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The Internet Is for Porn

themargins.substack.com

351–360 of 460 posts

Re: The Internet Is for Porn

#351
post #318

"Everything in life is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power." I think the debate is not really about porn, but people's sense of justice, cheating, deserving things or not etc. Some feel like porn gives unearned satisfaction to young men, a virtual substitute they don't have to work for. The bitter other side will say, no shit, I won't slave away to get screwed over, it's much more straightforward business to co…

> Puritans may feel like so much sexuality and hedonism tries to cheat and get the benefits, while not suffering consequences, like pregnancy, adult responsibility of family life etc. That it hollows out the sanctity of this intimate and symbolic act. Not a puritan, but I could never explain that viewpoint to me with anything else than envy. Like, being careful with sex if it may lead to unwanted pregnancies makes pe…

Sociologically, the worry is that larger and larger numbers of the young male population will withdraw, and become Hikikomori. Doing the bare minimum to sustain themselves, and riding life between moments of hollow, isolated, carnal release with no greater purpose and a constant nagging dissatisfaction with their marginal existence.

From a perspective of optimization, it could be seen as young men reaching a local minima with respect their quality of life vs the risks and costs of its maintenance.

The commodotization and derisking of sexual pleasure and titillation decouples it from the behaviors it's historically been used as a reward for. This reweights the incentive structures in our society that kept a lot of otherwise ne'er-do-well young people productive.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's something we definitely need to have a collective dialogue about, as we no longer have any centralized moral or executive authorities capable of unilaterally responding to this shift in a manner that puts us back into social balance.

Re: The Internet Is for Porn

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's such a primitive and toxic line of thinking its especially a nonsense argument when you note that porn is one of the few industries with a huge pay gap - and in favor of women. its so significant that top tier actresses pay scale has a floor that is higher than the ceiling of the equivalent male talent.

sure but the actors aren’t making the most money, the men running the companies are

Yeah like, cherry picking a stat in a huge way. But even worse I think it misses the point that porn is super exploitative to the performers.

Re: The Internet Is for Porn

#353
post #29

Porn always reminds me of other classical debates that have no end like guns and abortion. The camps of folks in the middle who are cognitively capable of making a difference can't because the outsized voices on either side of them are screaming for either total freedom or total shutdown. They actively fear monger people out of action so no real progress is made. It prevents the best coders and business people from w…

> My basis for that is that virtually anything sex related, apart from toys, cannot be purchased with credit or debit cards. Most porn can be bought with credit cards, at least in the USA. Mainstream payment processing companies like stripe may not be willing to do it but if you go try to buy (legal) porn right now with a credit card you will be able to do it.

There's a spectrum with this.. some banks will allow CC processing for a porn biz.. some get creative with how they label things... some will even get into details about types of content maybe..

but it's not as easy as mainstream, and often much more expensive to process and in some cases to even sign up.

Last I looked into ccBill - they were collecting an extra 2 grand up front payment to enable process mastercard.

These systems are taking advantage of niche classes imho.

There is also the threat of getting deplatformed / de-processed? quickly because bad PR - something that a local hardware store would not be worried about.

It's harder to find places to work with you, it's more expensive, and easier to loose your ability to get paid. Sometimes there are things like operation chokepoint that try to make it near impossible for a small independent operator to go out on her own.

Re: The Internet Is for Porn

#354
post #202
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " " Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." I'm sorry if I violated the site rules, but I don't see how? At the time of my post, there was no hint or indication of lostgame being a victim of sexual assault [1]. I'm familiar with the concept of "steelmanning" an argument, but I don't think we should be expected to tr…

> By "extremely triggering", I assume you mean "somewhat annoying"?

That was trivializing what the other commenter said.

I take your point that the full context hadn't been clarified yet.

Re: The Internet Is for Porn

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument holds no water and it is pretty disgusting of this uber-for-porn pimp to pretend he is doing good. Porn is like weed. If you want to consume it ethically you need to verify your sources. These cam sites have their own serious exploitation issues that are completely being ignored. If you go on reddit you can find many threads discussing cam girls who are suspected to either be underage or be literal sex s…

Like weed, which many people actually grow themselves?

Not all porn is created for sale. Modulo all the revenge porn stuff... there’s plenty of people creating their own “personal” porn. From candid selfies shared only with a partner to full on private amateur movie collections.

