It's media critique, it's not saying that everyone in the world is beautiful and unaroused, just that the way the world has changed has led to media showing beautiful people that aren't horny, and how that affects our view of the world (and vice versa)
> This cinematic trend reflects the culture around it. Even before the pandemic hit, Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them. Maybe we’re too anxious about the Apocalypse; maybe we’re too broke to go out; maybe having to live with roommates or our parents makes it a little awkward to bring a partner home; maybe there are chemicals in the environment screwing up our hormones; maybe we don’t know how to navigate human sexuality outside of rape culture; maybe being raised on the message that our bodies are a nation-ending menace has dampened our enthusiasm for physical pleasure.
This stresses me out as a young and not sexually active millennial. What do we do as a society to improve some of these trends? Do we want to? What do I do as an individual to change my individual situation?
Live your life and turn off the bullshit. Otherwise, wait for it to burn out. Social media is a bubble, and the milk that helps create the metoo froth.
We’ll sacrifice bad guys to the volcano gods for awhile, then the bubble will pop, the trend will fade and women (in the media) will be thirsting for men who aren’t wusses.
There are almost 7.7 billion people on the planet already, even with less than replacement birthrates, I think we're good on human count for the next 300 years or so at a minimum so unless the birth rate really catastrophically collapses. We could lose an order of magnitude of people without endangering genetic diversity, take significant load off of the environment, and frankly, quite probably improve the human condition with fewer billions of other people to compete with in the world. I recommend seeing how we can extend this trend to demographics and countries it hasn't reached yet.
It doesn't rely on ever expanding populations. It relies on retirees to be the minority which is a reasonable assumption to make. After all, everything the elderly buy has to be extracted/made via labor of the young.
The math is more dismal than that. With a 1.5 birth rate (common in Europe) the population drops by more than half in three generations (about 100 years). This causes the economy to collapse—stock valuations have baked in assumptions of future generations of consumers existing. But it can get worse. South Korea has a fertility rate below 1 and Taiwan is headed that way. At that rate, the population drops by almost 90% within a century.
Poorly constructed economies predicated on ever increasing growth have no business existing. Economies will adapt (and should! it just means more economic drag to provide for seniors until the larger, older cohort has aged out and equilibrium at a lower population level has been reached).
It's disturbing to me that people think population must keep growing. If anything the world could stand to LOSE a significant portion of the population. Resources would be far less strained.
If we built our economies on the expectation of continued population growth, then that just means there was a MASSIVE lack of forethought. But that doesn't mean the solution is to start pumping out more kids. Instead we adapt how these structures work to accommodate the flat or lessened population numbers.
This policy is called degrowth (or ecofascism) and it's not true. Resources were used far more inefficiently and many of them were used more in absolute terms when the population was smaller. It's even possible that we need this many people to do the scientific research needed to use things more efficiently.
Specially when it's clearly not true. Just look at population not in work in western countries, even outside the current pandemic situation. If we really needed more people wouldn't we have near full employment? Economy will adapt to less demand, though there will be likely pains, but money is just numbers anyway...
There are going to be real, significant consequences from us as a Western society collectively deciding to commit civilizational suicide. Every day I see attractive, intelligent, productive, highly empathetic couples justifying their decision to not have children because of abstract "environmental concerns" amongst other decadent reasons (all highly abstract and indicative of civilization in decline, "first world luxuries" that our ancestors would scoff at) such as not being able to "afford them" [4]. Of course, "we'll just implement UBI and good socialized healthcare," but please tell me how that will work when approximately 34% [5] of the US population are tax net-negative [6], while growing exponentially? [7]. The US is going the way of South Africa or Zimbabwe, and I do not want to be around when the food runs out and the crowd is looking for a (white) scapegoat.
The total fertility rate for North America is 1.7 [1]. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate for Sub-Saharan Africa is 4.7 [2]. I know the utopian liberal vision is "we're all created equal," but it simply is not true with the scientific consensus being that IQ is 50-70% heritable [3]. The brutal fact is that some people have a higher intellectual (and productive) potential than others. Rather than look at the facts, we have continued down this path of denial and as a result millions of people are suffering needlessly [8]. The movie Idiocracy is starting to look more like a tutorial instead of a humorous warning.
"Let the children starve, maybe a few of them could become rocket scientists with the help of Affirmative Action, depending on how they fall on the bell curve. At least then we wouldn't have to give up our liberal free-market utopia. At least then we wouldn't have to admit... we're not born equal."
I'm sure you're probably appalled at the possible solutions to this, "eugenics" is the triggering word. Genuinely ask yourself, what do you think we have now? We have a global system, thanks to Western foreign aid, Universities, corporations, and Hollywood, flat-out incentivizing the least productive, least conscientious, least innovative people on the planet to continually reproduce at a higher rate than the most productive, most empathetic, most innovative people. Do you want your grandchildren to exist in a world where they're severely outnumbered by parasites?
I do not, and neither does China. While the US imports millions of low-wage workers, China's net migration rate was negative for the past 70 years [9]. They send their children to US universities to learn from the world's most fashionable and "progressive" professors, while spying on them [10]. You recommend "extending this trend [of fashionably ending our genetic lines] to demographics and countries it hasn't reached yet" while China encourages parents to have 2 children [11]. The US media loves discussing reparations [12] for slavery, while China colonizes Africa [13].
I just don't understand, how can a place so interested in growth, innovation, and future-oriented thinking be so quiet about your society committing suicide around you? Is Twitter going to save us from brain-draining our own population?
>IQ
That's not relevant. There are no controls for black IQ because they almost uniformally exist at a socioeconomic strata beneath the average white. The concentration of the majority of the African-descended US population is in economically depressed areas. The culture is heavily controlled by white influence, and while it's not necessarily intended to undermine their image it certainly doesn't help it. Lil Wayne is not a good role model, Lil Wayne is not good PR he is a poor emissary to represent the majority of the black population. So what do we have as a product? We've got a population that is at a disproportionate disadvantage because their image has been smeared, because they grew up in the wrong cities, and they had bad role models elected for them. And there's people who break the mold despite that.
And since you can't grow a baby in a vacuum, the data is inexorably tainted. Not to mention that it decorrelates once you move out of the range of people with serious cognitive deficits, at least in terms of monetary success, with outliers showing 140IQ and $30k income per annum. And in terms of productivity there's too many arguments to be made to even begin considering how lackluster that argument is. Like productivity being tied to income, and that income isn't correlated with IQ, thus IQ can't be determined to have a correlation with productivity, right?
>liberal free-market utopia
We're a psuedo-fascist democracy. Since the first time the government elected to choose a company to even acknowledge we departed from the liberal ideal. Corporations being people? Big fascist move there. But yeah, you keep laboring under that impression.
>growth, innovation, future-oriented
Maybe we've figured out, collectively, that shit is fucked. That the finite world can't provide each generation consecutively with the same allotment of resources and the tangible decline in quality of life that we're already suffering is enough to push most everyone out of the reproduction cycle, voluntarily or not. Maybe people are (literally) sick from the constant goading we receive from our "culture" which is little more than emotionally appealing marketing in the vast majority of cases. It's a dissatisfying and vacuous sphere of garbage.
To the point of innovation, we're hilariously stagnant in every aspect. Always have been.
Future orientation is what allowed the communist revolution to justify the killing of millions. Future orientation is what the Nazi party used to justify their actions. We need to look to the now.
> I know the utopian liberal vision is "we're all created equal," but it simply is not true with the scientific consensus being that IQ is 50-70% heritable [3].
"heritable" does not mean "genetic", please stop reading fake science and slatestarcodex comments. Children exist in the same environment and have the same nutrition as their parents.
Besides that, most published scientific results are false, so why are you believing anything about IQ when you haven't personally sat the people you're claiming are inferior down and had them take a test?
If you meant unborn children or fetuses you should've said that, because the most obvious interpretation of your original words is that you meant postnatal children. That is typically how the word "Child" is defined: "A person between birth and puberty"[1] - not a person before birth.
Nevertheless, what you cited and attacked is uncontroversial. IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or some combination. You then turned such a scientifically uncontroversial statement into an emotional straw-man attack.
All children start off as fetuses and inherit things that affected them before they were children.
> IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or some combination.
Yes, and I said it wasn't genetic. A "heritable" effect can only last one generation - all you have to do is invest in lead abatement.
In fact, even if it is genetic it can still be treated. Phenylketonurics have a "genetic condition that reduces intelligence" that affects them when they drink Coke, and the treatment is to not do that.
People who discuss this in SSC and marginalrevolution comments don't care about this - what they want is to have secret knowledge that society won't acknowledge that says they're morally superior to Mexicans so they can complain about immigration.
> All children start off as fetuses and inherit things
Right, but you said "Children exist in the same environment", which is present-tense. If you said "Children existed in the same environment", then it would've come across as you intended.
> I said it wasn't genetic
Source/rationale? That's a rather strong claim.
> even if it is genetic it can still be treated.
Potentially correct, but it doesn't mean it can be treated well given current knowledge. There's lots of genetic problems where our treatments currently suck, and you can't claim to know when/if those treatments will get better for some specific genetic problem.
> People who discuss this in SSC and marginalrevolution comments don't care about this
Who would argue against lead abatement resulting in higher IQ levels? Who would argue that prenatal nutrition isn't part of the picture? I mean sure, you can find one nutjob in the comments section anywhere. But that's hardly an argument against anything.
Of course not, this is a strawman. I was disputing the positive claim that it isn't genetic, I was not claiming that heritability implies genetic determinism.
Irrelevant (because the assignment of twins to particular environments is mostly blinded to mutation differences) and pedantic (because the differences are trivial).
Wrong, and wrong. Keep pace with the literature. Differences can manifest as early as embryogenesis and have far reaching outcomes, e.g. there have been reports of different covid severity outcomes within a twin pair.
Hell, you do know that the cells in your own body don't all have the same genome, right?
As I said, it's irrelevant since assignment is mostly random at birth. The law of large numbers takes care of trivial differences since those differences are largely randomized.
Most childless couples I know feel it's unethical to have children with impending environmental collapse. Why would you want to bring children into the world with global warming, mass climate migration and other horrific things likely to happen within their lifetimes?
> Why would you want to bring children into the world with global warming, mass climate migration and other horrific things likely to happen within their lifetimes?
Because not bringing them in is defeatism. Suicide in fact.
If you want to solve the problem, children are ones who can do it, and your task is to prepare them to do it.
If you flunk from this, you are the reason the world fails.
> If you want to solve the problem, children are ones who can do it
Yeah, but maybe not human children.
If anything we need more non human children on this planet, we are attempting to fish the oceans dry, there's less than 10% of old growth forests still in North America.
Almost every ecosystem on earth is severely degraded due to human activity. If aliens came to visit they might logically assume that humans are at war with nature.
We are living in a slow moving apocalypse and we don't even recognise that fact because we think that this is normal.
What baffles me since I first studied ecology in 1990-s and to this day is this inexplicable divide in certain someones' minds between "us" and "earth".
There is no such thing. We are the one, the unity.
There is no border, no difference between "ecosystems" and "us". The whole biosphere is a single, very complex, but undivisable system. Get rid of any tiny single part, like a single human being and it responds.
In this light, I see the notions like childfree or extinction rebellion as cancer. People doing this do not even attempt to understand the real consequences of their actions.
You may want to expand your circle if that’s “most” of the childless couples you know.
And why would you want to bring children into the world? Because there is no guarantee those things will happen.
What if someone decided not to have children in the 1960’s because the Cold War was going to result in nuclear annihilation? They and their non-existent children missed out on decades of peace and prosperity.
> Every day I see attractive, intelligent, productive, highly empathetic couples justifying their decision to not have children ... The total fertility rate for North America is 1.7 [1]. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate for Sub-Saharan Africa is 4.7 [2].
HN requires I give the best interpretation here. It sounds like there's an observation bias: you see prime individuals not reproducing, but what about elsewhere? It certainly seems possible the same cohort in Saharan Africa are not making the same choice, given the higher birth rate.
> ...IQ is 50-70% heritable.
Alright, but IQ doesn't translate to attractiveness or productivity. My school's valedictorian went on to work an IT Support job. Should we be saddened if they don't reproduce?
Lastly, there are plenty of poor, intelligent people. Your comment sets up this narrative that intelligence is split by continent, and humanity will be worse off, since the smart continent has a lower reproductive rate. The facts don't support that. Most people alive today are the progeny of serfs of the Middle Ages. They were poor, but certainly not all were unintelligent.
It's a form of laziness, the most common of human behaviors. Deny, avoid, delay, until you're absolutely forced to do what is uncomfortable or painful.
Personally I use escorts, it is not easy finding an independent, good looking, permissive, not-very-expensive girl but by my calculations that's a far more efficient way of satisfying my inner-chimp until I want to get married and have kids.
I do not want to participate in some mating ritual that involves two persons lying to each other in order to just relieve some sexual tension. In Romania I do not feel that generally girls are ok with no strings attached sex without this dishonest dance and even so, I couldn't probably get as attractive a girl as an escort. Maybe I could by investing a lot more time than I'm comfortable with just to satisfy a basic urge... but for 100$ I can have sex with girls of the same level of say Emma Stone that really know what they're doing.
So if I make even 25$/h that's 4h of work for 1 sex session, which will take place entirely when I feel the desire for it. To find a similar (looking) girl that will have sex "for free" will probably take more than 10x more time and even then the actual sex might not be as good. Even if it is as good it will happen when the stars align and we both want it at the same time.
I appreciate your honesty. For the last several years I have supported a charity that helps women to escape this cycle of oppression in Romania. I've heard some of their stories, how difficult life is after they've found a way out. All I can say is that victims abound despite appearances.
Thank you. I believe I have enough experience to tell if a girl is enjoying her time with me or not and go out of my way to make her feel good (I perform oral and am generally not defensive). When I say I look for 'permissive' girls I mean I look for girls that permit kissing and "sports fucking". I don't choke / slap / hair pull or whatever. If a girl gives signs that she doesn't enjoy sports-fucking I don't persist, finish quickly and simply never visit her again.
I have heard my share of sad stories from them and I don't revisit those. Regardless of my participation or not in this trade I know the trade will go on, there will always be men who seek this kind of service so I appease my conscience by treating the girls well and not revisiting those that don't seem to genuinely enjoy my company.
I simply can not believe one can act so well in front of me and on the side be forced to do this. I mean moaning is simple to fake but the 30 min of conversation of the 1h I pay for? Keeping a cheerful vibe while opressed is hard to do.
There is no need for acting, a girl would have lots of visitors and make similar amounts of money even if she wasn't cheerful, probably make more if she's the fast-fuck type.
You underestimate how horny some men are. One girl was telling me how it was 15 years ago.. men would line up in front of the apt building, go in, get a blowjob and a quick fuck for like 20min door-to-door, pay 25$ and leave. I don't know if she in particular didn't perform "girlfriend experience" type work or that's how they mostly were but trust me, there are more men who don't care about how happy the girl is and don't give a crap about her being cheerful or not.
I'm not suggesting you are doing anything morally wrong, but keep in mind that they may be faced with a situation where not only are they being pressured into this by specific people but there simply aren't good alternatives for them to make decent money.
Men tend to make more money than women. If a woman has a child or children to care for, sex work or exotic dancing etc al may be her only really viable option.
I will add that like with any industry, insiders will know some tricks and may have been coached on how to handle certain things. In the book Mayflower Madame, the escorts were explicitly told to act excited if a guy splurged at dinner and bought an entire bottle of champagne and not act like this was an everyday occurrence for them even though it might be the second or third time that day.
There's a world of difference between the girls I'm talking about and the escorts who get booked for whole-night affairs and go to dinner with clients.
Honestly I don't even know if there are any escorts like that in Romania. The few people that could afford them are relatively well known and going to dinner in an expensive restaurant would be seen by basically everybody which I assume is not desired by men of high status. They might book them at the hotel though and honestly for 1000$ a night or more I assume it is easy to act.
However I pay 70$-100$, you think a girl would care enough to act for such little money? Even though it's Romania, most people that make money easily learn to not give a crap about money and are not generally motivated by money.
Edit: also, I never tip, I only pay the advertised price.
I appear to be the highest ranked woman on Hacker News. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent any time on the leader board here (under a different handle).
A number of people on the leader board are millionaires. I have reason to believe their participation on HN is part of what makes them wealthy.
I was homeless for nearly six years and remain dirt poor and continue to get a lot of guff any time I try to talk about that, no matter the reason and no matter the framing.
I have six years of college. Etc.
While I was homeless, men sometimes offered me cash to sleep with them based solely on my looks and obvious poverty. But trying to network with business professionals on a platform that literally helps a lot of people become quite wealthy has done relatively little for my bottom line and I have been repeatedly told "Go get a real job" and this kind of crap.
You said you are paying four times your hourly wage and I imagine that $25/hour is fairly good money for Romania. It would be decent pay in the US where people are trying to advocate for a minimum wage of $15/hour.
I don't know what her cut is out of what you pay and I don't know how much of her time you are getting, but for a lot of women, that would be vastly better pay than they have any hope of making any other way and they will put up with it simply because the alternatives amount to starving to death and may be just as objectionable as sex work.
Lots of low paying jobs are unpleasant work, like cleaning toilets. Lots of low paying jobs subject you to abusive bosses and abusive customers. It's common knowledge that wait staff at restaurants are typically treated terribly.
> While I was homeless, men sometimes offered me cash to sleep with them based solely on my looks and obvious poverty.
The way I find girls is through a community forum which practices reviews. I very rarely visit a "new" girl which doesn't have good reviews from reputable members so while I am sorry to hear your experience, I have never offered money to a girl for sex out of the blue or because I felt she was vulnerable. I've only ever been to girls that explicitly advertise such services.
> Lots of low paying jobs are unpleasant work, like cleaning toilets. Lots of low paying jobs subject you to abusive bosses and abusive customers. It's common knowledge that wait staff at restaurants are typically treated terribly.
You assume I am going to girls that are generally treated terribly, have a pimp that takes all their money and are happy to act cheerful for 100$ per hour having sex with 20+ different men per week.
There's no need for her to act, there's plenty of demand for warm bodies without any need for good social skills. And I believe generally those girls that don't offer good GFE are probably forced into it. That would probably even be the majority of the market. I don't know, I haven't done any field research on this but I assume I only visit like 1-2% of girls and am very rarely dissapointed with a new girl because it's hard to fake honest signals.
However it is not hard to make a decent living as an independent girl. The good ones generally work from 10am to 22pm at most. They take good care of themselves, screen clients and build up private lists where they won't even take new clients. If she just wants to live a basic good life she could take 5 regular clients 2-3 times per month and make 1000-2000$ easily working at most 20h per month. That money could well pay for eating only takeout and have a very nice appartment in Bucharest.
My very first words in my first comment were: I'm not suggesting you are doing anything morally wrong
I'm not making any of the assumptions you accuse me of. I'm just trying to say that the world of work and opportunities available to women are different than for men, so their logic for why they make certain choices may not be what a man would expect based on how he thinks about his choices in relation to how to earn a living.
I'm medically handicapped and for that reason I have been celibate for nearly 16 years. If I thought I could successfully become a sex worker or exotic dancer and make good money for a while to pay off my debts and pay cash for a house, I would likely do that. I have no moral objection to sex work and I've thought a great deal about it and a lot of marriages are thinly veiled sex-for-money deals, in essence.
I would rather get paid by the hour for sex than be some man's property pretending we "love" each other when we don't. I'm crystal clear on that detail.
