Sure, but I wasn't implying it. It was a commentary on my personally missed context. I'm sure most of the people reading it "normally" captured the context just right.
As an asexual person, I wish this wasn’t the case, and I find it extremely triggering how hard it is to completely avoid adult content online.
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.
Sites like OnlyFans have nothing to do with you or relationships in general. The vast majority of people don't go on those types of sites.
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.
What women expect from men seems to have sharply risen in the last decade. Before getting my degree and getting in shape I was able to find partners. Nowadays people aren't even willing to be friends with me. If women's expectations in fact haven't gone up then I have no idea what the people from my past saw in me that more recent people don't.
When you climb the social ladder, there's a brief moment when yours and women's expectatitions aling, but that moment quickly passes and you enter the territory when the sides flip: women chase you, but you stay clear of any legally binding relationships. You perceive loneliness as a flaw, I perceive it as freedom, and while we're both lonely, we derive the opposite emotions from it.
Well I somehow went from having multiple exes beg me to marry them at one point all the way to not even being able to get to know a single woman in years. The complete lack of women in any aspect of my life has proven to be extremely inconvenient(even outside the context of dating)
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 for Google because they want to.
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.
> Feminists I know are selling themselves because they like sex, and controlling their bodies time economy is their choice.
Not to dwell on this so much, as my observations of sex workers were those who did it for need rather then pleasure, but what part of 'selling yourself' is empowering?
I mean if you like something, like a hobby, you usually don't seek to monetize it if you want keep enjoying it. It seems to cheapen the activity as you start applying different metric than sheer joy as the only goal, and instead look an things through an PNL lens.
In fact introducing these metrics is almost always a net negative activity--now in my 30s I've turned almost all of my hobbies, skills and interests into a professional career to the detriment of my pleasure towards it and suffered because I bought into the fake adage of 'never having to work a day' for most of my Life.
Whereas it's now become the new normal to view 'feminism' as a preferential distortion of facts and realities in favour of biased outcomes that don't hold up to any scrutiny.
I have no problem with sex workers, I've treated them all with the same respect I would with customers in the professional or corporate sectors I've been in and they always remarked how differently I was because of that.
But, the truth is I hold almost near disdain for social media 'thots' (male or female) who exploit mentally weak and vulnerable people into giving them money in exchange of attention/sexual exploitation and exploiting Human vulnerability and a need for connection. I think the same applies to these 'feminists' prostitutes and their false narrative because of the obvious level of hypocrisy behind it and its motives is one of obvious extractive relationships with people based on self-interest, vulgar opportunism and having the social inertia to carry on forcing people to buy into that view.
> 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.
The Catholic Church still exists, start with questioning why that den of pedophilia is institutionalized in modern Society despite the countless amounts of child rape and exempt from taxation before you go any further. Then you'll see why things like the Epstein-Maxwell sex trafficking of minors is more common than one would care to think. Which again ties to the what I said above about exploitation of vulnerable people.
How you can connect a handful of (some college educated) women I know putting their body where they want with men they pick as being anything like a billionaires sex cabal drugging and buying kids from poor parents are at all similar is some Machiavellian effort. Bravo.
But since we’re on the subject; maybe put less value into financial trade which is the contemporary value store propping up the exploitation of billionaires.
Perhaps buy fewer gadgets that prop up the economy they grift on from the masses agency.
Perhaps be more for raising taxes to distribute wealth to communities that can use it if you’re that worried.
Above all perhaps avoid centralizing authority over agency in private power. A pattern we keep buying into as a species only to realize it rather makes things worse for the majority.
Put your agency into something that tackles artificial social problems (stock values, disposable widgets sold!, not enough money for M4A or community uplift in poor areas) instead of (sad as it may be) human issues that have existed forever, and there’s precious little we can do about it. Even if billionaire sex cabals vanish, are you going to scour the world seeking out every tribal instance? Or are you simply reaching for acceptable semantics from your perspective?
In other words: walk the walk when it comes to pushing back against immoral behavior as you see it. Semantic battles here over specific instances are self congratulatory and empty if we’ll simply equivocate away structural changes.
> Feminists I know are selling themselves because they like sex,
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.
> 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
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?
> 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.
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.
Well, it's entirely possible that I'm underestimating how prude America is, as I haven't lived there.
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.
> Well, it's entirely possible that I'm underestimating how prude America is, as I haven't lived there.
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.
> 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.
My bad. I guess it's more Czechia and Hungary specifically. Due to various business reasons and historic opportunities of the unregulated market and chaos after the change of system in 1990 and the generally atheistic society, poverty and conventionally attractive women (and white, which was important for the rich first world market). Poland was/is perhaps too religious for this.
> 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.
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.
>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.
Sounds like the majority of jobs. Although I agree that the lack of social services in the US has reached ridiculous levels.
> As an asexual person, I wish this wasn’t the case, and I find it extremely triggering how hard it is to completely avoid adult content online.
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.
I’m not @lostgame and I’m not ace, but I can easily imagine that a constant barrage of stuff that you’re not into could be triggering/empathise with someone saying that it troubles them.
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 find BDSM quite repellent [...] orgasm-noises in porn [...] upsetting
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.
That style of quotation makes it seem like I personally find orgasm noises upsetting rather than that I believe others can. Was that how you understood my original comment? If so, I need to improve my style, because the latter not the former.
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).
> That style of quotation makes it seem like I personally find orgasm noises upsetting rather than that I believe others can. Was that how you understood my original comment?
No, that was a failure of my editing skills. Sorry for that.
> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
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.
> As an asexual person, (...) I find it extremely triggering how hard it is to completely avoid adult content online.
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).
Asexual is a broad spectrum. All it means is you don’t feel sexual attraction. I’m both asexual and hypersexual. (Bipolar is the gift that keeps on giving.). I happily read and write furry porn as a hobby.
If you want to see how asexuality and sex can work in a relationship, my story Date Night covers that.
I'm really sorry about my ignorance. Never considered that you could turn asexual after a traumatic experience. I was under the impression that it was a natural-born condition; thus my comment.
> I am asexual by choice due to several instances of violent sexual assault.
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?
Because unfortunately it sneaks it way onto shit like HN, and then I get a bunch of pissed off people telling me stop being such a pussy about it or ‘get off the internet’ when it’s because I AM A VICTIM OF VIOLENT SEXUAL ASSAULT.
Respectfully, I think you’re being unreasonable. Your first comment made no mention of your sexual assault (and, once you’ve mentioned it, most commenters–myself included–are quite sorry that this happened to you). People aren’t telling you to “get off the internet”, they are responding to your claim that it is impossible to avoid sex on the internet. For which, quite frankly, there are many better ways to go about this than arguing with people in the comments section for an article about “The Internet is for Porn”. If your desire is that people scrub the internet clean of sex, that’s not going to happen, sorry. That being said, there are many tools available to make it so that your experience remains free of such things.
