Bringing Sexy Back. Internet Surveillance Has Killed Eroticism
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Regulars are buzzing about the notion that internet surveillance has sucked the eroticism out of our culture, sparking a lively debate about whether our online world has truly become more or less sexy. Commenters riff on the idea, with some arguing that the internet has simply compartmentalized sex into its own "dark" corner, making it more diverse and extreme, while others contend that our culture has become more overtly erotic, just in a different way. The discussion takes a darker turn as commenters discuss the addictive nature of the internet and the role of multi-billion dollar enterprises in shaping our online behaviors. As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that the thread is tapping into a timely and relatable anxiety about the impact of the internet on our lives.
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The latest waves of trying to ban porn certainly shows that this isn't what those in power desire, though.
"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.
There are several multi-billion dollar enterprises who spend all day every day trying to make their products more addictive (in your words, using YOU).
It's unlikely a meaningful number of people can pull themselves off of the dopamine treadmill by their bootstraps.
https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9780520295414
> 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?
Also having aphantasia sucks, I envy those who can visualize things in their mind.
While people see more sexualised imagery then probably ever before younger people have less and less of sex with their peers. Sex sells, still. For how long, I wonder.
Market forces ruin fucking everything in their attempt to paperclip-maximize, if you don’t keep them on a leash. That includes sexiness. What’s described is an outcome of a system where “it makes number go up” is sufficient justification for almost anything.
Oscar Wilde nailed this one: Everything is about sex except sex, which is about power.
What I'm reading from this is that you have a muffin fetish, because, er, otherwise, I'm not sure how you're getting there. If you mean that there exists somewhere a brand of muffins with a rude name, sure, probably. But _most_ muffins, no sex.
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.
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.
And the only thing that determines how we’re perceived, is the disposition of those perceiving us. This person is a villain, because you don’t like this kind of person. That person is an angel, because you have an affinity with that person.
We have already met the enemy..
He is us.
Framing matters and context too, but some things are just objectively bad in any light. Some are objectively good.
I think that truth (or at least belief in it) underlies why we collectively punish folks perceived as getting away with something that looks undeniably bad. Then add other phenomenon like the bandwagon effect and it can be crushing to the target.
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.
There's a reason I deleted my reddit and Facebook and never had a twitter. You're not going to have genuine conversations and experiences there if your goal is "socializing" these days. Or at least, the genuine ones are outflooded by engagement bait.
This will certainly not be offered by capital, though.
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.
Stopped. Thanks to that gore poster, I suppose.
But I went back to look maybe a week ago and when I did it was incomprehensible. It was full of in-jokes and references that made no sense to me. Dunks and subtweets that were context free. Strangely a short period away made the whole thing look like an alien culture.
Among those with whom I established any contact there's a:
-Doctor in training
-Teacher
-Small business owner doing house renovations
-Telecom company sales representative
-Taxi driver
There's hardly any overlap between them in terms of what they do for a living and it's like that naturally in every place that's not close to some kind of large business like a factory.
It's hard to ignore the tread that the younger a group is, the more being too online is just the default. It's hard to avoid the reality distorting effects of algorithmic content consumption when it is replicated by everyone you meet at school, especially with sex and gender relationships because those topics play so well on social media.
I feel bad for young kids. I think nerds (like you), queer people (like me and the author), and other terminally online people are canaries in the coal mine for what will become the new normal.
I have a younger sibling who is in their 20s but not very online and only one or two of their friends are, even though they constantly use social media. I think queer groups tend to be a lot more line than others. Leaving Seattle will probably help too but much of the US is unfriendly to queer folks so there's probably only a handful of other places to go.
That's an interesting way to put it, I think this happens a lot. But sometimes I think an opinion from a highly-specific online community escapes their bubble and becomes a reality in other groups, and sometimes this is sad.
For example I think there are way too many youngsters these days using the words 'chad' and 'incel' and they truly believe these things are true. Some go as far as saying that you are either born one way or another and there is no way to fix it. The very same thinking pattern caused teenagers to kill each other in multiple instances.
It seems some people just fail to realize that whatever is the norm in their online space is not reality.
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.
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.
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.
Some time ago I said to a coworker who I consider as a friend : 'I enjoy your company'. Another (younger, italian) coworker told me to be careful after I said to him 'she has such a soft voice'.
I really did not expect that reaction. To my feeling, no line got crossed and the fact that we are still friends and at times even share our thoughts about love and relationships in general, proves that we trust and respect each other.
You seem to be to afraid to be friends with your coworkers because of potential consequences? If that is so, i'm sorry, you are missing out a great deal in life.
Unfortunately if someone chooses to interpret your words or actions in an uncharitable way there’s not much you can do other than move on. It’s their burden to carry, not yours (except when there are real world consequences but I do think that’s a rare circumstance)
On 1995, which is 30 years ago, it was neither normal nor accepted. You was major asshole if you did it and lawsuits
It was that assholes did it, knew fully well it is an asshole act, but it was impossible to stop them. Because it was too easy to blame less powerful woman.
That was a huge no-no 30 years ago, at least in the US. In fact, it was a major no-no at my first job in 1979 and would get you fired.
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.
I’m not necessarily saying they are wrong either. It’s a tough zone. If I imagine people I know saying that to me, in my head most of them come off lecherous and creepy.
I feel like close friends could say that stuff to me or vice versa but most of the time it would come off weird at best.
Wait really, just for thinking someone is hot and telling you, their friend?
To be clear, I’m also not saying anyone would ostracized for this, nor that anyone would ostracize me if I said this. But if one of my more casual friends randomly commented that their hairdresser is hot, I’d give them a bit of a sideways look, yeah.
But that’s why I think it’s self selection:
- you mention that even from friends you would find it strange and seem to flock with similar perspectives;
- by contrast, I don’t and flock with people who don’t either.