I'm sorry if you feel uncomfortable with the idea that maybe some of these women don't really want to be doing this kind of work and feel like it's a big moral issue if they don't. But the simple reality is that, say, in Hollywood, women need to look good and be sexy to become successful. In contrast, men are deemed to be sexually attractive because they are successful.
When push comes to shove, women are expected to use their sexuality to some degree to open doors career-wise in a way men are generally not expected to do. This is rampant across multiple industries and it's something people mostly don't want to talk about and it's part of why you see so much sexual harassment of women on the job, etc.
I haven't caved to the pressure to go that route because I have a bigger personal demon looming over me that does such terrible things to a person it is classified as a dread disease.
But trying to get into that probably isn't clarifying anything. It's probably just opening up a giant can of worms pointlessly.
I think I will stop here, whether it served to clarify anything or not. Sometimes the least worst action is just "stop digging your grave deeper."
I won't comment on the personal stuff because I've stopped trying to save everyone. For the record I rolled on random.org with a 20% chance saying I should offer to personally help you and you got 57.
> When push comes to shove, women are expected to use their sexuality to some degree to open doors career-wise in a way men are generally not expected to do
Men are generally not epected to use their sexuality because it doesn't work. If it worked I'm sure some % of men would use it. Proof : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165800
I don't believe women are expected to use their sexuality. Women just have that tool available to them and some will choose to use it. Some men will only hire or promote those kinds of women and honestly I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, we could debate this for hours.
I absolutely agree that if they could, there are men who would.
I don't agree that women are not expected to use their sexuality. I'm not interested in debating it.
I've stated my opinion. Some folks here will recognize my handle and have some idea of who I am and yadda and others won't. It is inevitable that different people will perceive my opinions differently depending on how much and what they know about me (and no doubt other factors as well).
> I rolled on random.org with a 20% chance saying I should offer to personally help you and you got 57.
Funniest thing I’ve read today. Is that a normal thing you do? Just online or for the panhandler at the corner via mobile? How do you determine the saving throw? So many Q’s..
For a while, whenever I felt tempted to goof off a little, I'd look at my phone. It if was an even number, I followed my desire, if [the last digit of the clock] was an odd number I carried on with what I was doing. Figured it would cut procrastination in half. I think it did.
I think many people could benefit by reading “Revolting Prostitutes” by Juno Mac and Molly Smith. I covers how sex worker’s rights are related to worker’s rights in general.
> I believe I have enough experience to tell if a girl is enjoying her time with me
Do consider that it is in the service provider’s interest to make you think this. When you are paying money for experience, you can’t use how the experience makes you feel to evaluate how the employees feel about it.
> If a girl gives signs that she doesn't enjoy [it, I] never visit her again.
Can’t you see how in this situation it would be in the sex worker’s interest to give signs she enjoys your thing? If she does not, she looses a customer.
I’m not saying that prostitution is wrong or that some sex workers don’t enjoy they job. It just might be the only realistic option for someone.
Some things that a country could do so that people have the option to not be a prostitute:
* food and housing for people who need it
* equal pay and career opportunity for men and women
* drug treatment programs that don’t put people in jail for addiction
I have no problem with a girl acting that she likes me in order to get my money. If she truly is that good of an actor then props to her. I only have a problem if she is forced into this profession by someone and my personal belief is that one can not be a perfect actor while being forced and abused by someone.
> Can’t you see how in this situation it would be in the sex worker’s interest to give signs she enjoys your thing? If she does not, she looses a customer.
You are speaking from theory and books. I speak from experience, I have been to a lot of girls that will tell you right quick that you are going too hard, won't like any position you want and are generally openly obnoxious to you so that you will leave as fast as possible. Usually you will find these after 23pm with low prices. I could write a small book on all types of sex workers I've encountered and very few of them are actually pleasant to be around. Now is that because they select their own customers just as the customers select them or because they're acting we will never know.
> It just might be the only realistic option for someone.
You are victimizing them because you haven't met them. I have yet to find a girl that is actually grateful as you would expect someone to be when they earn in 30 min what others work a whole day for. They could find a corporate job that easily pays 600-700 euros, live with a roommate and cook their own food like most other girls in Bucharest or have sex for 2h per day and make 4 times that. 99% of them, even the ones I carefully select are arrogant and spend money like there's no tomorrow living an expensive lifestyle. Can't really blame them because I am basically doing the same thing but to suggest these are hidden victims is really showing your lack of inexperience.
I'm not saying there aren't victims of abuse, what I'm saying is that it is hard to hide such abuse.
Not trying to insult but genuinely curious: how do you derive any kind of satisfaction (mental I guess) from this interaction? Don't you feel disgusted with yourself once it's over with? Why is just jacking off not a better option than this?
Why would I pay money to make myself feel disgusted? I am not a masochist. I derive great pleasure and satisfaction from this. My stress levels are kept well below my friends who are desperate to find girls and have sex but are disgusted by sex workers. I have much lower anxiety around women in general too and I am able to communicate with them normally without the overwhelming need for sex.
I just believe that mouthwash and soap works. Been doing this for 5-6 years now and it only gets better as I get better at treating them better, being more relaxed which makes them more relaxed etc.
> Why is just jacking off not a better option than this?
Why are you watching videos in 720p+ instead of using magazines? It's just a higher resolution experience.
Hey I'm glad to see another fellow HNer with a similar mindset - I've actually had those same calculations as you and made similar choices. In fact I travel quite a bit and have basically tried escorts in at least 30+ countries (including Romania).
I see a problem developing though where having so easily "hooked-up" with good looking women for money anywhere I am, even if I do get married at some point, I fear my urge to try someone new (and hence cheat on my partner) will be pretty strong after a while just because it's so easy and convenient to do so. I don't have a solution for this and this is also the reason I'm not able to get myself to commit to a serious relationship.
Not sure if you've thought of this or experienced this issue.
> I fear my urge to try someone new (and hence cheat on my partner) will be pretty strong
I am the kind of person that will stick with anything if I love it. Even with escorts if I find one that I really like and she really stands out I will go see her exclusively until things change. I won't feel the need for variety just for the sake of it but I know not everyone feels this way.
I haven't tried this but there are people out there that build "harems" while being honest about it. If you truly can't live without variety and are confident in yourself you will find a girl that wants an open relationship or maybe you can find someone bisexual that can enjoy variety with you.
How do you prevent catching nasty STD's while trying out so many escorts? Like a lot of the infections like herpes, gonorrhea, Chlamydia and even herpes are spread through kissing and oral sex, so even condoms don't always save you. And a lot of these infections can be asymptomatic so a quick look at the girl also doesn't help. Have always wondered how people who follow lifestyle like you deal with this.
People can get sick after eating wrong food, due to chemical or bacterial contamination. Where do you think this is more likely to happen: in a restaurant with professional staff that feeds 100 people every day, or on a picnic without professional catering?
I think escorts are safer than casual sex, their job is at stake.
The analogy doesn't make sense cause people aren't served the same food. Whereas a prostitute is reusing her body. I agree sex workers are more likely to take precautions but alas just because of having multiple sex partners they are more likely to suffer from various STIs. As I said earlier wearing a condom doesn't save you from a variety of infections. So just having sex with multiple partners increases your risk of infections. A study from England that looked into it:
> FSWs were almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with chlamydia, and three times more likely to be diagnosed with gonorrhoea than other female attendees, adjusting for demographic factors.
The contamination is unlikely to come from raw food itself, chefs at restaurants are buying from the same retail channels as the rest of the people.
The source of contamination can be improper storage or handling, kitchen equipment, dishes and cutlery, people doing all the above. All these things are reused in restaurants.
> twice as likely to be diagnosed with chlamydia
See the table on page 347. For chlamydia, "period prevalence" figure is 10.1% for sex workers, 8.5% for other female attendees. That's 20% difference, not twice as likely.
Compensating for demographics factors is hard. You can surely compensate for the factor "young", can probably compensate for the factor "single", but how would you compensate for the factor "promiscuous", i.e. likely to go out and have casual sex? Because that's the demographic group people gonna sleep with, instead of sex workers.
> This stresses me out as a young and not sexually active millennial. What do we do as a society to improve some of these trends? Do we want to? What do I do as an individual to change my individual situation?
Why do we need to? The data shows that sex, drug use, etc., actually peaked with baby boomers. They were peak frivolity. It’s only because they created all the media for decades that we think those were good things. Millennials are a more sober and serious generation for a more sober and serious time. No need to regress.
A boomer could graduate high school, get a job, buy a car, buy a house, and start saving for retirement.
Younger generations have to work 10X as hard for a chance at that kind of middle class lifestyle.
When it comes to where you live it's poor job prospects or unaffordable real estate: pick one. Everything goes up but wages. If you're not in the "professional class" by 30-40 years old you're in real trouble. There's an alternate path that involves living in low cost of living places and working your ass off while you live below your means, but that's not really easier just different.
Younger generations, especially those younger than GenX, know that you just can't fuck around... literally or metaphorically. The party's over.
Edit: Someone will comment that this was only true for white boomers. You're right. Now it's true for nobody.
It didn’t just “happen” with boomers. My parents didn’t have their first home until in their mid thirties, payed 13% interest on their mortgage, worked plenty of shit jobs on the way there, saving etc. Your description of the boomers is idealized and I think not remotely the norm. They enjoyed far fewer material possessions than we do today, and by many measures had fewer money-making opportunities than exist today, and capital wasn’t nearly as free as it is today. When you’re in your 40’s (provided you make smart choices in your 20’s and 30’s) you’ll have far more wealth than the kids of that time will. Part of it is just a function of longevity and saving. Stop expecting to be able to buy a house when you graduate. It wasn’t true for my boomer parents, wasn’t true for me (younger genX), and doesn’t seem to have changed now. If you seriously think you’re a more dour generation with tougher problems, it should be all the more motivation to stop spending money on frivolous services and throw-away possessions and save, save, save. Focus on bringing social and chemical stability to your life and creating a new, stable family. Leverage the myriad money making opportunities out there. I read comments like yours and then read an article in a business rag talking about the disrupted workforce of today, specifically how easy money is giving younger workers more freedom to set the terms of their employment. I would have killed for the low-barrier-to-entry opportunities available today on the Internet when I was in my teens. If you can’t make it in America in today’s environment, it’s a product more of your informal environmental education. Get new teachers - don’t complain, up your game.
I'm not trying to glorify a life of reckless abandon, but in the context of the actual article, it's a little concerning to me that normal parts of human life like humor and sexuality seem to be a negative to you, and we should instead strive for "sobriety." That seems a rather grim view of human existence. I'm also not sure I can take seriously the notion that somehow this is a more serious moment in history than all of the others that came before it. The Cold War and the threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation? World wars that killed millions and the worst genocide in human history? Colonialism and slavery? Religious civil wars? General poverty and starvation? At what point in history were things less serious than now? When were humor and love somehow more appropriate?
In my opinion that (as a mainstream social narrative) is a false dilemma. The real division is between casual relationships and long relationships. The message I got as a young person is that casual sex should be celebrated and endorsed. That is a lie. Casual sex erodes long, meaningful relationships. It makes it that much harder to commit. Long relationships are how functional families are built. Functional families provide a bedrock to the society at large.
I think you are having a very idealised vision of society and families. You would be surprised to see what lies beneath all those "functional" families of the past. To my experience, having an active sex life (not talking here about carelessness) and multiple partners, even one night stands, could be quite helpful for someone and help them open up and experience life.
I mean these are all sort of arbitrary categories. I'm not saying "go have casual sex, it'll enrich your life." I agree that long-term meaningful relationships are fulfilling. But sexual attraction, flirting, humor—these are all spontaneous parts of human societies and human lives. To suggest we're living in such a serious time that they're not appropriate is macabre and anti-human, in my opinion, and will only create more suffering.
How did boomers use more drugs? Since the boomer generation we had a crack epidemic, 2 heroine, 1 of those mixed with prescription opiates, and a non stop meth problem. Marijuana is legal in a bunch of states now. Psychedelics are having a revival. Mdma didn't even exist until recently and there have been two waves of rave culture
> At their peak in 1980 illegal drugs accounted for 5 % of total personal consumption expenditure in US. An astonishing figure corroborated by contemporary estimates that cocaine sales peaked at $35bn in 1980. Rachel Soloveichik
@BEA_News
Thinking about it more, I guess you need to clarify if a boomers today use more drugs or was drug use higher in the 60s,70s,80s then in 00s and 10s. Other stuff I searched suggested boomers in the 10s are hit hard by opioids
Drugs are increasingly unkind to the bod the older you get, so I’d imagine it’s the latter.
For the record, I paid about 125/g in the mid nineties. I’m sure someone’s made a chart of this somewhere. I remember High Times magazine or Cannabis Culture used to have a spot price table in most issues based on numbers submitted by their readership. Would make an interesting graph. I don’t tend to trust LE valuations of drug prices because their incentivized to inflate them on capture and deflate them on selling risk.
I assume this will relax slightly as we see lockdowns and masks ease up after most of a population has herd immunity from vaccines.
I don't really know how to change whole cultures though, other than to change the propaganda (messaging) or improve the support structures so people feel safe enough to experiment and have fun with life.
Part of me wants to put the blame on the female side for the reduction of sex. Mostly because girls will be slut shamed for doing anything sexual. So girls hold it back. You can't blame them for being conservative in the society we live in. Stop telling the female half of the population that they need to be innocent virgins,sex is normal.
The other excuses don't really resonate with me. Roommates? We were having plenty of sex in college, text your roommate to go away for a bit. Parents? Idk I just used my car or wait for them to go to sleep. 17 - to early 20s just do what you can. I don't get the broke thing, college bars are cheap, or we just went to parks or whatever.
Nothing makes sense. Nobody knows what to do or how to work this shit. Moving targets.
Last time I had a girlfriend I'd come off a 2 year spree of virtual homelessness and poverty. I was living with my parents (mom and dad, both separated) transiently. I was dirt poor, drugs problem, losing jobs etc... She was in college studying to become a nurse. It wasn't one of those asymmetrical relationships either. She wasn't on the goon squad.
Now that I have money, my own place, some direction and intention in my life... In most context where I have exposure there's some sort of hazard. Like trying to do anything at work when there might be a signal there seems like a terrible idea. Way too much potential for bad shit. At college, well shit I don't know if I'd be okay with dating anybody younger than 21, or a 21 year old for that matter (which is the rough majority). Even if we assume the age floor was 28 I still wouldn't dare approach anybody without evident interest, and networking at school is impossible because I'm swamped with work and work. I can get conversations started on Tinder, but they burn out fast and hard, no effort on the other end. I get a lot of matches, but I've only managed to finagle 2 dates out of what has to be hundreds of matches. I can't say how many I've actually opened, the odds look like shit regardless. Doesn't help that I live in an ultra-conservative rural cesspool where there's like... .5 degrees of separation.
And then what are you to take from all the man-bashing shit? All the vitriolic speech against white males? And so on and so forth.
> And then what are you to take from all the man-bashing shit? All the vitriolic speech against white males? And so on and so forth.
If you were an alpha male you'd never be paying attention to this in the first place. This is only a concern if you're reading memes spread by neurotic people on the internet.
This makes no sense because women today are more sexually free than they have ever been. In absolute terms women are still often slut shamed, but it's still less than in the past.
How far back does this millenials have less sex thing compare too? Today's women that grew up in the 90s yeah probably is more free then one from 50s and earlier. But compared to the 70s? I don't think it's farfetched to guess that society's feelings towards women sexuality have regressed since the sexual revolution of the 70s. Paris Hilton having a sex tape coming out was a huge deal, that's what millennial girls grew up with.
I don't mean to suggest that this is the only reason, I just think it contributes.
That's true but there's the woke / me-too movement now. I have a "friend" that I met from Tinder during early pandemic, we only met once because of it, and then it was purely sexting exchange of pictures and so on.
Last month she started following a local me-too movement FB group that had women sharing about their past harassment experiences and calling out their aggressors, that ranged from total abuse of power, to sexual innuendos over IM.
Last couple of times we texted each other mostly consisted of her showing me past screenshots of chats where someone (from Tinder) would be sexually suggestive, nothing explicit, and would start to tell me how she didn't realize that she was being harassed and that she's being disgusted by them.
Sounds like you’re on speaking terms still, maybe now’s the time to get that affidavit signed that everything was consensual. :D I’m kidding.. but maybe I’m not.
Changing your "not sexually active" situation will take putting yourself out there a lot, lowering your standards (you can raise them later), being open to meeting all sorts and getting rejected a lot. You'll certainly gain entertaining stories, and you'll probably meet some new friends, possibly one or more lovers and one of them may become a romantic partner if that's what you're after. Please be good to the people you meet while you're doing this. And along the way you'll develop a tolerance to rejection, which is a somewhere between life hack and superpower.
All that that may be overwhelming though. The block you quoted is riddled with social anxieties. See if that's hold you back, and if so then get a professional to help you out.
Side note, now is a good time to prepare for this change, because the pandemic has put everyone into extended isolation all at once. So there's a lot of pent up desire for connection that will be getting released over the next year.
I'm not OP but I'm not sexually active either and share the same worries and am probably a few years older than him.
Thanks for sharing those videos, even though I was able to make that physique/style/life control transformation several times (get fit -> fall into a hole -> get fit again, rinse and repeat) during my 20s, this pandemic made me fall into a rut and I'm heavily struggling to stay on the right track that makes me climb up again. These videos are were another spark of motivation to try again.
As for the "not sexually active" situation, I've noticed the feeling of frustration has become more intense and had made me more sad about it lately. As an introvert, the co-workers social circle is usually one of the main ones, but unfortunately I'm working alone because it has many more pros (own schedule -> go to gym when it's deserted, beat traffic, do errands at times where there are less waiting times, etc). Old college friends are starting to get married and be more busy, so I've been seeing them less, so less opportunity to be introduced to new people. I've tried salsa classes before the pandemic but didn't workout for that matter (couples that are very private, people that leave once the class ends, tight groups of friends). I've also tried the Tinder way, and the closest I've ended with a woman from it, she ended up losing interest when the pandemic started. Now I'm seeing someone from Tinder, and even though it will probably stay at friendship I'm taking it.
I've been seeing a therapist since a couple years ago after I had my first panic attack, since then I've been using therapy for all my issues. However, even though I've been open about my sexual frustrations, I feel like my therapist ignores it and simply tries to work on my social aspect in general. My therapist is female and I wonder if having a male therapist it would be different, I've been wanting to try but I already invested many sessions with my current therapist.
We all have to be extra kind to ourselves (and to each other) during the pandemic. It's an exceptionally unusual, transient time. Still, it is a long time to be socially distanced in various ways from coworkers, lovers, friends, etc.
Things will get better soon.
And yes, I'd imagine that a more similarly gendered and oriented therapist would find it easier to relate to your concerns. But maybe just being direct with your current therapist would help. There may be a good reason she's redirecting you to more general social aspects, or maybe she's not trained to deal with male sexuality.
Yes. Tell her directly, "I feel like you ignored my concerns about my sexual life," and see what she says. Beating around the bush in therapy (and in most of your important adult relationships) is almost always a waste of time.
> I've been seeing a therapist since a couple years ago after I had my first panic attack, since then I've been using therapy for all my issues. However, even though I've been open about my sexual frustrations, I feel like my therapist ignores it and simply tries to work on my social aspect in general. My therapist is female and I wonder if having a male therapist it would be different, I've been wanting to try but I already invested many sessions with my current therapist.
