Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

> But both sides, the girls and the men paying them, benefit from the objectification of the other, at least on the surface — the girls, by profiting from the man’s isolation and dire circumstances, and the men, by sexualizing the girls. One perhaps is not worse than the other, but neither is worth celebrating.

It's great when you read an article so obviously ill-founded that the author has to admit they're wrong at the end. This is a cycle that has existed for hundreds of years, it's asinine to me that people are still trying to make some kind of 'moral play' here. It's a free country; these free people are creating enterprise based on their likeness. I'm sure that riles up HN users who spend their lives building thankless, exploitative SaaS products that get cursed by their users under their breath, the same as this site seems to hate 'influencer culture' and social media as a whole. At the end of the day, though, they're living a life they're happy with. They can advocate for themselves and aren't being pimped out by someone who doesn't care about their wellbeing. Other jobs and careers are completely attainable still, if not completely possible to have alongside whatever OnlyFans account you run.

You are equating the happiness of the individuals involved as the basis for determining whether or not the action is moral. Its inherently a hedonistic perspective. Of course you can't make a moral claim that prostitution is wrong if you consider the "happiness" of the pimp, prostitute, and john as the highest good involved. Frankly, I'm not sure how you could make many moral claims considered reasonable based on that kind of criteria. Using the same measure you could justify all sorts of abusive situations so long as the exploited is "happy" with their circumstances.

I make no moral claim because I don't see a moral axis here. It's equivalent to arguing about the morality of cigarette companies or breweries; our societal precedent for freedom overrides whatever personal harm it might cause. Same goes for selling knives, guns, porno films or sex toys. We can obviously regulate the obscene and dangerous conduct surrounding these things (and we do), but the right to having them is what drives our free market. It's no more exploitative than Apple teasing you with an iPhone 14 event, getting you tech-horny enough to open your wallet come October.

You are making many moral claims. Your standard for what is moral are all over the place but you just made one:

> "...our societal precedent for freedom overrides whatever personal harm it might cause"

You've just appealed to a relativistic moral standard. Essentially, because we have a precedent for "freedom" in regards to possession of certain substances or items we as a society are justified in ignoring the detrimental effects of the mentioned items.

By that same train of logic, societal reform of any kind is actually a bad thing because you are overturning the existing precedent 0f that society. Its absurd.

Sorry, but you can acknowledge that something is ethical and moral while also acknowledging that the incentives of a system result in some local maximum in the happiness of the players involved where a different set of incentives might yield a global maximum that yields a great satisfaction for all parties involved.

The best good-faith criticisms of this arrangement of dating have nothing to do with puritanism, misogyny, envy, or selfishness but instead are criticisms that the dating market involved is dissatisfying to most or all involved compared to what it could be.

> but instead are criticisms that the dating market involved is dissatisfying to most or all involved compared to what it could be.

According to who? You? I know this site's demographics and prejudices, the middle-class heterosexual white male perspective on dating should be worse than it was 50 years ago! Especially here in the US, the notion of the man courting multiple women has been flipped on it's head. Women are getting more cautious, thinking long-term instead of throwing their hopes and dreams into Joe Shmoe with his Bachelors degree and $50,000 of college debt. I'll listen to people whine about morals until the cows come home, but I think Occam's razor would suggest that men simply have less authority in the dating scene now, leading to greater dissatisfaction and mounting resentment towards sex work. It's a childish thing to complain about.

I find your notion that dating 'should be worse' implies dating as a zero-sum game where conditions for one demographic improving necessitates the loss of another group. I disagree with that premise, and none of the 'dissatisfying' parts of dating that I'd say men uniquely experience are necessarily at the benefit of women or some other demographic. And finally I'd not say that the growth of sugar baby style relationships or OnlyFans is primarily at the detriment of men, I'd say it's less than ideal for any gender or group involved. But not really interested in further discussion as it seems like you're more interested in identity politics or looking at things through demographics.

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