The outer World is not the place where people will find what comforts them.
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.
Being sex repulsed and asexual are two very different things.
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.
Asexuality and even asociality have been effectively forced upon me by my peers. I don't see any viable avenue to express my sexuality the way I had presumed I would get to as an adult.
The Hacker News guidelines regarding choosing strong interpretations apply to you regardless. “I was sexually assaulted” is an opportunity to clear up misunderstandings, not an excuse to comment in bad faith.
Wow - I am amazed at the number of people commenting who might not realize I am a multiple time even recent victim of violent sexual assault - and no, it’s not just ‘mildly annoying’, it can send me into tears.
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" - amazing summary, really. I've seen this attitude a lot, but these 4 words is the best summary I've seen. You basically said that unless we tip toe around your sensitivity and morning mood, we all can go to hell. That's like going to a nightclub and demanding to put the volume down and to change music to something less tasteless, maybe Mozart or Bach, because otherwise you'd feel unwelcome in the club.
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.
There was absolutely no need to include the stupid fake feminist take. Plenty of women and plenty of feminists also oppose 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.
Nice, found a bunch of vids of featured "performer" Aella getting boffed on Spankbang. Surely "unashamed casual porn consumer" OP would have no problem if his sister were also a "performer" on Onlyfans.
Yes. Don't reflect on how far your people have fallen. Don't consider how foul and ugly the world has become. Don't realise that you are being replaced.
You have porn and video games. Sit down and shut up.
Porn isn't going anywhere. The oldest known depiction of a human figure is pornographic [0]. Since porn will always exist, better that it be produced and consumed in the open, legally speaking. Sex workers deserve the same safety and labor protections as the rest of us.
The article is not exactly sympathetic to the "virtual pimps":
> 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?
>A perfect example is porn mega-name Mia Khalifa, who was paid a grand total of $12,000 for only a handful of shoots
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.
New artists and performers get paid less until they have a marketable reputation. That's how the art/entertainment IP industry works, from porn to music to movies to books.
Khalifa is rich now.
Couldn't you say this comment is virtually pimping an idea? What a culturally inflammatory term you've chosen for any service that does anything to help facilitate sex work.
They are literal pimps doing literal pimp work: recruiting young girls, connecting them with clients, and taking a cut of the profit, while keeping control of the whole business.
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.
> if these sex workers setup their own site and did their own business directly with their clients
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
Yes in some ideal environment a sex worker and a pimp could have a mutually beneficial relationship. But that is not why pimping is looked down upon. And you made no honest attempt to address the issues that exist in practice.
I suppose that's technically true, but in the same sense you could say that YouTube pimps its content creators, Hollywood pimps its actors, record labels pimp their artists, etc. Do you honestly think every entertainer and content creator should build and run their own company? Most people don't have the skills and ambition to be entrepeneurs, and content creators need to spend their time focussing on, you know, creating content.
Personally, I would love this conversation to move more toward an issue with capitalism in and of itself, which is a much more worthy debate than talking about if the facilitation of sex work is morally justifiable.
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.
> 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.
You seem to have missed a staggeringly huge piece of the picture here:
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.
This is a bad argument because it tries to divide sex work into "not really sex work" and "really sex work" and then move all moral objection the latter case. Sex work is work and deserves a safe environment and fair compensation whether or not it involves intercourse with clients.
> Clients aren't paying to actually have sex with OF creators!!
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.
They may be confusing it with other Venuses like the Venus of Willendorf - there has been some discussion around the possibility https://www.jstor.org/stable/2744349 - but the Venus of Hohle Fels has no head so the argument is more difficult to make for it.
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.
It never ceases to amaze me a nude depiction is called pornography. Anthropologically speaking it’s quite interesting. It may or may not have had a pornographic function, but the depiction itself would be described a nude.
Well for all intents and purposes, it's also true that SV treats all nudes, even partial, as porn, or at least "objectionable enough content" to disable advertising next to it.
Jesus, you've got to be kidding me. Are you going to tell me that the "Birth of Venus" is also "pornographic"? Besides, whatever porn may have existed 1000 years ago, internet porn is a completely different thing, and should not even be compared.
I agree with you that pornography is "not going anywhere". The utility of this media is to increase worker morale and make them more docile and less interested in "the hunt" or "playing the game" of mate discovery/signaling/courting. The mind/body during a viewing session is idled (not going anywhere) - tapping the reptile brain as a shortcut around the ancient accountability driver that is sculpting the self for mate approval & selection (sting of rejection inspires adaptation).
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?
I joke with friends that the internet was invented by porn coders - back in the 90s, porn companies would pay college kids to deliver more porn faster, cheaper (with perl). Before that it was porn BBSes doing the same thing, people would pay for dialup access to download. Porn delivery has been on the forefront of pushing certain areas of tech for a long time, it's just not openly acceptable.
You go back a ways and that was certainly a trope and there was some truth to it. Pre-ISPs for the general public, even commercial private BBSs that were discussion boards and file distribution points for lots of non-porn purposes, definitely had a big porn part and it wouldn't surprise me if that's what drove most of their subscriptions.
I didn't appreciate this article's tone. It seems to somehow suggest Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are evil for not having made the collective decision to launch porn startups. It takes me about five seconds to think of good reasons to not get involved in that business, that have nothing to do with being a bad person.
And, I in 5 second can give you many reasons why SV should get into porn, and make it less taboo, but more open.
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... :)
Was any of that invented in silicon valley? None of those things were even improved by silicon valley, it was mostly large pre-existing corporations or government funded research (google was founded on a public campus, for example). ISPs are also mostly subsidised by the government.
Looks like the porn industry is bankrolling a PR campaign to legitimize their business.
It is particularly amusing to see them pretend they are feminists when in truth practically all feminists hate porn.
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.
Someone made a business helping people escape their porn addiction. It's no different than helping heroin addicts by "talking about their needles." You can't just deconstruct everything.
Literally continued scrolling through the thread, and found this comment after a your other one dismissing being an OnlyFans creator as not being a real job. I don't disagree with your point here, but the cognitive dissonance is deafening.
I find it funny that there is a movement on every side of the political spectrum against touching yourself.
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.
I don't think no fap is right wingers- it's just people who think they are healthier not faping. I'm not saying they are right or wrong (For all I know it could be true for them but not for you?), but it's more like a fad diet than a political thing.
This is a super good read, if you have 10 minutes I highly recommend. I have absolutely no problems with pornography and if my own daughter decided this was the industry she wanted to enter I would help jumpstart her career anyway I could just as I would any career she chose. 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!
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.
Google also indexes and returns results for websites that host not only illegal underage porn but terrorism websites, racist websites, etc. and profit from it but we give them a pass? You are making a “what about this??” argument and ignoring that they have mechanisms in place to remove illegal content which any website that allows user-generated content cannot control.