Get a new therapist. At the very least try a few sessions with someone else. Yes, try a male therapist. Your rationalization of "already invested many sessions" is that of the sunk cost fallacy. You should be so confident that you're not wasting your time in therapy that you'd never think to ask internet strangers if you should switch. The worst that could happen is you waste a few hours trying out a new therapist or two. The best that could happen is that you actually find someone who isn't dismissive of a concern that's clearly animating you, about a very important part of human existence.
Do change your therapist, women find it very hard to see how frustrating lack of a sex life can be unless they themselves have been in a similar situation and most haven't. When I've complained about lack of sex to female friends, they've often said what's stopping you from installing Tinder, they are really oblivious to how different the experience can be for men and women there. If she's dismissing it, its unlikely to improves. Moreover, personally, one can be really good at social stuff but completely not make headway in sexual stuff, and then you've lost a year and are nowhere near where you would like to be.
Being sexually active is a choice. Nothing's stopping you from going out there and meeting people. There's plenty going on if you're willing to step out of your house and meet people. (And no, swiping on apps doesn't count.)
(Pandemic lockdowns of course might get in the way, but I'm speaking generally when those restrictions aren't there)
For the vast majority of people it simply doesn't work like that. It's a long, expensive, seldom successful and generally frustrating experience which takes a toll on self-esteem.
Unless you're in the top 20% or so of attractiveness.
Consider the plight of the humble salmon: Spend your whole life just for one chance to mate, most likely to be killed by other fish, eaten by bear, yanked out of your home via net or metal hook, it all smells like fish, and then you die on a gravelly shore with birds ripping your eyeballs out.
> what do we do as a society to improve some of these trends?
Well, HIV/AIDS seems relatively under control compared to when I was a young man, and there’s a vaccine for HPV, so get on out there, young blood!
Aversion to anonymous or even just casual sex for my generation (X) was from diseases. That seems like less of an issue now, but maybe the education system doesn’t want to let up on the risks yet, kind of like cities keeping us doing the recycling motions even when they’re throwing it in landfills - the behaviors are deemed valuable or the institutions just haven’t caught up to reality.
Probably your biggest issue as a generation is the freely available custom porn and social media alienating people from each other - there’s a lack of need to hook up and a self-inflicted lack of opportunity. Also, sensitivities to workplace hookups are a much bigger deal than they were even 15 years ago.
The important question is "do we want to?" We are gods by the standards of people five hundred years ago. Even the opportunities 50 years ago pale in comparison to what many of us have access to today; you no longer have to be in the exact right place and time to be exposed to the state of the art in technology and science. You can bring together material and people from anywhere in the world in a matter of days to pursue goals that can dominate your life for years at a time. The pursuit and achievement of these goals can make many people truly happy.
We're at a point in time where our society places a lot of value in sex and romance, but it's now easy to largely forego these things and dump your time into other things you're passionate about. It seems that when these discussions about the relative celibacy of young people come up, people talk a lot about how it must be because young people are facing effectively insurmountable struggles, and mostly ignore that it's possible that it's easier to focus on things other than sex now. That possibility runs contrary to how most of us were brought up, and it's why you're asking what we should do to "improve" these trends. Have we considered that there might be nothing to fix, and that the trend doesn't need to be stopped?
Currently reading The Master and His Emissary and can't help but feel this is a related problem. In short, more and more of life is being packaged into lifeless utilitarian abstractions, and less and less are we connected to spontaneous, intuitive, and humanistic facets of life.
Cute article, but may I.offer a simple alternative? Movie makers want to appeal to viewership in homes where there are children, and younger audiences in general. You can't show much nudity or direct sexual themes to minors. That of course doesn't explain why the house in Poltergeist was more normal looking, but that point isn't really bolstered by too much else.
How does this explain the historical trends that are the subject of the article? Are you saying that fewer children were trying to watch TV in the 90s?
I think this is why British crime dramas / police procedurals seem to feel more real (to me, raised in a post-colonial country) - very few people look like temporarily financially embarrassed models slumming it as detectives.
Yes! Although after binging watching 21 seasons of Midsomer Murders, we noticed everyone in the later season got a lot hotter. Consequently, the plot lines got a lot more “conventional” (read: American).
I'm actually doing something similar -- watching all of Midsomer Murders. I absolutely love the way John Nettles' Barnaby (haven't seen any with the new actor) is righteous and upstanding without becoming preachy. In particular S01E03 where his partner's homophobia is shut down. The fact that most of the horrible people are high-brow also has a nice feel to it -- very Columbo-esque.
> we noticed everyone in the later season got a lot hotter
Not always.
(mild spoiler)
The resident pathologist Dr Fleur Perkins who appears in series 20 is played by seventy year old Annette Badland, [0] who is much sterner than her predecessor (a much younger Manjinder Virk [1]).
That said, Midsomer Murders does now have a different demographic than the earlier series, which typically involved older, white eccentrics living in quaint English villages, and caricatured a rural society that is now long gone. The cast is now more likely to include Black and Asian characters in various roles as good guys, villains, innocents, suspects and guilty parties. The current Mrs Barnaby is a 50-year old woman, also a stronger character than her predecessor, who was also in her 50s when she first appeared in the series.
One of the last television series I watched was The Practice, which not only was notable for having both attractive, average, and ugly cast members, but it is actually a realistic plot point that sometimes comes up with envy between them.
But yes, European media in general is less focused on physical æsthetic perfection than I find U.S.A, Japanese, Korean, and Indian media to be; I often find a similar result in German, Swedish and Dutch television series that characters seem to look considerably more average.
Eh, kinda. Luther? Sherlock? Global sex-symbol superstars right there. The same forces at play in Hollywood are at work in London, it's just that the best-looking ones move out to California as well.
Not sure if it's a taste thing, but I don't find any single character on Sherlock to be particularly attractive, having just binged on the entirely of the show in the past two weeks.
Luther, okay, I'll grant you, it's Idris Elba. But everyone else around him (aside from his ex) looks rather, well, normal and British.
Ruth Wilson is a great actress, and, in my opinion, somewhat attractive, but she's not of the "Moved to LA and looking for stardom" mould that a lot of American actors and actresses fall into.
“Somewhat” attractive? Ruth Wilson is very hot, if you excuse my objectifying. She’s had interesting career moves, but would definitely not look out of place in any US movie or tv series...
The original Office was an outstanding example of portraying normal people. The US version pushed a good bit more to some people being a bit cartoonish.
I love this about British/ Nordic tv. It feels as though every show injects more gritty realism compared to US polish. There is a spectrum though and US is actually on the better end. Most Asian tv shows feature the a tiny pool of the same gorgeous people who may or may not have acting skills.
The ones that have stuck in my head over the years have been Daywatch and Nightwatch, Leviathan, and How I Ended This Summer. I’m sure there’s a few more I can’t remember right now. (I highly recommend all of those...)
I don't know if this is just what they picked for BBC America, but every single British TV comedy I've ever watched has a cast of 90% white haired elderly people sitting around and being sarcastic at each other. Last of the Summer Wine, Dad's Army, Are You Being Served, etc etc.
These were also the only thing my parents watched, so it was a relief when I got to watch normal people TV and saw someone in their 20s.
> Last of the Summer Wine, Dad's Army, Are You Being Served, etc etc.
Those are, depending on taste, some of the worst. And they are also old. There was a lot of good from that era, comedy and other, like fawlty towers, blake's 7 (not comedy), monty python etc. I think gp was referring to modern UK crime shows though? As in the days of dads army and are you being served, american shows also were not like in the article. Or are they showing re-runs of these shows on BBC America now?
Well if you're wondering, I went to visit my family in the UK right before it stopped being possible to travel and they made me watch all these shows again. (I think I got to see Dr Who once.) So someone still likes them.
I was so confused by this when I saw which British TV shows were being broadcast in America, I lived there for a year as a 17 year old. Suddenly dated stereotypes and the general lack of awareness about contemporary British culture, accents, etc. made complete sense.
Even back then (about 17 years ago) the titles mentioned above were equivalent to the lowest tier cable re-runs on one of those retro TV channels that thrives on being cheap.
> Bodybuilders experience this as they go on crash diets to quickly cut fat so that their muscles will show during competitions; though they look like physically perfect specimens of manhood, they don’t dream of women, but of cheeseburgers and fries. Many eating disorder patients lose their sex drive completely and even stop menstruating.
I had to laugh at this. I went on a meal replacement drink (Aussielent) for a while for all meals, and I vividly remember for the first time in my life, I dreamt of eating a juicy hamburger. It was like some oasis in a desert, and that burger was all I thought about the next day
There are interesting ideas here. Personally, I find the War on Terror explanation a little far fetched. I think a more likely possibility is that movies started specializing.
In the decades before the Internet, cinema was one place where the average person who didn't buy dirty magazines could glimpse more skin than in everyday life. Then the Internet came along. Suddenly pornography was in everyone's home. Soon it was in everyone's pocket. Sexual desire became something you could very easily take care of, to your exact specifications, in private.
The one-size-fits-all portrayals in movies became gauche by comparison. And unnecessary. The public had infinite access to the sexual equivalent of gourmet food, so it suddenly seemed old-fashioned for the cinema to keep peddling stale bread.
Probably this also contributed to the me-too movement and the surrounding fallout over the sexualization of women in spaces where sexuality was now seen as being inappropriate. For example, the controversy over grid girls in racing.
A populace thoroughly satiated in private can afford to be puritanical in public.
which is true and such deeply weird thing. and ties into the idea (though i think it's not super well supported in the article) that some of this comes from basically anxiety over physical threats.
Violence in media doesn't lead to violence in real life for various reasons. Most people are generally taught not to be violent to others and laws help enforce that social norm.
Sex in media does lead to more sex real life because there's no social norm or law against not having sex and sex leads to STD and unwanted pregnancies.
Hence, there is a logic to violence in media is okay and sex in media is less ok. One has no consequences, the other does.
There was a case a few years ago where a US federal judge refused to outlaw torture in case there was a “24 type situation”. (24 was a popular tv show a few years ago in which the main character regularly tortures people for information, to protect America.)
I once read a reader question in a mainstream game magazine (GameInformer I think?) where they asked why it was ok for games to have violence but not sex. The answer was extremely angry they had to explain this, like a parent lecturing a child who'd just embarassed them in public.
But anyway, their answer was the opposite of yours. Violence in games is good because you "shouldn't do it in real life". Sex in video games is bad because you "should do it in real life". The kids currently call this "touching grass" or "getting some bitches".
That sounds like the same answer to me. As an adult you should have "responsible" sex in real life. So, sex in media with a young and irresponsible audience will lead to irresponsible sex and all the repercussions. Hence, the common idea, don't show kids sex.
Violence in media will not (or at least no one has been able to find a connection)
I don't know where you got the idea that I though sex is sinful. I only suggested that as a society "responsible" sex (sex that doesn't cause unwanted pregnancies nor get you sick with an STD) is a desirable outcome for society and people in general. Otherwise have any kind of sex you want with whoever you want.
The point is only that sexual media has an arguably negative influence on society and violent media does not so it's not irrational to find violent media non-problematic and sexual media to be problematic for kids.
The 10 year old can see porn and sex has plummeted does not mean seeing more porn = less sex. The world is complicated and there are plenty of other reasons there is less sex happening (assuming there actually is less sex happening)
As just one example, many people claim the reason there is less sex is people stay home and entertain themselves with the facebook/instragram/tiktok/youtube/twitter/reddit/video-games/netflix vs go out and socialize IRL. That could easily be the major factor in decline in sexual activity even if sexual media by itself influences kids to be more promiscuous.
The idea is that keeping people occupied and diverted then you can fail as a civil leader but still maintain your control and position. The more people are satisfied (by government or business efforts or other large scale entities) the less likely they are to rebel when those entities are failing them. Even if they aren't properly satisfied, they're still made content.
Sexuality consists of much more than plain sexual imagery - one of the key examples in the article states "Neither character is glamorous in this scene, but their relationship feels frisky and lived-in and charismatic and real." Mainstream movies generally have romances, but do they feel real and lived in, or stilted? This has little to do with pornography, and more to do with the way we tell stories about ourselves.
I find the War on Terror explanation a little far fetched.
Yes, that was a bit much. The Cold War produced a much more serious fitness boom, especially during the Kennedy Administration.[1] It also produced an education boom. Today, 71% of young Americans are ineligible to serve in the military.[2] Too fat, too dumb, too criminal, or too drugged. There seems to be little concern about this at political levels.
I wonder if the lack of concern is because of the future of autonomous warfare. There's drones of course, but also tech that enables things like aircraft carriers to run with much fewer crew.
I'm betting that national healthcare will cause a fitness boom. We'll start seeing each other's poor health as tax money, and there will be more stigma for being overweight.
The public clamor for “$2k” checks, which comprise less than 1/4 of the $1.9 trillion dollar package that’s now entering reconciliation proves pretty strongly that the public is not sensitive to the cost of their government “benefits”.
The Democratic Party has never been particularly concerned about taxes and debt. The Republican Party is periodically concerned about it, but mostly when they don’t control the government.
I used to think Democrats would tax and spend, and republicans would borrow and spend. It looks like both will now print money (expand the money supply) and spend.
The next few years will be an interesting test of “Modern Monetary Theory”.
Looks like the ideal for deficit control is to have a democratic president and republican control of both houses of Congress. Unified government by either party leads to less constraint on spending.
If Democrats make up half the team that you claim is most effective at limiting deficits, it would seem to me to be difficult to sustain the argument that Democrats don't care about them.
Yeah, but that happened with the other party controlling the purse strings, in both cases, who were voted in as a reaction to those administrations with financial mandates.
Both Clinton and Obama inherited a recession from their Republican predecessors, and were punished for the unforgivable sin of responding appropriately.
By that logic did Bush inherit the dot-com crash from Clinton? I think you'd like to make the world fit neatly into ideological views. The boom-bust cycle of the US economy is pretty nuts when you step back and take it all in. Often the federal policies and bank regulations, to the extent they drive 'irrational exuberance', seldom reach their zenith and nadir all within one administration. The subprime mortgage crisis being a good example.
If you don't think it's possible to make the world fit neatly into ideological views, then I don't understand your former comment where you appear to give credit for the deficit reduction under Clinton and Obama to the Republicans.
> I'm betting that national healthcare will cause a fitness boom. We'll start seeing each other's poor health as tax money, and there will be more stigma for being overweight.
Don't see this in Canada, where tax dollars pay for it. Stigma only works if there is a majority against a minority. Most people are fat.
My understanding is that a lot of people who join the military now come from military families, so they're kind of already prepared for it. (This is different from AOC's claim which is the military preys on poor students and gamers.)
If you're going in just as a drone pilot, the fitness standards wouldn't be needed for anything, so presumably they expect people to still be doing something up close and physical though?
Running ships with much fewer crew is fine until something breaks and needs to be repaired. The Navy tried that for a while with the LCS and it didn't work.
This has a significant consequence - the military is an almost foolproof path out of the lower and well into the middle class. You can basically do nothing but be mediocre or even marginal and still be financially secure and earn a solid retirement.
> The public had infinite access to the sexual equivalent of gourmet food
If you think porn is "gourmet", you've not watched enough of it. Porn is the McDonalds of sex: repetitive, predictable, largely "safe" (with minimal care, you won't see what you don't want to see), and purposedly all-encompassing but still largely detached from the real thing.
I'm an unabashed porn consumer and I have to tell you, I yearn for anything resembling the sexual chemistry you get in good movies of old. Two people flirting and exchanging double-entendres is a billion times sexier than 99% of mainstream porn.
I bet there's a cottage industry of porn that specializes in serving you that kind of experience. Even if it's just packaged from existing movies and more "softcore" or something.
Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be. And if there's enough demand (and it's legal), people will make specialized porn to serve it.
Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be.
It seems like you're using something like the efficient market hypothesis without looking at the evidence.
I'm not a huge porn consumer but I've seen enough and know enough of the industry to say you're basically wrong, at least wrong as far as any "cottage industry" for porn with decent production values, acting or "sincerity" goes. The key thing is decent production value in a movie can't be created in home-grown way, it requires serious dollars. Oppositely, there are actors and there are "adult actors" and the two jobs are considered very distinct (in the way that receptionist and sex-workers are segregated and should be segregated, as mentioned on another thread).
But hey, prove me wrong. I'd love to see a counter example.
> But hey, prove me wrong. I'd love to see a counter example.
Based on another commenter's suggestion that you basically want "sex in movies that aren't about sex", it only took me a few minutes of googling to find sites which seem relevant to your interests:
- r/watchitfortheplot
- mrskin.com
It seems like you want porn which feels more organic and authentic than stereotypical porn. Sure the material in these sites wasn't expressly made to be porn, but it is porn in the way its packaged by these sites and subsequently used. And it's probably better that way, because it gets you what you're looking for in this case.
There is. But like with all markets, it's more expensive and will always have less mass appeal than the lowest common denominator. That downward pressure is felt in that industry just like in all others.
The Western porn market is a monopoly (the same company owns Pornhub and approximately every studio.) If you want something different, you'd have to train your tastes until you can handle something foreign like JAV[1], or scrounge indies like random onlyfans accounts.
[1] which are all really boring, seriously they're like four hours long and nothing happens, and that's besides the completely different set of morals and expected fetishes
I mean gourmet by comparison. McDonald's is gourmet compared to sand. Likewise, porn is gourmet compared to cinema from a sexual perspective (at least the kind of cinema the article is about), because cinema had to stop at sanitized teasing where porn can go all the way. For the average viewer, that's fine wine in terms of sexual gratification, even if the execution is the joyless jackhammering that as you rightly point out is typically what hits the front pages of mainstream tube sites.
You’re attacking a straw man here. Your experience and personal anecdote may be completely true— however, you are skirting OPs very interesting idea so succinctly stated: that “a populace thoroughly satiated in private can afford to be puritanical in private.” My immediate hunch is that this is generally true.
What the fallacy for correlation is not causation?
Because as far as I agree that porn is so widely accessible now, I’m not sure it’s in itself enough to explain why mainstream movies are so safe.
I would look toward spécialisation : yes. We’re talking exclusively about super hero action movies here. And even if the idea and the article really interested me: other movies exists. Some are horny as fuck; in 2021.
The article author mentioned Disney a few times; for once I think we can’t blame the military industrial complex but a entertainment company that is obsess with being us-white-middle-class family friendly.
So again, because I’m rambly, I would personally blame cultural aplanissement because of fear of loosing markets, than porn or 9/11.
Have a look at Cindy Gallop's Make Love Not Porn https://makelovenotporn.tv/ - it's been going for a few years now.
It's kind of what you describe. It's like pornhub's "home" videos idea but a 1000 times better - actually curated, personal and real. Haven't followed them recently but at the beginning they actually organised camera setups for people who wanted to be featured.
Thank you so much for recommending us! MakeLoveNotPorn is 'Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.' We're pioneering the whole new category of social sex (what Facebook would be if Facebook allowed us to socially sexually self-express). If porn is the Hollywood movie, we're the real world documentary :) Our mission and manifesto is here: https://socialsexrevolution.com/
This just depends on what you search for and think of as porn. I was exposed to a world of more female friendly hardcore porn by a female friend which I had little idea about. Other than that, porn bodies have a range that is far wider than mainstream media, you can find everything from SSBBWs to super skinny women, and lot of variations inbetween.
