I'm an atheist and I still think porn may be a valueless, happiness destroying exploitation of the way the human brain works in a way that makes zynga appear to be an angel of virtue. The less of it there is, the better.
The problem is cultural rather than anything else. I always thought the UK was sexually repressed, and then I experienced the US. As a European you learn fast - never discuss religion, politics or sex with an American. It's a cultural constraint that stems from a government influenced by religion, which paints sex as dirty. Indecent exposure? Social construct, rooted in religion.
Fix that and porn and prostitution take their legitimate place in a balanced society.
1) reduces the number of sexual assaults (because horny people have an easy "out") (what supposedly happened after the fall of Soviet Union, after which porn became legal in the eastern block)
2) enables lonely people or others who don't seek companionship an easier way of sexual release
3) historical value: record yourself when you're young, so you can easier remember your sexual joys when you're older.
It's a form of art. A bunch of people doing harmless consensual acts digging that deeply into your psyche actually makes it very strong and effective art.
Classifying something as porn or obscene is a personal decision that each individual makes.
I think nobody doubts that the porn industry is a very exploitative business.
However, an easily overlooked aspect of porn is that it canalizes and binds a lot of "useless" energy. A few years ago I heard this tongue-in-cheek hypothesis about male sexuality: Once they manage to reliably eliminate all porn, it will take two days before mobs with clubs and pitchforks roam the streets making political demands.
Do you think that is true of all porn?
If there are companies who are the zyngas and EAs of porn, can there be a Valve of porn? What about small independent amateur producers?
I am also an atheist. I was brought up in a Calvinist society (Afrikaner). For a long time I thought the same thing about porn. But I think it has much more to do with the strict upbringing that made everything around sex weird.
You state that "porn may be a valueless, happiness destroying exploitation of the way the human brain works". What are your reasons for saying this? Is it just your personal aversion? Or do you think it holds in general (in which case you'd at least have to provide some evidence).
Care to elaborate? How is porn an "happiness destroying exploitation of the way the human brain works"? I have yet to hear someone claim porn is making them unhappy except maybe in some extreme case of "porn addiction" (apparently such thing exists). My gut feeling is that lack of porn would make many more people unhappy.
Replace 'porn' with Wall Street, politics, institutionalized religion, professional sports, etc. and the case could be just as strong. There are many fields of human endeavor and modern society which are built around the idea of taking some natural tendency or desire we have, then leveraging it for private profit, even encouraging an unhealthy degree or type of expression of it. It's not limited to porn with regards to sex.
I agree wholeheartedly, and, in fact, this idea is becoming mainstream among both psychologists as well as regular people. Neurologically it works almost identically to any other physical addiction with much the same results. More information at [1], [2], and [3].
There's a reason we have these "archaic" views on sex, and it's more than religious dogma; although, every mainstream religion prohibits the hook-up culture these startups are advocating. In addition to the risk of disease, we seem to be happiest when we treat sex as a very intimate act between people that care deeply for one another rather than simply the casual social act described by Huxley's Brave New World.
Considering you have no issue with the "exploitation of the way the human brain works," and doing it yourself, I find your comment weak and hypocritical.
There's three underlying issues here that drive these decisions:
1) Legal and financial risk, the adult industry sees a vast amount of fraudulent transactions. That's the primary reason that most financial institutions won't deal with it, but there are specialist payment providers who will.
2) Ethical reasons. Many companies won't work with tobacco, alcohol, gambling, porn and other vice industries because it doesn't fit with their corporate objectives.
3) Marketing reasons. Even if a company doesn't intrinsically oppose vice businesses, being involved can clearly impact public perception of the business. This is a much bigger deal if you're running a multisided business like a social network or an app store because it can cause your entire business to shift because of the feedback loop.
To your second point. Aren't the corporate objectives of all US companies to make a shitload of money for their shareholders? If so, they should be jumping on all those businesses like horny teenagers, because those businesses make a lot of money.
> the adult industry sees a vast amount of fraudulent transactions.
There are two sides to this. For actual porn sites, the "vast amount of fraudulent transactions" are actually friendly fraud. Husbands getting caught and denying they did anything, or claiming to not have approved a charge. While up-sales and cross sales are contributor to this, this actually leads to much less fraud then you'd anticipate. It's usually the 3-day free trial that gets people (and rather than contacting support, who'd promptly refund the money), they just claim their credit card was stolen.
The truth is, when you compare the majority of the porn industry with the majority of the gaming, movie, and music industries (all entertainment industries), porn companies treat their customers far better than the others.
Disclaimer: I worked in adult industry doing credit card processing for about 10 years.
There's a mob of religious (and some non-religious) activists waiting around for any excuse to raise hell as soon as one of these companies makes any attempt to legitimize porn.
