The main thing I get out of this article is how easy it is to get trapped in a bubble thanks to algorithmic social media.
For the most part, sexy never left, and statistics bear this out. OnlyFans brings in enormous amount of revenue, even after an expensive, failed attempt to be not-just-a-porn-site. Hypersexualized gacha games are pulling in tens of millions of dollars per month, and not just for men; the women-targeted Love and Deepspace had over $50 million in revenue in October. Marvel Rivals, criticized in some circles (such as the social circles of those in the article) for being an oversexualized "gooner game" has remained in the top 10 games played on Steam since its release a year ago. And nothing drives it home more than stumbling across the shady side of YouTube and finding videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions of views.
> I choose these examples from my personal life because they express sentiments that were once the kind of stuff I encountered only in the messy battlegrounds of Twitter, amid discussions about whether Sabrina Carpenter is being oversexualized, whether kinks are akin to a sexual orientation, whether a woman can truly consent in an age-gap relationship, and whether exposure to sex scenes in movies violates viewer consent.
Ultimately, these are the kind of things discussed only by a small, vocal, very online (some might say terminally online) minority. To think that they represent more than a tiny fraction of the world is, again, reflective of how easy it is to get trapped into online echo chambers.
videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing
a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions
of views.
Anecdata: even if they're wearing bras and not dressed in a revealing way and it's a still photo... the views will pour in.
I've had a Flickr account for about 20 years. I used to run a community and I took a lot of pictures at our gatherings, which were primarily 20-somethings. Some photos had 100-1000x the views of other pictures and it took me a while to figure out why.
The photos with surprising view counts had women with large chests.
I know how obvious that sounds but many of these photos were so lowkey that... trust me, it was not obvious. For some of these photos, we're talking about something that would not be out of place as a yearbook photo or hanging on a church's bulletin board. It would just be a group photo of people hanging out, nothing sexy or revealing, and rando woman #7 in the photo might be apparently chesty. And it would have 100x the views of other photos from that event.
Interesting and amusing.
There are a number of ways you could think about it. Some views might be attributable to people who can't access explicit content due to parental controls or local laws but I have a hunch some people actually prefer this sort of thing to explicit content.
(I also wonder if there's a slight voyeuristic/nonconsensual appeal to these photos. Which ties back in to the opening paragraph of the linked article...)
It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.
> or the most part, sexy never left, and statistics bear this out. OnlyFans brings in enormous amount of revenue, even after an expensive, failed attempt to be not-just-a-porn-site. Hypersexualized gacha games are pulling in tens of millions of dollars per month, and not just for men; the women-targeted Love and Deepspace had over $50 million in revenue in October. Marvel Rivals, criticized in some circles (such as the social circles of those in the article) for being an oversexualized "gooner game" has remained in the top 10 games played on Steam since its release a year ago. And nothing drives it home more than stumbling across the shady side of YouTube and finding videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions of views.
These are all things about sex but none of them are sex or lead to sex. These are outlets for sexual desires that don't require any social connection at all. You could argue that the article outlines many of the reasons why these things are so popular today - there is a much higher social price to pay for a potentially embarrassing or humiliating situation than there used to be. Easier to avoid it altogether and play gooner games.
I don't know if I'd compare an anime gacha game to "Friendship ended because I talked about two pretty girls at a hair salon". I feel this comment really symbolizes the entire point of this post.
>Ultimately, these are the kind of things discussed only by a small, vocal, very online minority.
They are discussed by a "minority" because we compartmentalized social media to some dozen websites. And they all have a financial incentive to suppress sexual content, be it visual, oral, or print. I think the the cause and effect is there.
"sexy" isn't "sexual". unless any pretty person you pass by is a sexual encounter.
The author is referring to erotic connections and experiences between individuals, not sexualized media.
e.g. She mentions examples of having trouble being “in the moment” in new sexual encounters. Consuming pornography does nothing to help that. If anything it likely makes it worse.
It feels weird just having to say this, but none of those examples evoke the word "sexy". Sexualization != sexy. The author is talking about how people interact in the real world, not media consumption.
I don't know if the balance of evidence supports significant changes in sexuality and eroticism or not, but I think the way you've made the case that it doesn't here is unconvincing. Consumption of erotic content on the internet and actually engaging in sexuality as a participant are drastically different matters and both the sign and magnitude of any correlation between them is hard to pin down. From my own anecdotal perspective, there's a weak but significant anticorrelation between how much porn/erotica people consume on the internet and how much they engage in sex or kink or even relationships with other people. Maybe the sample of people I've met isn't indicative, but I would say neither is anything you're using as supporting evidence here
The idea that zoomer Puritanism is only a tiny minority online and not a majority is fatally wrong. You don’t know how badly you will be treated for even small age gaps among zoomers anymore.