I wonder if the answer isn't more mundane, money. Parents today seem to have no problem with their children seeing a movie where people are eviscerated on screen but won't let their kids see movies with sex in them. I found it funny that "Bridgerton", and "Game of Thrones" both produced with more sex, have been quite popular.
I don't think it's just the parents. I think Hollywood relies on an export market. They don't want any country blocking a film from being shown to teens, in the theatres. Teens have the largest disposable incomes, of any market segment, especially when it comes to watching movies. Comical violence is an easy sell. If you add anything sexual, there is the risk of it being censored.
Game of Thrones has plenty of nudity, including full frontal (ermagerd!). But it doesn't have a whole lot of sex that you'd call erotic, as opposed to just being violent rape, carefully catalogued here:
The paying audience for blockbusters is now global - and many movies earn more outside the U.S. than in it. As such, movie makers are probably now paying more attention to what is considered appropriate versus obscene elsewhere.
Or just aiming for the lowest common denominator - and taking out anything that might be controversial in any of their global markets. (Take out sexuality for the American market, and take out politics for China).
Putting aside parenting choices, the two types of images (sex and violence) are not equivalent.
Sexual images produce a physiological response... you get horny.
Violent images don’t really do much, maybe revulsion. But, other than that, not much at all.
A picture of a bullet-ridden corpse will not make you want to shoot people.
A picture of a naked chick having sex, on the other hand, will elicit a desire to have sex.
Apples and oranges.
To be sure, there are many who blame the ‘violence in video games’ and the like as the cause of crime. Those people are idiots... getting a good headshot in Counter-Strike gives you the exact same kind of thrill as making a basket or a hole in one ... nobody says, “Hell yeah! Now I want to kill someone!”
But, watching porn?
That’s exactly what it does... the imagery itself makes you go “Hell yeah! Now I want to fuck someone!” (Which, to most porn watchers, means fucking their hand.)
If anything, a bullet-riddled corpse should evoke sadness, not the desire to shoot more bullets into it or other things.
Maybe you meant that watching one character inflict violence on another triggers audience feelings of aggression or fear, depending on which character we empathize with. What we watch undoubtedly causes all manner of emotions: horniness, elation, shame, fear, revulsion, pride, etc.
Sadly I feel that Hollywood movies are made for 12 year old boys. Parents sent their kids to the movies (before the pandemic), it was a form of independence. One more granted to boys than to girls, unfortunately. Other demographics tend to spend their time/money elsewhere. Girls mature quicker and quickly moved on to other interests than hanging around the movie theatre part of the mall.
In the 1980s parents still tagged along, so the movie couldn't be too comical...and, the kids wouldn't get the mature part anyway.
Even simpler. Disney (et al) produces the majority (?) of movie hours the public watches in 2021. That combined with globalization of demand - you don’t want to cut off any geographical regions that can’t handle anything controversial and you have boring, technically immaculate, corporate movies.
> Sexual desire became something you could very easily take care of, to your exact specifications, in private.
That's a very shallow view. It as much takes care of your sexual desires as fries takes care of your daily nutrition. It's great if you have no real food available and can be a fun snack if you're still hungry.
McDonalds is popular the world over. I wouldn’t take GP to task over their observation. The observation may imply a shallow society, and whether fries or sex, there’s obviously a massive global market for cheap and easy, so something in that observation is pretty accurate. If everything is biological competition, I think society just hasn’t found a way to compete effectively with massively broad and easy access to porn.
I mean, look at some of the posts here about people being disillusioned by the work, expense, and time it takes to even meet eligible people, much less hook up. Maybe the answer is in more meat-space social organizations - all those social (non-government) institutions like church, fraternal organizations, sports leagues, served to build social networks and now all of that is mostly gone for young people. So it’s meeting at work (increasingly taboo), chance encounters, bars maybe (and also often useless or horrible outcomes), or online shopping. Understandably difficult circumstances. What new drivers could compel different preferences?
I'm not sure, frankly, but I think there's a connection. A more sexless society is also a society with a lower overall birthrate. When the pressures of urbanization and modern life mean few people choose to have children while the trends in the article and in many of these comments show that people are less likely to accidentally/serendipitously become pregnant as well combine to somewhat drastically reduce the birthrate.
Birth rates plummeted through the 1960s and 1970s across the Western world, while the gonorrhea rates skyrocketed, in a period specifically noted for its sexual forwardness.
Birthrates plummeted in the 1960s but were still vastly higher than today. Birthrates peaked in the 1950s. Current birthrates are equal to the nadir of birthrates in 1980, but they appear to still be falling (but we shall see!).
US abortion rate is now lower than it was before Roe vs Wade and fertility rate has been dropping in tandem with the dropping abortion rate, so I don't think that explains it.
Neither are regular hormonal pill abortions. In fact, the pill (monthly pill, not morning-after) is the most common birth control method and most prolife people support it, even though technically there’s a possibility that it may prevent implantation (if for whatever reason ovulation happens anyway).
If you want to call that abortion, then go right ahead but I think you’ll be in the minority (just like people probably wouldn’t call a natural lack of implantation a miscarriage because they have literally no way of knowing that it happened... a dewer containing 100 frozen undifferentiated embryos is just not the same as an actual child, and I think most people do not act like it is). I think the vast majority of people understand a sort of gradient between conception and birth. Most people who are prolife would be uncomfortable banning the pill and most people who are nominally pro choice probably aren’t too comfortable with later-term abortions. Reality is complicated and so are people’s opinions.
It's probably many things, but I think another factor is a delayed transition to (biological) adulthood, which leaves fewer "prime years" for the tiring task of raising children. That delayed transition comes in part from an increased focus on the self. Although individualism is often attacked or derided in modern American culture (from the political left at least), I feel like there is a near-universal individualism across our society that never existed in the past - people are delaying/skipping having children and putting their own exploration and experience first. It's a luxury in that we didn't have this option previously as a species, but now we can entertain "finding ourselves" or traveling as a lifestyle and so on. For many, delaying parenthood or skipping it outright is a simple matter of not disturbing that freedom of choice that they've come to enjoy. For others, that freedom itself becomes tiring and the search for purpose brings them back to children. But the side effect in aggregate, is a more sexless society and lower overall birthrate. Just a thought...
That, and the hyper-individualism of capitalism makes it super hard to AFFORD that collectivist goal of perpetuating the species. Housing is much more expensive, as is healthcare, which are two things you need when starting out as a young family. Lack of collective bargaining power compared to the 50s means starting wages are also much lower and jobs are less stable, so it’s harder to take that leap to add another person to the household (which requires probably another room plus thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in medical expenses which as a young person could be the same as an entire year’s income).
So I think the challenge is a kind of selfish individualism from both the left and the right, although of different types. And let’s not even count the cost of schooling (which the right wants to burden the parents for).
> That delayed transition comes in part from an increased focus on the self.
Mostly no. It comes because modern hiring practices are trending toward making first time job applicants unemployable - and because under-25 incomes are less likely to come anywhere near covering minimal living expenses.
> A more sexless society is also a society with a lower overall birthrate.
Since the 1950s, basic living has steadily become increasingly complex and decreasingly affordable. Sex is harder for six exhausted roommates under one roof.
I think the lack of sex in Hollywood can be traced at least in part to the Chinese market. There's a lot of money in it and studios are more than happy to comply with CCP guidelines to get a share of that pie.
Came here to say this. Big budget Hollywood movies have to be internationally viable nowadays and that means conforming to the least common denominator of the target audiences. The result is movies that are palatable to the US and China and are utterly vacuous garbage.
Adults also don't tend to go to movies, so movies are made for kids. I wonder if Hollywood executives sit around the conference table wondering if a kid that doesn't speak English, doesn't live in N. America, will get the movie.
I'm actually okay with this. I only watch movies with my family and I'm sick of having to pass up on actually interesting movies because they're excessively vulgar.
If there was a service I could pay to censor movies for me, I would.
Yeah, I actually prefer a minimal sex scene (conveying the idea that it happened) to the explicit and lengthy stuff in your average HBO mini-series. Even less tolerant of sexual violence and torture. When I think of how many fake rapes I’ve witnessed/mentally onboarded via cinema/tv it makes me throw up a bit.
> If there was a service I could pay to censor movies for me,
We used to have a number of them. Cleanfilms was one. Send them a DVD, they'd sanitize the content onto another disc, ruin the original and send you both.
Legacy copyright gatekeepers couldn't resist their own compulsions for control - they systematically sued CF and others out of existence.
It's interesting, but pretty easily explained, right? Disney. What if you excise their canon from all the points made? I don't know the answer to that, honestly I don't watch movies. I'd be willing to bet their demographic capture strategy weighed children more highly than adults. That's easy memorabilia sales, tickets, dvd's, subscriptions, indoctrination, which will later yield nostalgia. And if you remove child-oriented or family films, the latter of which may even contain sexually suggestive content, from my recent movie/tv experiences there's still a lot of sex. I suppose if you weigh popularity there's an argument to be made. But does sex sell movies when you can watch an infinity of hardcore pornography with not only full blown nudity, but any variety of fantasy?
The really strange part, which seemed to me to be largely overlooked, is the ratio of violence to sex. The US in particular seems possessed by an interesting duality. One being that depictions of extreme violence are fine, but full frontal nudity is somehow verboten. And then another interesting point, the magnitude of which I'm not wholly aware of, is that we're almost certainly the porn capitol. Not in production alone, but in consumption as well, but I'm speculating on the basis of anecdotes.
This was a fun read, especially as someone who grew up with those 80s and 90s movies.
That said, and as the author touches on, the action/super hero of today is a PG-13 one. Studios need to reach the widest audience possible to make the most money, so it's a safer bet.
Sure, back in the day studios had the same imperative, but the licensed toy game was still young, so they didn't realise that maybe if they made Die Hard PG instead of R they could sell some John McClane action figures to younger viewiers.
Nowadays, that's basically the starting point; what we can we sell outside of the movie? how can we milk the franchise for as much as possible?
And that's where a lot of the sex appeal is lost. Marvel movies can't be as raunchy as a result.
Another topic that the author touched on was the way the ideal aesthetic has changed in not just our bodies but where we live or what we do in our spare time.
I agree that more and more we are optimising for artifice; fitness classes, extra curricular activities, holidays, concerts and events we attend, just to keep up an appearance online or in person. And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason.
Anyway, it's a complex and interesting topic and I'd love to read more about this perhaps from even further back (50s or 60s) if anyone has something similar to this post?
That's because western families often have no problem with watching massive amounts of violence with each other but watching a graphic sex scene with memaw and pepaw is gonna make you squirm.
Having an R-rating didn't mean a lack of toys. "Alien" came out in 1979 to an R-rating. Yet a friend at the time (we were both 10) received a 12" (30cm) xenomorph action figure for Christmas.
Hell yes they did, the Drogo sex scene would be hilariously uncomfortably outrageous if they even hinted at her being underage.
Game of Thrones was lauded for it's gritty shocking approach to sex and death, at least in the first couple seasons, but I don't think a TV show could ever touch the harshness of the world as described in books.
> Hell yes they did, the Drogo sex scene would be hilariously uncomfortably outrageous if they even hinted at her being underage.
I think it would have been outrageous for a different reason, but the show's scene was still uncomfortable for its lack of consent. One of the key points of that scene in the book was how cautious Drogo was to respect boundaries. In the show, the repetition of "no" was used as a command, as a denial of Daenerys' choices, and to state that her choices do not matter. In the book, the repetition of "no" was used as a question, not a command, in order to ask for consent despite a language barrier. This was used to draw a contrast between Daenerys in Westerosi society, where she had no choices of her own, and Daenerys in Dothraki society, where her choices were respected.
There are a lot of other children in that television show. They did not seem to shy away from implying they had sex with people for all kinds of horrific reasons.
Because it featured all of those. People would justify it as "a gritty and realistic portrayal of historical attitudes", but any historian will tell you that's a load of bull; it was basically just porn. A good partial deconstruction of GoT's shallow relationship with reality can be found here:
You're probably not totally off. GoT was special in quite a few aspects, but I would not be surprised if it was true in the general case - in fact, I think GoT was popular exactly for breaking that mold, but this gives diminishing returns.
A more general rating can also cause people to lose interest. The original Star Wars would have had a G rating, Lucas added a severed hand scene to move it to PG rating making it seem more acceptable to adult audiences.
> That said, and as the author touches on, the action/super hero of today is a PG-13 one. Studios need to reach the widest audience possible to make the most money, so it's a safer bet.
I agree, this is the most likely explanation.
It's just like pop songs which are only ever about the one thing everyone on the planet understands. At some point companies decide to target the lowest common denominator in order broaden their audience and maximize profits. The results might still be good but the fact certain qualities were lost in the process cannot be denied.
I think PG-13 had more to do with it than anything else. If you’re coming from an R rating, reaching PG might destroy your movie. PG-13 is far more reachable. No one is trying to peddle serious quantities of Mean Girls merchandise.
I feel like a lot of 80s movies just a generic sex scene or topless woman inserted as a matter of course. Because it was expected whether or not it was remotely relevant to anything.
The infamous “Boob scenes” of 70’s and 80’s cinema always stuck me as a peculiarly pre worldwide web artefact.
ie with ready access to actual, proper porn teenage lads no longer need to see a random set of norks added to films like Police Academy, Porkies or Trading Places solely for titillation[sic].
The world was different back then.
To hook up with someone you had to actually speak to a random stranger, get shot down, deal with it and workout whatever goofy thing you’d said or done before plucking the courage to have another go.
I'd guess this was always true, but to a lesser extent. Movies today are super expensive, and at least the movies discussed here are considered failures if they don't reach a huge ammount of people.
The risk was still there before, but may be not to this extent.
That is the game the studios have been playing. Larger investments, higher risk, but more calculated same-ness with high appeal to the 4 quadrants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-quadrant_movie
Netflix has turned this model upside down and releases films on its platform that are designed to target specific audience groups.
It's now a "solved problem" though. We live in the endpoint where the formula to craft an optimally revenue generating movie is not only possible but expected, and studios are designed with that expectation as a baseline.
There are certainly fewer happy accidents out there now.
I would say it's been a solved problem for all movies. We all know what sells and have for 100 years. People claiming modern movies are all sequels, prequels, and unoriginal aren't really paying attention. We've been telling the same stories for the past 2000 years with the same archetypes, skeletal plots, and emotional presentations. 4 out of 5 times I can tell you what is going to happen at any point in a given movie. All the stories have been told. Critics like to act like this or that is original, but it's really not and they know it. What makes a good movie is acting, immersiveness, humanity, and coherence.
Marvel movies are also made to export to a global audience looking for family-friendly entertainment. I'm sure some countries' censors would balk at sexual content as much as they would disagreeable political content.
They already make special cuts for china, extended editions for BD releases, director's cut, ...
Couldn't they just make another cut for more conservative audiences that omits/tones down a few scenes?
Why would they do that when not spending any resources, time and money on having such scenes is more profitable as it doesn't appear to be hurting their viewership numbers?
> Sure, back in the day studios had the same imperative, but the licensed toy game was still young, so they didn't realise that maybe if they made Die Hard PG instead of R they could sell some John McClane action figures to younger viewiers.
Merchandising! Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the real money of the movie is made!" - Yogurt, Spaceballs (1987) Heck, most of the 1980's cartoons were designed to sell toys.
> I agree that more and more we are optimizing for artifice; fitness classes, extra curricular activities, holidays, concerts and events we attend, just to keep up an appearance online or in person. And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason.
Social media did this. Before narcissism became en vogue, gym rats and party people existed and no one else really cared because they were not visible. Now they show up in your social media feed every day. They make you feel small and less complete. Maybe you should go to the gym and more clubs to keep up otherwise you aren't cool or interesting. Meanwhile its all senseless, shallow peacocking and hedonism.
This makes me think of a AAA game I was part of where, in early production, it was announced we would target an older audience to be able to stay true to what we were depicting. The art director said not to worry about sales because our actual fan base was adults, anyway.
And then, slowly over the course of the project, the targeted age rating kept decreasing because it was projected we would then sell more.
The author misses the driving force behind most of this - Chinese censorship and the money behind the Chinese market. If you're making a modern blockbuster you'll double your take if you make sure it plays well in China - which you primarily do by making it sexless, ensuring that any gay representation is minor enough to be cut, etc.
Bingo! Shooting extra scenes and more CGI for the Chinese audience is way more expensive than just settling the for the LCD of safely not offending people. I also think that's why movies like Deadpool do so well. It's a good movie but it also attracts an audience that is starving for non PG13 movies.
The History of Sexuality (French: L'Histoire de la sexualité) is a four-volume study of sexuality in the Western world by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, in which the author examines the emergence of "sexuality" as a discursive object and separate sphere of life and argues that the notion that every individual has a sexuality is a relatively recent development in Western societies.
I find that "invented here first" of western society is nearly always flawed and incorrect. Just like people's claims that "romantic love" is a relatively recent "discovery" of western society when it is readily apparent in literature from civilizations from all over the world. We're all still humans with raw emotions that haven't changed much in probably 100K years.
> And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason.
I've been hearing this sentiment lately and don't understand it. What gives one person insight into the psychology of another without an intimate relationship? How can one know another is doing something for "the wrong reasons"? It feels like a lazy stereotyping heuristic.
Actually, I do think I might understand it. It could be introverts failing to achieve full theory of mind about extroverts. Which itself might be a lazy stereotyping heuristic, but at least it has the virtue of reacting to an expressed state of mind, and not an implied one.
>Millennials and Zoomers were less sexually active than the generation before them.
The violence like street fights is also down. The way of progress. Civilization naturally tames the primary instincts by directly dampening them (observed decrease of testosterone) while simultaneously providing ample channels for redirection and sublimation.
I feel compelled to make the very-adjacent-to-the-article statement that "Starship Troopers" is not an adaptation of the novel, but at best a vacuum-forming of another script into the space of Starship Troopers.
IIRC, the original script was called something like "Bug Hunt at Outpost 9" and someone at the studio said "Hey, we can get the rights to Starship Troopers and this thing will sell better."
Is this a side effect of normalizing porn, that sexuality is more effectively partitioned?
I once had a debate in an online forum about legalizing prostitution, and most participants were supportive of it. Then I asked the same group, what about legalizing partial prostitution, like a receptionist that also has sex with the boss as part of the job description. The participants all immediately switched to revulsion at the idea and none would support it.
So why is 100% sex work less exploitative than 50% sex work? I don't think it is. But for some reason our culture finds specialist sex workers more tolerable. The same pressure seems to be bifurcating entertainment.
> But for some reason our culture finds specialist sex workers more acceptable.
Does it? You asked this on an online forum, not a national survey. I don't think our culture has a majority view on the nuance of prostitution. The most engagement I'd expect on this topic is from people who feel strongly that it shouldn't exist at all.
I think because prostitution is considered “dirty work”, must like many other dirty professions.
Receptionism is “clean work”, consequently a receptionist cannot be forced to lower himself to dirty work. — this would apply to working with human waste or various medical work as much as prostitution, I would gander.
A receptionist can be required by contract to serve drinks, play the piano, and various other things that a receptionist does not ordinarily do, but weeding through garbage, performing sex acts, or changing diapers, — that is off limits.
So why is 100% sex work less exploitative than 50% sex work?
Gotta say that often questions like this are often as just taken as ways to win rhetorical points and not thought about seriously by those who ask them. But there's actually a good answer. Yes, sex work is extremely exploitative in the sense that you selling a "big piece" of yourself. Which doesn't mean it should be illegal but it should segregated. Why?
