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Sex is going out of fashion?

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Re: Sex is going out of fashion?

#491

Post by hellisothers »

davidktr wrote: post #477
jszymborski wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (along with many others) have been saying it for a while; there just isn't the same infrastructure for physical community as their once was. The church, the mall, the rotary club... these were bumping hot beds of socialisation. I'm the last person to denigrate the importance of online communities, most of my closest friends don't live in my city. There is, however, a very real and important role for communities tie…

All of this so much. My problem though is that I just don't know which IRL community to join. I've tried a few, it was not for me. Our hackerspace is heavily into identity politics, which I'm not. So I end up reading books, which is fine too I guess. I'm just not really part of society.

I’m also going through this and there are a lot of (weird) spaces out there, latest example: archery club. I’m currently looking into what it takes to break into 24h of Lemons which is dirt cheap amateur car racing and partying with nerds who like cars.

Re: Sex is going out of fashion?

#492

Post by kelseyfrog »

wonderwonder wrote: post #395

Wonder if this is related to the lack of personal relationships in general, especially friendships. There is an epidemic of loneliness in the world. So many ways to communicate and all we can do is post memes and upvote influencers. I am happily married but have zero friends. I met my wife through my friend group in college. If I heaven forbid got a divorce tomorrow, not sure where I would meet someone new. Guess I w…

We're nineteen years into the project of digitally reifying human relationships - one that's snowballing into an unmitigated catastrophe.

Social media circa 2003 began as a codification of existing human relationships. One's first digital friends records generally were a product of social relations, but as the marginal cost of digital reproduction tends toward zero, so did the cost of digital records of friendship untethered from the supervenience of social reality.

The digitization of friendship as a signifier of the friendship replaced the latter forming a simulacrum - the signifier replaced the signified. “the simulacrum is never that which conceals truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”[1] It's this very digital simulacrum completely detatched from social reality that leads to "Would things get strange if I hit it off with someone and she asked to meet my friends and I said I have none?"

While a reflexive, "log off. go outside. touch grass. meet people," is easy to respond with, it ignores the real problem with the magnitude of the problem: there are few people doing the same - the world's social energy is hoovered up and mediated by the systems of digital social capitalization. There isn't a surplus left to interact with.

What's even worse is that offline interactions themselves are mediated by the online. The process of initiating friendships itself has been digitally systematized either implicitly by digital chance encounters or explicitly in the form of friend finding apps. The online world gatekeeps the offline world. The world has undergone a psychic migration and the former world is in ruins. Truly "we have abandoned living."

1. Baudrillard 1981

Re: Sex is going out of fashion?

#493

Post by treis »

youessayyyaway wrote: post #65

These threads are always fun, because they often say more about us commenters than the subject matter. Personally, I find the article's supernatural stimulus theory compelling. Sex takes a lot of time if you aren't being selfish about it. It's also boring, compared with other forms of entertainment and creative pursuits, pornographic or not. I'm not sure this is all that new, either. Jokes about the declining frequen…

>Sex takes a lot of time if you aren't being selfish about it

Can you put a number on what you mean by "a lot of time"?

Re: Sex is going out of fashion?

#494

Post by collegeburner »

mc32 wrote: post #474
wonderwonder wrote: post #395

Wonder if this is related to the lack of personal relationships in general, especially friendships. There is an epidemic of loneliness in the world. So many ways to communicate and all we can do is post memes and upvote influencers. I am happily married but have zero friends. I met my wife through my friend group in college. If I heaven forbid got a divorce tomorrow, not sure where I would meet someone new. Guess I w…

I wonder what solution autocratic centralized societies will leverage so as not to collapse? Import populations ala US, or somehow "motivate" locals to reproduce? Singapore and Japan have been unsuccessful at getting people to voluntarily engage in producing larger families.

They may have to do some serious "motivation". Because not just is having and raising kids a big burden, they also force a lifestyle change a lot. Especially if you do not want to shove them off to daycare.

Re: Sex is going out of fashion?

#495

Post by phendrenad2 »

vgel wrote: post #444
freiherr wrote: post #331

Ignoring the content, the writing style was extremely annoying. Anyone else with similar feelings?

Yeah this was insufferable. I can only hope it was upvoted to talk about the subject and not for what the author actually said (the one time I'm glad for this bad habit of HN's).

To many people, sex is a cheeky, rebellious topic, and can only be discussed in terms like this.