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.
Pornhub was widely damaging to the “the vast majority of legitimate employees“ in the industry. It built itself by stealing their work using the paper-thin ruse of “user-uploaded” videos, pushing down wages, working conditions and establishing itself as a quasi-monopoly player who could further set terms to its advantage and against sex worker and smaller companies. This has all been quite well documented.
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.
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.
>if my own daughter decided this was the industry she wanted to enter I would help jumpstart her career
Luckily for you, engaging in porn is strongly correlated with the absence of a loving father. Hopefully she rebels and comes to value her dignity and virtue, even if you don't.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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 th...
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.
I thought a lot about your comment. This is what bugs me:
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?
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Just as a sex worker can choose to engage in their activities because they are of the opinion that it is okay, one can certainly choose to have a negative opinion of their choice. As long as those opinions don't turn into adverse action (e.g. banning one's rights to engage in sex work) I don't see what the consequences of having opinions is.
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.
For what it's worth, I agree with you, and I'm shocked at the attitudes here. Don't worry, you're not the crazy one.
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.
While I kinda feel the same like you ... I have a 3.5 year old daughter now and if she later wants to become a prostitute or work in porn, I'd support her. There are some people that really enjoy this kind of work, for example check out this interview with Lisa Ann [0] ... she really enjoyed her work in porn but was very careful to not catch diseases and it was always a worry for her.
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.
> I have absolutely no problems with pornography and if my own daughter decided this was the industry she wanted to enter I would help jumpstart her career anyway I could just as I would any career she chose.
> 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..
Yes these people are absolutely disgusting and when pressed they say "Woah, are youjudging people for being comfortable with their sexual expression???"
Yes, yes we are. The most comfortable life isn't the most worthy life to live. We don't value people for making money off sex because that's degenerate.
I'm glad that monetized platforms like Twitch and OnlyFans exist. It's an accessible way for the younger generations to make ludicrous amounts of money for not too much up-front investment. There's definitely work and downsides involved, just not like some lesser paid, more credentialed professions. Hopefully this puts pressure on the essential jobs in society to actually raise compensation in comparison.
The rest of us boring, unattractive folks will just have to settle for desk jobs.
So the reason society should pay people more for actual work is because creeps like you enjoy throwing thousands of dollars at 18 year olds who will say your name while masturbating on cam? Pathetic.
The only investment being that they're selling their body for money, and generating a negative presence online that doesn't help their future career aspirations. I don't think this is a good thing to encourage young people to do.
They are selling pictures of their body. The body gets nearly no wear and tear for the work.
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"?
Facial tattoos are a traditional practice for many ethnic groups. Many modern practitioners feel that they're reclaiming a practice that was persecuted under American Puritanism.
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.
> Facial tattoos are a traditional practice for many ethnic groups. Many modern practitioners feel that they're reclaiming a practice that was persecuted under American Puritanism.
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.)
> I'm curious about this: is there any record of actual Puritans persecuting someone explicitly for having a facial tattoo?
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.
Correct, as to my intent (I probably should not have capitalized the P). The taboo nature of facial tattoos is simply the evolution of a revulsion towards tattoos in general among "polite" American society. Until very recently, visible tattoos (and before that, tattoos of any kind) could be disqualifying for public-facing positions.
> Correct, as to my intent (I probably should not have capitalized the P). The taboo nature of facial tattoos is simply the evolution of a revulsion towards tattoos in general among "polite" American society. Until very recently, visible tattoos (and before that, tattoos of any kind) could be disqualifying for public-facing positions.
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".
What you do online has consequences. Not everyone is going to agree with your worldview.
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.
Do you ask the same thing about waitressing and front of house retail work? Forced to put on a smile, be submissive and obedient and make a pretend connection to the customer purely to ease a transaction and get a larger tip? Does that have an impact on relationships with people?
There's way more work that goes into making and maintaining that presence than just showing up with a body or personality. A lot is marketing, but it's not like traditional marketing you'd be taught at a university. They're figuring a lot of it out by trial and error, which is some amount of risk of getting it wrong. And popularity can swing quickly and dramatically so you can get fired by the internet mobs (more risk).
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.
Read about discrimination and hostility former sex workers face. It is very real and can be pretty ugly.
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.
You're glad that cash-strapped young women are ruining their lives for a new handbag?
What prospects do they have for marriage and family after permanently uploading filth to the internet? No high quality man is sticking around after he discovers that bombshell.
It has normalised this catastrophic trend. It has eliminated whatever barriers may have been in place.
At a societal level, it is degrading and humiliating. I know if I was on the outside looking in, I would never tire of pitifully laughing at a people in a state of collapse where a significant proportion of their young women are doing this without censure or shame.
I find most jobs to be just as degrading and humiliating as being a cam performer, while stealing more time for less money.
Venues like OnlyFans also allow people to cut out pimps and other predatory manager types.
Truly, puritanism is not dead.
Yeah, construction workers, athletes, etc, are trading their bodies for money. Hell, you could argue some programmers are by sitting 12+ hours. I don’t really see why OnlyFans is any worse
1) Assuming that making money from OnlyFans is "ruining their lives" is taking a moral high ground based on disallowing women to have control over their sexuality
2) Assuming that these women are performing just to buy handbags..... As if women don't have other reasons to need money just like everyone in society.
3) Assuming that women are searching for a "high quality man" who would disapprove of them having made money off of OnlyCams because it's "filthy". Again, places women in the passenger seat, assumes that they are only around to try to find a quality mate (male) and that their only desirable qualities are their "purity" that has somehow been tarnished.
I could go on. This is a disgusting point of view.
1) They're engaging in pornography. They're performing lewd acts for strangers on the internet. Nobody is seizing control of their sexuality, just expressing supreme disappointment and disgust at their reckless, perversive choices therein. Don't you dare suggest that I do not have the moral high ground over literal prostitutes.
2) Don't be facetious.
3) I'm not even quite sure what your point is here. Is a man "in the passenger seat" if he's seeking a nice woman? I'm not sure what you're implying. At some point, these women are going to want to settle down- yet their trove of online pornography will make it very very difficult to attract a good man. Their "purity" has absolutely been tarnished. Nobody wants a hooker tucking their kids in at night.
I could go on. Pull your head out. It's unconscionable to facilitate a social collapse where impressionable young women are perverted for the sexual and sadistic satisfactions of strange men.
1) They're engaging in pornography. They're performing lewd acts for strangers on the internet. Nobody is seizing control of their sexuality, just expressing supreme disappointment and disgust at their reckless, perversive choices therein. Don't you dare suggest that I do not have the moral high ground over literal prostitutes.
2) Don't be facetious.
3) I'm not even quite sure what your point is here. Is a man "in the passenger seat" if he's seeking a nice woman? I'm not sure what you're implying. At some point, these women are going to want to settle down- yet their trove of online pornography will make it very very difficult to attract a good man. Their "purity" has absolutely been tarnished. Nobody wants a hooker tucking their kids in at night.