Yeah, I think she's assuming that, since some of those people are IRL friends, that means they're not terminally online people.
I'm around finance folks and they're all trapped into the same crypto-and-AI influencer bubble, but they would never be able to tell because their physical connections are also finance people who are likely to be caught in the same corner of the algorithm. So their real life conversations reinforce the worldview that the internet presents.
This is likely the same case. The author might not be involved in certain online spaces, but she shares characteristics with her friends who make them all be targeted by the same bubble, so everyone she knows echoes that space to her.
> For the most part, sexy never left, and statistics bear this out
Recently I've seen a figure in a reputable source showing that people tend to have less sex than ~20-30 years ago (even if we just look at married couples).
OP's point (imo valid) relates to the private sphere, and how we as normal humans are more afraid of outing our sexual fears/desires because of the possibility of them being amplified on the internet.
And you somehow think that millions of men masturbating to a few onlyfans accounts is a counterargument to show everything is actually fine
I would not say that this is due to a social media bubble - HN is the only social media i use, i have friends along the political spectrum, and still i can relate to many of the points that the author raised. At one point, I found myself increasingly uncertain and conflicted about my own "actual convictions", and "underlying motives", and whether someone else (even potentially!) labeling me as a creep or assuming poor intentions automatically makes me one. Some unfortunate preceding life experiences corroded my self image as well, which might have contribute to it, but that's not the point.
I'd actually go further and argue that what appears to twist this social fabric inside out is not only the online nature of the interaction itself, but the corporate centralized algorithmic nature of it. I am in no way a proponents of decentralizing everything (social media, money, infra, etc) for the sake of it - most systems work more efficiently when centralized, that's just a fact of reality. Maybe the fact that ads, corporate communications (linkedin -speak posts / slack / mcdonald's twitter account) and social interactions now live in the same space (and barely distinguishable in feeds) must have somehow forced these spaces to use the most uniform neutered language that lacks subtleties allowed in 1:1 communications? So people speak in political slogans and ad jingles instead of actual thoughts? Because these spaces NEED people to speak like that to stay civil and "corporately acceptable"? I am just brainstorming, in no way suggesting that a "free for all" is a solution.
I watched a movie called Anora recently, and toward the end there's a dialogue along the lines of
- If not for these other people in the room, you'd have raped me!
- No I wouldn't.
- Why not?
- (baffled and laughing) Because I am not a rapist.
One way to interpret this movie, this dialogue, and what follows is that the main female character has been used and abused her entire life by the rich / capitalist system in general / embodied by a character of a rich bratty child of an oligarch in particular - that her world almost assumes this kind of transactional exploitation as a part of human relationships - and struggles to feel safe without it - almost seeking more exploitation to feel somewhat in control. And the other person in the dialogue above (who is not a rich child) counters that by asserting and knowing very well who he is (and isn't), and that knowledgeable doesn't require or provide any further justification.
Tldr maybe the magical dream of a conflict-free society where people understand each other is not ours after all - maybe it is the ideal grassland for ad-driven social media to monetize our interactions in a safe controlled fashion? one evidence towards that is the de-personalized neutered templated nature of the kind of "advice" that people give online to earn social credit - that leaks into real world 1-to-1 interactions in the form of anxiety of being "watched and judged" - as described by the author?
> how easy it is to get trapped in a bubble thanks to algorithmic social media.
This. For example there are so many awesome videos on YouTube that would actually make the world and cross-culture relations better if more people got to see them, but few people will unless they specifically search for them.
Like just yesterday I stumbled upon this amazing nature documentary [0] from Poland (in English) of a quality rivaling or exceeding that of the major channels, with no ads, no "like and subscribe!!" begging, and it's just as amazing that I didn't hear of this since the 3 years it's been up.
There's many more videos on all topics that you don't need to be a purveyor of the subject to enjoy and appreciate, sitting at criminally low views and likes.
> “Who are you defending yourself against?” To which he answered, to my astonishment: “I don’t know. The world.”
Indeed. Moving our every interaction in daily life plus our innermost thoughts to the internet has instilled a low-key fear in all of us that we'll be raked over the coals and villified as the world's worst villains. The digital tar and feathers are lurking always, a menacing psychological force. And it can even happen without our knowledge; some stranger can post a two second context-less clip or a snippet of a conversation and make us look our worst.
It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.
> It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.
I suspect the answer is to find out who benefits from our misdirected anger, and whether they are also involved in creating and fostering this misdirected anger.
It's old news now, but when I first heard about social media (Facebook specifically) and gaming companies hiring psychologists years ago, I knew it was pretty much over. Couple this with surveillance for the doom spiral.