Re: Sex is going out of fashion?

#496

Post by sph »

krageon wrote: post #57
sph wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both that and online porn has ruined us. It is an major epidemic that is still under the radar for how massive it is, in my opinion. And it's sad, because sex is very fun and porn is a very poor approximation of the real thing.

The irony here is that you are responding to someone lamenting puritanical thought with a puritanical post.

No. What is ironic is thinking being against porn is puritanical. It's not all black and white.

Like many people outside of the US, I am as far from puritanism as possible, yet I maintain that porn is a cancer. We should have more sex instead. The hippies were onto something.

Re: Sex is going out of fashion?

#497

Post by [deleted] »

krrrh wrote: post #176
krageon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony here is that you are responding to someone lamenting puritanical thought with a puritanical post.

The subtlety is that the hyper stimuli of modern porn streaming, while lascivious on the inside, is leading to something that looks like puritanism on the outside, hence the drop in actual sex.

[deleted]

Re: Sex is going out of fashion?

#498

Post by wonderwonder »

CalRobert wrote: post #415
wonderwonder wrote: post #395

Wonder if this is related to the lack of personal relationships in general, especially friendships. There is an epidemic of loneliness in the world. So many ways to communicate and all we can do is post memes and upvote influencers. I am happily married but have zero friends. I met my wife through my friend group in college. If I heaven forbid got a divorce tomorrow, not sure where I would meet someone new. Guess I w…

Three years ago a HN user named Dexwiz wrote something that hit me hard. I'd felt this, but I never saw it put in to words so well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20470085 """ The Screen and the Job have displaced almost everything else is our lives. Loneliness is just a primary symptom. The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in thin…

"The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions." this is very true and the most terrifying part is I see it in my kids, addicted to their video games. They play online games with their friends and actively communicate but I when I tell them no games today they have lost the ability to entertain themselves. They just kind of hang around hoping I am going to let them play. Its pretty sad and I working on figuring it out but also trapped in my own screen working 9 - 10 hours a day.

Re: Sex is going out of fashion?

#499

Post by jimt1234 »

freedomben wrote: post #307
bko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entertainment has entered a tyranny of choice. I see it personally. I can watch nearly every show and movie that was ever created but I still flip through Netflix and RT endlessly, often times choosing not to watch anything. When I was younger I would just watch Seinfeld re-runs, with commercials and all. Am I more "entertained" today than I was when I was growing up? I'm not convinced. The weirdest thing is I don't…

I've noticed the same thing. Honestly, as much as I hate ads, I've recently discovered Pluto TV on Google TV. It feels a lot like cable used to! You can pick from "channels" and you get what you get. There's no pausing, no rewinding, and your choices are limited to what's on. I would have laughed if someone had told me that I'd be turning it on, but I frequently do. Basically whenever I'm not sure what to watch, I fl…

I watch Pluto-TV for the exact same reason: it reminds me of old school cable-TV. I turn it on and "veg out", just like when I was a teenager. I tend to watch it before I go to sleep when I'm trying to shut down anyway.

The movie, The Big Short, was on heavy rotation about a year ago. Good movie. They have an entire channel dedicated to Narcos, so I'm basically fluent in Spanish now - well, "drug dealer Spanish", at least.

Re: Sex is going out of fashion?

#500

Post by el-salvador »

freedomben wrote: post #307
bko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entertainment has entered a tyranny of choice. I see it personally. I can watch nearly every show and movie that was ever created but I still flip through Netflix and RT endlessly, often times choosing not to watch anything. When I was younger I would just watch Seinfeld re-runs, with commercials and all. Am I more "entertained" today than I was when I was growing up? I'm not convinced. The weirdest thing is I don't…

I've noticed the same thing. Honestly, as much as I hate ads, I've recently discovered Pluto TV on Google TV. It feels a lot like cable used to! You can pick from "channels" and you get what you get. There's no pausing, no rewinding, and your choices are limited to what's on. I would have laughed if someone had told me that I'd be turning it on, but I frequently do. Basically whenever I'm not sure what to watch, I fl…

> It feels a lot like cable used to!

I had to stay once in an old hotel in a small town. It had an old CRT analog tv with analog cable. It brought back memories. Like the TV tuner changing channels really fast.

Fast channel surfing is something I hadn’t been able to do since switching to a digital tvs and digital cable about a decade ago.

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