into work beg to differ. You can buy anything from lingerie, to lube (with CBD Oil!), videos, handcuffs, ball gags... You can get any of this stuff online too.
The only place where you might struggle to use Visa cards for sex is on sites that have been busted with illegal content.
I think the debate is not really about porn, but people's sense of justice, cheating, deserving things or not etc.
Some feel like porn gives unearned satisfaction to young men, a virtual substitute they don't have to work for. The bitter other side will say, no shit, I won't slave away to get screwed over, it's much more straightforward business to consume porn.
A wife may feel cheated and less desired, and therefore feel like they are less necessary, a "resource" they provide is devalued.
Puritans may feel like so much sexuality and hedonism tries to cheat and get the benefits, while not suffering consequences, like pregnancy, adult responsibility of family life etc. That it hollows out the sanctity of this intimate and symbolic act.
Others may feel camgirls are collecting undeserved money, they don't do actual noble valuable work, just cash in based on their genetics and immorality.
It all comes down to a feeling that people get things they don't deserve.
It's about feelings that the young man should work his ass off to obtain status than satisfy himself with porn. The female performer should rather hold on to her sexual value and motivate men to work to get it and then only give it out when also taking on the responsibility of childbirth.
And therefore it's not likely that the debate will get "resolved", because it's not about some objective disagreement but about who deserves what. It's more metaphysical and depends on one's fundamental worldview and framework of justice.
What? No. This is idiotic. Who said that?
I think the theological morality case is more like treating sexual addiction, like porn addiction, like a sickness that needs support and treatment, at least more than it is now.
The Christian perspective is that on a moral level, watching porn is in the same category as adultery and whatever sexual immorality that is depicted in the pornography. That's because moral culpability is in the heart to start with.
Folks don't sign up for the same worldview, sure. And it's a nonsense (perhaps harmful) worldview if you reject Christian teaching altogether. But there's a lot more subtlety, realism, and (from their perspective) care for people than is captured by concerns about cheating and symbolism.
More concretely, there is a lot of excitement to see progress on modern slavery and human trafficking in many Christian circles. The intersection between pornography, sex work, and sexual slavery is especially concerning in those circles.
> “ Some feel like porn gives unearned satisfaction to young men, a virtual substitute they don't have to work for.”
What? Maybe extremist groups like the proud boys, but I’ve literally never heard this objection. People tend to worry more about socialization and the harmful psychological effects porn can have on people.
> “ Others may feel camgirls are collecting undeserved money, they don't do actual noble valuable work, just cash in based on their genetics and immorality.”
Again, thats an extremist misogynistic viewpoint. The real objections I’ve heard concern the exploitation of the industry and the lack of protections for workers.
All the worldviews you describe are hyper-conservative, and don’t at all describe society as a whole.
I meant this part as quite analogous to the drug debate. People dislike drug comsumers because they feel drugs are a cheat: you get unearned pleasure without having to work for it. You sidestep your noble duties of working and earning the fruits of your labours by short-circuiting and hooking your brain directly on to pleasure juices. I think -- said explicitly or not -- a lot of the same sentiment underlies the anti-porn stance. That men can get (part of) the pleasure without the work. The underlying idea is that without porn, men would be forced to rather work on themselves, improve themselves, mature and provide value to society to attract female attention etc. Just like the (misguided or not) idea that without drugs all the junkies would suddenly go take on a decent 9-5 job and climb the ladder like one is supposed to and indulge in buying stuff with their hard earned money. Just outlining a narrative, not that I believe this simplified story, just that I think these patterns are lurking there, it's not merely about showing bodies and genitals due to some irrational arbitrary taboo.
> Again, thats an extremist misogynistic viewpoint. The real objections I’ve heard concern the exploitation of the industry and the lack of protections for workers.
What people say in public to look good is different from what they act out. Despite all the liberal attitudes in western europe for example, if you go to a brothel in Amsterdam, you won't see rich Dutch girls self-actualizing, or middle-class Norwegian girls expressing their empowered sexuality, but poor Bulgarians, Ukraininans, Hungarians, Roma, etc.
Sure there are exceptions. But overall even most of the enlightened liberal Western European parents don't actually want their daughter to become a pornstar or a prostitute. For reasons approximating my previous comment -- that they are worth more than their mere bodily appearance, etc.
While I can certainly imagine someone feeling this way, I've never thought this and I've never heard anyone express this perspective. I think you may be imagining too hard.
Why else? Perhaps you mean that drugs physically harm you, like you will become a methhead or crackhead with your teeth falling out etc? But that requires really sliding down the deep end...
Perhaps I was raised differently. As a kid, my parents told me upfront that drugs are awesome and people do them because they are really enjoyable not because junkies are evil mutant monsters who like to destroy their lives, and that the awesomeness is the danger in them, that they are empty enjoyment without deeper achievements etc.
This was in contrast to school finger wagging lectures, which just said that drugs are baaad and you must learn to say NO or you will destroy your health and life and drugs are poison and terrible and will eat your flesh (slides showing the effects of krokodil, and shady people in alleyways). Which just confused me because why such a big deal about poison that destroys your life? Why would anyone do this if it's so straightforwardly bad?
In the other hand, you also have a feeling of this person not being a productive member of society. My tax dollars go to fixing this persons' mistakes. I wouldn't complain if my tax dollars went to properly rehabilitating these people though.
It is a chicken and egg problem though, like many others in life. Do people take drugs and therefore stop progressing in life or do they not see any other paths forward, any positive examples to follow (for whatever reason) and therefore turn to drugs, and it's perhaps one bad decision they can take out of lots of bad options from the cards they were dealt?
People rarely ruin their lives if they just experiment with drugs for recreation, self-discovery, psychedelic trips etc. if their life is in order, with healthy relationships, a pride in their work etc. The danger is mostly when it is a substitute for life/social achievements.
Similarly with porn and OnlyFans. It provides an intimacy to people who don't currently have the means/skills to get it in real life. But could they perhaps develop it if they put in more effort? Now the bitter kind of people would say it's not worth it, they will just cheat on you, trap you in marriage, the divorce you and take it, everyone is a golddigger or just wants to date assholes etc. etc. There's lots of ideologies for this. Again chicken and egg. Are you unable to form relationships because you spend so much time with fake intimacy, fake achievements in video games, fake virtue and validation on social media etc, or the other way around?
The underlying issues are societal and they aren't just about the surface level products and services.
It's common, at least in my bubble.
But there's lot of sneering like this https://9gag.com/gag/arVYxm5 spreading on social media, which is essentially that girls on onlyfans are going for the easy money instead of more "decent" work and career path. I know it's just a meme, I'm not defending a silly image as truth, just as the illustration of the viewpoint. The idea that there is a who-deserves-what aspect.
And perhaps you think the anti-porn Christians simply tell boys not to jerk it because of an irreducible argument that "Jesus doesn't like that", but to me it's pretty clear that there is a deeper Christian pattern underlying it, namely suffering/effort giving rise to reward, and that it's immoral to sidestep that, Garden of Eden, Christ paying for sins by suffering on the cross etc. The protestant ideal of hard work etc. Do these ideas seem foreign to you?
As someone who is a supporter of legal sex work and pornography. The "cashing on genetics" part bothers me the most. I don't know how to process when good looking people can earn thousands of dollars almost doing nothing (particularly on digital platform like OnlyFans), whereas regular people have to work day and night to earn a living. Right now, when sex-work is stigmatized, it seems fair because they are getting paid a lot while suffering the stigma. Similar to a lot high-risk job is also high paying because of the high risk. But once sex work gets accepted in the society, then why should they get paid so much without the work like rest of the society. Maybe if sex-work gets destigmatized it will not be very high paying profession.
Well, welcome to all of life. More attractive people, taller men etc. get hired, promoted and trusted more. Not just in porn, not just in regular modeling or acting or singing, but also in any job. They get better options in the dating market.