Not just that, but death treath, stalking, parasocial obsession, blackmail, scams, catfish, foreign propaganda, and so on, putting yourself out there on the internet brings so many risks nowadays.
> It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.
Shocking? Hell this is half of the value social media provides capital: distracting the population with a hall of mirrors while offering precisely zero paths to a better future.
Who moved every interaction in daily life to the internet? Most conversations we have are private, even if they are digital. Most of my ms teams interactions are with a single person. I trust them to not make sceenshots to share those. I don't see much difference with oral conversations, where I also trust they do not gossip about them.
The main part I object to in this essay is the ideological carveout. The author is seemingly willing to defend the #MeToo movement because it was in the service of a mission "to end a long-standing and long-permitted norm of sexual abuse within institutions", and "cancel culture" (I'm also putting it in quotes as I agree it's a very loaded term) because the backlash to it was helpful to the right and detrimental to the left. If you agree with the reasoning, then, all of the behavior being criticized is okay? In that case I don't see how or why anyone would ever change their behavior. The author's friend who wanted her to apologize to the hairdressers probably has a strong belief that being sexualized at work is a serious problem faced by women. From the right, many Christians strongly believe that criticizing behaviors like premarital sex is part of the social immune system that keeps family and community bonds strong.
I think there's a meaningful difference between being a genuine liberal who wants to change how American society thinks about sex, and being a partisan who wants to use puritan callouts as a cudgel on your enemies while ensuring that your own behavior is never subject to criticism. The essay displays an awareness of the tension, but decisively chooses the partisan path.
> "to end a long-standing and long-permitted norm of sexual abuse within institutions"
Sure, but it makes no sense to equate institutional abuse with genuine erotic connection among equals, which is what OP seems to ultimately be advocating for. The two are polar opposites. And the OP is not arguing that sexualizing people in the workplace is a good thing; her stance is that she never even sexualized the person to begin with. She's talking about her inner thoughts, not her overt behavior.
I was struck by this too. I initially found it offputting, but then realized that it reinforced her point: We are all subject to social media (etc) bubbles, and it's tough to see the insides of them!
By including these, she demonstrated her point with a genuine, meta example of how even someone writing about these can be unwittingly part of them.
I think some definitively good things came out of "me too". Some people got caught for repeated cases of serious abuse. There were also cases where someone faced very public "accusations" that didn't amount to a hill of beans. I think it's fair for people to not want to condemn the whole movement when it seemed to actually do something about a real problem that was intransigent for so long. That doesn't mean they have to like everything about it.
At the same time the central failure of "me too" is that it created exactly zero reproducible structures or practices to control institutional sexual abuse going forward. Everyone is more "aware", but the fundamental process hasn't changed, although some new titles might have been created. This failure results in a mixture of hypervigilance (the author's friends) and fatalism (the author), because there is no clear definition of what, exactly, is the particular social procedure that represents "me too" even in the ideal scenario.
I did find it interesting that the entire post was such an eloquent description of a generalization of cancel culture, yet the author still went out of her way to virtue signal to readers who would reflexively dismiss any allusion to cancel culture as made up or partisan. Probably the right call, since those are some of the ones who most need to hear what she has to say, but still funny.
> I think there's a meaningful difference between being a genuine liberal who wants to change how American society thinks about sex, and being a partisan who wants to use puritan callouts as a cudgel on your enemies
I mean, those aren't just meaningfully different; they're entirely at odds with each other. You can't have a liberal attitude toward sex and a puritanical attitude toward sex at the same time.
One of the big rules is you don't expose the unwilling public. Apologizing to the two women who were brushing the author's hair is a double-whammy: you're involving them in the sexualizing of this experience, and you're implicitly expecting them to be ok with it and forgive you.
If someone is going to demand you do this or they will end their friendship with you, you're "lowkey" better off losing that friend.
Yeah. This is like geting angry at someone because of a dream you had. I just wouldn't even know how to react to that. Well beyond my qualifications to dissect.
It's not advice. It reads to me that the friend is lacking the framework to express that the conversation the author just involved them in made them uncomfortable.
Like there is so much detail missing here: was this within the bounds of established conversation the author has with this person, was it contextually appropriate? Does the friend ever relate similar experiences back and this reaction was surprise?
> Back and forth, back and forth, we fought like this for a while. In fact, it ended the friendship.
Even if the women could read the desire from her face, there was nothing to apologize for. She felt attraction a feeling induced by non-reasoning parts of her brain. She didn't give in to it by for example hugging them without consent.
An old folk song comes to mind: "
I think what I want, and what delights me,
still always reticent, and as it is suitable.
My wish and desire, no one can deny me
and so it'll always be: Thoughts are free!"
So, if anything, the mistake was to tell the "friend" about it.