Porn is legal. You are thinking more of any attempt to make porn non-censored and relaxing regulatory restrictions on the distribution of porn. Yes, feminists & the religious "right" will raise hell because they're the primary reason porn is so inflammatory in this country.
This is the beginning of the plot of the movie Strange Days. Essentially the ability to record the thoughts of people during extremely intimate periods of their lives. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/ It only took us 18 years to get to that point.
Does anyone else think there's just an upper-limit to how much porn can be consumed by the average person? I think it's just assumed that if porn were suddenly as acceptable as mainstream programming, it would suddenly become the most popular thing, ever. But would it? People can read books for hours. People can watch Game of Thrones/Breaking Bad/Mad Men/Downton Abbey/James Bond movies in a marathon fashion. Hell, people can run marathons in a marathon fashion. But watching porn, constantly? Besides porn/sex-addicts, how big of a market is there for porn watching in excess of 10min-1 hour a day?
Wow, if this is the class of insert you get after paying what I presume are not insignificant amounts of fund, I'd hate to see the budget for a compelling one.
Reading between the lines, he sounds butt hurt to me due to dismissals from the sand hill road set. Well, no shit. Everybody (there) knows that adult content can be cash positive very close to day one, and due to their strong balance sheets they are hardly the likeliest M&A targets.
The rest (bulk) of the article seems to riff on mainstream acceptance nay open discussion. But it's far from jerking off that many people have an aversion to speaking frankly about. Go talk to some random guy on the streets about his bowel movements, or if his daughter is still on anti-psychotics and get back me.
If you want "respect" go do a social/mobile/whatever the new hotness is and go to the big firms hat in hand. They'll probably give you the money assuming you keep the crazy bottled up for the duration. Then you'll have no problem getting those business critical speaking gigs and becoming a go to react quote of some 3rd rate blog like tech crunch. And your friends will all be suitably impressed and jealous (to your face).
But after the money runs out all that goes away. Personally I'd just take the cash positive business for what it is ( a gift) and stop trying to validate yourself through others. Or just take up lying.
(yes, I know this doesn't have a lot to do with the specific points raised, but if you let them frame the conversation tehy've already done 90% of their job)
My favorite is when I read about litigious porn companies suing for copyright violations (like Perfect10 vs Google image search), calling their copyrighted images INTELLECTUAL property!
What is weird about that?
IP refers to anything that is a product of intellect, it doesn't make judgements about whether something is high brow or not.
And, to be more exact, what kind of harm you're talking about?
I could think of some very real and large issues that are usually linked with pornography (human abduction, treating [usually] females as sexual objects, etc), but after some thinking (not very deep, I must admit) I've concluded none of them are caused by pornography itself (in a same way knives aren't the cause of homicides, although many people died stabbed with a knife). But I may be missing something.
Alex Petralia specified he was prohibited by PayPal’s privacy policy from divulging information on accounts
I love how the companies use the "privacy policies" as excuses to not answer question even when the question is asked from the media on behalf of the person asking.
It's Sunday, so submissions need less attention to make it to the front page.
HN is not just tech, it's for articles which are "deeply interesting".
This article is interesting because it shows how hard it is for one area of business to exist even though it's legal, and a normal part of everyday life for many (most?) people.
US attitudes to sex have a dampening effect on WWW, affecting sites that have nothing to do with the US. Regular, softer, sites face weird prohibitions. Meanwhile, American porn (often deeply unpleasant) is pervasive and causing some nations to introduce nationwide mandatory filtering.
[+] [-] btipling|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spearchucker|12 years ago|reply
Fix that and porn and prostitution take their legitimate place in a balanced society.
[+] [-] tomp|12 years ago|reply
Some values I see for porn:
1) reduces the number of sexual assaults (because horny people have an easy "out") (what supposedly happened after the fall of Soviet Union, after which porn became legal in the eastern block) 2) enables lonely people or others who don't seek companionship an easier way of sexual release 3) historical value: record yourself when you're young, so you can easier remember your sexual joys when you're older.
[+] [-] kristopolous|12 years ago|reply
Classifying something as porn or obscene is a personal decision that each individual makes.
[+] [-] sentenza|12 years ago|reply
However, an easily overlooked aspect of porn is that it canalizes and binds a lot of "useless" energy. A few years ago I heard this tongue-in-cheek hypothesis about male sexuality: Once they manage to reliably eliminate all porn, it will take two days before mobs with clubs and pitchforks roam the streets making political demands.
[+] [-] barry-cotter|12 years ago|reply
I presume you feel the same way about the female equivalent of porn, romance novels, eh?