Genetically more intelligent people have higher chances at high earning jobs.
The pattern on cashing on genetics is extremely widespread and it's also not entirely clear it can be abolished without screwing up society. We do need the right people for the right jobs. You don't want to watch ugly people's porn (except if that's your thing, no kink shaming implied!), or marry stupid people etc. etc. You may try to console yourself that individual hard work can override all that, and it can to a degree, but we like to kindle ourselves in the fairytale of the "just world fallacy". Reality is harsher.
Genetically being superior today is essentially a lottery, while then, it would be something you can buy. Imagine that society.
But what if some people become fundamentally better, an actually clearly superior "race", ie the Nazi myths of superiority becoming fact (as applied to this new optimized race/new entity)?
Society isn't prepared to talk about it.
See that's the problem. We as a society need to stop putting sex on a pedestal. It's just sex. Pleasure is pleasure, why would anyone not want to be pleasured?
And why is pleasure something that has to be earned? It is very simple to give and receive pleasure, why complicate that?
I'm suggesting that it can be valued for pleasure, and it can be valued for procreation. Because both are true (at least in the PIV scenario).
The anti-sex folks are following old, overly simplistic, and ineffective campaigns to "protect people from themselves (via their genitals)". Most of it is well intended but oh so wrong.
Edit: the only problem is the boundaries of power -- wanting to apply religious beliefs to the whole population rather than their particular sect. And I'd wager a fair amount of the conflict over this power is manufactured in order to keep the base riled up.
People thought that after the pill, sex will become simple and uncomplicated, just have orgies for fun all the time. But it's not happening on a large scale even in the very liberal societies. There was a brief moment with the hippies, but it didn't last long. Yes there is hookup culture, but it's far from uncomplicated. It's not everyone can easily participate in and has its own little games.
It's one of the fundamental components building our social fabric.
Why does pleasure have to be earned? I'm not sure I subscribe to that, I probably need a few decades more of contemplation and experience to answer such a thing. I'm just saying that there is such a template in many people's moralities. I think it's kind of silly, because the universe doesn't care, it's not a vending machine to put in hard work and get rewards. It's way more random and unpredictable than that. Sometimes something easy gives you lots of reward, and toiling away in the wrong way leaves you with nothing. But on the whole, on a large scale, on a population level, at the expectation, you cannot get something out of nothing, it seems. It's not a law of physics or anything. It may also seem pseudo-religious. But overall it seems to be the strategy that people adopt who achieve things. That you need to put in effort to reap rewards. Otherwise all kinds of things can happen, like hedonic adaptation, setting your baseline at a different place, inflation of the value of things etc.
The truest line from Starship Troopers.
This perception that it has value is one of the very things that people add just to complicate things. It isn't about value, or a chase, and to be honest I wish people would decouple it from anything more than intimacy. It should only be about getting you and your partner off. (And making babies, where wanted.)
For something that builds up inside all of us, some of us very quickly, society should really try to make it easier for everyone to access, especially since we are all equipped to provide.
Everyone is equipped with the necessary hardware to work in my factory. Barring health issues it costs nothing. Why does your labor need to have "value"?
One can dream...
Simply "sawing away" without emotion or "stakes", it loses value.
People don't just want to have sex, they want to have sex with some people, in some circumstances. Men are less picky (both out of necessity and due to lower consequences), but still somewhat selective, if for no other reasons then opportunity costs.
Nothing is simple about sex.
In terms of pure thrusting, that is a very narrow view of it. For one thing you're forgetting about sensuality, foreplay, kink, and polyamory, and the immense feeling of satisfaction of blowing off steam that builds up over time.
Not a puritan, but I could never explain that viewpoint to me with anything else than envy.
Like, being careful with sex if it may lead to unwanted pregnancies makes perfect sense - but those people seem even more upset at the possibility of sex that has no risk attached to it.
Isn't improving quality of life something we are all striving for? This movement seems to go the exact opposite direction and embrace suffering instead of joy.
But I don't think that's all.
From a perspective of optimization, it could be seen as young men reaching a local minima with respect their quality of life vs the risks and costs of its maintenance.
The commodotization and derisking of sexual pleasure and titillation decouples it from the behaviors it's historically been used as a reward for. This reweights the incentive structures in our society that kept a lot of otherwise ne'er-do-well young people productive.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's something we definitely need to have a collective dialogue about, as we no longer have any centralized moral or executive authorities capable of unilaterally responding to this shift in a manner that puts us back into social balance.
Even this would make a moderate amount of sense if the work at least were meaningful. But it isn't - the only importance seems to be that the man in question appears to be successful in something, even if that work is actively harmful to society or the environment.
Porn has become one of those buzzwords which triggers an emotional response and is used as a political tool by everyone. ("Taking away our culture and morally corrupting the young generation" is a common refrain heard around me by prominent people even today). I feel that anything which enters this realm where your first response is a strong emotional one (nationalism, criminal etc.) its very hard to get to a solution or even a way forward. Best is to maybe just change the word you use.
This article touches upon that, inviting readers to drop off if they are triggered by usage. I would say they need to read it more than those who are happy to read further and are not triggered. This is where the outrage about the NYT article had the unintended effect. The points were correct, but were not presented factually, and instead to trigger a moral outrage causing the payment processors to stop usage. To think of it, Pornhub was one of the few sites with financial power, resources, and motivation to put the stop to revenge porn and non consensual uploads. Asking to do that would not have scored any points for anyone. Maybe the solution I propose isnt right, but it is impossible to have that conversation given the vitriol internet generates for anything like a half cooked thought not agreeing to the mainstream idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_citie...
The usual usage is just:
Tier 1: Metro cities, the ones you've likely heard of. Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi etc.
Tier 2: Cities, but much smaller population-wise. These are the cities that are getting newer airports for eg. Most state-capitals would fall here. These count up to around 50 to 100 depending on who you ask. Linked to national highways usually.
Tier 3: Small urban towns. Population is usually a few lakh (1 lakh=100_000) at most. (<300k or so).
It more-or-less corresponds to the X/Y/Z usage on the wikipedia article.
If one's morals can be corrupted by porn, one hadn't much morals to begin with.
Where porn exposes one's weaknesses, one should introspect to evolve, not tilt against windmills.
It sounds like "we shouldnt help the weaker ones"
It's 100% correct.
I think the moralistic argument makes much more sense. Most of the VC types who want to "make it big" in SV do it not just for the money, but also for the approval of their peers and the praise of their Ivy-league brethren ("Wow, look how smart he is, he was one of the earliest investors in Facebook!") Making it big in porn just wouldn't have the same cachet, and would be a potential minefield of social opprobrium.
Porn spam is difficult in the same manner filter-evading YouTube clips are - it's human intelligence applied at scale. With highly motivated humans at that. It really is harder than all the things which you mentioned.
Porn spam is an unbelievable technical challenge because it's so damn profitable. If you fight them you are fighting the best—and an army of hundreds of thousands of the not-so-best, who can overwhelm you with sheer numbers. Also the spammers tend to be vindictive kooks, and active efforts against them can bring DDoSes, swatting, and other unpleasantries down on you and yours.
Child porn and revenge porn are ever-present. You will have to moderate it, which means people will have to see the images. Also people like to use porn sites to distribute snuff imagery (videos of suffering/torture/death). Imagine the job of a Facebook moderator except ultra-concentrated.
I don't think the moralistic and execution arguments are opposed; rather they are an ill-virtued cycle of reinforcement. The industry is shady and filled with bad people because it's said to be shady and filled with bad people. I do expect SV & friends to keep trying, because there's just so much money!
I would even assume that this is actually happening pretty regularly with different piracy scenes. If you want to rip content with as minimum amount of traceability, identity theft (cc fraud under a different name) would be high on the list. Afterward people can just copy the copies.
The question then is why would it be different for porn?