True! And yet, oddly enough, I'd argue that this obviously bad advice is, in a way, the expected online (corporate?) etiquette, that is being, for some odd reason, applied in the real world.
It is akin to situations that several comics I heard described -in which either a caretaker (or even the relative with a disability themselves) was corrected and schooled for using "non inclusive language" when addressing their relative / a relative referring themselves. To which, anecdotally, the typical reaction of the said relative was along the lines of "oh, i am sorry honey, i wanted to say it is hard for a damn useless cripple like me".
Whatever the direct cause, as an older person who grew up Catholic, quite literally the most surprising thing in life for me to discover: Sexual repression emphatically cannot be strongly blamed on religion.
And I'm not mentioning this to defend religion necessarily, I'm just surprised and almost "impressed" at how, in the absence of religious sexual repression, young people and the internet invented a whole new way of doing it.
Sounds like a too online person with too online friends. About ten years ago, I had an experience that pointed out the too online nature of people (in that case, myself).
It’s all in the culture of the social media bubble they’re in. I was on Reddit a lot. Reddit had just gone through the Great Hate of Hipsters (with their skinny jeans and ear gauges) and had moved on to a new target: Atheists.
The scorned atheist was (perhaps is?) stereotypically a nerdy young man with, notably, an affection for fedoras and pride in “euphoric” quotes.
All right, so I spent all this time on Reddit and it was clear to me: Americans think fedoras are weird and American girls can’t stand them. I don’t have a predilection for hats personally so this wasn’t a big deal but good to know. But I was a nerdy young man.
Then one day I was traveling with a group of friends, mostly girls, and we walked by a hat store. Completely confusingly, the girls were highly enthusiastic about us boys wearing the hats. Some of them specifically picked out the much hated fedora! For me!
I said something about atheist-kid-something and they looked at me confused till one of them said “oh it’s some Reddit thing; forget it, just try it on” and life just moved on.
So what was the deal? I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community.
Anyway, I think this writer’s friends are part of some highly specific community with some kind of Twitter-like norms. And this supposed change in society is just a change in her local group.
The word "eroticism" in this article is quite misplaced. A fleeting sexual thought about a stranger who happens to be providing a service to you in that moment (hair brushing, apparently) has nothing to do with eroticism, precisely because it's not "sexualizing" in any real-world sense. Incidentally, eroticism properly understood (i.e. turning actual consensual love, intimacy and perhaps even sexuality itself into a genuine, positive and human-affirming artform) is also quite dead, but not for any reasons this article is talking about. It's just getting caught in a cross-fire between the most disrespectful and lewdest sort of commercial hardcore pr0n and a kind of renewed, reactive prudery from governments and policy-makers.
What a solid piece of writing. I’m Gen X, and have talked with my siblings about the online realities my teenage nieces and nephews face, and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion the author comes to in the last paragraph. Along the way, though, there was framing of a lot of points that I’ve struggled to find the right words for. So, bravo.
Sounds to me more like the author has weird friends and never had a stable relationship in her life. Relationship sharing is awesome if you have a stable relationship. And people usually don't talk about their kinks in this weird fashion.
In fact, I think the Internet has increased eroticism manyfold. Look at porn apps, games and websites. People are more open about their sexuality than ever, but anonymously.
> The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public
It's a horrible way to live your life. But it doesn't have to be this way. This has to be this way only for terminally online people. If you don't go to twitter, there's no importance to anything anybody on twitter thinks about you. Of course, for certain people, like actors, politicians, top-level entertainers and so on, there's no other way to achieve anything now, but for most people it's entirely optional. You don't need to be on twitter (substitute any social media here) to be a good teacher, farmer, programmer, designer, builder, gardener, nurse or car mechanic. It's still completely voluntary so far.
Nah. I'd like less "sexy" on the internet and most everywhere else. It's exhausting having people shove their sexuality in everyone's focus constantly. I'd like to be able to buy some muffins without being reminded about sex on the packaging, the description, and the product name. Let muffins be muffins. Just like extroverts are energy vampires for introverts, the non-sexually obsessed are tired of the sex obsessed wanting everything to be about celebrating the sexual obsessions of the sex obsessed. Broaden your horizons and get a hobby that doesn't involve telling everyone about what you want to do with your genitals.
Weird stuff, you are just talking to a 5 year younger friend about hair brushing being pleasant and now you needr to apologize to the hair brusher?
> She demanded that I apologize to the women for sexualizing them.
This doesn't work that well in real life. Let me sketch a scenario:
Oh eh, hi, eh, sorry, I have to admit than when you were brushing my hair, I was sexualizing you.
