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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> natalism. Some people worry about inverted demographic pyramids. They want to see more births, so they need more horny guys trying to form relationships instead of being content single.

This one seems to have an obvious problem.

It's October, consider the traditional Halloween party for 20-somethings. Slutty costumes, college students making out on the couch, and those are the tame ones.

All of that stuff has been effectively banned from workplaces and official school functions and the like for a while now. Meanwhile people increasingly do their social interaction via social media. So what happens if you ban revealing images and sexual dialog from there too? Where are you leaving for people to actually do those things, if you want them to connect with each other?

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Birth rates are down. And you used "traditional Halloween party", yes that's what you think happens traditionally, but what if you just opened cosplay category on Pornhub and didn't go to the party to meet your potential mate? Seems easier right? That's what they are getting at.

It's not a full replacement, but it's enough to keep people content with the status quo.

Halloween has only been a major, marketed holiday for the millennials and later generations. As late as the beginning of the 1980s it was a kids’ holiday only for most of America. Spirit Halloween was founded in 1983; 80s horror films (like Halloween) helped build the holiday for adults.

Traditional ways of meeting a spouse don’t involve slutty costumes at once-a-year parties (Halloween is not a spouse-selection fertility festival), but family, church, and neighborhood connections that build over spans of time in 3d. Sometimes HN seems to miss slow, complex, physical-world interactions because of a focus on modeling transaction-like events or instants (like parties).

> Halloween has only been a major, marketed holiday for the millennials and later generation. Spirit Halloween was founded in 1983; 80s horror films (like Halloween) helped build the holiday for adults.

The people who were in college in the 1980s aren't millennials. If you were 22 in 1983 then you were born in 1961. That's not even Gen X, that's a boomer.

And Halloween in particular isn't really the point anyway. The decade associated with topless hippies and free love was before the 1980s. The Romans would dispute the notion that this sort of thing is a recent development.

> Traditional ways of meeting a spouse don’t involve slutty costumes at once-a-year parties (Halloween is not a spouse-selection fertility festival), but family, church, and neighborhood connections that build over spans of time in 3d.

The issue being that the neighbors are no longer renting a hall to have local discussion meetings because that sort of thing now happens on Facebook. And then if Facebook is a place where non-platonic sentiment gets you a ban, what happens?

> what if you just opened cosplay category on Pornhub and didn't go to the party to meet your potential mate?

The thing about imposing content restrictions via corporate intermediaries is that they're not that selective. If you're not banning cleavage and innuendo from the mass market services then they become the funnel to OnlyFans and escort services, but if you are then the result is a de facto ban on real people flirting with each other because they're afraid of having their account locked.

Consider what "chilling effects" implies in the context of sexual expressiveness.

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