That said this is a situation that is slowly improving thanks to competition. However this is likely going to be a stain on the porn industry for decades after the problem is mostly gone due to the way the financial industry does risk analysis.
I find it absurdly laughable that you think that there is any moralistic response from Silicon Valley VCs who have funded outright theft and lawbreaking--and who also funded YouTube when it was primarily a porn distribution system.
People have made lots of money from porn over the years. The porn tech conference used to occur at the same time as CES--and often it was more technical than CES--things like Laserdics, DVDs, the web, online credit card tech, etc. all were at the porn conference long before the mainstream ones. One could make an uncharitable comment about it being more profitable to sell shovels in the gold rush than to be a miner/performer ...
The big issue with porn sites is that they only scale so far, and then it's a race to the bottom, and when you hit the bottom the law starts knocking on your door. So, you have to switch off porn before the race to the bottom starts if you want to scale further. And if you make make that change at the wrong time or in the wrong way, your site dies.
OnlyFans is in the race to the bottom now. There is always another girl who looks just as good who will do whatever thing you want for 10% less than that other girl. Do you really think that people really care whether they're watching Porn Star A or Porn Star B--or whether they care that Porn Star B is $10 less per <whatever>?
Sure, there will be some exceptions where a bunch of people want to see some famous Disney tart's naughty bits. The rest of the performers, however, are in the swamp.
OnlyFans broke the monopoly. Great! But then it will become the monopoly. The wheel simply turns.
Simple question: Who was the most popular porn star 5 years ago? 10 years ago?
Most of the past porn stars lament how much the ubiquity of porn has reduced their escort/stripper revenues which were way more than their porn revenues ever were.
Just like everything that goes online, your customer base goes global but so does your competition. And the customer base is mostly men in developed rich countries while the competition is a lot of very pretty young women in very poor countries.
The rest of us boring, unattractive folks will just have to settle for desk jobs.
There's only negative presence in the sense of haters. Would you also encourage young people to avoid being Black, or Muslim, because that's a "negative presence"?
It's not that there can't be reasonable appearance standards; however, it would be incredibly disingenuous to claim that those standards are established within a neutral cultural atmosphere. I personally find white dudes with short or no hair (the skinhead/cop cut) threatening, but no one's ever going to make that disqualifying.
I'm curious about this: is there any record of actual Puritans persecuting someone explicitly for having a facial tattoo? (It is true, of course, that Puritans in England and the colonies did not have a modern perspective about the separation of church and state and persecuted minorities like the Quakers. A revulsion to their sense of justice is also pretty understandable, but justice was pretty rough back then, too.)
Like “fundamentalism”, “Puritanism” is probably more commonly (outside of specific technical discussions of sectarian history or theology) used in a sense which does not refer specifically to the theological group the term technically denotes but a broader (but overlapping, not a superset) group defined largely by a set of traits stereotypical of the group designated by the technical term.
Thanks for clarifying; appreciated!
> doesn't help their future career aspirations
it fits perfectly (unfortunately).
only if you confuse causation. If most black dudes have poorer career prospects, it doesn't mean it's only because they are black, there are a load of other correlating factors.
If women as a group did worse as a group because some do porn, you wouldn't say "Don't be a woman", you'd be more specific: "If you are a woman, don't do porn".
Becoming a sex object is not a noble thing, and something you have full control over. You pulling race into this is completely irrelevant and a desperate grasping for straws. Race is not something you can control, and you subconsciously equating this to "negative presence" projects something on your behalf that I don't think helps you here.
there's always a cost.
If the moneys good, would you disregard that?
Not sure why it's a negative presence, either. Anyone who thinks it was a negative presence is not really someone you'd want a job from after making $10,000 - $100,000 a month.
Many employers won't hire you and will fire you if they find out - regardless how great worker you at. Plenty of prospective partners take issue with it or can't deal with feelings of resentment, jealousy etc.
Do we really want to hold sex work in the same regard as being an entrepreneur or doctor? What kind of signal do you think that sends?
The battle cry of the can't be arsed. The difference between them and you is you applied for the desk job.
Can't be arsed to do what?
With 700k creators earning a cumulative total of 700m, and a few of them earning hundreds of thousands or even millions, it sounds like it already has.
Is this really progress towards equality, or a generation of women self-objectifying themselves.
I'm not going to risk getting pulled into any of the ten different arguments going on here, beyond stating that I consider it a very good thing to increase the agency of the most vulnerable members of this line of work. But suffice to say that with this level of vehement disagreement even on whether sex work has any sort of societal value at all, it's really no surprise that this lucrative opportunity has gone to a region that doesn't have these moral qualms.
And that is a little surprising, given that, as the author points out, Silicon Valley takes no issue with any number of other industries that have debatable moral consequences.
So basically, you only want to state your own opinion, and not hear the many that disagree with you?
Then why not put it on a personal blog, rather than a site intended for discussion?
It's almost the exact same experience of aspiration, hope, envy, release, etc. Even though it's all media, and yet we say the sex media is taboo, when reality is these representations of what we perceive to be powerful and desirable are all the same thing.
When I wrote for magazines, and after we got into the drinks, I'd have this same conversation with some of the more bourgeois writers and editors, who insisted they were prim and serious, but when it came down to it, they were in the porn business, just the fancy kind.
Whether you are looking at naked people, expensive clothing, cars, or even very serious and meaningful political commentary - it's all on a spectrum of sensational pornography. Even renowned fashion photographer Helmut Newton famously talked about the store Hermès as the world's most exclusive sex shop. He understood it, and he knew exactly what he was doing.
The only difference is in the aesthetics and beliefs the pornography reinforces.
OnlyFans isn't the only tech attempt to “address sex work”, it's basically a hybrid of the premium user content with centralized content infrastructure model of many recorded-video sites with the patronage / p2p subscription model of Patreon, etc. It may (or may not) be revolutionary in effect, but it's a stepwise change in model building on other recent stepwise changes.
It's not something that came out of nowhere after a long period of no innovation.
It's called the patriarchy for a reason. I don't know about you, but the priests I see ranting about pornography, the politicians I see talking about regulating it, the police who harass sex workers, people running groups like nofap, so on and so on, are men.
Yes of course women also contribute to it. But when I read the article, I didn't so much see it as blaming men, as explaining how the current social system is organized, and how that relates to gender. This is the point of the critical study of gender (AKA Women's Studies), not laying blame, but describing the system and how to confront it.
Not understanding that, treating it like someone is trying to blame an entire gender, rather than simply explaining how we got here, is why people make jokes about fragile masculinity and snowflakes on the right.
That reason being, this is what many feminists think. And the rest of society don't call it the patriarchy for a reason too.
There are plenty female Catholics, even if there priests aren't (what about nuns?), Politicians/police follow societal cues. AFAIK, nofap has little to do with disdain for porn, and the people involved hardly represent society.
> as explaining how the current social system is organized
highlighting that the industry is run by men is otherwise irrelevant; unless you are blaming this fact as relevant.
> Not understanding that
There is nothing to "understand", this is just your opinion, not established fact. People do indeed make jokes about "fragile masculinity" etc - and those people are feminists, and there are plenty of jokes at their expense too (and afaik "snowflake" is usually applied to the left).
How is people recognising that they have a problem and are unhealthily addicted to something somehow a bad thing?
High speed ultra hd pornogrpahy desensitises the mind into looking for constantly more "extreme" content leading to a race to the bottom with many losing desire for the "normal".
There's nothing wrong with that. Putting Porn on this pedestals where it's all good and there's nothing wrong with it is as bad as making it some sort of extreme horrible thing that we must shame and hide. Moderation is good.
I must also suggest that if you're looking to SV to use tech to bring ethics to adult work, you're barking up the wrong tree. We should be thankful SV hasn't stepped in to "disrupt" the industry, with it's track record of privacy violations and exploitation of user data it's the absolute worst match up for a privacy sensitive industry like adult work. I don't think techs lack of involvement is out of the kindness of it's heart anyway, I think it's a risk avoidance outcome.