You can't make it much better, perhaps write a formal letter and focus on the hairbrush:
Three weeks ago, I was in your excellent shop. My hair never has been nicer. During the hair brushing, I got the feeling I felt a bit more for the hairbrush than I fell about you, I hope you can forgive me.
That gives a nice feeling about what was first a fairly normal human interaction.
It sounds hot though, good tip. But I got a humiliation kink, oh noes! How to resolve then? It is a catch-22 now. Need to do silly apologize, apologies are sexual, need to apologize for sexual feelings due to silly apologies. Haha, how do I get there?
Man it is so hard for me to find anything recognizeable here - this panopticon of judges who determine whether you’re ’allowed’ to experience pleasure sounds like superstition and rumor, or at the very least paranoia in the head of one slightly sexually repressed person.
> The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there, always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?). To claim that these matters are merely discursive in nature is to ignore the problem. Because love and sex are so intimate and vulnerable, the stakes of punishment are higher, and the fear of it penetrates deeper into the psyche and is harder to rationalize away than, say, fear of pushback from tweeting a divisive political opinion.
I don’t see myself in this passage at all. My husband and I had sex this morning and I didn’t waste a moment thinking about this supposed panopticon of sexual surveillance that the author casually assumes is somehow omnipresent in ‘our’ lives.
Where is she getting this from??
How do her experiences so completely fail to line up with my own? Is this her own mental health issue? Is it the friends she chooses to surround herself with, or the content she chooses to consume?
It’s all very strange and impossible to relate to. I can’t remember the last time I felt like anyone else had anything to say about my sex life, at the very least anything that wasn’t generally positive / supportive.
I think this is true to an extent, but it's actually far deeper and more basic than that we fear being watched by others.
"the self" is formed in relation to others, it is not formed by itself. The way that people think of their own self, is the way they imagine themselves to act in relation to others _only_. There is no "me" alone, it's all entirely relational.
The problem I think we have now is that a huge proportion of how we relate to others has been moved online. When I was growing up, being in a picture was something that happened rarely -- on "picture day" for the yearbook, at a family gathering when someone happened to have a disposable camera. But now, kids are in photos and videos all the time, 24/7. The way we relate, from very early on, is influenced by the deeply unnatural online parasocial relationships of Instagram etc.
It goes further than you, a stable self who is worried about cancel culture. It's built into your sense of self, it affects how your self is constructed. It's deeply embedded into who you are, your way of being. To be is to be perceived and we are being perceived in these really weird/unnatural/algorithmic ways, and it is reflecting on us.
Wow, this is terrible. People really live like this?
If I would say to my female friend that I like when hair dresser is stroking my hair, she would probably just look at me: 'ha ha! you nerd!'.
Asking somebody to apologize for your own thoughts... The situation like that it is beyond cringe... if somebody would be doing that in my country, psychological help would be recommended.
> It is seen as more and more normal to track one’s partner through Find My iPhone or an AirTag, even though the potential for abuse of this technology is staggering and obvious. There are all kinds of new products, such as a biometric ring that is allegedly able to tell you whether your partner is cheating, that expand this capability into more and more granular settings.
These criticisms seem to be more a reflection of the author's paranoia and sex-obsession than legitimate criticisms of the tools and technologies.
IMO, location sharing is pretty awesome among loved ones, and biometrics can help us manage our health? But I guess everything has to be about "sexual surveillance"...
[+] [-] mjr00|3 months ago|reply
For the most part, sexy never left, and statistics bear this out. OnlyFans brings in enormous amount of revenue, even after an expensive, failed attempt to be not-just-a-porn-site. Hypersexualized gacha games are pulling in tens of millions of dollars per month, and not just for men; the women-targeted Love and Deepspace had over $50 million in revenue in October. Marvel Rivals, criticized in some circles (such as the social circles of those in the article) for being an oversexualized "gooner game" has remained in the top 10 games played on Steam since its release a year ago. And nothing drives it home more than stumbling across the shady side of YouTube and finding videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions of views.
> I choose these examples from my personal life because they express sentiments that were once the kind of stuff I encountered only in the messy battlegrounds of Twitter, amid discussions about whether Sabrina Carpenter is being oversexualized, whether kinks are akin to a sexual orientation, whether a woman can truly consent in an age-gap relationship, and whether exposure to sex scenes in movies violates viewer consent.
Ultimately, these are the kind of things discussed only by a small, vocal, very online (some might say terminally online) minority. To think that they represent more than a tiny fraction of the world is, again, reflective of how easy it is to get trapped into online echo chambers.
[+] [-] JohnBooty|3 months ago|reply
I've had a Flickr account for about 20 years. I used to run a community and I took a lot of pictures at our gatherings, which were primarily 20-somethings. Some photos had 100-1000x the views of other pictures and it took me a while to figure out why.