Other kinds of work exists that extremely exploitative - dangerous, physical exhausting, possibly-humiliating and damaging. Those should be segregated also and usually are. But let's an experiment:
Receptionist + some danger deep diving
Receptionist + some heavy underground construction
Receptionist + some lion tamer work
Dangerous heavy construction for part off your rent
The reason all those are a problem is because they take a lot out of a person and if you pair them with receptionist, you'll get someone who is paid as a receptionist but often doing these things. Which screws both ordinary receptionists and people paid more to do the highly exploitative labor.
This phenomena doesn’t apply to just dangerous work. One should expect any provision in a contract to be the norm. If a contract specifies that work on Saturdays is ok, assume every Saturday that you will work. Adjust your pay requirements to reflect this. Don’t let the other party to convince you that “it’ll only be sometimes” or “just in case”. For the 50% stuff, the real answer is empower the worker and train people to sign 2 different contracts for seemingly unrelated jobs. If that screws them out of benefits, then ask for more money. At the very least, it prevents the low pay for hard labor.
Honestly those examples you provided take a lot more skill and effort than most people put into exploitive sex. The consequences of doing those examples “wrong” are far higher, too, e.g. loss of life or limb.
I think a better retort would be that people want professional jobs where their contribution is based on seemingly objective merit. If 50% of your performance is judged by one person in an entirely subjective way, i.e. their satisfaction with sex, it’s not a very well protected job for one thing. Further, the benefit of exploitive sex industries is not having to commit - to be able to switch it up. Tightly coupling your exploitive sex with job positions whose value increases directly with the amount of institutional knowledge retained would not be wise - your turnover or dissatisfaction would be too high. Finally, despite all the efforts of exploitive industries, sex is still a biological function and very personal to many (most?). There are subtle relationships involved in such intimacy despite efforts to avoid it. From a management perspective, there’s a risk to being “friends” with people that work for you, much less having sex with them. I think it would introduce too many opportunities for personal feelings interrupting optimal productivity. Put directly, the integrity of your decision-making ability on behalf of the company would likely be compromised.
That’s not remotely true for US corporate work. Companies want to protect their investments - progressive discipline policies are set up with the intention of avoiding the liabilities and wastefulness incurred by the hasty decision making of a single individual. Most companies reserve their “at-will” status, but in practice getting fired on the spot for an exception or omission (non-criminal) is pretty rare. Usually there’s a layer or two before outright termination. It took me years to appreciate the fact that my skills and knowledge made me more valuable to a company than a single screw-up could overshadow. Took a lot of stress and anxiety off my shoulders when I did.
Others have explained why certain jobs are "segregated", and how sex work could plausibly fit into that category. But even if it does not, there's nothing we can learn about sex work from the reactions described above.
Isn't it strange how most programmers think that specialist barista work is not demeaning, but would quit on the spot if they were instructed to serve morning coffee to the management?
Oh wait, it's not strange at all! Most people who work as programmmers do not want to serve coffee, and will naturally coordinate to avoid normalizing it, lest it become a recurring part of every job description. This happens even though work as a barista does not fit into the 'dangerous and therefore segregated' category. Indeed, there would be nothing unusual about a receptionist who also handles catering at events and serves coffee to management.
Or is serving coffee also "effectively partitioned" by "our culture"?
I optimize the way I put dishes in the dishwasher, I design my own closets so I'll have the best design for what I do every day (i.e. clothes I use regularly are close by) — eg. I hang my t-shirts because it's faster than folding them — etc.
There are things that can be optimized in serving coffee too!
And when you had enough, you can just start serving terrible coffee :D
I don't want to serve coffee... or apply application hotfixes (stuff more typically "administrators" or "ops")... but at my pay rate? I'd do it and question why I'm getting paid $$$$$ to do something that $ can do.
If your boss is the sort of person who would serve coffee to the team you're probably fine cowtowing in this way. Otherwise, I think you risk being tainted in their eyes. They might see the others at the meeting as superior, wrt the role of programmer (etc.); and unconsciously associate you with less technical work.
I think you risk "why are we paying $$$$$, isn't that the guy who serves the coffee" even if it's subconscious.
I think this plays a funny parallel to SNL in 15/16 with Trump and Hillary... Trump played President on the show and Hillary played a bartender. (I may be off slightly on details, but the idea is there - perception is reality).
But my attitude is more along the lines of "I'll do what it takes to get the job done" and that attitude comes from my veteran experience - there was no shortage of times where the NCOs (mid level enlisted) would get "dirty" when a job has to get done...
You can see it as "why is that person relegated to nothing duties"... I see it as "that guy is part of the team and will get the job done, no matter what".
I do get your point and can see how "office politics" can spin things that way.
If it were part of the job description, there would be nothing wrong with being asked to serve coffee to management, no matter what your position is. If it is not in the job description, then it is generally inappropriate.
Neither is wrong in the sense that it goes against any proven cosmic principle (depending on where you live it might go against national law, see below).
It's just that, as it was written above, the people who would be requested to do it "feel revulsion at the idea and none would support it". They'd coordinate against ones that tried to normalize such a policy.
Many programmers don't want to live in a world where they have to agree to serve coffee every morning if they want to make their living as programmers. And they have sufficient leverage to make sure that things won't turn out that way. Doesn't mean that they have anything against people who choose to make their living serving coffee. That's the whole point.
People have even stronger feelings about the importance of sexual service not being part of receptionist job descriptions. They felt so strongly about it that they outlawed the practice, and they make sure that it stays illegal even in countries where prostitution is otherwise allowed.
> Isn't it strange how most programmers think that specialist barista work is not demeaning, but would quit on the spot if they were instructed to serve morning coffee to the management?
It's trivial to get that exercise on its' head. If management is ok putting clauses into highly trained workers' contracts about coffee serving, as a highly trained worker, I'd demand they introduce a clause for highly-trained and highly-paid management to clean others' shoes. What's fair is fair, right?
If they can't take the same high, non-elitist ground, well, that's a clear-cut abuse, ain't it?
But to be honest, "elite" jobs classification is present across the population (ask anyone in "low-skilled" job what they think of University professors; now ask us who know how Universities run internally :)).
There is a huge difference if those "non-job" things are "communal" or written-down or coming from authority. I think most people would not have a problem taking the broom and cleaning up after someone else has left a mess at the office ("look at this mess, let me clean it up" — "hey, let me help too"). But having your "boss" order you do it is an altogether different matter.
If a company advertised for a part time programmer, part time barista, how would people react? They might think it was funny, and they probably wouldn't apply, but they wouldn't think that the very existence of such a position was unacceptable.
There isn't generally a common problem with people being coerced into programming or into serving coffee against their will. There is a common problem with people being coerced into sex.
In my eyes, the issue is that it the becomes the norm that receptionists need to have sex with their bosses and people who are only interested in the receptionist part are put in the position of needing to go into sex work or someone else getting the job they want.
Isn't this true of people who are not interested in prostitution/pornography needing to go into prostitution/pornography or getting paid less to take a job that isn't involved with that?
> why is 100% sex work less exploitative than 50% sex work?
I oppose receptionist that also has sex with the boss. Exploitation has nothing to do with that.
At least in my world view, having sex at workplace is unprofessional.
First of all, spending corporate or investor's money on paying sex workers is wrong.
Even if the boss is the sole owner of the company i.e. spending their own money, boss fucking a receptionist causes unhealthy atmosphere in the company. The company gonna have hard time attracting female candidates on other positions. Employees who have families gonna have interesting conversations with their SOs.
You seem to be suggesting there would be logistical problems with the idea of the prostitute/receptionist, but I think that even if those problems were solved it would still be a bad idea. If there was a clause in the contract that sex had to be outside the workplace and the money to pay for the sex act had to come from the entertainment accounts and the company had no problem attracting female employees or retaining workers, would you support it then? That would seem to answer all your logistical concerns.
I think the only way to solve them, pay all employees way above market. If you do that, it doesn't matter the money to pay the receptionist comes from entertainment accounts.
Another hard to solve issue is envy. A manager in the company might want to have their own receptionist.
> would you support it then?
In a hypothetical world where all parties are totally OK with a boss sleeping with a receptionist - sure, why not?
> Why is spending investor's money on sex workers any more wrong then spending it on other job perks?
Because it harms the company. This perk gonna reduce hiring pool by a factor of 2-4. I think many married people, women, and probably many lgbtq+ people wouldn’t want to work there.
> What's "unhealthy" about boss having sex with receptionist.
Sex between consensual adults is fine. The unhealthy atmosphere is caused by other people in and around the company knowing, and discussing, what’s going on.
> can't they just go poly if they don't want to risk being fired?
Gonna be hard to sell that idea to wives/husbands of these employees.
It's OK to spend investor's money on massages or fitness coaches to keep the team in top shape, but not OK to add a happy ending and blow off some steam?
Some people aren’t gonna be interested in sex at work. I would expect many women and non-binary people gonna pass. This means they’re unfairly compensated. While you can argue employer-provided or subsidized childcare is unfair too because people without children don’t benefit, I think there’s a consensus that productivity hit is too expensive for the company.
Other people have families, for them it’s even harder to solve in a good way. You can’t just pay them more money, they might find themselves in a position to choose between job and marriage, that’s not a good position to be.
Sex at work might be a great perk for single male employees, but I think issues caused for the rest of the people are worse, gonna affect bottom line in a negative way. Hiring is the worst of them, IMO.
Sex work and pugilism I think can be strongly equated. Both involve using ones body and adult consent. One for sex, the other for violence.
We don't outlaw boxing or MMA. But we put regulations on it. We shut down illegal basement fights. And we hope people going into it aren't coerced and have recourse if something goes wrong. We accept that if an adult wants to get punched in the face for money that's something society can accommodate with reasonable expectations.
But there's no world where we would see a boss getting in the ring with his employees to fight for money as something acceptable.
I don't think that's a perfect analogy because the worker can win in boxing in a way that they can't as a prostitute and there is likely far less of an appetite for compelling your workers to fight you than there is for compelling your workers to have sex with you.
I agree we shouldn't normalize employer/employee boxing matches (although I'd be willing to participate in some instances...) but it seems a lot less consequential a choice as legalizing the hybrid prostitute role.
I think people are confusing the notion of being a secretary and having sex with your boss with the idea that it is inherently wrong for superiors to use their workplace capital to exploit those who work under them. It is completely correct that the latter idea is exploitative; however, if a woman is a secretary and is also arranged to have sex with her boss via her job description, and she consents to this when accepting the job offer with full understanding of what her job entails -in effect being a fifty fifty secretary sex worker- then there is nothing wrong with this at all, quite self evidently. It would be consensual and in writing. If she is not coerced into the job, it is not exploitative.
I get what you're saying and think that's a pretty reasonable view. But why do we see having to use your brain to earn a living, or use your muscles to earn a living as any less exploitative? Why is any job ethical unless someone can choose to have no job and be fairly comfortable? Either way, you're essentially forced to do something you'd otherwise not do.
Depends entirely on how much you're paying now doesn't it.
But that wasn't the condition that the OP said made him comfortable. He said he'd be okay with legal sex work only as long as the person could otherwise live a life of comfort without the need to work. He didn't say he'd be okay with legal sex work as long as the person could have chosen to carry a bag instead.
Well they're pretty identical in effort, so the same - you apparently consider them to be entirely the same class of work with no moral/ethical difference.
Lifting a pen to write a cheque for 10,000 is identical in effort to doing the same thing to write a cheque for 10. Physical effort is not the only criteria we use to assign value. I don't believe that it's ethical to enforce my moral/ethical beliefs on other consenting adults.
Buying the time of a Nasa engineer and buying the time of a day labourer are different classes of activity. Just because it costs more for one than the other does not change the ethics of the situation.
You feel differently about someone charging for sex than someone charging to use their brain or their brawn, but that does not mean that everyone feels the same way. Why should your feeling rule the day and be enforced on adults who feel differently about it? Sounds like the church of old.
My initial post in this thread was about the legality of consenting adults engaging in whatever activities they both agree to. I tried to highlight the distinction being made and think it has a lot to do with slightly prudish notions of sexuality and frankly a notion that men and especially women aren't capable enough to make the correct choice for themselves.
I’m not sure I can describe to you why I feel this way in logical terms. Perhaps it’s just cultural but I know I, and the vast majority of the population finds mental and physical work far less undesirable/bad than sexual.
Yes, that all makes sense. Will just note that there was a time not so long ago when just as large a majority of people thought homosexuality was a horrible abomination, or worse.
Attitudes change and in my view it's time to stop being so emotionally negative toward sexuality and the diverse choices made among consenting adults.
I think there is something very wrong with that requirement. In the name of sexual liberation you would make sexual wage slavery common. In a world where this is normal or acceptable corporate lawyers and HR departments may write in such clauses into employment contracts just to cut down on the number of sexual harassment cases and issues.
The reason why “50%” sex work shouldn’t be legal is because job descriptions change over time so it could easily be the case that every attractive women with a male boss suddenly has to have sex with them or be fired for not completing their job description. Sure, a lot of women can quit, but exploitation already happens now when it is illegal so if the law was on the exploiters side things would only get worse.
I disagree, a world where any job can be coerced into being a sex job is a worse world over all. People don’t generally get away with coercing women who are researching astrophysics into sex these days, your idea would make that legal and thus more common.
Is it the exploitation or is it the idea of it being a normalised part of workplace culture?
I'm in favour of fully legalised prostitution, but I don't want to be personally exposed to it in any capacity. I want the workplace to be about work. I don't want my money wasted arresting people for having sex.
No ones bought it up but to me it seems an issue of of coercion and consent. Even if prostitution was 100% legal it should absolutely be up to the prostitute on a case by case basis when, where, who and how they had paid sex. On that basis your boss who inherently has power over you being able to ask for sex is to close to exploitation and easy to see how it can be abused. We should note this abuse is already all too common in non-sex roles.
I also think this applies to full time sex worker positions if there was an “and you’ve got to fuck your boss” contract clause.
That's a very good point: basically, it's easy to support sexual work as "contractor work", where the "working party" can choose who they work with, without any long-term commitment (or at least, simple way to break off the contract).
An employment contract is significantly different in that employer gets to decide who the work is done for by the employee.
The same protections should be extended to full time employment as well. In the same way your boss cannot compel you to do something dangerous and there are standards around safety and workplace rules.
This is no brainer. If a job description involves having sex, then people who don't want to have sex will be forced to do so which violates basic human right. On the other hand having sex with boss or any one with consent should not be prohibited legally.
The argument can be applied to the number of working hours in a week or minimum wages. Exactly this is the problem. There won't be any jobs for people who don't want to have sex as part of the job
This is an anecdote from my student life. One of my colleagues told me how all the girls in the class (including her) are going out of their mind for the chubby, average looking teaching assistant and how he's "very sexy". He wasn't even particularly nerdy, nor well-dressed, humorous or well-spoken (since those might be quirky or well-regarded behaviours that can be considered "sexy" too): to me, he was decidedly average in any way I'd look at him. Nothing wrong with girls liking him, it was just curious to hear him being called "very sexy"!
Similarly, male students were going crazy about female teaching assistants who were admittedly very average looking, and didn't have much going for them otherwise either.
Thus, I've always interpreted that to be that "position of power" makes for an unreasonable judgement (of both brain and heart :), but you are free to make of that what you will.
At university, my then-girlfriend confessed that she had had sexual fantasies about her tutor, an unremarkable-looking white-haired man in his mid-fifties at the time.
Some of my university professors and assistants were too nerdy or decrepit to be sexy, but most were smart, interesting people that students listened to attentively for hours and found attractive beyond their moderately plain appearance. There were several couples (and triangles) among faculty, evidence that they made a strong impression on each other too.
I wasn't at all focusing on appearance: thus my mention of "decidedly average in any way I'd look at him" (this includes how smart they appeared to be). Your professors/assistants were obviously "well spoken" if they could keep their students' attention for hours, and I had such professors/assistants too.
I think the answer to it might be in assigning some unscientific statistics to the world.
Starting here: perhaps 5% of people are psychologically capable of sex work. The reason behind legalizing (or decriminalizing) sex work is to maximize the liberty of, and reduce the harm to, this 5%.
Concurrently we must account for the 95%.
If we were to normalize sex work in the context other professions, then the volume of jobs requiring sex would quickly outpace the number of people who would choose that profession in lieu of economic necessity, and so you will have people be sexually exploited. Perhaps the free market will solve this in the long term but in the mean time you’ll have many a hurt persons.
So basically the whole thing is a compromise based on what we believe about the economic incentives and workforce, aiming to please multiple outlooks.
Although the “contractor” point another poster made is maybe more compelling.
> When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content : John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?
None of those were major studio action blockbusters (Terminator, one might mistake for that because of the resulting franchise, but it was an indie film that hit it big; all the rest are out-of-genre.)
So, if those are really your comparisons, the problem may be that you are comparing fundamentally different kinds of movies. The description of “even when they have sex no one is horny” seems to be pretty typical, over a long time window, of action blockbusters. Horniness is big in comedy, romance, and erotic subgenres of other genres, but it's not big in action (though non-blockbusters might include it because they tend to have more freedom to depart from genre rules.)
No need to go to 1934 for that, just look at David Bowie. His teeth were crooked until he got them fixed in his 50s (and supposedly ruined his vocal signature). Or even more recently, Hugh Grant's teeth were pretty bad in 4 Weddings... and Notting Hill.
The innuendo is pretty strong and the characters are mostly terrible people and the plot pretty dark.
But also very witty, fast paced, and funny. Some really interesting shots, too, with moving and panning cameras, or things happening in both foreground and background.
Maybe it’s just me, but I roll my eyes at anything sexual in TV and movies. They’re usually completely unnecessary to the storyline, and almost feels like a quota (sex scene, check). Even The Simpsons throws in unnecessary sexual plots, and every time I see them, I can’t understand why they added it in.
It's a critical element of the human experience. But I agree the hamfisted non-dynamic insertion of sex is tasteless. Of course sex isn't necessarily a rational behavior all things considered, so spontaneity and hamfisting is almost vaguely appropriate by that virtue.
Yeah been feeling the same lately. That "obligatory" topless shower scene, man, just drop it. If I want to see tits I know where to go.
Showing a couple bonding is fine, but it adds nothing knowing they did it doggy style.
Nudity is fine if it adds something. But too much feels like a checkbox being ticked off.
Most recently I recall being really pleased watching Greenland that they didn't have one of those typical scenes. I was so expecting it, and it was so refreshing that it wasn't included.
I keep up with the diet and fitness regimen not because of the hollywood ideal body, which I gave up on decades ago, but because I'm entering the years when cognitive decline starts. Diet and fitness are crucial to staving that off.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 438 ms ] threadhttps://web.archive.org/web/20210215153656/https://bloodknif...
An interesting diversion for sure.
This stresses me out as a young and not sexually active millennial. What do we do as a society to improve some of these trends? Do we want to? What do I do as an individual to change my individual situation?
We’ll sacrifice bad guys to the volcano gods for awhile, then the bubble will pop, the trend will fade and women (in the media) will be thirsting for men who aren’t wusses.
If we built our economies on the expectation of continued population growth, then that just means there was a MASSIVE lack of forethought. But that doesn't mean the solution is to start pumping out more kids. Instead we adapt how these structures work to accommodate the flat or lessened population numbers.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/econom...