The vast majority of those that enter the sex business are consenting adults with free agency and control over their own actions. That some people are angry later and feel shame is a result of society disapproving of their decision rather than genuine harm caused to them. We need to change attitudes towards sex work to remove the shame rather than stop entry into a massively popular and universal industry that crosses all cultures.
Vice - and by that I mean sex, drugs, and rock and roll - is best consumed in moderation and the human experience is improved because of it. Prohibition and outlawing massively popular industries drives them underground but does not eliminate the demand, overall harming the people who work in the business. The insane shutdown of Backpage, a website whose operators worked closely with law enforcement, just drove the prostitution industry underground and made it even harder for detectives to do their jobs. Furthermore the internet is global and shutting down western sites just moves them offshore where they are just as easily accessible but basically impossible to shut down.
In summation I applaud OnlyFans and wish that there was less shame and more support to employees of businesses like pornography that provide massive enjoyment and receive tons of hate for literally zero reason when analyzed rationally.
Because that's what was happening: mass unconsensual sharing of images, including images of children.
My critique is more about the wide disapproval of the porn industry itself, which you can already see in the comments of this post, which I find both absurd and harmful to the vast majority of legitimate employees of this very popular and mainstream industry.
The conflation of puritanical objections to pornography with opposition to their regime of theft and worse is nothing other than a cynical maneuver meant to distract from the operation and consequences of their enterprise.
I'd say that knowing that everyone in school saw you having sex it's worse.
If the problem is "mass unconsensual sharing of images" social networks are a lot worse than any porn website.
There are tens of unauthorized pictures of people faces and properties on social networks, not counting kid pictures.
Does PornHub keeps a list of shadow profiles like FB does?
I don't think so.
If I was a parent my biggest issue would be the "not consensual" part of the story.
Because it's rape.
Teenagers are secretly recording girls on there phones having sex with them.
They use a phone and save the video.
They share clips with friends on snapchat
They send full length clips via google drive or other file sharing programs.
A friend may upload to pornhub and random people can see. Under 200 videos in 3 years were found.
You think by shutting down pornhub it stop this? Your daughter is safe? You are focusing on the least important part of the chain. If pornhub doesn't exist this is shared on xxxvideos or vk or someother service.
If you really wanted to stop the problem you have to halt the chain of events earlier.
Legalizing, but heavily regulating vices is definitely the way to go. I think a lot of European countries have good models for this (Switzerland and Amsterdam come to mind). The demand for these things is going to exist, and is usually best if it is legalized and put into red light districts / out of public, etc.
That said, social tolerance should not devolve into some sort of forced social acceptance for the "liberation" of sex work. Just as any woman should be free to engage in sex work, I should be free to judge her for it (just as my girlfriend would be justified in asking about whether I ever purchased sex work). Just as anyone should be able to eat what they want, health consequences be damned, I should be able to call them "fat" instead of whatever PC word people use these days like "rotund" or "plus-sized", etc. Both of those are choices, and adults have to accept the consequences of those choices (unlike inherent things like sexual orientation or skin color). I cannot go and get a bunch of face tattoos and then whine about lack of acceptance when I get turned down for client-facing tech jobs.
You can't have your cake (engage in sex work, on either side of the transaction) and eat it too (complain about how society does not accept your decision with open arms). It's ironic that folks who are all about "freedom" are more than willing to call the Thought Police because society doesn't agree with them.
There's also a difference between certain things that had been considered taboo / forbidden but are now accepted vs. sex work and drugs: the ends do not justify the means. Allowing gay marriage provides an ends (i.e. more people, LGBTQ folks, who can live on equal legal footing as hetero folks) that more than justify the means (accepting that societally and legally). Legalizing drugs that allow folks to alter their conscience more than justifies the legalizing and shift in attitude.
What are the ends / results for sex work? While certain sex workers may make an inordinate amount of cash (which is certainly their right to do in a free market exchange), sex work does not provide a net benefit to society. It ruins relationships (e.g. infidelity with porn or physical sex acts, harming unwitting partners and children of the transgressors) and prevents them from even starting (e.g. stunted personal development due to excessive porn use, as I have seen in a lot of my male colleagues who were the first generation to grow up with high speed internet porn and are now in their early 30s and have no idea how to connect with a partner as a human being and not just a sex object; or in women who sell their bodies one way or another and then end up in no relationship or in an abusive or otherwise substandard relationship because they neglected to build career and interpersonal skills that could benefit them and their pursuit towards self-actualization).
Although these harms cannot and should not be regulated against by the government, it would be reckless to encourage ignorance of the societal harms.
A lot of what you said makes some sense but I definitely lost you there. If you are seriously disabled, your partner has died, you are very old, or have any sort of issue that makes it impossible to have a normal sex life or have any chance of finding a partner that is young and attractive, this is certainly ethically OK to trade money for temporary sexual activity. This is a free exchange between consenting partners.
"Net benefit to society" is the dumbest part of what you said here. By definition two consenting adults trading anything - baseball cards, lawn mowing, sexual activity - is mutually beneficial or they would not have conducted the exchange. Society is better overall when your arbitrary restrictions on what two consenting people can do is removed, as my beliefs on what should be banned are different from yours and different from the guy down the street, so it's better to default that anything that doesn't harm me and is between two consenting people is fine for them.
I get an overall attitude from you that sex is something morally bad. I am friends with a pair of swingers and have witnessed them meet another couple who was into the same thing, leave the party to consummate the relationship, and return a few hours later as if nothing had happened. For some people sex is just something they do and is separate from emotional commitment.
The fact some people watch porn and cannot connect with others intimately does not mean everyone is this way. Just as not everyone who tries cocaine becomes a drug addict, not everyone who watches porn becomes sexually broken. My wife and I have a very healthy sexual relationship and we are both OK with each other viewing erotic material, either together or personally.
I think you need to broaden your horizons about what the totality of human experience is and accept there are many who live very fulfilling lives unencumbered by arbitrary rules on sexual expression.
I apologize for going too far here. I'm certainly bringing my own bias to bear which is worth mentioning: some relatives of mine have had their marriages blow up because their husbands were engaging in sexual conduct outside of their relationship behind my relative' backs. The amount I care about my extended family and the effect it had/has on them (especially my (step-?) nieces and nephews) certainly biases me a lot.
Sex is great, and an important part of life. I fundamentally agree that action between two consenting parties that does not affect any third parties (e.g. my relatives / their kids in the above example) is totally fine, from drugs to porn to swingers or anything else. Even though I prefer monogamy, I don't think it's some societal downfall if people engage in activity I wouldn't participate in myself.
However, I think it's hard to deny biology, specifically brain development in children and the effects of porn and (separately) the drive to reproduce.
Brain development: I find this disconnect between people who are roughly >35 years old and those who are younger: men in the latter category grew up having access to unlimited video porn on the various "tube sites" since their preteen years, whereas in the former category these tube sites are something one likely stumbled upon as in early adulthood or later. Exposure to this type of pornography (vs. something like a VHS tape or a playboy issue) in the younger cohort, specifically for men, is very different from the older cohort's experience; whereas the older group learned about their sexuality in an environment that was not very different from that of prior generations, the younger group received (and receives) a level of stimulation through these tube sites that wires their brains differently at a formative point in their lives (roughly, the teen years). The unlimited, unfiltered exposure to every type of sexual act under the sun, without context or education, influences how the younger cohort (especially men) views sex. Consensual sex, be it swinging or porn or anything else, is not what is taught; porn tends to portray that sexual acts are about self-fulfillment, not mutual fulfillment. I say "tends to" because I must admit I don't know about the myriad categories that must exist now, but I'm guessing the category of "person A and person B do [some sexual act] and then cuddle while expressing their love for each other and discussing their future plans" is not near the top of that list.