The photos with surprising view counts had women with large chests.
I know how obvious that sounds but many of these photos were so lowkey that... trust me, it was not obvious. For some of these photos, we're talking about something that would not be out of place as a yearbook photo or hanging on a church's bulletin board. It would just be a group photo of people hanging out, nothing sexy or revealing, and rando woman #7 in the photo might be apparently chesty. And it would have 100x the views of other photos from that event.
Interesting and amusing.
There are a number of ways you could think about it. Some views might be attributable to people who can't access explicit content due to parental controls or local laws but I have a hunch some people actually prefer this sort of thing to explicit content.
(I also wonder if there's a slight voyeuristic/nonconsensual appeal to these photos. Which ties back in to the opening paragraph of the linked article...)
It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.
[+] [-] boredtofears|3 months ago|reply
These are all things about sex but none of them are sex or lead to sex. These are outlets for sexual desires that don't require any social connection at all. You could argue that the article outlines many of the reasons why these things are so popular today - there is a much higher social price to pay for a potentially embarrassing or humiliating situation than there used to be. Easier to avoid it altogether and play gooner games.
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|3 months ago|reply
>Ultimately, these are the kind of things discussed only by a small, vocal, very online minority.
They are discussed by a "minority" because we compartmentalized social media to some dozen websites. And they all have a financial incentive to suppress sexual content, be it visual, oral, or print. I think the the cause and effect is there.
"sexy" isn't "sexual". unless any pretty person you pass by is a sexual encounter.
[+] [-] dpark|3 months ago|reply
e.g. She mentions examples of having trouble being “in the moment” in new sexual encounters. Consuming pornography does nothing to help that. If anything it likely makes it worse.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] advael|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Der_Einzige|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kace91|3 months ago|reply
I'm around finance folks and they're all trapped into the same crypto-and-AI influencer bubble, but they would never be able to tell because their physical connections are also finance people who are likely to be caught in the same corner of the algorithm. So their real life conversations reinforce the worldview that the internet presents.
This is likely the same case. The author might not be involved in certain online spaces, but she shares characteristics with her friends who make them all be targeted by the same bubble, so everyone she knows echoes that space to her.
[+] [-] verisimi|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pms|3 months ago|reply
Recently I've seen a figure in a reputable source showing that people tend to have less sex than ~20-30 years ago (even if we just look at married couples).
[+] [-] ramblerman|3 months ago|reply
And you somehow think that millions of men masturbating to a few onlyfans accounts is a counterargument to show everything is actually fine
[+] [-] unknown|3 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bbminner|3 months ago|reply
I'd actually go further and argue that what appears to twist this social fabric inside out is not only the online nature of the interaction itself, but the corporate centralized algorithmic nature of it. I am in no way a proponents of decentralizing everything (social media, money, infra, etc) for the sake of it - most systems work more efficiently when centralized, that's just a fact of reality. Maybe the fact that ads, corporate communications (linkedin -speak posts / slack / mcdonald's twitter account) and social interactions now live in the same space (and barely distinguishable in feeds) must have somehow forced these spaces to use the most uniform neutered language that lacks subtleties allowed in 1:1 communications? So people speak in political slogans and ad jingles instead of actual thoughts? Because these spaces NEED people to speak like that to stay civil and "corporately acceptable"? I am just brainstorming, in no way suggesting that a "free for all" is a solution.
I watched a movie called Anora recently, and toward the end there's a dialogue along the lines of
- If not for these other people in the room, you'd have raped me! - No I wouldn't. - Why not? - (baffled and laughing) Because I am not a rapist.
One way to interpret this movie, this dialogue, and what follows is that the main female character has been used and abused her entire life by the rich / capitalist system in general / embodied by a character of a rich bratty child of an oligarch in particular - that her world almost assumes this kind of transactional exploitation as a part of human relationships - and struggles to feel safe without it - almost seeking more exploitation to feel somewhat in control. And the other person in the dialogue above (who is not a rich child) counters that by asserting and knowing very well who he is (and isn't), and that knowledgeable doesn't require or provide any further justification.
Tldr maybe the magical dream of a conflict-free society where people understand each other is not ours after all - maybe it is the ideal grassland for ad-driven social media to monetize our interactions in a safe controlled fashion? one evidence towards that is the de-personalized neutered templated nature of the kind of "advice" that people give online to earn social credit - that leaks into real world 1-to-1 interactions in the form of anxiety of being "watched and judged" - as described by the author?
[+] [-] Razengan|3 months ago|reply
This. For example there are so many awesome videos on YouTube that would actually make the world and cross-culture relations better if more people got to see them, but few people will unless they specifically search for them.