[+] [-] radio4fan|12 years ago|reply
Hookup apps and dildonics are not porn.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_pron|12 years ago|reply
You state that "porn may be a valueless, happiness destroying exploitation of the way the human brain works". What are your reasons for saying this? Is it just your personal aversion? Or do you think it holds in general (in which case you'd at least have to provide some evidence).
[+] [-] olalonde|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agilebyte|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|12 years ago|reply
By keeping innovative sexual content out of the door you let the worse objectifying non-interactive non-adaptive porn to thrive.
[+] [-] mkramlich|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pvnick|12 years ago|reply
There's a reason we have these "archaic" views on sex, and it's more than religious dogma; although, every mainstream religion prohibits the hook-up culture these startups are advocating. In addition to the risk of disease, we seem to be happiest when we treat sex as a very intimate act between people that care deeply for one another rather than simply the casual social act described by Huxley's Brave New World.
[1] http://yourbrainonporn.com
[2] http://www.yourbrainrebalanced.com/index.php?board=1.0
[3] http://reddit.com/r/nofap
[+] [-] bashinator|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inzax|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlotito|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ig1|12 years ago|reply
1) Legal and financial risk, the adult industry sees a vast amount of fraudulent transactions. That's the primary reason that most financial institutions won't deal with it, but there are specialist payment providers who will.
2) Ethical reasons. Many companies won't work with tobacco, alcohol, gambling, porn and other vice industries because it doesn't fit with their corporate objectives.
3) Marketing reasons. Even if a company doesn't intrinsically oppose vice businesses, being involved can clearly impact public perception of the business. This is a much bigger deal if you're running a multisided business like a social network or an app store because it can cause your entire business to shift because of the feedback loop.
[+] [-] wereHamster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlotito|12 years ago|reply
There are two sides to this. For actual porn sites, the "vast amount of fraudulent transactions" are actually friendly fraud. Husbands getting caught and denying they did anything, or claiming to not have approved a charge. While up-sales and cross sales are contributor to this, this actually leads to much less fraud then you'd anticipate. It's usually the 3-day free trial that gets people (and rather than contacting support, who'd promptly refund the money), they just claim their credit card was stolen.
The truth is, when you compare the majority of the porn industry with the majority of the gaming, movie, and music industries (all entertainment industries), porn companies treat their customers far better than the others.
Disclaimer: I worked in adult industry doing credit card processing for about 10 years.
[+] [-] m_ram|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fosap|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quantumpotato_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoper|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trotsky|12 years ago|reply
Reading between the lines, he sounds butt hurt to me due to dismissals from the sand hill road set. Well, no shit. Everybody (there) knows that adult content can be cash positive very close to day one, and due to their strong balance sheets they are hardly the likeliest M&A targets.
The rest (bulk) of the article seems to riff on mainstream acceptance nay open discussion. But it's far from jerking off that many people have an aversion to speaking frankly about. Go talk to some random guy on the streets about his bowel movements, or if his daughter is still on anti-psychotics and get back me.
If you want "respect" go do a social/mobile/whatever the new hotness is and go to the big firms hat in hand. They'll probably give you the money assuming you keep the crazy bottled up for the duration. Then you'll have no problem getting those business critical speaking gigs and becoming a go to react quote of some 3rd rate blog like tech crunch. And your friends will all be suitably impressed and jealous (to your face).
But after the money runs out all that goes away. Personally I'd just take the cash positive business for what it is ( a gift) and stop trying to validate yourself through others. Or just take up lying.
(yes, I know this doesn't have a lot to do with the specific points raised, but if you let them frame the conversation tehy've already done 90% of their job)
[+] [-] cft|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wprl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drdaeman|12 years ago|reply
And, to be more exact, what kind of harm you're talking about?
I could think of some very real and large issues that are usually linked with pornography (human abduction, treating [usually] females as sexual objects, etc), but after some thinking (not very deep, I must admit) I've concluded none of them are caused by pornography itself (in a same way knives aren't the cause of homicides, although many people died stabbed with a knife). But I may be missing something.
[+] [-] olalonde|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|12 years ago|reply
I love how the companies use the "privacy policies" as excuses to not answer question even when the question is asked from the media on behalf of the person asking.
Do they think we are idiots?
[+] [-] tomp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quantumpotato_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomohawk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radio4fan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|12 years ago|reply
HN is not just tech, it's for articles which are "deeply interesting".
This article is interesting because it shows how hard it is for one area of business to exist even though it's legal, and a normal part of everyday life for many (most?) people.
US attitudes to sex have a dampening effect on WWW, affecting sites that have nothing to do with the US. Regular, softer, sites face weird prohibitions. Meanwhile, American porn (often deeply unpleasant) is pervasive and causing some nations to introduce nationwide mandatory filtering.
[+] [-] sigzero|12 years ago|reply