Reproduction drive: the drive to procreate is hard-wired as one of, if not the most important aspects of all animals, and the human brain is built upon a very deep animal "core" (Thinking, Fast and Slow [0] gives a good deal of evidence about the ancient and modern brains). That proclivity, combined with the ease of access to porn, creates a problematic situation. The things you mentioned are either a) difficult to access or have legal consequences (e.g. cocaine) but have a strong influence on one's neurology or b) easy to access but are less prone to activating some primal drive inadvertently (e.g. lawn mowing, baseball cards, though I'm sure even something like baseball cards can become an addiction). Porn falls into both categories. This ease of feeling good or relieved through porn can definitely cause addiction (see all of the nofap stuff on reddit or on other forums). The desire to exchange money for instantly feeling like someone desires you, up to and including in a sexual way (i.e. through prostitution, or perhaps some very intimate only fans interaction), can certainly drive men to eagerly lust after such options if the only other option is to face up to the hard facts about one's choices or shortcomings in life (although I posit that this latter action will lead to more fulfillment).
On top of all of this, you have tech companies, who have honed their suggestion algorithms to suggest the perfect video to each viewer, exploiting these neurologic drives to increase view time in order to get more ad revenue. Just as these algorithms have thrust fringe conspiracies and fear or anger inducing videos towards people on youtube, it has thrust videos that exploit the human sexual drive towards the viewers, which in turn causes more of such videos to be produced. As I stated in the paragraph about brain development, I doubt these videos encapsulate very many, if any, of the important aspects of healthy sexual interaction (e.g. open and honest discussions about what boundaries to draw, the meaning one sees in sex).
> Society is better overall when your arbitrary restrictions on what two consenting people can do is removed, as my beliefs on what should be banned are different from yours and different from the guy down the street, so it's better to default that anything that doesn't harm me and is between two consenting people is fine for them.
I agree with you that these things (drug usage, sexual acts) should /not/ be banned. Any sort of government intervention is certainly a net loss in terms of the outcome of both the individuals involved in the activity /and/ society as a whole. There are too many people in prison in the name of the war on drugs (costing money in both the short term to house them, and in the long term when counting the contributions they could have been making, not to mention the ethical malfeasance of it), Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being gay, etc. When the government gets involved in people's choices that don't harm other people, it generally ends poorly.
However, I think it's dangerous to expect that most people, especially adolescents, will successfully navigate their discovery and understanding of their sexuality and preferences when they are exposed to hypernormal sexual stimuli that tries to hijack their sexual urges to turn their watch time into profit. I don't think that these tubes sites have anyone's sexual health in mind, both the consumers and producers of the content. It sounds like you and your wife (and your swinging friends) have come to a healthy equilibrium, and that is fantastic! However, I think that's an exception, a bright light at the end of a lot of understanding and communication and potentially fraught conversations, when the rule (for almost everyone else) is secrecy and self-fulfillment.
> If you are seriously disabled, your partner has died, you are very old, or have any sort of issue that makes it impossible to have a normal sex life or have any chance of finding a partner that is young and attractive, this is certainly ethically OK to trade money for temporary sexual activity. This is a free exchange between consenting partners.
I have lived in a country with legalized prostitution, and I agree that sex work can be an important substitute for (typically men) fulfilling needs. When I was trying to learn "erotic vocabulary" in the country's language, I would actually read the text from the "escort ad / review" sites. The ads will specifically mention "pensioners / disabled welcome!" and the reviews would be almost heartbreakingly touching, like "Svetlana made me feel vibrant and youthful, in a way I haven't felt since my wife died". I agree that these transactions are beneficial to both parties and serve an important purpose (financial, emotional, physical) in both parties' lives.
However, there is a reason that the reviewers use pseudonyms and the prostitutes typically hide or blur their face in their photos on the sites: there is a social stigma against this type of exchange for both parties. This social stigma may very well close doors for one's future prospects, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to both participants. Understanding that one may make a lot of money (for women) or be able to achieve sexual stimulation with almost no effort (for the Johns) may feel good right now, but that part of one's life may very well stain one's record for future endeavors. For example, I know that anecdotes are not data, but I have not met a man or woman who would be totally okay with it if their partner would have been involved in sex work; most would consider it a deal breaker. By choosing to engage in sex work (producing or consuming), an enormous swath of potential future partners is eliminated. I don't know what kind of public awareness campaign would be needed to change public opinion on such a massive level (i.e. to become okay with sex work), but I know that whinging about how unfair it is that people have different opinions (i.e. a stigma against sex work) does not help.
It's not a judgment on the participants in an absolute sense, but pretending that there are no negative consequences in terms of the judgment they will likely receive from other people sets people up for a harsh reality shock. It's even worse when we encourage the participants to stand against the prevailing forces of human nature (i.e. all the evolutionary biology stuff), a quixotic endeavor if there ever was one.
It really breaks my heart in these comments when people say they'd encourage their daughters to engage in sex work if they chose it (or, on the opposite side of the coin, encourage their sons to hire prostitutes or explore their sexuality through isolated encounters with algorithmically suggested, endlessly-streaming high-def porn videos). These activities have serious consequences on one's future due to social stigma (for engaging in sex work) or one's social growth / personal development due to neuroanatomical changes (primarily men, but women as well I'd venture). Whereas my Irish Catholic ancestors avoided broaching the subject through religious damnation and even more extreme social stigma, it feels like the version of this non-conversation that is had under the guise of "free sexuality", i.e. "just explore your sexual urges on your own I'm sure you'll figure it out", is equally problematic. The pendulum has swung too far from overbearing guidance to absolutely none at all (and, in fact, encouragement). In the middle is where the conversations should be had. The conversation has to be based in reality, i.e. that actions have consequences (social stigma of sex work or the rewiring of one's brain to hypernormal stimuli during formative years), that everyone has a complex web of feelings, and that understanding how those feelings and emotions involving one's sex life is very important for long-term fulfillment.
As I think we both agree, the best decisions and interactions are made when all parties involved are made fully aware of the benefits and consequences of each course of action. Pretending that sexuality is an exception to this is unwise at best.
I understand that a lot of the most inspiring people in the world were the ones who had a vision of a better reality and brought it into being (Ghandi, MLK, both Roosevelt presidents, Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, etc), but encouraging kids to take that path when it goes against social stigma and neuroscience in regards to human sexuality will almost certainly not result in their success.
That said, social tolerance should not devolve into some sort of forced social acceptance for the "liberation" of sex work. Just as any woman should be free to engage in sex work, I should be free to judge her for it
What exactly are you judging her for? For being comfortable with her body?
Personally, I choose to avoid people who choose the easy path in life and refuse to accept reality or be accountable for their actions. Whether it's people refusing to admit that they have an addiction (to porn, drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, video games) or women engaging in sex work and then complaining of the consequences (e.g. not being able to find the partner they want after they quit doing sex work), people who don't take responsibility for their choices given their circumstances, whatever they may be, are unpleasant to be around at best (often complaining about how unfair things are) and are dangerous at worst. If the circumstances are that some woman does sex work because she comes from an impoverished background and desperately needs financial freedom, I understand why she may choose sex work (though I really wish there were institutions in place so that she didn't have to make that choice; late-stage capitalism has made the world a harsh place). If she does it because she can make a lot of money and wants nice luxuries, I know that that sort of person and I would have no overlap in our worldview. As another example, I decided to cut out some close male friends of mine in certain athletic endeavors when they started using performance-enhancing drugs.
It's nothing about some form of prudish morality. It's about not wanting to associate with anyone who makes key choices in their life that I think reveal a certain morality that I don't agree with. Everyone has this right (to free association) and I don't think any sort forced association should be palatable to anyone living in a country with modern governance.
Of course. It's practically axiomatic. Which is why it is strange you brought up one particular opinion.
I wrote a few lines of speculation, but all of them would piss people off. Suffice to say, just ignore the negativity and express your opinions thoughtfully, as you did here.