Like just yesterday I stumbled upon this amazing nature documentary [0] from Poland (in English) of a quality rivaling or exceeding that of the major channels, with no ads, no "like and subscribe!!" begging, and it's just as amazing that I didn't hear of this since the 3 years it's been up.
There's many more videos on all topics that you don't need to be a purveyor of the subject to enjoy and appreciate, sitting at criminally low views and likes.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NBTZJi_grk
[+] [-] titzer|3 months ago|reply
Indeed. Moving our every interaction in daily life plus our innermost thoughts to the internet has instilled a low-key fear in all of us that we'll be raked over the coals and villified as the world's worst villains. The digital tar and feathers are lurking always, a menacing psychological force. And it can even happen without our knowledge; some stranger can post a two second context-less clip or a snippet of a conversation and make us look our worst.
It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.
[+] [-] rapind|3 months ago|reply
I suspect the answer is to find out who benefits from our misdirected anger, and whether they are also involved in creating and fostering this misdirected anger.
It's old news now, but when I first heard about social media (Facebook specifically) and gaming companies hiring psychologists years ago, I knew it was pretty much over. Couple this with surveillance for the doom spiral.
[+] [-] didibus|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MangoToupe|3 months ago|reply
Shocking? Hell this is half of the value social media provides capital: distracting the population with a hall of mirrors while offering precisely zero paths to a better future.
[+] [-] nuancebydefault|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] resfirestar|3 months ago|reply
I think there's a meaningful difference between being a genuine liberal who wants to change how American society thinks about sex, and being a partisan who wants to use puritan callouts as a cudgel on your enemies while ensuring that your own behavior is never subject to criticism. The essay displays an awareness of the tension, but decisively chooses the partisan path.
[+] [-] zozbot234|3 months ago|reply
Sure, but it makes no sense to equate institutional abuse with genuine erotic connection among equals, which is what OP seems to ultimately be advocating for. The two are polar opposites. And the OP is not arguing that sexualizing people in the workplace is a good thing; her stance is that she never even sexualized the person to begin with. She's talking about her inner thoughts, not her overt behavior.
[+] [-] the__alchemist|3 months ago|reply
By including these, she demonstrated her point with a genuine, meta example of how even someone writing about these can be unwittingly part of them.
[+] [-] scythe|3 months ago|reply
At the same time the central failure of "me too" is that it created exactly zero reproducible structures or practices to control institutional sexual abuse going forward. Everyone is more "aware", but the fundamental process hasn't changed, although some new titles might have been created. This failure results in a mixture of hypervigilance (the author's friends) and fatalism (the author), because there is no clear definition of what, exactly, is the particular social procedure that represents "me too" even in the ideal scenario.
[+] [-] buu700|3 months ago|reply
> I think there's a meaningful difference between being a genuine liberal who wants to change how American society thinks about sex, and being a partisan who wants to use puritan callouts as a cudgel on your enemies
I mean, those aren't just meaningfully different; they're entirely at odds with each other. You can't have a liberal attitude toward sex and a puritanical attitude toward sex at the same time.
[+] [-] elevation|3 months ago|reply
This is antisocial advice. It's beyond inappropriate to use the pretense of apology to announce your intimate fantasies to strangers.
[+] [-] linsomniac|3 months ago|reply
If someone is going to demand you do this or they will end their friendship with you, you're "lowkey" better off losing that friend.
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] XorNot|3 months ago|reply
Like there is so much detail missing here: was this within the bounds of established conversation the author has with this person, was it contextually appropriate? Does the friend ever relate similar experiences back and this reaction was surprise?
> Back and forth, back and forth, we fought like this for a while. In fact, it ended the friendship.
Seriously there's a ton of missing context here.
[+] [-] nuancebydefault|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] uansherug|3 months ago|reply
So, if anything, the mistake was to tell the "friend" about it.
[+] [-] easeout|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bbminner|3 months ago|reply
It is akin to situations that several comics I heard described -in which either a caretaker (or even the relative with a disability themselves) was corrected and schooled for using "non inclusive language" when addressing their relative / a relative referring themselves. To which, anecdotally, the typical reaction of the said relative was along the lines of "oh, i am sorry honey, i wanted to say it is hard for a damn useless cripple like me".
[+] [-] jrm4|3 months ago|reply
And I'm not mentioning this to defend religion necessarily, I'm just surprised and almost "impressed" at how, in the absence of religious sexual repression, young people and the internet invented a whole new way of doing it.
[+] [-] renewiltord|3 months ago|reply
It’s all in the culture of the social media bubble they’re in. I was on Reddit a lot. Reddit had just gone through the Great Hate of Hipsters (with their skinny jeans and ear gauges) and had moved on to a new target: Atheists.