I could go on. It's unconscionable to facilitate a social collapse where impressionable young women are perverted for the sexual and sadistic satisfactions of strange men.
I think it's better than the alternative, as it eliminates the middle man and the performers own the content. But I imagine it will end up like most platforms for content, yielding to superstar economics and a race to the bottom for everyone else whose work has become commoditized and faces unyielding competition for attention. The vast majority of creators on OnlyFans will likely not be able to support themselves I'd guess, or if they will it will only be as supplemental income (I'm saying based on looking at no data).
> But I imagine it will end up like most platforms for content, yielding to superstar economics and a race to the bottom for everyone else whose work has become commoditized and faces unyielding competition for attention.
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.
Porn always reminds me of other classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown. They actively fear monger people out of action so no real progress is made. It prevents the best coders and business people from working on these problems and leaves a void for seedy people to fill. This is a human problem and I think largely a problem derivative of manipulative overthinking and over empathy.
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.
> My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards.
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.
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.
They support credit cards again. Although they had to tighten their content guidelines to meet non-existant requirements.
> 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!
A lot of working girls accept credit cards with "discreet billing" (IT/Computer services etc), and almost all accept Venmo/Square Cash/PayPal, all of which get filled by credit or debit cards. Some even refuse to set an appointment without paying a deposit online.
There's a spectrum with this.. some banks will allow CC processing for a porn biz.. some get creative with how they label things... some will even get into details about types of content maybe..
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.
Who said disrupt? I certainly didn't. That said, tech (not Silicon Valley) could develop open methods for verification or DRM that could be useful in solving the problems people are talking about.
Tech isn't all about making money. Silicon Valley probably is.
OnlyFans seems to have disrupted the porn industry in an ethical way I think. Profit obviously isn't always closely aligned with ethics, but being ethical is usually a good idea all other things being equal. People are more likely to support your company if they think you behave ethically (it helps if they believe in your mission), and if you have a history of acting honestly you can maybe derive gains from the fact that your customers may trust you more.
Has it? It seems to me that OnlyFans is going to quickly create a winner-takes-most environment, where much like in music most people put in a lot of work for not a lot of pay. Atop that, there's a toxic parasocial aspect to it where consumers pay for semblance of an emotional connection.
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.
If performers could actually buy food and shelter with digital currency, rather than having to go through an exchange with wildly oscillating prices from one day to the next, I reckon they would switch very quickly. But they can’t, so they won’t.
> The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown
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?
> Porn always reminds me of other classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown.
Conservatives and progressives/liberals have completely different world views:
Precisely. The culture of our main groups is what drives the loud voices. In the end, American culture is useless for solving these kind of problems, at least for the time being.
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.
I mean, this is all well and good - if those people wouldn't actively consume porn and take the services of sex workers, as the OP points out. The "yuck" factor seems to only apply if this stuff is discussed in the open.
There have always been radical people on both the Left and Right over the decades. But how much traction do those radicals have on getting elected politicians and on actual policy?
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:
I went out of my way to pick the CDC, The Nation, and NPR specifically in order to avoid accusations of nutpicking. As the CDC example shows, you don't actually need to elect politicians in order to enact policy.
> 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.”
> 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
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.
> classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion.
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.
I mean. That statement tracks pretty well if you look at our government, where the elderly are represented in elected offices at double or even triple their actual share of the population.
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]
It’s less bad than that. 24% in the 2010 census were under 18 and 9.9% were 18–24.
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.
Sure, but the implication that congressional representation should closely track percentage of the population is ludicrous. I mean, according to a quick Google search, nearly 40% of Americans are under age 30, the minimum age for a US Senator. Should we be mad none of them are Senators, or heck, that not one of the nearly a quarter of Americans who are under 18 (aka children) are in Congress?
You are trivializing what is an actual worldwide issue: even in democratic countries the young are completely not represented. Not “underrepresented”, not represented at all. It’s a massive, massive problem that very few countries actually tried to tackle. The young are the future, but governments can (and mostly do) completely ignore their needs, and simply run everything into the metaphorical ground - they’ll be gone by the time the real impact of their choices will be apparent, anyway.
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.
I don't think it's taking the point too far to say that this will be one of the horsemen when the end comes for our current form of governance. Communications technology speeds social change, and government digs it's heels in because it's run by people who "know better" because they feel like their experience is more important than actual fact.
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.
I'd note that its not like these are recent events in canada. Trudeau (the current Prime minister's dad) introduced the bill that semi-legalized abortion (under restricted circumstances) and introduced some gun control, 52 years ago. (Among other things like legalizing homosexuality and contraceptives). Then 20 years later the remaining restrictions on abortion were ruled unconstitutional.
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.
The abortion debate still happens (at varying intensities and varying degrees of public view) in much of Europe.
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 German news paper like Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has little reason to mention the 2nd amendment rights, because there are no 2nd amendment rights in Germany.
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.
Perhaps there's a good reason for that. Not all ideas are created equal, and the proliferation of mass shootings in the states should serve as a strong signal that our gun laws are dumb.
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.
I agree with you on the practical utility of the 2nd amendment for defending against tyranny (and if anything it seems to be more of a distraction, encouraging tyranny to developed unchecked with the idea that it will be fought at some future breaking point). But with regards to school shootings there is a much more prominent and straightforward cause - mass media itself, both news and entertainment. And they're continually working to write themselves out of the narrative by directing focus at inanimate objects.
I am not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that it was actually journalists that were running around shooting the kids, and not kids wanting to take revenge with guns they had easy access to? And that without easy access to guns the kinds would have killed the same number of people with, say, a kitchen knife? Really?
It seems like you willfully misunderstood my argument, as talking about journalists shooting kids is some obvious caricature.
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.
Most rich western countries don’t have mass shootings in schools. Even though the media you describe is the same. So obviously the media is not the reason why. So what is the difference then? It’s simple: kids in the US have easy access to guns. Not so in other rich western countries. If kids in other rich countries had easy access to guns, there would be school shootings there as well.
Interesting that a soldier is ignoring both A) the incredible power of guerilla warfare (see: Vietnam War), and B) the horrifyingly bad optics, and possible sanctions, that would result from the US actually utilizing unrestrained military might against their own citizens.
A) We are engaging, currently, in a number of asymmetric (read: guerilla) wars right now, with an unfathomable level of success - see Afghanistan, Iraq et al. We have learned a lot and gotten a lot better at things since Vietnam (not to mention, we train on American soil, so the guerilla advantage is more or less lost, there).
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.