But if my daughter would consider one of those jobs, I would make sure she would be very aware of the risks and I'm not just talking about the STDs. I'd make her aware that it could be extremely hard to find a different job, especially after a career in porn. And also, if my daughter would get children of her own, children could be bullied if they discover their mother worked in porn.
Also, it does seem a lot of actors and actresses in porn are from broken families and that is kind of sad.
---
> My wife and I are very free spirits and the previous HN discussions on Pornhub / NYT article made me feel like I was taking crazy pills and living in 1850’s Victorian England. The pearl clutching was so intense I was very worried the pearls would break from pressure!
Maybe because almost no man of any quality whatsoever would want to raise a daughter to be a whore, used and abused in all degrading possible ways. Funny that.
There is nothing "free" or "progressive" or any 2020 buzzword that would make this argument anything other than disgusting. As if raising your daughter to be used in gangbangs and things like that is anything other than pure form of degeneracy and the absolute lowest of the low.
Some people think that just because they are capable of doing the god awful nasty things that no sane man or woman would do, that they are somehow "progressive" as if that takes some special skill or something...
What skill do women need to have in porn? Fake tits, fake lips, fake asses in some cases, fake everything.. they just get paid a lot of money because there are not enough insane people that want to do it.
Fathers talking about daughters being literal whores. Jumpstarting... What is happening with this world..
There's probably also the cultural aspect around it. Most people still feel pretty ackward with all things related to sex. Just talking about it is taboo. Most people feel more comfortable just not bringing the topic. Even with the amount of porn being consumed, you'd be hard pressed to have anyone talk about their porn consumption to anyone else, including their sexual partner.
It's not been very long since sex can be had safely either. For most of history, sex came with lots of risks, like pregnancy and diseases. In my opinion, it'll take a few more generations for safe sex practices, safer sex work environment like digital sex work, and all that to catch up and start changing people's attitudes around it. Not sure that SV investors can do anything about that.
That's more of a US attitude than a European one, the UK sits somewhere in the middle, we aren't as puritan as the US would have everyone believe it is nor are we as open as say the French or the Germans.
Have to use a throwaway lest my skeletons get attached to me.
> Isn't mostly men behind OnlyFans?
Yeah. The irony to me of this wave of the 'sexual revolution' is that the message is that it's OK for Women/Men to sell their bodies as such on the internet... And the end result is a bunch of white men who were in many cases already rich are getting richer via their 'cut'. OnlyFans/Manyvids/Etc are just like the Apple or Android store. They provide some level of legally required and/or percieved need (Verification, APIs and docs, etc) and then get a cut for doing not much else.
> Like many industries that rely on talent that is often young and naive, greedy middlemen (almost always men) who control production and channels of distribution take all the upside for themselves. A perfect example is porn mega-name Mia Khalifa, who was paid a grand total of $12,000 for only a handful of shoots - a tiny, tiny fraction of the value her content has generated for distributors like Pornhub.
Nonetheless this problem is not unique to porn. We don't criminalize Patreon, Medium, Spotify, PayPal, or Visa. We probably should, but if we're going to start dismantling exploitative business practices on moral grounds, why start with the most precarious workers and not the most entrenched and richest middlemen?
This specific example is used by the author to illustrate how OnlyFans is better for performers in comparison. OnlyFans performers keep 80% of their revenue and retain the copyright to their material [0]. Operating in the light of day as opposed to in a legal grey area means the copyright actually gets enforced.
https://www.ibtimes.com/bangbros-says-mia-khalifa-lied-about...
It is not my fault you are offended.
I would have no problem if these sex workers setup their own site and did their own business directly with their clients. No pimp would be involved then. There would be no recruiting, which is also where I see a big problem. And nobody would be taking a cut.
That's exactly what they can't do. No major hosting providers allow pornographic content; none of the mainstream payment processors will handle the money; no advertisers will run their campaigns to find customers. This is specifically because of moral panic like yours driving anti-pimping regulations.
OnlyFans isn't great - none of these more-than-a-payment-processor-less-than-an-agency platforms are. But if your outrage is truly about exploitative work and not oh look someone's having sex, there are dozens of organizations you should be lining up to take down first.
- Recruiting young girls: Good infantilization here, you mean young women over the age of consent that can decide for themselves what they can do with their bodies? Those women? And how are they being recruited? By demonstrating the value of their service and being an attractive alternative to McDonald's minimum wage burger flipping? Is McDonalds in the burger-work pimping business?
- Connecting them with clients: So basically any communication network is a pimping network?
- Taking a cut of the profit: They are a popular platform like any other, a place where users know to go to find sex-workers, and they are using that platform as a business. Film festivals also act as middle-men in this regard, but does anyone say film festivals are in the "film pimping" business?
- While keeping control of the whole business: I think I need a source on this, are they shutting down OnlyFan creators because they are linking to an external website? I couldn't find anything in their terms: https://onlyfans.com/terms/user-content
If anyone actually has problems with "People exploiting their bodies to functionally exist in society", then please, let me introduce you to this guy called Karl Marx.
Despite his feminist leanings Marx himself had a terrible attitude towards sex work and seemed completely incapable of applying his own theories to it.
I would usually direct people towards Silvia Federici's work with some introduction, but I don't believe most people in this thread are engaging in good faith and worth the time.
Clients aren't paying to actually have sex with OF creators!!
I say seem to because I think you're arguing in bad faith. You've already made up your mind and continue to press on hoping you can say "pimp" enough times to draw attention away from the absence of actual prostitution.
You may not be familiar enough with the Sex Worker industry as a whole, but this absolutely can and does happen.
Oftentimes, it is under a plan discussed in private over a secondary channel (Signal or Telegram or Wickr if they're real pros, Snapchat if they are less careful.) Most common scheme I've observed is either you finish the transaction on a side app or purchase a large amount of their video content and it is applied as a 'credit'.
No, this is not what the majority of OnlyFans creators do. But the legitimate sellers and rest of the market provide a smoke-screen for those who wish to do less accepted forms of Sex Work.
I also think being a self-portrait doesn't preclude the possibility it was pornographic or the more conventional (but imo also nearly equivalent) interpretation of them as fertility fetishes, as the original reply implied.
Imagine the need to sneeze but never feeling the release. Backlogged desire for energy exchange nearly satisfied by staring out of a one way mirror (search results, Ex Machina) into an ironic public display of intimacy.
An advanced society is romantic. Leave something to the imagination - construct metaphors to describe the act if it becomes so urgent that it must be advertised.
Sometimes I will hear explicit lyrics allowed to project into public spaces. Are we baboons or humans?
Anyway, pornhub and other sites seem to be going the onlyfans direction which will only increase competition and make things better for these entertainers.
Interesting interview by one of the top earners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlW2QdzZuZ8&
Many feminists still believe that pornography is the oppression and exploitation of women. And they have good reason to believe that.
Who are you to say that everyone else is a prude and you are right and they are all wrong? How come you get to dismiss the real world effects of this activity?
How much of this is an actual problem, as opposed to the handful of cases that end up getting much more coverage than any other kind of death?
Isn't that American culture? You see that everywhere, from movies to games.
Violence and murder: ok!
Sex: OMFG EWW ARE YOU INSANE THINK OF THE CHILDREN
OnlyFans reminds me of Zivity from 2008 which was VC-funded and founded by a woman but it didn't take off and has now been forgotten. There are probably lessons to be learned from that history but first you'd have to know that history exists.
The song from the musical is embedded as a video in the article.
Absolutely no reason for you to be snarky about it.
As far as payment companies go, the anti porn stance comes from Visa, Mastercard and Amex and their backing banks, and maybe US govt policy.
If you want porn to have a safe space in the USA, get rid of laws like SESTA / FOSTA and prevent discrimination of payment processing on the basis of sex work. It's the political and finance industry that is ultimately responsible for this.