The scorned atheist was (perhaps is?) stereotypically a nerdy young man with, notably, an affection for fedoras and pride in “euphoric” quotes.
All right, so I spent all this time on Reddit and it was clear to me: Americans think fedoras are weird and American girls can’t stand them. I don’t have a predilection for hats personally so this wasn’t a big deal but good to know. But I was a nerdy young man.
Then one day I was traveling with a group of friends, mostly girls, and we walked by a hat store. Completely confusingly, the girls were highly enthusiastic about us boys wearing the hats. Some of them specifically picked out the much hated fedora! For me!
I said something about atheist-kid-something and they looked at me confused till one of them said “oh it’s some Reddit thing; forget it, just try it on” and life just moved on.
So what was the deal? I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community.
Anyway, I think this writer’s friends are part of some highly specific community with some kind of Twitter-like norms. And this supposed change in society is just a change in her local group.
[+] [-] zozbot234|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] listenfaster|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] slurrpurr|3 months ago|reply
In fact, I think the Internet has increased eroticism manyfold. Look at porn apps, games and websites. People are more open about their sexuality than ever, but anonymously.
[+] [-] smsm42|3 months ago|reply
It's a horrible way to live your life. But it doesn't have to be this way. This has to be this way only for terminally online people. If you don't go to twitter, there's no importance to anything anybody on twitter thinks about you. Of course, for certain people, like actors, politicians, top-level entertainers and so on, there's no other way to achieve anything now, but for most people it's entirely optional. You don't need to be on twitter (substitute any social media here) to be a good teacher, farmer, programmer, designer, builder, gardener, nurse or car mechanic. It's still completely voluntary so far.
[+] [-] dontwannahearit|3 months ago|reply
"I let the internet fck with my mind, now I want to un-fck it."
USE the internet, don't to let it use YOU.
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nonce42|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pityJuke|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] EA-3167|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pino999|3 months ago|reply
> She demanded that I apologize to the women for sexualizing them.
This doesn't work that well in real life. Let me sketch a scenario:
Oh eh, hi, eh, sorry, I have to admit than when you were brushing my hair, I was sexualizing you.
You can't make it much better, perhaps write a formal letter and focus on the hairbrush:
Three weeks ago, I was in your excellent shop. My hair never has been nicer. During the hair brushing, I got the feeling I felt a bit more for the hairbrush than I fell about you, I hope you can forgive me.
That gives a nice feeling about what was first a fairly normal human interaction.
It sounds hot though, good tip. But I got a humiliation kink, oh noes! How to resolve then? It is a catch-22 now. Need to do silly apologize, apologies are sexual, need to apologize for sexual feelings due to silly apologies. Haha, how do I get there?
[+] [-] mock-possum|3 months ago|reply
> The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there, always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?). To claim that these matters are merely discursive in nature is to ignore the problem. Because love and sex are so intimate and vulnerable, the stakes of punishment are higher, and the fear of it penetrates deeper into the psyche and is harder to rationalize away than, say, fear of pushback from tweeting a divisive political opinion.
I don’t see myself in this passage at all. My husband and I had sex this morning and I didn’t waste a moment thinking about this supposed panopticon of sexual surveillance that the author casually assumes is somehow omnipresent in ‘our’ lives.
Where is she getting this from??
How do her experiences so completely fail to line up with my own? Is this her own mental health issue? Is it the friends she chooses to surround herself with, or the content she chooses to consume?
It’s all very strange and impossible to relate to. I can’t remember the last time I felt like anyone else had anything to say about my sex life, at the very least anything that wasn’t generally positive / supportive.
[+] [-] mlsu|3 months ago|reply
"the self" is formed in relation to others, it is not formed by itself. The way that people think of their own self, is the way they imagine themselves to act in relation to others _only_. There is no "me" alone, it's all entirely relational.
The problem I think we have now is that a huge proportion of how we relate to others has been moved online. When I was growing up, being in a picture was something that happened rarely -- on "picture day" for the yearbook, at a family gathering when someone happened to have a disposable camera. But now, kids are in photos and videos all the time, 24/7. The way we relate, from very early on, is influenced by the deeply unnatural online parasocial relationships of Instagram etc.
It goes further than you, a stable self who is worried about cancel culture. It's built into your sense of self, it affects how your self is constructed. It's deeply embedded into who you are, your way of being. To be is to be perceived and we are being perceived in these really weird/unnatural/algorithmic ways, and it is reflecting on us.
[+] [-] npodbielski|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Anonyneko|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pphysch|3 months ago|reply
These criticisms seem to be more a reflection of the author's paranoia and sex-obsession than legitimate criticisms of the tools and technologies.
IMO, location sharing is pretty awesome among loved ones, and biometrics can help us manage our health? But I guess everything has to be about "sexual surveillance"...