The total fertility rate for North America is 1.7 [1]. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate for Sub-Saharan Africa is 4.7 [2]. I know the utopian liberal vision is "we're all created equal," but it simply is not true with the scientific consensus being that IQ is 50-70% heritable [3]. The brutal fact is that some people have a higher intellectual (and productive) potential than others. Rather than look at the facts, we have continued down this path of denial and as a result millions of people are suffering needlessly [8]. The movie Idiocracy is starting to look more like a tutorial instead of a humorous warning.
"Let the children starve, maybe a few of them could become rocket scientists with the help of Affirmative Action, depending on how they fall on the bell curve. At least then we wouldn't have to give up our liberal free-market utopia. At least then we wouldn't have to admit... we're not born equal."
I'm sure you're probably appalled at the possible solutions to this, "eugenics" is the triggering word. Genuinely ask yourself, what do you think we have now? We have a global system, thanks to Western foreign aid, Universities, corporations, and Hollywood, flat-out incentivizing the least productive, least conscientious, least innovative people on the planet to continually reproduce at a higher rate than the most productive, most empathetic, most innovative people. Do you want your grandchildren to exist in a world where they're severely outnumbered by parasites?
I do not, and neither does China. While the US imports millions of low-wage workers, China's net migration rate was negative for the past 70 years [9]. They send their children to US universities to learn from the world's most fashionable and "progressive" professors, while spying on them [10]. You recommend "extending this trend [of fashionably ending our genetic lines] to demographics and countries it hasn't reached yet" while China encourages parents to have 2 children [11]. The US media loves discussing reparations [12] for slavery, while China colonizes Africa [13].
I just don't understand, how can a place so interested in growth, innovation, and future-oriented thinking be so quiet about your society committing suicide around you? Is Twitter going to save us from brain-draining our own population?
[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
[2]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
[4]: https://redd.it/lzw82g
[5]: dysrend ↗ >IQ
That's not relevant. There are no controls for black IQ because they almost uniformally exist at a socioeconomic strata beneath the average white. The concentration of the majority of the African-descended US population is in economically depressed areas. The culture is heavily controlled by white influence, and while it's not necessarily intended to undermine their image it certainly doesn't help it. Lil Wayne is not a good role model, Lil Wayne is not good PR he is a poor emissary to represent the majority of the black population. So what do we have as a product? We've got a population that is at a disproportionate disadvantage because their image has been smeared, because they grew up in the wrong cities, and they had bad role models elected for them. And there's people who break the mold despite that. astrange ↗ > I know the utopian liberal vision is "we're all created equal," but it simply is not true with the scientific consensus being that IQ is 50-70% heritable [3]. hntrader ↗
Wrong. There are twin studies that establish this. astrange ↗ How'd you get those twins to be born to mothers in different places and to have different prenatal nutrition and epigenetics? hntrader ↗ If you meant unborn children or fetuses you should've said that, because the most obvious interpretation of your original words is that you meant postnatal children. That is typically how the word "Child" is defined: "A person between birth and puberty"[1] - not a person before birth. astrange ↗ All children start off as fetuses and inherit things that affected them before they were children. hntrader ↗ > All children start off as fetuses and inherit things rhfkfld ↗ Heritable doesn't imply genetic determinism. It's not a strong claim, it's just not what that word means hntrader ↗ Of course not, this is a strawman. I was disputing the positive claim that it isn't genetic, I was not claiming that heritability implies genetic determinism. rhfkfld ↗ Twin studies are bull. Twins don't even have the same genome hntrader ↗ Irrelevant (because the assignment of twins to particular environments is mostly blinded to mutation differences) and pedantic (because the differences are trivial). rhfkfld ↗ Wrong, and wrong. Keep pace with the literature. Differences can manifest as early as embryogenesis and have far reaching outcomes, e.g. there have been reports of different covid severity outcomes within a twin pair. hntrader ↗ As I said, it's irrelevant since assignment is mostly random at birth. The law of large numbers takes care of trivial differences since those differences are largely randomized. randycupertino ↗ Most childless couples I know feel it's unethical to have children with impending environmental collapse. Why would you want to bring children into the world with global warming, mass climate migration and other horrific things likely to happen within their lifetimes? lstodd ↗ > Why would you want to bring children into the world with global warming, mass climate migration and other horrific things likely to happen within their lifetimes? gerbilly ↗ > If you want to solve the problem, children are ones who can do it lstodd ↗ What baffles me since I first studied ecology in 1990-s and to this day is this inexplicable divide in certain someones' minds between "us" and "earth". refurb ↗ You may want to expand your circle if that’s “most” of the childless couples you know. JMTQp8lwXL ↗ I'm struggling to understand the argument here. 127 ↗ It's a form of laziness, the most common of human behaviors. Deny, avoid, delay, until you're absolutely forced to do what is uncomfortable or painful.
And since you can't grow a baby in a vacuum, the data is inexorably tainted. Not to mention that it decorrelates once you move out of the range of people with serious cognitive deficits, at least in terms of monetary success, with outliers showing 140IQ and $30k income per annum. And in terms of productivity there's too many arguments to be made to even begin considering how lackluster that argument is. Like productivity being tied to income, and that income isn't correlated with IQ, thus IQ can't be determined to have a correlation with productivity, right?
>liberal free-market utopia We're a psuedo-fascist democracy. Since the first time the government elected to choose a company to even acknowledge we departed from the liberal ideal. Corporations being people? Big fascist move there. But yeah, you keep laboring under that impression.
>growth, innovation, future-oriented Maybe we've figured out, collectively, that shit is fucked. That the finite world can't provide each generation consecutively with the same allotment of resources and the tangible decline in quality of life that we're already suffering is enough to push most everyone out of the reproduction cycle, voluntarily or not. Maybe people are (literally) sick from the constant goading we receive from our "culture" which is little more than emotionally appealing marketing in the vast majority of cases. It's a dissatisfying and vacuous sphere of garbage.
To the point of innovation, we're hilariously stagnant in every aspect. Always have been.
Future orientation is what allowed the communist revolution to justify the killing of millions. Future orientation is what the Nazi party used to justify their actions. We need to look to the now.
"heritable" does not mean "genetic", please stop reading fake science and slatestarcodex comments. Children exist in the same environment and have the same nutrition as their parents.
Besides that, most published scientific results are false, so why are you believing anything about IQ when you haven't personally sat the people you're claiming are inferior down and had them take a test?
But I get it, you are only pro-science when you happen to agree with the conclusions already.
Nevertheless, what you cited and attacked is uncontroversial. IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or some combination. You then turned such a scientifically uncontroversial statement into an emotional straw-man attack.
[1] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Child
> IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or some combination.
Yes, and I said it wasn't genetic. A "heritable" effect can only last one generation - all you have to do is invest in lead abatement.
In fact, even if it is genetic it can still be treated. Phenylketonurics have a "genetic condition that reduces intelligence" that affects them when they drink Coke, and the treatment is to not do that.
People who discuss this in SSC and marginalrevolution comments don't care about this - what they want is to have secret knowledge that society won't acknowledge that says they're morally superior to Mexicans so they can complain about immigration.
Right, but you said "Children exist in the same environment", which is present-tense. If you said "Children existed in the same environment", then it would've come across as you intended.
> I said it wasn't genetic
Source/rationale? That's a rather strong claim.
> even if it is genetic it can still be treated.
Potentially correct, but it doesn't mean it can be treated well given current knowledge. There's lots of genetic problems where our treatments currently suck, and you can't claim to know when/if those treatments will get better for some specific genetic problem.
> People who discuss this in SSC and marginalrevolution comments don't care about this
Who would argue against lead abatement resulting in higher IQ levels? Who would argue that prenatal nutrition isn't part of the picture? I mean sure, you can find one nutjob in the comments section anywhere. But that's hardly an argument against anything.
Hell, you do know that the cells in your own body don't all have the same genome, right?
Because not bringing them in is defeatism. Suicide in fact.
If you want to solve the problem, children are ones who can do it, and your task is to prepare them to do it.
If you flunk from this, you are the reason the world fails.
Yeah, but maybe not human children.
If anything we need more non human children on this planet, we are attempting to fish the oceans dry, there's less than 10% of old growth forests still in North America.
Almost every ecosystem on earth is severely degraded due to human activity. If aliens came to visit they might logically assume that humans are at war with nature.
We are living in a slow moving apocalypse and we don't even recognise that fact because we think that this is normal.
There is no such thing. We are the one, the unity. There is no border, no difference between "ecosystems" and "us". The whole biosphere is a single, very complex, but undivisable system. Get rid of any tiny single part, like a single human being and it responds.
In this light, I see the notions like childfree or extinction rebellion as cancer. People doing this do not even attempt to understand the real consequences of their actions.
And why would you want to bring children into the world? Because there is no guarantee those things will happen.
What if someone decided not to have children in the 1960’s because the Cold War was going to result in nuclear annihilation? They and their non-existent children missed out on decades of peace and prosperity.
> Every day I see attractive, intelligent, productive, highly empathetic couples justifying their decision to not have children ... The total fertility rate for North America is 1.7 [1]. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate for Sub-Saharan Africa is 4.7 [2].
HN requires I give the best interpretation here. It sounds like there's an observation bias: you see prime individuals not reproducing, but what about elsewhere? It certainly seems possible the same cohort in Saharan Africa are not making the same choice, given the higher birth rate.
> ...IQ is 50-70% heritable.
Alright, but IQ doesn't translate to attractiveness or productivity. My school's valedictorian went on to work an IT Support job. Should we be saddened if they don't reproduce?
Lastly, there are plenty of poor, intelligent people. Your comment sets up this narrative that intelligence is split by continent, and humanity will be worse off, since the smart continent has a lower reproductive rate. The facts don't support that. Most people alive today are the progeny of serfs of the Middle Ages. They were poor, but certainly not all were unintelligent.
I do not want to participate in some mating ritual that involves two persons lying to each other in order to just relieve some sexual tension. In Romania I do not feel that generally girls are ok with no strings attached sex without this dishonest dance and even so, I couldn't probably get as attractive a girl as an escort. Maybe I could by investing a lot more time than I'm comfortable with just to satisfy a basic urge... but for 100$ I can have sex with girls of the same level of say Emma Stone that really know what they're doing.
So if I make even 25$/h that's 4h of work for 1 sex session, which will take place entirely when I feel the desire for it. To find a similar (looking) girl that will have sex "for free" will probably take more than 10x more time and even then the actual sex might not be as good. Even if it is as good it will happen when the stars align and we both want it at the same time.
I have heard my share of sad stories from them and I don't revisit those. Regardless of my participation or not in this trade I know the trade will go on, there will always be men who seek this kind of service so I appease my conscience by treating the girls well and not revisiting those that don't seem to genuinely enjoy my company.
I simply can not believe one can act so well in front of me and on the side be forced to do this. I mean moaning is simple to fake but the 30 min of conversation of the 1h I pay for? Keeping a cheerful vibe while opressed is hard to do.
Millions of retail workers would disagree. And acting isn't even the oldest profession.
You underestimate how horny some men are. One girl was telling me how it was 15 years ago.. men would line up in front of the apt building, go in, get a blowjob and a quick fuck for like 20min door-to-door, pay 25$ and leave. I don't know if she in particular didn't perform "girlfriend experience" type work or that's how they mostly were but trust me, there are more men who don't care about how happy the girl is and don't give a crap about her being cheerful or not.
Men tend to make more money than women. If a woman has a child or children to care for, sex work or exotic dancing etc al may be her only really viable option.
I will add that like with any industry, insiders will know some tricks and may have been coached on how to handle certain things. In the book Mayflower Madame, the escorts were explicitly told to act excited if a guy splurged at dinner and bought an entire bottle of champagne and not act like this was an everyday occurrence for them even though it might be the second or third time that day.
Honestly I don't even know if there are any escorts like that in Romania. The few people that could afford them are relatively well known and going to dinner in an expensive restaurant would be seen by basically everybody which I assume is not desired by men of high status. They might book them at the hotel though and honestly for 1000$ a night or more I assume it is easy to act.
However I pay 70$-100$, you think a girl would care enough to act for such little money? Even though it's Romania, most people that make money easily learn to not give a crap about money and are not generally motivated by money.
Edit: also, I never tip, I only pay the advertised price.
A number of people on the leader board are millionaires. I have reason to believe their participation on HN is part of what makes them wealthy.
I was homeless for nearly six years and remain dirt poor and continue to get a lot of guff any time I try to talk about that, no matter the reason and no matter the framing.
I have six years of college. Etc.
While I was homeless, men sometimes offered me cash to sleep with them based solely on my looks and obvious poverty. But trying to network with business professionals on a platform that literally helps a lot of people become quite wealthy has done relatively little for my bottom line and I have been repeatedly told "Go get a real job" and this kind of crap.
You said you are paying four times your hourly wage and I imagine that $25/hour is fairly good money for Romania. It would be decent pay in the US where people are trying to advocate for a minimum wage of $15/hour.
I don't know what her cut is out of what you pay and I don't know how much of her time you are getting, but for a lot of women, that would be vastly better pay than they have any hope of making any other way and they will put up with it simply because the alternatives amount to starving to death and may be just as objectionable as sex work.
Lots of low paying jobs are unpleasant work, like cleaning toilets. Lots of low paying jobs subject you to abusive bosses and abusive customers. It's common knowledge that wait staff at restaurants are typically treated terribly.
> While I was homeless, men sometimes offered me cash to sleep with them based solely on my looks and obvious poverty.
The way I find girls is through a community forum which practices reviews. I very rarely visit a "new" girl which doesn't have good reviews from reputable members so while I am sorry to hear your experience, I have never offered money to a girl for sex out of the blue or because I felt she was vulnerable. I've only ever been to girls that explicitly advertise such services.
> Lots of low paying jobs are unpleasant work, like cleaning toilets. Lots of low paying jobs subject you to abusive bosses and abusive customers. It's common knowledge that wait staff at restaurants are typically treated terribly.
You assume I am going to girls that are generally treated terribly, have a pimp that takes all their money and are happy to act cheerful for 100$ per hour having sex with 20+ different men per week.
There's no need for her to act, there's plenty of demand for warm bodies without any need for good social skills. And I believe generally those girls that don't offer good GFE are probably forced into it. That would probably even be the majority of the market. I don't know, I haven't done any field research on this but I assume I only visit like 1-2% of girls and am very rarely dissapointed with a new girl because it's hard to fake honest signals.
However it is not hard to make a decent living as an independent girl. The good ones generally work from 10am to 22pm at most. They take good care of themselves, screen clients and build up private lists where they won't even take new clients. If she just wants to live a basic good life she could take 5 regular clients 2-3 times per month and make 1000-2000$ easily working at most 20h per month. That money could well pay for eating only takeout and have a very nice appartment in Bucharest.
I'm not making any of the assumptions you accuse me of. I'm just trying to say that the world of work and opportunities available to women are different than for men, so their logic for why they make certain choices may not be what a man would expect based on how he thinks about his choices in relation to how to earn a living.
I'm medically handicapped and for that reason I have been celibate for nearly 16 years. If I thought I could successfully become a sex worker or exotic dancer and make good money for a while to pay off my debts and pay cash for a house, I would likely do that. I have no moral objection to sex work and I've thought a great deal about it and a lot of marriages are thinly veiled sex-for-money deals, in essence.
I would rather get paid by the hour for sex than be some man's property pretending we "love" each other when we don't. I'm crystal clear on that detail.
I'm sorry if you feel uncomfortable with the idea that maybe some of these women don't really want to be doing this kind of work and feel like it's a big moral issue if they don't. But the simple reality is that, say, in Hollywood, women need to look good and be sexy to become successful. In contrast, men are deemed to be sexually attractive because they are successful.
When push comes to shove, women are expected to use their sexuality to some degree to open doors career-wise in a way men are generally not expected to do. This is rampant across multiple industries and it's something people mostly don't want to talk about and it's part of why you see so much sexual harassment of women on the job, etc.
I haven't caved to the pressure to go that route because I have a bigger personal demon looming over me that does such terrible things to a person it is classified as a dread disease.
But trying to get into that probably isn't clarifying anything. It's probably just opening up a giant can of worms pointlessly.
I think I will stop here, whether it served to clarify anything or not. Sometimes the least worst action is just "stop digging your grave deeper."
You have a good day.
> When push comes to shove, women are expected to use their sexuality to some degree to open doors career-wise in a way men are generally not expected to do
Men are generally not epected to use their sexuality because it doesn't work. If it worked I'm sure some % of men would use it. Proof : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165800
I don't believe women are expected to use their sexuality. Women just have that tool available to them and some will choose to use it. Some men will only hire or promote those kinds of women and honestly I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, we could debate this for hours.
I absolutely agree that if they could, there are men who would.
I don't agree that women are not expected to use their sexuality. I'm not interested in debating it.
I've stated my opinion. Some folks here will recognize my handle and have some idea of who I am and yadda and others won't. It is inevitable that different people will perceive my opinions differently depending on how much and what they know about me (and no doubt other factors as well).
You have a good day.
Funniest thing I’ve read today. Is that a normal thing you do? Just online or for the panhandler at the corner via mobile? How do you determine the saving throw? So many Q’s..
> I believe I have enough experience to tell if a girl is enjoying her time with me
Do consider that it is in the service provider’s interest to make you think this. When you are paying money for experience, you can’t use how the experience makes you feel to evaluate how the employees feel about it.
> If a girl gives signs that she doesn't enjoy [it, I] never visit her again.
Can’t you see how in this situation it would be in the sex worker’s interest to give signs she enjoys your thing? If she does not, she looses a customer.
I’m not saying that prostitution is wrong or that some sex workers don’t enjoy they job. It just might be the only realistic option for someone.
Some things that a country could do so that people have the option to not be a prostitute:
* food and housing for people who need it
* equal pay and career opportunity for men and women
* drug treatment programs that don’t put people in jail for addiction
See “Revolting Prostitutes” for more details
> Can’t you see how in this situation it would be in the sex worker’s interest to give signs she enjoys your thing? If she does not, she looses a customer.
You are speaking from theory and books. I speak from experience, I have been to a lot of girls that will tell you right quick that you are going too hard, won't like any position you want and are generally openly obnoxious to you so that you will leave as fast as possible. Usually you will find these after 23pm with low prices. I could write a small book on all types of sex workers I've encountered and very few of them are actually pleasant to be around. Now is that because they select their own customers just as the customers select them or because they're acting we will never know.
> It just might be the only realistic option for someone.
You are victimizing them because you haven't met them. I have yet to find a girl that is actually grateful as you would expect someone to be when they earn in 30 min what others work a whole day for. They could find a corporate job that easily pays 600-700 euros, live with a roommate and cook their own food like most other girls in Bucharest or have sex for 2h per day and make 4 times that. 99% of them, even the ones I carefully select are arrogant and spend money like there's no tomorrow living an expensive lifestyle. Can't really blame them because I am basically doing the same thing but to suggest these are hidden victims is really showing your lack of inexperience.
I'm not saying there aren't victims of abuse, what I'm saying is that it is hard to hide such abuse.
I just believe that mouthwash and soap works. Been doing this for 5-6 years now and it only gets better as I get better at treating them better, being more relaxed which makes them more relaxed etc.
> Why is just jacking off not a better option than this?
Why are you watching videos in 720p+ instead of using magazines? It's just a higher resolution experience.