Also I think if SV was hypothetically female dominated, the anti-sex work attitudes would actually be increased. AFAIK the groups that pushed laws like SESTA or FOSTA were definitely more female led. https://www.vox.com/2016/3/11/11203740/prostitution-legal-me...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/coomer...
(The article is more interesting than the stereotypical headline suggests.)
On the left? It's more of a fetish type thing (chastity) but it's one of those lifestyle long-term fetishes that someone might notice at a party.
In the middle? No nut November, which started as a joke but has a very serious reddit presence.
On the right? no fap.
None of these 3 groups have any overlap with each other - yet they all agree that touching your dick (even if only temporarily like in November) is bad.
Always thought that this was very funny
But, that’s not the way most social media approaches the problem. Given that there are alternate ways to address the problem that aren’t being tried, I don’t see “hostility” as an unreasonable take.
the titillation aside, the porn industry is one of the oldest and the main pillars of the internet. this: https://www.plytix.com/blog/how-internet-porn-paved-the-way-...
[..]In other words, sex not only sells, it basically invented new ways of selling.
The classic example is Danni Ashe, a pornstar who calls herself a ‘geek with big breasts.” She launched a softcore porn website (epically titled “Hard Drive”) in the 1990s that quickly became the busiest site on the internet.
$8 million and 45 employees later, she had built one of the first ecommerce empires. Pornographers like Danni pioneered payment and security solutions that laid (pun intended) the foundations for Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and the broader commercialization of the world wide web.
Let’s take a deeper look at the ecommerce technologies brought to us, in part, by porn.[..]
and then step back and marvel before you kneel to the gods of porn as you read the above link.. for giving us the interwebs.
How different can the experience be? surely, it's win-win all the way around. It would eliminate exploitation, human trafficking and clean. and of course, it would all be in the cloud. what's not to love?
That sounds much better than the app stores with their 30% (until recently for Apple) and Twitch which takes a whopping 50% of a $5 sub.
Also, the point of the article is that it's much better for the performers than traditional porn.
Wrong, it has a lot to do with it. Search engines, servers, laptops, cameras, websites, encryption, internet access,the list goes on...
It’s like with legalization of marijuana, mostly good things can come out from helping regulate this business and cutting off traffickers and other weird people who only want to do harm or get rich upon it.
On other hand SV is hugely hypocritical about this... :)
It certainly has had a negative affect on my mental health.
I also find it ridiculous how services like PornHub and OnlyFans are featuring a lot of videos which clearly fetishizes borderline (okay, obvious) pedophilia, and, since its profitable, only pull it down when they might be in legal trouble for it.
why is that?
Somebody else enjoying content they paid for has nothing to do with you - it's easy to avoid and easy to not be involved.
>Somebody else enjoying content they paid for has nothing to do with you - it's easy to avoid and easy to not be involved.
I'd argue that platforms such as these have an effect on gender dynamics in society as a whole.
I assure you, the thing that is stopping you from being in a relationship isn't Only fans. I'd recommend trying to find ways to build up yourself confidence.
Puritan economics seem perfectly accepting of destroying ourselves.
Willingly sell self for pleasure though? Psh
Only if the pleasure comes from that new gadget or next airfare (which is destroying the environment but so it is)
Having been in a sector of fintech that many sex workers used, I can say with confidence that the majority of the women within were single moms who simply couldn't or didn't have access to the social net to feed their children and aren't doing it because they want to.
It was entirely eye-opening to see how sad it is when you're talking with a young women trying to sell their bitcoin at 2am to pay for rent before they get evicted and have enough to buy baby formula and diapers.
The US is so backwards, they can show the most depraved forms of violence and cruelty imaginable and call it entertainment with out batting an eye, but showing the Human form in any sexual manner is somehow cause for alarm and deemed perverse and promoting rape culture if you believe some of the most absurd in Society.
Whereas in Europe and Asia nudity is completely accepted in many public areas, and sex work is tolerated, legal and is just another, albeit uncommon, thing people do for a living and nothing more.
As for this article, its showing how pervasive the Panopticon this form of the Internet is and underscore the idea that 'you are the product' mantra about 'free' services. We really need a different Internet already. Porn is and will always be a big component of the Internet, but much like the antics you had when you were an adolescent you soon realize their is much more value in other things and move on.
People are hardly working in slaughter houses and coal mines because they want to.
Feminists I know are selling themselves because they like sex, and controlling their bodies time economy is their choice.
One would think on this forum that it’s a gradient of statistics and not black and white anecdotes would be more obvious.
Exploitation of minors is one thing. Though, I do not see many folks lifting a finger over child political prisoners in rancid cages. So I’m left wondering if exploitation is the real issue or the sex part given cultural norms.
Sex work is the only job where you believe the advertising. "I'm selling a little bit of sex because I have such a high sex drive" or "I love sex and I need to fund my way through college" -- they need to say this because most of their punters do not want to buy sex from people who are poor and desperate for money.
This is way overemphasized on the Internet by people who don't have much experience with living in Europe. It's similar to Europeans imagining that in the US it's an everyday thing that people are dying left and right because they can't pay for an emergency ambulance to take them to the hospital.
Nudity may be less stigmatized than in America, but prostitution is not something normal people as just another job that they'd be happy if their daughter chose it. On the surface, people may seem more tolerant of it, but privately they definitely act differently.
Why do we see so few Dutch and Swedish and Danish emancipated free empowered women self-actualize through porn work? Why is it always poorer Eastern European Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian women at the top of porn star lists?
When I was in my last year of apprenticeship in Switzerland I managed one the estates of the owner's homes for most of the year while they worked in Bern, which included the investment homes they had in Zurich and in Lussane. It was where generational wealthy people parked their money, guess who our neighbors were? High class Swiss escorts, I know this because I met them and asked to keep an eye on things while I was away and gave them vegetables from our farm in exchange as a good gesture of will.
I lived in S. Germany in what was once Ag land but had been urbanized for wealthy 'Green minded' Germans, where prostitution is once again legal. I got chatted up on the train a few times only to find out (by my then German-Anglo fiance) it was a meet and greet tactic they use to get them into the brothels and is apparently common to use on foreigners and university students. They were all German not one was Eastern European, which to be honest is what I'm more physically attracted to than most Western Europeans.
I can go on here about working Summers in Croatia, and Italy that included catering to nude sunbathing crowds in camp sites and resorts which are frequented mainly by other Western Europeans, but suffice it to say: I was born and raised in CA, but I've lived and worked in Europe long enough to stand by my claims and spent my Summers as a child in the coast of Spain as I'm half S. European myself. Where the local 'puti-club' is just another thing people joke about since its so common.
> Why do we see so few Dutch and Swedish and Danish emancipated free empowered women self-actualize through porn work?
First, as I outlined already and my first hand experiences: I don't think sex work is empowering at all and often has more to do with poverty and dire economic circumstances then the tired narrative of it being so that's shoved down our collective throats by this neo-femisnist narrative. Which is why you see the higher frequency of E. European women you mentioned in those situations instead of a women from wealthy Nordic country with good social nets and social mobility.
In some ways it seems America is quite hyperfixated on sex, but in very specific ways with specific taboos. Like nipples are the end of the world, but selling anything from cars to hamburgers with sexy women is A-OK. Just paste a sticker on the nipples at least, then it's fine. Cheerleaders, boxing ring sign holding girls etc. etc.
In contrast, the European things you mention, like bathing and saunas and beaches are not about drooling over bodies, but just being normally without clothes, often among family. Not sexually.
I think these need to be distinguished. Sexuality isn't equal to nudity.
I think its incredibly distorted, the US overly sells Sex as an image to sell things and links it to everything it can.
Not least of which is porn and the Valley in SoCal as opposed to NorCal refers to the what was Ground Zero for Porn where all the old studios were based out of and was where most of the online stuff was created. Though Japan seems to have the highest production in terms of population-to-content if I recall correctly, which again coincides with bad economic situations, specifically under-employment and very low marriage/fertility rates.