Re: The Internet Is for Porn

#356
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While what you say about bad actors is true, I just don't buy your argument. SV prides itself in solving "hard problems" (whether that's actually true is another issue entirely), so are you honestly saying that the issue with high chargeback rates or illegal content is too difficult to solve? I mean, SV can create advanced electric cars, launch rockets into space, serve millions of queries a second, but porn spam is…

Considering what the original idea behind Facemash was, I don't think the type of industry to achieve success in matters. Porn spam is difficult in the same manner filter-evading YouTube clips are - it's human intelligence applied at scale. With highly motivated humans at that. It really is harder than all the things which you mentioned.

Imho the fact that porn-related “supposedly-technical” problems are still so prevalent, is an actual raincheck over SV’s claims of world-changing capabilities. In the end, SV dudes are mostly just pushing ads and marketing Chinese tech. When hard people-problems come up, be it fake news or scammers, they have no solution.

Re: The Internet Is for Porn

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Men are expected to sell their bodies in manual labor. Women are not. Seems a double standard.

I dunno... my Grandma had to pump well water and boil it to wash clothes, prep meals for Grandpa and their 11 children (would have been 13, but one was stillborn and another died as a baby). She was a tough old bird. Married at 16. First kid at 18. Last child at 44. Grandma didn't get a washing machine until 1970, if I recall. Had she not been there to take care of the kids and the farm, Grandpa couldn't have worked…

People don't look down on your grandma they just recognize she had a hard and pretty shitty life and don't want be a ox that can speak English. Stop being such a incel loser jesus.

Re: The Internet Is for Porn

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That it hollows out the sanctity of this intimate and symbolic act. See that's the problem. We as a society need to stop putting sex on a pedestal. It's just sex. Pleasure is pleasure, why would anyone not want to be pleasured? And why is pleasure something that has to be earned ? It is very simple to give and receive pleasure, why complicate that?

Perhaps because many communities deeply believe sex is more than just for pleasure?

Humans love to manufacture mysticism around the purely physical world. Symbolism is a terrifying thing. Nothing is anything more than it seems, and the sooner we get around to accepting that, the better off we'll be.

Re: The Internet Is for Porn

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhen in the last two centruries, the general population seems to have internalized the view that making money = work, keeping a house functioning = not work. It's peculiar, if you think about it, given how big a multiplier the latter is to the former. I'm guessing this is one of the early case of society falling victim to metrics - making money is easy to quantify and compare, housekeeping isn't.

Feminism stigmatized keeping a house functioning. “Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” became a slur thrown at women who had the nerve to not serve a corporate master.

I’m not going to downvote because it’s true there are feminists (including second-wave feminists who fought the really tough political struggles) who have shared the view that working in the home / building a family has less value than that of earning a wage / building a career.

However, feminism is a (very) broad church and the majority of feminist that I’ve come across would argue for legislative and other societal barriers be removed so that a woman is free to choose between motherhood and career – or whatever balance works best for her own inclinations and circumstances.

Re: The Internet Is for Porn

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean. That statement tracks pretty well if you look at our government, where the elderly are represented in elected offices at double or even triple their actual share of the population. According to the 2010 census Americans over 65 make up under 15% of... well, Americans[0], but currently occupy 147 seats in the House (out of a possible 435) and 48 in the Senate (out of 100), along with executive branches in 15 s…

Sure, but the implication that congressional representation should closely track percentage of the population is ludicrous. I mean, according to a quick Google search, nearly 40% of Americans are under age 30, the minimum age for a US Senator . Should we be mad none of them are Senators, or heck, that not one of the nearly a quarter of Americans who are under 18 (aka children) are in Congress?

You are trivializing what is an actual worldwide issue: even in democratic countries the young are completely not represented. Not “underrepresented”, not represented at all. It’s a massive, massive problem that very few countries actually tried to tackle. The young are the future, but governments can (and mostly do) completely ignore their needs, and simply run everything into the metaphorical ground - they’ll be gone by the time the real impact of their choices will be apparent, anyway.

This dovetails nicely with another big problem of most political systems: the cursus honorum for politicians is often very slow, meaning that, by the time a person gets to call the shots, the world has already changed significantly. This could simply be considered folklore when the world moved slowly, but we’ve effectively lost that luxury about 100 years ago. And when we go the other way, and elect mid-life people, we end up with revolving-door issues and poor selection criteria (looks over brains etc).

So yeah, age-representation is a big unsolved problem of democratic government.

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