Agree. It doesn’t matter how much ammo you store in your little hut in the woods, the number of guns you buy, the amount of Tactical Toothbrushes in camouflage paint you squirrel away. The government doesn’t even have to use the army. It can simply declare you to be a terrorist (using one of the secret courts), and send in the local gun crazy SWAT guys to take you out. And if you as much as look at one of your Tactical Toothbrushes when they burst through your bedroom door at 4am, they will shoot you so full of holes that not even your mum will recognise you. Followed by a press conference where the government will proudly declare to the world that they have eliminated yet another terrorist and back slaps all around for the brave boys who pumped you full of lead.
People outside the US scoff because of the ridiculous amount of harm done by overly easy access to firearms in the US and your inability to discuss it seriously as a nation, as profoundly ridiculed by the Onion[1].
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.
> My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards.
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.
> [About SV] An observer might note that all of these companies are dominated by men, in an industry dominated by men, tightly interwoven with a venture capital industry that is super-dominated by men. So it’s curious why none of these men have shown any interest in addressing the massive and lucrative sex work industry that overwhelmingly serves, well, men; until you consider who pays the real costs of that industry’s brokenness: women.
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.
Also, this isn't historically true; women were and are a historically significant part of the industrial labor force, and before that did a good share of agricultural work as well. Certainly industrial labor had gender divides, but it's not a strange fluke that, say, most of the people who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire were women.
Somewhen in the last two centruries, the general population seems to have internalized the view that making money = work, keeping a house functioning = not work. It's peculiar, if you think about it, given how big a multiplier the latter is to the former. I'm guessing this is one of the early case of society falling victim to metrics - making money is easy to quantify and compare, housekeeping isn't.
Feminism stigmatized keeping a house functioning. “Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” became a slur thrown at women who had the nerve to not serve a corporate master.
One of my rules is: society always over-corrects. I think it’s because bombast and mockery gets more attention than rational and balanced thought.
We went from “women can’t do what men do” or “women should never have careers because it’s bad for the family” to “any woman who stays home is letting herself down,” or is stupid, etc.
How about this: women who want careers can have them, women who don’t can stay home, and both are okay because people have the right to choose their course in life.
I’m not going to downvote because it’s true there are feminists (including second-wave feminists who fought the really tough political struggles) who have shared the view that working in the home / building a family has less value than that of earning a wage / building a career.
However, feminism is a (very) broad church and the majority of feminist that I’ve come across would argue for legislative and other societal barriers be removed so that a woman is free to choose between motherhood and career – or whatever balance works best for her own inclinations and circumstances.
Talking about feminists then "We are useful", I might assume you are a feminist, but switching between 1st and 3rd person.
Or, you say "We are useful by default" as if from the other perspective (i.e. mine). If so, hard to tell if you are responding to me specifically, or some "HN crowd" generally; in either case, yes, feminists have to prove themselves, or specifically their ideology. And no, I haven't said anything about "useful by default", that's your strawman.
I think you're being sarcastic, in which case your whole post is just a bad-faith, low-effort dismissal. It'd be useful if you'd respond less cryptically.
I think you’re confusing the word “work” with “having a job”. No one, as far as I know, thinks that running a house isn’t work. But they also don’t think that it’s a job
If you wanted to take a stab at that sort of argument, make it along the lines of men being disposable gender: hard manual work with high risk of death, lower life expectancy, women and children first, if you're not making serious money you are a failure etc.
Historically, virtually all women passed on their genes, but 60 % of men did not. (Numbers approximate)
At the same time the whole reason women had gold jewlery was because they weren't allowed to have money, so take it as you will
I dunno... my Grandma had to pump well water and boil it to wash clothes, prep meals for Grandpa and their 11 children (would have been 13, but one was stillborn and another died as a baby).
She was a tough old bird. Married at 16. First kid at 18. Last child at 44. Grandma didn't get a washing machine until 1970, if I recall. Had she not been there to take care of the kids and the farm, Grandpa couldn't have worked at an industrial bakery from 4 a.m. to noon. Then from noon to around 3, he'd come home and sleep, then take over work in the fields until dusk.
Grandpa sold his body in manual labor, but Grandma was right beside him.
It kind of disgusts me that a lot of modern women look down on someone like my Grandma, who built a happy home, a beautiful family, and fostered literally nothing but warm and special memories for all her kids and grandkids.
People don't look down on your grandma they just recognize she had a hard and pretty shitty life and don't want be a ox that can speak English. Stop being such a incel loser jesus.
Everyone had a hard and pretty shitty life in 1932. From the people living in New York City to the people living in rural Mississippi.
> Stop being such a incel loser jesus.
I'm not even sure how you got here, from what I posted... other than having to assume you have some significant psychological issues. Talk to someone, please. Your mental attitudes aren't healthy.
I have had plenty of women in my life judge my Grandma, forgetting she was a teenager during The Great Depression, and forgetting that women of rural Mississippi had very little avenues of fulfillment beyond child rearing and household administration available to them. Or even worse, they think they could have done anything different... failing to recognize their fathers would have essentially married them off, and their husbands would have beaten them until they fell in line.
"Or even worse, they think they could have done anything different... failing to recognize their fathers would have essentially married them off, and their husbands would have beaten them until they fell in line."
"It kind of disgusts me that a lot of modern women look down on someone like my Grandma, who built a happy home, a beautiful family, and fostered literally nothing but warm and special memories for all her kids and grandkids."
When it's your grandma who cooked for you and made you happy its a happy home but even you can realize when its not your grandma its some sad dump getting her ass kicked by drunk hillbillies. No shit modern women look down on your stupid rose tinted nonsense. You can't seem to fathom that your grandma had a really shitty and garbage life from your own description no shit people do not want that life. Stop being such a incel loser.
SV doesn’t care about porn, because it’s a bad PR, at least for now. There’s no “Larry Flynt” kind of guy there, that would like to move it forward. Or have courage to fight for it.
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... :)
Yeah it's such a dumb argument. The obvious explanation is that all of those companies are ad supported, and advertisers don't want to advertise next to porn. If advertisers suddenly wanted to advertise on porn pages, how many seconds do you think it would take for FB to change that policy? But let's pretend it's because they're men.
This feminist take was definitely uncalled for in this article. The author's bias about how the women, _who are actually getting monetarily compensated_, are the victims completely misses the costs to the purchasers, who are almost all men, in terms of their money and the neurologic changes that such sex work consumption has. Having the "algorithm" suggesting and enticing these men back to buy more subscriptions / pics or however it works on these things is just as much a negative side effect as the women experience in social stigma.
Not really? I can't think of the last time a prominent newspaper named & shamed a random working man for spending money on porn, whereas that happened with the NY Post and a paramedic with an onlyfans just last week. Your view of reality is wildly distorted.
I don't know enough to decide with certainty if the post in question is right, but it definitely seems earnest. I believe the poster sincerely holds those beliefs.
People seriously believe being advertised at is "just as much a negative" as the stigma from being a porn actress? I have no appreciation for the advertising industry, but this is hard for me to believe.