Your edit was well timed, as you pretty much echo what I wrote. It's so weird... in University you're almost encouraged to do it all, but then when you get to the professional setting and you reach low level management position in an office setting you're briefed on sexual harassment so much you're almost terrified any encounter with the opposite sex will be deemed rape. It's horrible and really not that much of an issue as they want you to think it is when you really think about it as most encounters are brief and forgettable if you're busy working.
It's a legal thing (threats of lawsuits and the associated costs are again one of those things about America that determine many other things). It's also spreading on campuses now, which weirdly have their own tribunals outside of the normal court system and reverse the assumption of innocence in rape accusations etc. Ties into how American college encompasses students lives to a huge extent, while in Europe things are more distributed, people do sports outside of college, regularly live outside of dorms etc. There's no college police etc. Similarly, American workplaces also seem to provide more, e.g. custom healthcare plans, a bit in the direction of how Japanes companies sort of become your "benevolent" provider who will organize many aspects of your life.
Either way, I think it involves lots of layers of posturing. In the end, many people still hook up or even pair up at the workplace. I also know people who are very politically conscious and support all the MeToo etc stuff, but somehow hooked up and became partners at an academic conference. You just have to do it the right way (risky, but not too hard for the socially skilled who know when and how to do it). It's still very much possible. People don't act the way they talk.
seriously?
I didn't even know that there are (popular) porn stars from my country, yet alone on the top of lists
This is crazily important.
However ... it still doesn't get to the question of why anyone would consider being on OnlyFans (I'm not discussing in-person sex work) to be more problematic than having to do some other sort of low-paid, low-status, boring, dead-end, exploitative job (and remember, OnlyFans is a classic long-tail situation: for most people on it, it is low paid).
The big picture is that we live in a society which despite occasional flowery words from a senator here and there does not actually value and care for all of its members. We continuously and repeatedly place our neighbors, family, friends, colleagues in situations where in order to survive they have to take options they do not really want to take.
We could take much better care of each other. We could make the bad options much better. We could do both.
Sounds like the majority of jobs. Although I agree that the lack of social services in the US has reached ridiculous levels.
By "extremely triggering", I assume you mean "somewhat annoying"?
Why does it annoy you that "adult content" is difficult to avoid completely? Should a homosexual person be annoyed (or "triggered") that depictions of heterosexual behavior can't be avoided completely? Or vice versa? I don't think so.
For example, and I know this is a “me” problem rather than something objective in the world: I find BDSM quite repellent because (a) I cannot at a glance tell if the image presented is roleplay or actual assault, and (b) because I am unable to empathise with the desire to see others in pain.
((b) means I also have a problem with the existence of the Saw franchise, let alone what felt like endless and unavoidable real-world advertising for it).
In the case of porn: orgasm-noises in porn are often (I won’t claim percentages, but often) somewhat similar to mild-to-medium pain noises, so I can easily believe that’s upsetting especially for someone who has never heard the real life version.
I'm not denying that some people feel that way, but it's extremely easy to avoid coming into contact with depictions of BDSM or pornographic orgasm noises – unless you deliberately browse adult content.
As for orgasm noises… they are sometimes used as joke content, even outside porn, (is this similar to the way slapstick violence is used as a joke outside horror films? I’m not sure, but feels like an interesting comparison).
No, that was a failure of my editing skills. Sorry for that.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I'm sorry if I violated the site rules, but I don't see how? At the time of my post, there was no hint or indication of lostgame being a victim of sexual assault [1].
I'm familiar with the concept of "steelmanning" an argument, but I don't think we should be expected to treat an argument as stronger than a reasonable interpretation warrants, given the information available at the time (sometimes called "supermanning").
[1] And I'm truly sorry for being insensitive, albeit unknowingly and unintentionally so.
That was trivializing what the other commenter said.
I take your point that the full context hadn't been clarified yet.
I would have guessed that if I were asexual, then adult content would leave me completely indifferent, wouldn't it? If I am annoyed by adult content it's precisely because it's extremely distracting; sometimes, when I have work to do, I would prefer to be asexual (at least for a few hours).
If you want to see how asexuality and sex can work in a relationship, my story Date Night covers that.
Disclaimer: It is furry fiction. There are no explicit sex, just discussion about it. https://www.thevoice.dog/episode/date-night-by-kayode-lycaon
I am sorry for what you had to endure. However, I think you're using the term "asexual" in a non-standard way, and I believe that has led me and others to misinterpret your original post. One cannot "choose" to be asexual, the same way as one cannot choose to be homosexual or heterosexual. One can, however, choose to be sexually abstinent or inactive. Would you agree that this is a better description of your lifestyle?
I like porn and I had not even heard of Onlyfans before 2 months ago.
Imagine forcing asexuality on the vast majority of the people in the World (and in history) that are not asexual.
The remarks around pedophilia sound more like a competitor trying to push an agenda against PornHub that a concerned citizen expressing an informed opinion.
Pedophilia has been traveling on any medium the humans have invented throughout history, I guess if one wanted to fight it by shutting down the platforms delivering it, internet as a whole (and probably TCP/IP as well) would be the first one that would have to go.
I’m both asexual and write pornography. I just don’t feel sexual attraction.
My understanding of sexual attraction is limited but I’ve learned to approximate it in my writing by talking with a lot of other porn writers and using my own roughly equivalent experiences to fill the gaps.
They might be confused.
Should I get off the internet now?
I’ve never seen such a lack of understanding or felt so personally attacked on HN before, as if you guys think I’m a pussy or something because you couldn’t imagine a case in which maybe, yes; it actually negatively affects my mental health.
To be honest - your stupid comments have affected my mental health, too; and I’m sorry for sharing. Ruined my morning for sure.
This is the most insensitive bullshit I have ever seen on HN and after ten years I might actually leave if this kind of insensitive hurtful bullshit continues. It’s not the first time I’ve been singled out for my orientation or sexuality here.
I have felt like HN was an LGTQBA+ friendly space for the decade I’ve been here but in the last year or two some of you have really chosen to show your true colours.
Fuck y’all’s insensitivity. I need a drink.
I hope you all enjoyed tearing me to shreds - I’m sorry that my sexual assault isn’t a good enough excuse for my sexuality and I’m sorry my triggers inconvenience you.
No; for real - I’ve been here ten years and just sent an email to close my account.
I don’t know what the hell is wrong with you people, but this is maybe the tenth incident of singling out and shitty behaviour to me this year alone on this forum, whether it’s for being transgender, gay, asexual, or now, for even daring to open up about sexual assault.
I’ve had it. There are communities where decency can prevail.
And I also find amusing the implication that onlyfans is a win for sex workers. Yeah, maybe for the typical porn star it is a better deal, but on the other hand they are also corrupting a lot of young girls that would otherwise have never gone into porn.
The problem with onlyfans and chaturbate and others is that there are a lot of serious criminal activities that the creators might be engaged in. Anything from the creator stating they are over age when they are a minor, to full blown sex slavery where girls are held and forced to perform against their will. So it is understandable that people are wary of getting into that mess.
The same fake feminist spewing bullshit about men keeping sex workers down, will very quickly accuse the same men of profiting from sex slavery or child porn if they had invested in these platforms.
There's endless lines of division among "men". Some men want to keep the "flow" of sex under control and don't like when sex is "handed out" too easily to men they don't see as worthy.
Some other men like the deal if they operate the business like a pimp or porn producer.
Consumer men may like it because they feel they can't satisfy their urges in other ways or they don't feel like the "real deal" is worth the effort and risk in comparison to these substitutes.
There are also men who just cheer on the empowered self-actualizing women to do what they desire to express their sexuality freely.
"Men" includes Rocco Siffredi, your local pastor, the loser nerdy virgin, the strict traditional father figure, a Christian wait-until-marriage boy, the nofap evangelist, etc. etc.