And I don’t particularly see a problem with that — the world is a big place and not everyone needs to be to everyone else’s taste. But like many things, people seem to form cliques.
Discussing sex in non-sexual contexts is weird. Author goes at length how it was a private, personal experience in her own body and mind. And if it stayed there instead of being babbled out to a friend she would still have that friend.
>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.
And “pretty”, even “beautiful”, doesn’t mean “sexy”.
I definitely think comments here reflect the large portion of male HN readers.
Talking is good, but be aware there are many readers.
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.
Give it a while, everyone falls off the attractiveness escalator eventually. For some the only thing worse than being objectified is being invisible.
Overweight, unkempt, awkward around women, and guaranteed zero attention from women.
Atypical, non-standard, or unconventional are more neutral in tone, so given your desire for a non-subjective word I'd recommend these instead.
I mean why do people even post something like that? It takes 2 seconds to look up the definition of abnormal. It's it really not knowing, it's is it (what I believe) trying to sneak in their moral judgements behind a veneer of supposed "neutrality"?
> Abnormal - deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.
Yes, that's precisely what it is. Moral judgements based on outdated ("conservative", especially clerical) understandings of the world, wrapped in some delusional sense of "objectivity". Only the scientifically and philosophically illiterate fall for it. In German, we call it Bauernfängerei (swizzling, duping; lit. "pawn catching").
You fall into the same trap ("non-standard", "atypical"); you just stepped on the euphemism treadmill.
This is an abjectly silly thing to say, and people who push back on it are not gaslighting. Homosexuality occurs naturally, and it's not even rare - it's far more common than red hair, for example.
Calling something like that "abnormal" isn't in the domain of fact, it's purely a side-effect of what you label "normal".
Homophobia arises from seeing homosexuality as a threat to your heterosexuality. The LGBT people are coming after your coveted "straight" status and try to infect you with the "gay" virus which makes it harder to attract a woman.
Basically it's the male equivalent of being "deflowered".
"It's a Wonderful Chest" from Chappelle's Show was ahead of the curve(s) on this.
So at least there's that.
I was an avid viewer of r/analog. I don't know if this was 'recent' or not, but every time someone post a naked picture, either good or not, it goes rapidly to Top posts.
Even though it used to had many comments like "This photo is not interesting other than the naked woman", the upvotes arrived anyway.
I think nowadays they mostly block the comments in those posts, but what used to be an inspiring subreddit that would pop from time to time in my feed, is not longer that interesting to me.
My first instinct is to agree with this sentiment. There’s a lot of pretty mediocre photography that gets attention because “naked woman”.
At the same time, you could equally say “that landscape photo is not interesting if you take away the lake”. If you take away the interesting piece of a photo, yeah, it’s not interesting anymore. The fact is that people (but especially men) enjoy looking at naked and near-naked women. It’s a consistently compelling subject. It might be “easy” but it’s still compelling.
But I've seen plenty of boring pics of lakes and none were on top posts, contrary to these cases.
It is of course subjective what makes a good photo or not, but sometimes it is pretty clear why a picture reached top posts.
He said nothing improves a landscape picture more than having a person in the picture. I didn't believe him.
Later, I went on a trip to Hawaii, and took maybe 300 landscape pictures of its beauty. Upon looking at them at home, I realized he was right. The ones with people in them, even random strangers, were always more interesting.
Art is judged on feelings it invokes. Naked women invoke strong feelings in a lot of people.
(I'd also love recommendations of other good photography related subreddits, if you have any!)
For e.g. there's a trend where painters post a painting of them while standing next to it. I do not subscribe to any subreddits but as some of these become popular, they pop into my homepage. 9 out of 10 of these are painted by a pretty woman.
Most woman don't run an OF of course. And wether they do or don't, anyone should be free to socialize over their hobbies on the internet, and/or present their art work for other to appreciate (and get validation with hundreds or thousands of up votes). But those on the intersection that choose to run thinly disguised ads ruin it for me :(
It feels very UNsurprising to me that nudity, or revealing photos, would get more views. There's various ways we can feel about it. But "surprised" would, erm, certainly not be one of them for me!
However, I was still surprised that extremely tame photos of slightly curvy women would get relatively large numbers of views, in a world where most people can easily find all the lewd, nude, and explicit images and videos they want.
https://www.reddit.com/r/2busty2hide/
The confusing ones in my account were sooooo much tamer though. The chests were not even remotely the focus of the photos. It was subtle enough that it took me a while to even figure out the trend.
And how would you distinguish "being sexualized" from "men finding a woman attractive" ?
(While written by a woman, it comes down decisively on the side of "hey - you don't need anybody's permission to find things sexy")
Is there an online forum like posting a URL to such photos?
But "links shared on forums" was always my leading theory.
In some cases, I'm sure the thumbnails enticed extra clicks. But some of the pictures just had a bustier than average woman in the background or something.
(99% of these people were my IRL friends as well, so I wasn't really trying to take salacious pictures....)
men with certain bodies, can't escape being tallized no matter what they do or wear
or you could just say they are tall
You also can't escape being ugly and receiving the opposite reaction as a man.
There are so many things that you can't escape that it seems pretty suspect to focus on this one in particular. The most obvious aspect of being alive is that your body is mortal. You will never be able to escape that fact. You also cannot escape chronic diseases that negatively impact your life every single day.
The idea that men and women pair up to produce new life together is one of the more wholesome aspects of life. There are plenty of insects where one of the partners dies in the process and many species that don't care for the young.
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 character has been used and abused her entire life by the rich / capitalist system in general / embodied in 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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Freeze
Maybe having conflict isn’t healthy, and letting people grumble about things under the breath is the right way forward, unironically.
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).
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