I don't know about "just as much". Negatives like these are hard to quantify and therefore hard to compare. What the men are paying for on OnlyFans is a pseudo-connection or a fake relationship.
This strikes me as being emotionally, sexually, or romantically manipulative or exploitative.
Of course the men choose to contribute but the incentive structure is for the women to foster a sense of intimacy or connection so they can exploit it for cash. It's a voluntary association, but it doesn't seem like a morally neutral or harmless association to me.
This is not to say that the harm men face from exploitation is greater than the harm that women face - or that women don't also face this phenomenon, but just that it is also a harmful byproduct of the service.
Nowhere in the comment you're replying to is it stated or even implied that men suffer a significant social stigma from consuming porn, nor that women DON'T suffer a social stigma for producing it. The viewpoint you describe is certainly twisted, but it hasn't actually been expressed by anyone.
For the record no real feminist would publish this horseshit. It is one thing to advocate for better conditions for sex workers. It is another thing entirely to pimp young girls on the internet, and to even equate the two while pretending to be a feminist is just despicable.
How is making an OnlyFans account, where the content creator is completely in control of their actions, in any way comparable to pimping? There isn't even a "pimp" in this scenario. The women have 100% agency in when, how, and what to post. To me that does seem pretty liberating.
You are assuming that the creator of the OnlyFans site is not under duress in any way. You are also assuming that the creator and maintainer of the site is the same person who is featured on the site. Exploitation of women (and men) can happen even in the most seemingly egalitarian of communities.
Millions of men and woman are exploited every day doing regular factory/office work. Factory workers risk their limbs and lives every day they go to work. So you obviously want to stop that as well right? Or if not: Why not?
The topic of sex work is probably one of the last contentious issues in feminism - is it exploitative or is it empowering? Is it just like any other form of work or is the sexual aspect inherently more dehummanising and alientating than normal work?
Wow. Are you really saying that the men who consume porn are equally victimized as actual sex workers, because of an algorithm?
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.
I think you're right if you're only putting 1 sex worker and 1 porn addict on the scale, but I would imagine that for every sex worker there could be 100 porn addicts watching them, the math gets more tricky.
This is an interesting point. The problem, I think, is that as individuals, we only have feelings based on our own experiences.
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).
If I understand it correctly, porn actors are adults, working under signed, legal contracts that specify, in extreme explicit details, exactly what they will be doing during a shoot. If they were actually forced to do it, then it would be a criminal act of rape, something that would very quickly bring down producers responsible for it. Do you have any evidence that porn actors in general are forced to work?
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.
A single example is not evidence for it happening in general. There are plenty examples of factories dangerously mistreating their workers. That doesn’t mean that they all do it or that it is common practice.
So there is some sort of scale of victimhood, and everyone should measured against it?
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.
> The author's bias about how the women, _who are actually getting monetarily compensated_, are the victims
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”.
If I understand it correctly, the sex workers are adults who has signed contracts to do a specific job for a specific amount of $ The same as a factory worker who might end up loosing their health or lives doing their job. What is the difference exactly?
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.
No one put a gun to that guy's head, society won't even ask him any questions about nor assume what he does in his personal time, whereas that same politeness doesn't extend to sex workers. That's just the tip of the iceberg as far as the difference between these two goes, as I see it
Well if we're going to go this route, no one put a gun to the girl's head either.
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.
Yea no one wants to work at walmart and no one wants to shop at walmart, but hey look at how many walmarts there are. When people complain that there are no jobs they mean there are no meaningful careers, not that there aren't enough walmarts to work at.
I think that the argument is that male tech workers consume porn as much as other men and therefore solving issues of porn industry could be solving issues they have too. E.g. selfishness of tech males should lead them to care about porn.
Your contra argument implicitly assumes that tech makes are special kind of males that don't use porn.
Essential issue isn't about solving their problems. Essential issue is about making them more money. Which opportunity makes them the largest amount of money, with the least amount of risk to their investment?
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.
The argument holds no water and it is pretty disgusting of this uber-for-porn pimp to pretend he is doing good.
Porn is like weed. If you want to consume it ethically you need to verify your sources. These cam sites have their own serious exploitation issues that are completely being ignored.
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.
Not all porn is created for sale. Modulo all the revenge porn stuff... there’s plenty of people creating their own “personal” porn. From candid selfies shared only with a partner to full on private amateur movie collections.
Welcome to 2020 where identity politics is the name of the game. It seems everything these days can be explained based on your race/gender and yet this is supposedly the most "woke" time ever. Cue the downvotes.
I want you to know that any downvotes might have less to do with 2020 or identity politics and more so your sloppy style of conversation. Throwing out a wildly undifferentiated blanket statement and ending on a passive aggressive "cue the downvotes" is bad content in my opinion.
It enjoy being subjected to different views. I hope we can uphold a certain standard for expressing them around here.
I want you to know that my "blanket statement" (as you label it) was itself a criticism of "blanket" generalizations we see all too often in this era of identity politics. How telling that you had nothing to say about the rampant use of identity politics to target and discredit people, but did feel it important to express your discontent with my "content".
> It's such a primitive and toxic line of thinking
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.
The people running the companies provide something that requires some capital investment and moderate technical sophistication. Meanwhile most people, and actually most sexual life forms in this planet, can perform sex. Unless sex workers unionize supply/demand economics will crush them. I don't see the need to involve male/female dominance in companies to find an explanation, but it seems fashionable nowadays.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
You think its shifting because you're operating on a human lifetime timescale. I'm operating on a million year timescale.
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?
i dont know why you are downvoted. i upvoted you. and bookmarked.
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.
You clearly have very limited experience with woman. 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. I am interested in what evidence you have for “we’re biologically programmed to understand ...” I have never heard or seen any evidence for that. So it would be interesting to see what evidence you have for such a strong broad statement?
> So it would be interesting to see what evidence you have for such a strong broad statement?
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.
Here is a different way to put it: I don’t recognise woman that I have known, loved, made love to etc. in your description of woman. Which makes me believe that your arguments are not correct for woman in general. Unless of course the woman in my life (by some extraordinary coincidence) happens to be the only woman on the planet not fitting into your description. Highly unlikely but of course possible. I by the way recommend reading the papers showing that most “evidence” in Psychology is not reproducible i.e. not scientific. I would caution against basing your conclusions on them.
Birds had too different evolution, they have roughly equal hard skills, which isn't true for humans. For humans sperm and eggs are entertainment and are quite high on Maslow pyramid, but the lower levels are solved only by men, and women have only eggs to offer in exchange (also developed plumage), and that's how they adapted, for them sex isn't entertainment, but survival, i.e. they are evolutionarily programmed for prostitution. And sex workers do enjoy sex, like everyone. You better make attractiveness of sex work your point.