I see a problem developing though where having so easily "hooked-up" with good looking women for money anywhere I am, even if I do get married at some point, I fear my urge to try someone new (and hence cheat on my partner) will be pretty strong after a while just because it's so easy and convenient to do so. I don't have a solution for this and this is also the reason I'm not able to get myself to commit to a serious relationship.
Not sure if you've thought of this or experienced this issue.
I am the kind of person that will stick with anything if I love it. Even with escorts if I find one that I really like and she really stands out I will go see her exclusively until things change. I won't feel the need for variety just for the sake of it but I know not everyone feels this way.
I haven't tried this but there are people out there that build "harems" while being honest about it. If you truly can't live without variety and are confident in yourself you will find a girl that wants an open relationship or maybe you can find someone bisexual that can enjoy variety with you.
I think escorts are safer than casual sex, their job is at stake.
> FSWs were almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with chlamydia, and three times more likely to be diagnosed with gonorrhoea than other female attendees, adjusting for demographic factors.
https://sti.bmj.com/content/90/4/344
The contamination is unlikely to come from raw food itself, chefs at restaurants are buying from the same retail channels as the rest of the people.
The source of contamination can be improper storage or handling, kitchen equipment, dishes and cutlery, people doing all the above. All these things are reused in restaurants.
> twice as likely to be diagnosed with chlamydia
See the table on page 347. For chlamydia, "period prevalence" figure is 10.1% for sex workers, 8.5% for other female attendees. That's 20% difference, not twice as likely.
Compensating for demographics factors is hard. You can surely compensate for the factor "young", can probably compensate for the factor "single", but how would you compensate for the factor "promiscuous", i.e. likely to go out and have casual sex? Because that's the demographic group people gonna sleep with, instead of sex workers.
Why do we need to? The data shows that sex, drug use, etc., actually peaked with baby boomers. They were peak frivolity. It’s only because they created all the media for decades that we think those were good things. Millennials are a more sober and serious generation for a more sober and serious time. No need to regress.
I mean, the US did embark on a multi-decade war. But is our time fundamentally more serious than what the Boomers went through?
Younger generations have to work 10X as hard for a chance at that kind of middle class lifestyle.
When it comes to where you live it's poor job prospects or unaffordable real estate: pick one. Everything goes up but wages. If you're not in the "professional class" by 30-40 years old you're in real trouble. There's an alternate path that involves living in low cost of living places and working your ass off while you live below your means, but that's not really easier just different.
Younger generations, especially those younger than GenX, know that you just can't fuck around... literally or metaphorically. The party's over.
Edit: Someone will comment that this was only true for white boomers. You're right. Now it's true for nobody.
> At their peak in 1980 illegal drugs accounted for 5 % of total personal consumption expenditure in US. An astonishing figure corroborated by contemporary estimates that cocaine sales peaked at $35bn in 1980. Rachel Soloveichik @BEA_News
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-cocaine-prices-change-201...
Thinking about it more, I guess you need to clarify if a boomers today use more drugs or was drug use higher in the 60s,70s,80s then in 00s and 10s. Other stuff I searched suggested boomers in the 10s are hit hard by opioids
Drugs are increasingly unkind to the bod the older you get, so I’d imagine it’s the latter.
For the record, I paid about 125/g in the mid nineties. I’m sure someone’s made a chart of this somewhere. I remember High Times magazine or Cannabis Culture used to have a spot price table in most issues based on numbers submitted by their readership. Would make an interesting graph. I don’t tend to trust LE valuations of drug prices because their incentivized to inflate them on capture and deflate them on selling risk.
I don't really know how to change whole cultures though, other than to change the propaganda (messaging) or improve the support structures so people feel safe enough to experiment and have fun with life.
The other excuses don't really resonate with me. Roommates? We were having plenty of sex in college, text your roommate to go away for a bit. Parents? Idk I just used my car or wait for them to go to sleep. 17 - to early 20s just do what you can. I don't get the broke thing, college bars are cheap, or we just went to parks or whatever.
Last time I had a girlfriend I'd come off a 2 year spree of virtual homelessness and poverty. I was living with my parents (mom and dad, both separated) transiently. I was dirt poor, drugs problem, losing jobs etc... She was in college studying to become a nurse. It wasn't one of those asymmetrical relationships either. She wasn't on the goon squad.
Now that I have money, my own place, some direction and intention in my life... In most context where I have exposure there's some sort of hazard. Like trying to do anything at work when there might be a signal there seems like a terrible idea. Way too much potential for bad shit. At college, well shit I don't know if I'd be okay with dating anybody younger than 21, or a 21 year old for that matter (which is the rough majority). Even if we assume the age floor was 28 I still wouldn't dare approach anybody without evident interest, and networking at school is impossible because I'm swamped with work and work. I can get conversations started on Tinder, but they burn out fast and hard, no effort on the other end. I get a lot of matches, but I've only managed to finagle 2 dates out of what has to be hundreds of matches. I can't say how many I've actually opened, the odds look like shit regardless. Doesn't help that I live in an ultra-conservative rural cesspool where there's like... .5 degrees of separation.
And then what are you to take from all the man-bashing shit? All the vitriolic speech against white males? And so on and so forth.
I'll go to pornhub, thanks.
If you were an alpha male you'd never be paying attention to this in the first place. This is only a concern if you're reading memes spread by neurotic people on the internet.
I don't mean to suggest that this is the only reason, I just think it contributes.
Last month she started following a local me-too movement FB group that had women sharing about their past harassment experiences and calling out their aggressors, that ranged from total abuse of power, to sexual innuendos over IM.
Last couple of times we texted each other mostly consisted of her showing me past screenshots of chats where someone (from Tinder) would be sexually suggestive, nothing explicit, and would start to tell me how she didn't realize that she was being harassed and that she's being disgusted by them.
Changing your "not sexually active" situation will take putting yourself out there a lot, lowering your standards (you can raise them later), being open to meeting all sorts and getting rejected a lot. You'll certainly gain entertaining stories, and you'll probably meet some new friends, possibly one or more lovers and one of them may become a romantic partner if that's what you're after. Please be good to the people you meet while you're doing this. And along the way you'll develop a tolerance to rejection, which is a somewhere between life hack and superpower.
All that that may be overwhelming though. The block you quoted is riddled with social anxieties. See if that's hold you back, and if so then get a professional to help you out.
Side note, now is a good time to prepare for this change, because the pandemic has put everyone into extended isolation all at once. So there's a lot of pent up desire for connection that will be getting released over the next year.
See also https://youtu.be/9mbp0DugfCA and https://youtu.be/ZOgvWIulxho for fun.
I'm rooting for you, fellow throwaway!
Thanks for sharing those videos, even though I was able to make that physique/style/life control transformation several times (get fit -> fall into a hole -> get fit again, rinse and repeat) during my 20s, this pandemic made me fall into a rut and I'm heavily struggling to stay on the right track that makes me climb up again. These videos are were another spark of motivation to try again.
As for the "not sexually active" situation, I've noticed the feeling of frustration has become more intense and had made me more sad about it lately. As an introvert, the co-workers social circle is usually one of the main ones, but unfortunately I'm working alone because it has many more pros (own schedule -> go to gym when it's deserted, beat traffic, do errands at times where there are less waiting times, etc). Old college friends are starting to get married and be more busy, so I've been seeing them less, so less opportunity to be introduced to new people. I've tried salsa classes before the pandemic but didn't workout for that matter (couples that are very private, people that leave once the class ends, tight groups of friends). I've also tried the Tinder way, and the closest I've ended with a woman from it, she ended up losing interest when the pandemic started. Now I'm seeing someone from Tinder, and even though it will probably stay at friendship I'm taking it.
I've been seeing a therapist since a couple years ago after I had my first panic attack, since then I've been using therapy for all my issues. However, even though I've been open about my sexual frustrations, I feel like my therapist ignores it and simply tries to work on my social aspect in general. My therapist is female and I wonder if having a male therapist it would be different, I've been wanting to try but I already invested many sessions with my current therapist.
Things will get better soon.
And yes, I'd imagine that a more similarly gendered and oriented therapist would find it easier to relate to your concerns. But maybe just being direct with your current therapist would help. There may be a good reason she's redirecting you to more general social aspects, or maybe she's not trained to deal with male sexuality.
Get a new therapist. At the very least try a few sessions with someone else. Yes, try a male therapist. Your rationalization of "already invested many sessions" is that of the sunk cost fallacy. You should be so confident that you're not wasting your time in therapy that you'd never think to ask internet strangers if you should switch. The worst that could happen is you waste a few hours trying out a new therapist or two. The best that could happen is that you actually find someone who isn't dismissive of a concern that's clearly animating you, about a very important part of human existence.
Research on satisfaction differences between relationship types is illuminating
(Pandemic lockdowns of course might get in the way, but I'm speaking generally when those restrictions aren't there)
Unless you're in the top 20% or so of attractiveness.
Well, HIV/AIDS seems relatively under control compared to when I was a young man, and there’s a vaccine for HPV, so get on out there, young blood!
Aversion to anonymous or even just casual sex for my generation (X) was from diseases. That seems like less of an issue now, but maybe the education system doesn’t want to let up on the risks yet, kind of like cities keeping us doing the recycling motions even when they’re throwing it in landfills - the behaviors are deemed valuable or the institutions just haven’t caught up to reality.
Probably your biggest issue as a generation is the freely available custom porn and social media alienating people from each other - there’s a lack of need to hook up and a self-inflicted lack of opportunity. Also, sensitivities to workplace hookups are a much bigger deal than they were even 15 years ago.
We're at a point in time where our society places a lot of value in sex and romance, but it's now easy to largely forego these things and dump your time into other things you're passionate about. It seems that when these discussions about the relative celibacy of young people come up, people talk a lot about how it must be because young people are facing effectively insurmountable struggles, and mostly ignore that it's possible that it's easier to focus on things other than sex now. That possibility runs contrary to how most of us were brought up, and it's why you're asking what we should do to "improve" these trends. Have we considered that there might be nothing to fix, and that the trend doesn't need to be stopped?
The change happened over many years since the time we could get ratings only from box office numbers and the review feedback took months.
I'm actually doing something similar -- watching all of Midsomer Murders. I absolutely love the way John Nettles' Barnaby (haven't seen any with the new actor) is righteous and upstanding without becoming preachy. In particular S01E03 where his partner's homophobia is shut down. The fact that most of the horrible people are high-brow also has a nice feel to it -- very Columbo-esque.
Not always.
(mild spoiler)
The resident pathologist Dr Fleur Perkins who appears in series 20 is played by seventy year old Annette Badland, [0] who is much sterner than her predecessor (a much younger Manjinder Virk [1]).
That said, Midsomer Murders does now have a different demographic than the earlier series, which typically involved older, white eccentrics living in quaint English villages, and caricatured a rural society that is now long gone. The cast is now more likely to include Black and Asian characters in various roles as good guys, villains, innocents, suspects and guilty parties. The current Mrs Barnaby is a 50-year old woman, also a stronger character than her predecessor, who was also in her 50s when she first appeared in the series.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annette_Badland
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manjinder_Virk
But yes, European media in general is less focused on physical æsthetic perfection than I find U.S.A, Japanese, Korean, and Indian media to be; I often find a similar result in German, Swedish and Dutch television series that characters seem to look considerably more average.
Ruth Wilson is a great actress, and, in my opinion, somewhat attractive, but she's not of the "Moved to LA and looking for stardom" mould that a lot of American actors and actresses fall into.
The BBC version from the eighties had actors more in keeping, I think.
[0]https://images.app.goo.gl/8XzUfBBE9RduB6Qj7
But I'm curious - what exactly gets to Australia from Russia nowadays?
You might like https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376968/ The Return and it sequel, The Banishment https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0488905/
They are sort of 'harder' than the 'How I Ended This Summer'.
Unfortunately, 2010-s didn't deliver much.
These were also the only thing my parents watched, so it was a relief when I got to watch normal people TV and saw someone in their 20s.
Those are, depending on taste, some of the worst. And they are also old. There was a lot of good from that era, comedy and other, like fawlty towers, blake's 7 (not comedy), monty python etc. I think gp was referring to modern UK crime shows though? As in the days of dads army and are you being served, american shows also were not like in the article. Or are they showing re-runs of these shows on BBC America now?
Even back then (about 17 years ago) the titles mentioned above were equivalent to the lowest tier cable re-runs on one of those retro TV channels that thrives on being cheap.
It has the occasional conventionally attractive actor, but boy howdy, they really roughed up Richard Dormer, who plays Sam Vimes.
In contrast, every time US studios have to film an actor over 35, they blood-sacrifice a weeping marsupial to the attractiveness pantheon.
I had to laugh at this. I went on a meal replacement drink (Aussielent) for a while for all meals, and I vividly remember for the first time in my life, I dreamt of eating a juicy hamburger. It was like some oasis in a desert, and that burger was all I thought about the next day
In the decades before the Internet, cinema was one place where the average person who didn't buy dirty magazines could glimpse more skin than in everyday life. Then the Internet came along. Suddenly pornography was in everyone's home. Soon it was in everyone's pocket. Sexual desire became something you could very easily take care of, to your exact specifications, in private.
The one-size-fits-all portrayals in movies became gauche by comparison. And unnecessary. The public had infinite access to the sexual equivalent of gourmet food, so it suddenly seemed old-fashioned for the cinema to keep peddling stale bread.
Probably this also contributed to the me-too movement and the surrounding fallout over the sexualization of women in spaces where sexuality was now seen as being inappropriate. For example, the controversy over grid girls in racing.
A populace thoroughly satiated in private can afford to be puritanical in public.
Sex in media does lead to more sex real life because there's no social norm or law against not having sex and sex leads to STD and unwanted pregnancies.
Hence, there is a logic to violence in media is okay and sex in media is less ok. One has no consequences, the other does.
https://www.google.com/search?q=does+sex+in+media+lead+to+se...
But anyway, their answer was the opposite of yours. Violence in games is good because you "shouldn't do it in real life". Sex in video games is bad because you "should do it in real life". The kids currently call this "touching grass" or "getting some bitches".
Violence in media will not (or at least no one has been able to find a connection)
Secondly, I didn't sign up for catholic church, sex is not a sinfull activity limited to procreation only.
The point is only that sexual media has an arguably negative influence on society and violent media does not so it's not irrational to find violent media non-problematic and sexual media to be problematic for kids.
The 10 year old can see porn and sex has plummeted does not mean seeing more porn = less sex. The world is complicated and there are plenty of other reasons there is less sex happening (assuming there actually is less sex happening)
As just one example, many people claim the reason there is less sex is people stay home and entertain themselves with the facebook/instragram/tiktok/youtube/twitter/reddit/video-games/netflix vs go out and socialize IRL. That could easily be the major factor in decline in sexual activity even if sexual media by itself influences kids to be more promiscuous.
Action films are more purely about action; fantasy films are more purely about fantasy. There's no need to mix in sexual titillation anymore.
Separation of concerns.
It's either accepted, liked, whatever. Or not.
This is a disturbing thing if true. It seems a key feature of an oppressive society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
The idea is that keeping people occupied and diverted then you can fail as a civil leader but still maintain your control and position. The more people are satisfied (by government or business efforts or other large scale entities) the less likely they are to rebel when those entities are failing them. Even if they aren't properly satisfied, they're still made content.
Yes, that was a bit much. The Cold War produced a much more serious fitness boom, especially during the Kennedy Administration.[1] It also produced an education boom. Today, 71% of young Americans are ineligible to serve in the military.[2] Too fat, too dumb, too criminal, or too drugged. There seems to be little concern about this at political levels.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Fat_(song)
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/downloads/unfit-to-serv...
I'm betting that national healthcare will cause a fitness boom. We'll start seeing each other's poor health as tax money, and there will be more stigma for being overweight.
The Democratic Party has never been particularly concerned about taxes and debt. The Republican Party is periodically concerned about it, but mostly when they don’t control the government.
I used to think Democrats would tax and spend, and republicans would borrow and spend. It looks like both will now print money (expand the money supply) and spend.
The next few years will be an interesting test of “Modern Monetary Theory”.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/31/fac...
http://goliards.us/adelphi/deficits/index.html is more useful. It shows party control of the presidency, house, and senate and deficits each year, not just at end of term.
Looks like the ideal for deficit control is to have a democratic president and republican control of both houses of Congress. Unified government by either party leads to less constraint on spending.
This seems to be the pattern:
Republican president: spend on this!
Democratic president: spend on this!Don't see this in Canada, where tax dollars pay for it. Stigma only works if there is a majority against a minority. Most people are fat.
If you're going in just as a drone pilot, the fitness standards wouldn't be needed for anything, so presumably they expect people to still be doing something up close and physical though?
All that is lost if you can’t even join up.
If you think porn is "gourmet", you've not watched enough of it. Porn is the McDonalds of sex: repetitive, predictable, largely "safe" (with minimal care, you won't see what you don't want to see), and purposedly all-encompassing but still largely detached from the real thing.
I'm an unabashed porn consumer and I have to tell you, I yearn for anything resembling the sexual chemistry you get in good movies of old. Two people flirting and exchanging double-entendres is a billion times sexier than 99% of mainstream porn.
Porn isn't gourmet or not gourmet, it can be whatever you want it to be. And if there's enough demand (and it's legal), people will make specialized porn to serve it.
It seems like you're using something like the efficient market hypothesis without looking at the evidence.
I'm not a huge porn consumer but I've seen enough and know enough of the industry to say you're basically wrong, at least wrong as far as any "cottage industry" for porn with decent production values, acting or "sincerity" goes. The key thing is decent production value in a movie can't be created in home-grown way, it requires serious dollars. Oppositely, there are actors and there are "adult actors" and the two jobs are considered very distinct (in the way that receptionist and sex-workers are segregated and should be segregated, as mentioned on another thread).
But hey, prove me wrong. I'd love to see a counter example.
Someone solves that safely and they'll do really well imho.
Based on another commenter's suggestion that you basically want "sex in movies that aren't about sex", it only took me a few minutes of googling to find sites which seem relevant to your interests:
- r/watchitfortheplot
- mrskin.com
It seems like you want porn which feels more organic and authentic than stereotypical porn. Sure the material in these sites wasn't expressly made to be porn, but it is porn in the way its packaged by these sites and subsequently used. And it's probably better that way, because it gets you what you're looking for in this case.
There is. But like with all markets, it's more expensive and will always have less mass appeal than the lowest common denominator. That downward pressure is felt in that industry just like in all others.
[1] which are all really boring, seriously they're like four hours long and nothing happens, and that's besides the completely different set of morals and expected fetishes
Eastern-european is much better, imo.
GP wants sex scenes that happen in a movie not movie that happens for sex scenes.
I would look toward spécialisation : yes. We’re talking exclusively about super hero action movies here. And even if the idea and the article really interested me: other movies exists. Some are horny as fuck; in 2021.
The article author mentioned Disney a few times; for once I think we can’t blame the military industrial complex but a entertainment company that is obsess with being us-white-middle-class family friendly.
So again, because I’m rambly, I would personally blame cultural aplanissement because of fear of loosing markets, than porn or 9/11.
It's kind of what you describe. It's like pornhub's "home" videos idea but a 1000 times better - actually curated, personal and real. Haven't followed them recently but at the beginning they actually organised camera setups for people who wanted to be featured.
https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Rape
It's telling that the closest thing to a loving, normal relationship seems to be the incestuous brother-sister saga of Cersei and Jaime.
A $100m+ budget doesn’t have room for risks.
Sexual images produce a physiological response... you get horny.