You may be right, but it seems plausible that men are also much less likely to understand the potential for and existence of abuse that happens to women in the porn industry.
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 think that the harm, abuse, maiming and occasional deaths happening to millions of factory workers is well understood. However we are doing very little to seriously address it. I haven’t heard any stories of woman loosing their arms, legs, or lives shooting porn in the porn industry. Have you?
Dude, the labor movement has been around for over a hundred years. We've made mind blowing progress on workers' rights. There hasn't been anything close to this for sex workers.
This guy seems to be operating on the assumption that MEN are to blame for pornography's status as a social pariah. As if mothers everywhere would be proud of their daughters producing pornography on Onlyfans if only their husbands weren't in their ear shaming them.
Those same mothers would likely be very glad if their daughter got a man with a well paying job, lots of money, and a big house. They think more in terms of their generation, how women's access to status worked back when they were young. Onlyfans opens a different way for attractive women to attain wealth. Much safer, and with way less pain involved than going through a marriage that was done for the money instead of for love, plus a painful divorce afterwards.
Or, you know, they could go get a real job. I heard lots of women are doing that these days and they're being pretty successful. I'm sure those same mothers would be equally glad if they got a proper high-paying job.
Feels like the definition of a No True Scotsman fallacy.
Maybe they should drive an Uber instead? No, that's not a real job, just a side gig. How about working at a drive-thru? Nope, that's supposed to a temporary stop for high schoolers. How about [...] (equally dismissive judgement).
These are adult humans putting out content and getting paid for it. That makes it a real job.
> Maybe they should drive an Uber instead? No, that's not a real job, just a side gig. How about working at a drive-thru? Nope, that's supposed to a temporary stop for high schoolers. How about [...] (equally dismissive judgement).
When did I say any of that? Those are all real jobs. Besides, I was replying to the GP's claim that Onlyfans is the "empowering alternative" to the traditional path of getting a husband with a well-paying job. There exists a third option.
Reading about sums like 100k per month makes it sound like a real job to me... Note that I'm only talking about that subset of girls on Onlyfans who make relevant sums of income, not the large number who doesn't.
Ultimately everyone sells some part of themselves.
Not every marriage is that way, there are many marriages where real love exists for decades. Those are a great ideal to strive for! But status and wealth is and remains a big component in the dating market.
agree :) The reason status and wealth remains big is most people wants easy life. And we people are taught we should work hard to earn money from school level. Society say we should become Doctor/engineer/High Level Manager at least where I live. If we can marry rich people and live happy life why not?
There are millennials with teenage daughters now. Older mothers with teenages daughters grew up watching Madonna videos on MTV. I'll need more explanation to understand the generational gap you're describing.
> This guy seems to be operating on the assumption that MEN are to blame for pornography's status as a social pariah
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.
NB: Writing from a perspective of someone who grew up in a conservative society (Tier 2-3 city in India), and may have a different take.
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.
fwiw, the usual usage of the term (as in the above comment) is not the same as the highly specific government usage that the wiki page described.
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.
Yes, same with China. Tier 1 = Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou. Tier 2 is debatable but also cities have lot of economic activity / people that you would have heard of.
There was recently an interesting interview with a content producer on OnlyFans by UnHerd, talking about the money, ethics, and how it differs from "traditional" (well, traditional in the age of PornHub) porn producers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlW2QdzZuZ8.
This article gives me the same vibes of that comic strip set in a post apocalyptic wasteland: "But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders". It reads like a parody of SV culture. Can some woke capitalist please tell me what's so empowering about women who are forced to sell body pics for a living? Should we thank OnlyFans for exploiting the lack of safety net in our society?
The overwhelming majority of us are "forced" to sell something for a living. Why make such a distinction between selling body pics versus manual labor?
459 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadThe song from the musical is embedded as a video in the article.
Absolutely no reason for you to be snarky about it.
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.
Not to dwell on this so much, as my observations of sex workers were those who did it for need rather then pleasure, but what part of 'selling yourself' is empowering?
I mean if you like something, like a hobby, you usually don't seek to monetize it if you want keep enjoying it. It seems to cheapen the activity as you start applying different metric than sheer joy as the only goal, and instead look an things through an PNL lens.
In fact introducing these metrics is almost always a net negative activity--now in my 30s I've turned almost all of my hobbies, skills and interests into a professional career to the detriment of my pleasure towards it and suffered because I bought into the fake adage of 'never having to work a day' for most of my Life.
Whereas it's now become the new normal to view 'feminism' as a preferential distortion of facts and realities in favour of biased outcomes that don't hold up to any scrutiny.
I have no problem with sex workers, I've treated them all with the same respect I would with customers in the professional or corporate sectors I've been in and they always remarked how differently I was because of that.
But, the truth is I hold almost near disdain for social media 'thots' (male or female) who exploit mentally weak and vulnerable people into giving them money in exchange of attention/sexual exploitation and exploiting Human vulnerability and a need for connection. I think the same applies to these 'feminists' prostitutes and their false narrative because of the obvious level of hypocrisy behind it and its motives is one of obvious extractive relationships with people based on self-interest, vulgar opportunism and having the social inertia to carry on forcing people to buy into that view.
> 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.
The Catholic Church still exists, start with questioning why that den of pedophilia is institutionalized in modern Society despite the countless amounts of child rape and exempt from taxation before you go any further. Then you'll see why things like the Epstein-Maxwell sex trafficking of minors is more common than one would care to think. Which again ties to the what I said above about exploitation of vulnerable people.
But since we’re on the subject; maybe put less value into financial trade which is the contemporary value store propping up the exploitation of billionaires.
Perhaps buy fewer gadgets that prop up the economy they grift on from the masses agency.
Perhaps be more for raising taxes to distribute wealth to communities that can use it if you’re that worried.
Above all perhaps avoid centralizing authority over agency in private power. A pattern we keep buying into as a species only to realize it rather makes things worse for the majority.
Put your agency into something that tackles artificial social problems (stock values, disposable widgets sold!, not enough money for M4A or community uplift in poor areas) instead of (sad as it may be) human issues that have existed forever, and there’s precious little we can do about it. Even if billionaire sex cabals vanish, are you going to scour the world seeking out every tribal instance? Or are you simply reaching for acceptable semantics from your perspective?
In other words: walk the walk when it comes to pushing back against immoral behavior as you see it. Semantic battles here over specific instances are self congratulatory and empty if we’ll simply equivocate away structural changes.
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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
You have porn and video games. Sit down and shut up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Hohle_Fels
> 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.
[0] https://onlyfans.com/terms/intellectual-property-rights
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?
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... :)
Wrong, it has a lot to do with it. Search engines, servers, laptops, cameras, websites, encryption, internet access,the list goes on...
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.
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
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.
Luckily for you, engaging in porn is strongly correlated with the absence of a loving father. Hopefully she rebels and comes to value her dignity and virtue, even if you don't.