Violent images don’t really do much, maybe revulsion. But, other than that, not much at all.
A picture of a bullet-ridden corpse will not make you want to shoot people.
A picture of a naked chick having sex, on the other hand, will elicit a desire to have sex.
Apples and oranges.
To be sure, there are many who blame the ‘violence in video games’ and the like as the cause of crime. Those people are idiots... getting a good headshot in Counter-Strike gives you the exact same kind of thrill as making a basket or a hole in one ... nobody says, “Hell yeah! Now I want to kill someone!”
But, watching porn? That’s exactly what it does... the imagery itself makes you go “Hell yeah! Now I want to fuck someone!” (Which, to most porn watchers, means fucking their hand.)
If anything, a bullet-riddled corpse should evoke sadness, not the desire to shoot more bullets into it or other things.
Maybe you meant that watching one character inflict violence on another triggers audience feelings of aggression or fear, depending on which character we empathize with. What we watch undoubtedly causes all manner of emotions: horniness, elation, shame, fear, revulsion, pride, etc.
In the 1980s parents still tagged along, so the movie couldn't be too comical...and, the kids wouldn't get the mature part anyway.
That's a very shallow view. It as much takes care of your sexual desires as fries takes care of your daily nutrition. It's great if you have no real food available and can be a fun snack if you're still hungry.
I mean, look at some of the posts here about people being disillusioned by the work, expense, and time it takes to even meet eligible people, much less hook up. Maybe the answer is in more meat-space social organizations - all those social (non-government) institutions like church, fraternal organizations, sports leagues, served to build social networks and now all of that is mostly gone for young people. So it’s meeting at work (increasingly taboo), chance encounters, bars maybe (and also often useless or horrible outcomes), or online shopping. Understandably difficult circumstances. What new drivers could compel different preferences?
And the overall fertility rate in 2020 was 1.779 births per woman as of 2020 in the US. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...
If you want to call that abortion, then go right ahead but I think you’ll be in the minority (just like people probably wouldn’t call a natural lack of implantation a miscarriage because they have literally no way of knowing that it happened... a dewer containing 100 frozen undifferentiated embryos is just not the same as an actual child, and I think most people do not act like it is). I think the vast majority of people understand a sort of gradient between conception and birth. Most people who are prolife would be uncomfortable banning the pill and most people who are nominally pro choice probably aren’t too comfortable with later-term abortions. Reality is complicated and so are people’s opinions.
So I think the challenge is a kind of selfish individualism from both the left and the right, although of different types. And let’s not even count the cost of schooling (which the right wants to burden the parents for).
Mostly no. It comes because modern hiring practices are trending toward making first time job applicants unemployable - and because under-25 incomes are less likely to come anywhere near covering minimal living expenses.
Since the 1950s, basic living has steadily become increasingly complex and decreasingly affordable. Sex is harder for six exhausted roommates under one roof.
If there was a service I could pay to censor movies for me, I would.
"Wait, There's Torture in Zootopia?: Examining the Prevalence of Torture in Popular Movies", 2019. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908
We used to have a number of them. Cleanfilms was one. Send them a DVD, they'd sanitize the content onto another disc, ruin the original and send you both.
Legacy copyright gatekeepers couldn't resist their own compulsions for control - they systematically sued CF and others out of existence.
ref:https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=554802...
ref:https://www.audioholics.com/news/studios-sue-family-friendly...
Haha. Brilliant article.
The really strange part, which seemed to me to be largely overlooked, is the ratio of violence to sex. The US in particular seems possessed by an interesting duality. One being that depictions of extreme violence are fine, but full frontal nudity is somehow verboten. And then another interesting point, the magnitude of which I'm not wholly aware of, is that we're almost certainly the porn capitol. Not in production alone, but in consumption as well, but I'm speculating on the basis of anecdotes.
What does it mean?
That said, and as the author touches on, the action/super hero of today is a PG-13 one. Studios need to reach the widest audience possible to make the most money, so it's a safer bet.
Sure, back in the day studios had the same imperative, but the licensed toy game was still young, so they didn't realise that maybe if they made Die Hard PG instead of R they could sell some John McClane action figures to younger viewiers.
Nowadays, that's basically the starting point; what we can we sell outside of the movie? how can we milk the franchise for as much as possible?
And that's where a lot of the sex appeal is lost. Marvel movies can't be as raunchy as a result.
Another topic that the author touched on was the way the ideal aesthetic has changed in not just our bodies but where we live or what we do in our spare time.
I agree that more and more we are optimising for artifice; fitness classes, extra curricular activities, holidays, concerts and events we attend, just to keep up an appearance online or in person. And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason.
Anyway, it's a complex and interesting topic and I'd love to read more about this perhaps from even further back (50s or 60s) if anyone has something similar to this post?
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Game of Thrones was lauded for it's gritty shocking approach to sex and death, at least in the first couple seasons, but I don't think a TV show could ever touch the harshness of the world as described in books.
I think it would have been outrageous for a different reason, but the show's scene was still uncomfortable for its lack of consent. One of the key points of that scene in the book was how cautious Drogo was to respect boundaries. In the show, the repetition of "no" was used as a command, as a denial of Daenerys' choices, and to state that her choices do not matter. In the book, the repetition of "no" was used as a question, not a command, in order to ask for consent despite a language barrier. This was used to draw a contrast between Daenerys in Westerosi society, where she had no choices of her own, and Daenerys in Dothraki society, where her choices were respected.
https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...
I still think Disney is the culprit. ( vs HBO on TV, but still, I would not be surprised if a happy meal with GoT theme existed )
I agree, this is the most likely explanation.
It's just like pop songs which are only ever about the one thing everyone on the planet understands. At some point companies decide to target the lowest common denominator in order broaden their audience and maximize profits. The results might still be good but the fact certain qualities were lost in the process cannot be denied.
https://jedibusiness.com/star-wars-figures.aspx?type=toyline...
ie with ready access to actual, proper porn teenage lads no longer need to see a random set of norks added to films like Police Academy, Porkies or Trading Places solely for titillation[sic].
The world was different back then.
To hook up with someone you had to actually speak to a random stranger, get shot down, deal with it and workout whatever goofy thing you’d said or done before plucking the courage to have another go.
In the meantime there was Sgt Callahan... :P
As opposed to... what time in the past where this was not true?
The risk was still there before, but may be not to this extent.
Netflix has turned this model upside down and releases films on its platform that are designed to target specific audience groups.
There are certainly fewer happy accidents out there now.
The Matrix, Memento and Delicatessen come to mind as examples.
And then there are examples of non-original stuff that is just beautifully executed like Die Hard, or Alien.
Merchandising! Merchandising! Merchandising! Where the real money of the movie is made!" - Yogurt, Spaceballs (1987) Heck, most of the 1980's cartoons were designed to sell toys.
> I agree that more and more we are optimizing for artifice; fitness classes, extra curricular activities, holidays, concerts and events we attend, just to keep up an appearance online or in person. And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason.
Social media did this. Before narcissism became en vogue, gym rats and party people existed and no one else really cared because they were not visible. Now they show up in your social media feed every day. They make you feel small and less complete. Maybe you should go to the gym and more clubs to keep up otherwise you aren't cool or interesting. Meanwhile its all senseless, shallow peacocking and hedonism.
And then, slowly over the course of the project, the targeted age rating kept decreasing because it was projected we would then sell more.
https://pen.org/report/made-in-hollywood-censored-by-beijing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality
I've been hearing this sentiment lately and don't understand it. What gives one person insight into the psychology of another without an intimate relationship? How can one know another is doing something for "the wrong reasons"? It feels like a lazy stereotyping heuristic.
Actually, I do think I might understand it. It could be introverts failing to achieve full theory of mind about extroverts. Which itself might be a lazy stereotyping heuristic, but at least it has the virtue of reacting to an expressed state of mind, and not an implied one.
The violence like street fights is also down. The way of progress. Civilization naturally tames the primary instincts by directly dampening them (observed decrease of testosterone) while simultaneously providing ample channels for redirection and sublimation.
IIRC, the original script was called something like "Bug Hunt at Outpost 9" and someone at the studio said "Hey, we can get the rights to Starship Troopers and this thing will sell better."
I once had a debate in an online forum about legalizing prostitution, and most participants were supportive of it. Then I asked the same group, what about legalizing partial prostitution, like a receptionist that also has sex with the boss as part of the job description. The participants all immediately switched to revulsion at the idea and none would support it.
So why is 100% sex work less exploitative than 50% sex work? I don't think it is. But for some reason our culture finds specialist sex workers more tolerable. The same pressure seems to be bifurcating entertainment.
Does it? You asked this on an online forum, not a national survey. I don't think our culture has a majority view on the nuance of prostitution. The most engagement I'd expect on this topic is from people who feel strongly that it shouldn't exist at all.
Receptionism is “clean work”, consequently a receptionist cannot be forced to lower himself to dirty work. — this would apply to working with human waste or various medical work as much as prostitution, I would gander.
A receptionist can be required by contract to serve drinks, play the piano, and various other things that a receptionist does not ordinarily do, but weeding through garbage, performing sex acts, or changing diapers, — that is off limits.
Gotta say that often questions like this are often as just taken as ways to win rhetorical points and not thought about seriously by those who ask them. But there's actually a good answer. Yes, sex work is extremely exploitative in the sense that you selling a "big piece" of yourself. Which doesn't mean it should be illegal but it should segregated. Why?
Other kinds of work exists that extremely exploitative - dangerous, physical exhausting, possibly-humiliating and damaging. Those should be segregated also and usually are. But let's an experiment:
The reason all those are a problem is because they take a lot out of a person and if you pair them with receptionist, you'll get someone who is paid as a receptionist but often doing these things. Which screws both ordinary receptionists and people paid more to do the highly exploitative labor.Sounds awesome.
None of those examples seem to have a problem...
I think a better retort would be that people want professional jobs where their contribution is based on seemingly objective merit. If 50% of your performance is judged by one person in an entirely subjective way, i.e. their satisfaction with sex, it’s not a very well protected job for one thing. Further, the benefit of exploitive sex industries is not having to commit - to be able to switch it up. Tightly coupling your exploitive sex with job positions whose value increases directly with the amount of institutional knowledge retained would not be wise - your turnover or dissatisfaction would be too high. Finally, despite all the efforts of exploitive industries, sex is still a biological function and very personal to many (most?). There are subtle relationships involved in such intimacy despite efforts to avoid it. From a management perspective, there’s a risk to being “friends” with people that work for you, much less having sex with them. I think it would introduce too many opportunities for personal feelings interrupting optimal productivity. Put directly, the integrity of your decision-making ability on behalf of the company would likely be compromised.
Could just as easily argue that providing sexual services increases her job security.
Isn't it strange how most programmers think that specialist barista work is not demeaning, but would quit on the spot if they were instructed to serve morning coffee to the management?
Oh wait, it's not strange at all! Most people who work as programmmers do not want to serve coffee, and will naturally coordinate to avoid normalizing it, lest it become a recurring part of every job description. This happens even though work as a barista does not fit into the 'dangerous and therefore segregated' category. Indeed, there would be nothing unusual about a receptionist who also handles catering at events and serves coffee to management.
Or is serving coffee also "effectively partitioned" by "our culture"?
There are things that can be optimized in serving coffee too!
And when you had enough, you can just start serving terrible coffee :D
I think you risk "why are we paying $$$$$, isn't that the guy who serves the coffee" even if it's subconscious.
But my attitude is more along the lines of "I'll do what it takes to get the job done" and that attitude comes from my veteran experience - there was no shortage of times where the NCOs (mid level enlisted) would get "dirty" when a job has to get done...
You can see it as "why is that person relegated to nothing duties"... I see it as "that guy is part of the team and will get the job done, no matter what".
I do get your point and can see how "office politics" can spin things that way.
It's just that, as it was written above, the people who would be requested to do it "feel revulsion at the idea and none would support it". They'd coordinate against ones that tried to normalize such a policy.
Many programmers don't want to live in a world where they have to agree to serve coffee every morning if they want to make their living as programmers. And they have sufficient leverage to make sure that things won't turn out that way. Doesn't mean that they have anything against people who choose to make their living serving coffee. That's the whole point.
People have even stronger feelings about the importance of sexual service not being part of receptionist job descriptions. They felt so strongly about it that they outlawed the practice, and they make sure that it stays illegal even in countries where prostitution is otherwise allowed.
It's trivial to get that exercise on its' head. If management is ok putting clauses into highly trained workers' contracts about coffee serving, as a highly trained worker, I'd demand they introduce a clause for highly-trained and highly-paid management to clean others' shoes. What's fair is fair, right?
If they can't take the same high, non-elitist ground, well, that's a clear-cut abuse, ain't it?
But to be honest, "elite" jobs classification is present across the population (ask anyone in "low-skilled" job what they think of University professors; now ask us who know how Universities run internally :)).
There is a huge difference if those "non-job" things are "communal" or written-down or coming from authority. I think most people would not have a problem taking the broom and cleaning up after someone else has left a mess at the office ("look at this mess, let me clean it up" — "hey, let me help too"). But having your "boss" order you do it is an altogether different matter.
If a company advertised for a part time programmer, part time barista, how would people react? They might think it was funny, and they probably wouldn't apply, but they wouldn't think that the very existence of such a position was unacceptable.
Isn't this true of people who are not interested in prostitution/pornography needing to go into prostitution/pornography or getting paid less to take a job that isn't involved with that?
I oppose receptionist that also has sex with the boss. Exploitation has nothing to do with that.
At least in my world view, having sex at workplace is unprofessional.
First of all, spending corporate or investor's money on paying sex workers is wrong.
Even if the boss is the sole owner of the company i.e. spending their own money, boss fucking a receptionist causes unhealthy atmosphere in the company. The company gonna have hard time attracting female candidates on other positions. Employees who have families gonna have interesting conversations with their SOs.
I think the only way to solve them, pay all employees way above market. If you do that, it doesn't matter the money to pay the receptionist comes from entertainment accounts.
Another hard to solve issue is envy. A manager in the company might want to have their own receptionist.
> would you support it then?
In a hypothetical world where all parties are totally OK with a boss sleeping with a receptionist - sure, why not?
What's "unhealthy" about boss having sex with receptionist.
Got news for you: it already happens a lot :)
As far as employees who have families, can't they just go poly if they don't want to risk being fired?
Because it harms the company. This perk gonna reduce hiring pool by a factor of 2-4. I think many married people, women, and probably many lgbtq+ people wouldn’t want to work there.
> What's "unhealthy" about boss having sex with receptionist.
Sex between consensual adults is fine. The unhealthy atmosphere is caused by other people in and around the company knowing, and discussing, what’s going on.
> can't they just go poly if they don't want to risk being fired?
Gonna be hard to sell that idea to wives/husbands of these employees.
Other people have families, for them it’s even harder to solve in a good way. You can’t just pay them more money, they might find themselves in a position to choose between job and marriage, that’s not a good position to be.
Sex at work might be a great perk for single male employees, but I think issues caused for the rest of the people are worse, gonna affect bottom line in a negative way. Hiring is the worst of them, IMO.
We don't outlaw boxing or MMA. But we put regulations on it. We shut down illegal basement fights. And we hope people going into it aren't coerced and have recourse if something goes wrong. We accept that if an adult wants to get punched in the face for money that's something society can accommodate with reasonable expectations.
But there's no world where we would see a boss getting in the ring with his employees to fight for money as something acceptable.
I agree we shouldn't normalize employer/employee boxing matches (although I'd be willing to participate in some instances...) but it seems a lot less consequential a choice as legalizing the hybrid prostitute role.
The only way I can see prostitution as ethical is if someone can choose to have no job and be fairly comfortable.
But that wasn't the condition that the OP said made him comfortable. He said he'd be okay with legal sex work only as long as the person could otherwise live a life of comfort without the need to work. He didn't say he'd be okay with legal sex work as long as the person could have chosen to carry a bag instead.
Why is 'forcing beliefs' even at question, you surely don't think whether you're forcing your beliefs on someone when the issue is carrying luggage?
Or, maybe they're different classes of activity and you already realise this ...
You feel differently about someone charging for sex than someone charging to use their brain or their brawn, but that does not mean that everyone feels the same way. Why should your feeling rule the day and be enforced on adults who feel differently about it? Sounds like the church of old.
My initial post in this thread was about the legality of consenting adults engaging in whatever activities they both agree to. I tried to highlight the distinction being made and think it has a lot to do with slightly prudish notions of sexuality and frankly a notion that men and especially women aren't capable enough to make the correct choice for themselves.
Attitudes change and in my view it's time to stop being so emotionally negative toward sexuality and the diverse choices made among consenting adults.
I'm in favour of fully legalised prostitution, but I don't want to be personally exposed to it in any capacity. I want the workplace to be about work. I don't want my money wasted arresting people for having sex.
I also think this applies to full time sex worker positions if there was an “and you’ve got to fuck your boss” contract clause.
An employment contract is significantly different in that employer gets to decide who the work is done for by the employee.
Once sex work becomes legal, then it has to abide by the same rules as everyone else.
They are going to get a lot of customers that many of them would probably not want to touch if they were not getting paid to do so.
... and in many cases that will be exactly why they are getting paid to do so.
This doesn't make sense. Not everyone wants to weld either.
Similarly, male students were going crazy about female teaching assistants who were admittedly very average looking, and didn't have much going for them otherwise either.
Thus, I've always interpreted that to be that "position of power" makes for an unreasonable judgement (of both brain and heart :), but you are free to make of that what you will.
I think the answer to it might be in assigning some unscientific statistics to the world.
Starting here: perhaps 5% of people are psychologically capable of sex work. The reason behind legalizing (or decriminalizing) sex work is to maximize the liberty of, and reduce the harm to, this 5%.
Concurrently we must account for the 95%.
If we were to normalize sex work in the context other professions, then the volume of jobs requiring sex would quickly outpace the number of people who would choose that profession in lieu of economic necessity, and so you will have people be sexually exploited. Perhaps the free market will solve this in the long term but in the mean time you’ll have many a hurt persons.
So basically the whole thing is a compromise based on what we believe about the economic incentives and workforce, aiming to please multiple outlooks.
Although the “contractor” point another poster made is maybe more compelling.
None of those were major studio action blockbusters (Terminator, one might mistake for that because of the resulting franchise, but it was an indie film that hit it big; all the rest are out-of-genre.)
So, if those are really your comparisons, the problem may be that you are comparing fundamentally different kinds of movies. The description of “even when they have sex no one is horny” seems to be pretty typical, over a long time window, of action blockbusters. Horniness is big in comedy, romance, and erotic subgenres of other genres, but it's not big in action (though non-blockbusters might include it because they tend to have more freedom to depart from genre rules.)
One interesting thing about them is even the beautiful stars often have bad teeth :-) Dentistry in those days wasn't very good.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021890/
The innuendo is pretty strong and the characters are mostly terrible people and the plot pretty dark.
But also very witty, fast paced, and funny. Some really interesting shots, too, with moving and panning cameras, or things happening in both foreground and background.
Showing a couple bonding is fine, but it adds nothing knowing they did it doggy style.
Nudity is fine if it adds something. But too much feels like a checkbox being ticked off.
Most recently I recall being really pleased watching Greenland that they didn't have one of those typical scenes. I was so expecting it, and it was so refreshing that it wasn't included.
- Neighbour: "Do you want to just lose weight, or do you want to have increased strength and flexibility as well?"
- Lester: "I want to look good naked"
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjTg7F59WfE