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 th...
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.
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[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPT1TKFmv_o
> 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..
Yes, yes we are. The most comfortable life isn't the most worthy life to live. We don't value people for making money off sex because that's degenerate.
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?
What prospects do they have for marriage and family after permanently uploading filth to the internet? No high quality man is sticking around after he discovers that bombshell.
It has normalised this catastrophic trend. It has eliminated whatever barriers may have been in place.
At a societal level, it is degrading and humiliating. I know if I was on the outside looking in, I would never tire of pitifully laughing at a people in a state of collapse where a significant proportion of their young women are doing this without censure or shame.
1) Assuming that making money from OnlyFans is "ruining their lives" is taking a moral high ground based on disallowing women to have control over their sexuality
2) Assuming that these women are performing just to buy handbags..... As if women don't have other reasons to need money just like everyone in society.
3) Assuming that women are searching for a "high quality man" who would disapprove of them having made money off of OnlyCams because it's "filthy". Again, places women in the passenger seat, assumes that they are only around to try to find a quality mate (male) and that their only desirable qualities are their "purity" that has somehow been tarnished.
I could go on. This is a disgusting point of view.
1) They're engaging in pornography. They're performing lewd acts for strangers on the internet. Nobody is seizing control of their sexuality, just expressing supreme disappointment and disgust at their reckless, perversive choices therein. Don't you dare suggest that I do not have the moral high ground over literal prostitutes.
2) Don't be facetious.
3) I'm not even quite sure what your point is here. Is a man "in the passenger seat" if he's seeking a nice woman? I'm not sure what you're implying. At some point, these women are going to want to settle down- yet their trove of online pornography will make it very very difficult to attract a good man. Their "purity" has absolutely been tarnished. Nobody wants a hooker tucking their kids in at night.
I could go on. Pull your head out. It's unconscionable to facilitate a social collapse where impressionable young women are perverted for the sexual and sadistic satisfactions of strange men.
1) They're engaging in pornography. They're performing lewd acts for strangers on the internet. Nobody is seizing control of their sexuality, just expressing supreme disappointment and disgust at their reckless, perversive choices therein. Don't you dare suggest that I do not have the moral high ground over literal prostitutes.
2) Don't be facetious.
3) I'm not even quite sure what your point is here. Is a man "in the passenger seat" if he's seeking a nice woman? I'm not sure what you're implying. At some point, these women are going to want to settle down- yet their trove of online pornography will make it very very difficult to attract a good man. Their "purity" has absolutely been tarnished. Nobody wants a hooker tucking their kids in at night.
I could go on. It's unconscionable to facilitate a social collapse where impressionable young women are perverted for the sexual and sadistic satisfactions of strange men.
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 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.
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.
We went from “women can’t do what men do” or “women should never have careers because it’s bad for the family” to “any woman who stays home is letting herself down,” or is stupid, etc.
How about this: women who want careers can have them, women who don’t can stay home, and both are okay because people have the right to choose their course in life.
However, feminism is a (very) broad church and the majority of feminist that I’ve come across would argue for legislative and other societal barriers be removed so that a woman is free to choose between motherhood and career – or whatever balance works best for her own inclinations and circumstances.
and yet, feminists will talk about feminism in overall positive terms without qualification. If it's a broad church, it can't be all positive.
We are useful by default.
They have to prove themselves
Talking about feminists then "We are useful", I might assume you are a feminist, but switching between 1st and 3rd person.
Or, you say "We are useful by default" as if from the other perspective (i.e. mine). If so, hard to tell if you are responding to me specifically, or some "HN crowd" generally; in either case, yes, feminists have to prove themselves, or specifically their ideology. And no, I haven't said anything about "useful by default", that's your strawman.
I think you're being sarcastic, in which case your whole post is just a bad-faith, low-effort dismissal. It'd be useful if you'd respond less cryptically.
None of what you say follows from my post at all. Unless you think "responding cryptically" is a form of feminism.
Empowering for men too. Patriarchy is harmful to everybody
Historically, virtually all women passed on their genes, but 60 % of men did not. (Numbers approximate)
At the same time the whole reason women had gold jewlery was because they weren't allowed to have money, so take it as you will
She was a tough old bird. Married at 16. First kid at 18. Last child at 44. Grandma didn't get a washing machine until 1970, if I recall. Had she not been there to take care of the kids and the farm, Grandpa couldn't have worked at an industrial bakery from 4 a.m. to noon. Then from noon to around 3, he'd come home and sleep, then take over work in the fields until dusk.
Grandpa sold his body in manual labor, but Grandma was right beside him.
It kind of disgusts me that a lot of modern women look down on someone like my Grandma, who built a happy home, a beautiful family, and fostered literally nothing but warm and special memories for all her kids and grandkids.
> Stop being such a incel loser jesus.
I'm not even sure how you got here, from what I posted... other than having to assume you have some significant psychological issues. Talk to someone, please. Your mental attitudes aren't healthy.
I have had plenty of women in my life judge my Grandma, forgetting she was a teenager during The Great Depression, and forgetting that women of rural Mississippi had very little avenues of fulfillment beyond child rearing and household administration available to them. Or even worse, they think they could have done anything different... failing to recognize their fathers would have essentially married them off, and their husbands would have beaten them until they fell in line.
"It kind of disgusts me that a lot of modern women look down on someone like my Grandma, who built a happy home, a beautiful family, and fostered literally nothing but warm and special memories for all her kids and grandkids."
When it's your grandma who cooked for you and made you happy its a happy home but even you can realize when its not your grandma its some sad dump getting her ass kicked by drunk hillbillies. No shit modern women look down on your stupid rose tinted nonsense. You can't seem to fathom that your grandma had a really shitty and garbage life from your own description no shit people do not want that life. Stop being such a incel loser.
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... :)
Of course the men choose to contribute but the incentive structure is for the women to foster a sense of intimacy or connection so they can exploit it for cash. It's a voluntary association, but it doesn't seem like a morally neutral or harmless association to me.
This is not to say that the harm men face from exploitation is greater than the harm that women face - or that women don't also face this phenomenon, but just that it is also a harmful byproduct of the service.
How would they find out?
and yet this gets expressed all the time under the feminist banner. Either real feminists have no control over the brand, or it's been hijacked.
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.
Maybe they should drive an Uber instead? No, that's not a real job, just a side gig. How about working at a drive-thru? Nope, that's supposed to a temporary stop for high schoolers. How about [...] (equally dismissive judgement).
These are adult humans putting out content and getting paid for it. That makes it a real job.
When did I say any of that? Those are all real jobs. Besides, I was replying to the GP's claim that Onlyfans is the "empowering alternative" to the traditional path of getting a husband with a well-paying job. There exists a third option.
Ultimately everyone sells some part of themselves.
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.
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.
Also, the point of the article is that it's much better for the performers than traditional porn.