Bringing Sexy Back. Internet surveillance has killed eroticism
lux-magazine.com304 points by eustoria 9 hours ago
304 points by eustoria 9 hours ago
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.
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.
> how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized
Give it a while, everyone falls off the attractiveness escalator eventually. For some the only thing worse than being objectified is being invisible.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/apr/04/thelas...
> you builders, stop wolf-whistling, it's coarse. Except if you do it to me. Then I'd be really pleased ...
Attraction and romance is complicated.
> For some the only thing worse than being objectified is being invisible.
"It's a Wonderful Chest" from Chappelle's Show was ahead of the curve(s) on this.
And for others, finally being invisible and not subject to leering in public and online is a mercy.
I have a pet theory that the reason certain men are homophobic is because they're terrified that another man is looking at them the same way they look at women.
Perhaps but I think it's just a normal ick response. People instinctively steer clear of "weird" or "perceived to be dirty" things even if it's illogical. (No matter how much some try to gaslight, homosexuality is abnormal. Note that abnormal != wrong. The former is a factual statement and the latter is a subjective/moral one, though for better or worse most of the globe does still treat it negatively and it's only in the social bubbles that we're in where it's accepted)
If that's all you need, you can always wear an oversized t-shirt with a wolf howling at the moon. Or maybe that only works for men.
Go to any photography subreddit that's not already focused on nudity or sex. Any photo with naked women will get more upvotes than most other submissions. It can be an objectively bad photo, that doesn't really matter.
Does not need to be naked, just a pretty woman.
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.
I can totally attest this.
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.
> “This photo is not interesting other than the naked woman”
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.
I guess if you take it literally, yeah.
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.
I still find that one to be one of the better photography subreddits, but I do agree that that's been happening a bit too often lately.
(I'd also love recommendations of other good photography related subreddits, if you have any!)
> I have a hunch some people actually prefer this sort of thing to explicit content.
The pragmatic takeaway is "making yourself more attractive will make people x100 more interested in seeing you."
So at least there's that.
Hrm, the takeaway is really (IMO) "Have a woman with a big chest in the same picture will get 100x more views"
thanks JohnBooty for sharing your insights about women with certain bodies
Like the valiant Sir Mix-a-lot before him, he can not lie
I think there is a remix that could be made with both of them.... Would sell.
>It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.
And how would you distinguish "being sexualized" from "men finding a woman attractive" ?
I feel called out here :( I physically cannot resist on clicking on videos or photos with even mildly attractive women in the thumbnail. Same thing IRL. Which is strange because I don't even care about porn.
Naked woman is like endgame. Seems great, but it actually sucks (hehe). Attractive woman in a completely normal situation is like starting new game and knowing it's gonna be really good.
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.
> "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.
Yes. 'cute', 'pretty', 'beautiful', and 'sexy' are all synonymous on the surface (and in my head I may use them as such) but in my eyes reflect different kinds of attraction.
I've definitely put more thought into this topic than many, though. It's not easy at all to tell the difference and my US society certainly doesn't care to delineate between them. But a good part of erotic writing lives and dies on if you can understand which audience you are going for and which forms of language you use to evoke that spectrum.
It can also expand to help in any kind of romantic writing as well.
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.
The takeaway is the same though. "I went to my hairdresser and they were hot" only gets you ostracized in very specific social circles. For 99.9999% of the world, it's normal conversation to have among friends.
I’m not really sure about that. I think if I told most people in my social circles that, they would look at me like I’m very weird.
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. Choice of words is also a big factor though. “Beautiful”, “gorgeous”, “attractive” are all more reasonable sounding to me than “hot” even though they all basically mean the same thing.
> In my head most of them come off lecherous and creepy.
Wait really, just for thinking someone is hot and telling you, who's presumably their friend?
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.
With this post on HN, her 'puritan echo chamber/bubble' meets this 'nerdy/intellectual echo chamber/bubble'.
Absolutely, I’m in a bubble as well. The average person would not only not know this site but assume something bad by its name.
> 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.
30 years ago it was rather normal that a manager would touch the behind of a coworker, which is clearly a bad thing. Nowadays looking in their direction a bit too long seems to be labeled 'not done'.
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.
It was not normal in a semse normal managers would do it and everyone would aprove.
On 1995, which is 30 years ago, it was neither normal nor accepted. You was major asshole if you did it and lawsuits were already won.
Perhaps in 1975. The earliest I remember a dude at the office getting fired for harassment was around 1988.
Safest thing to do is just leave no possible room for doubt. This means you can’t be friends with your coworkers, which is disappointing, but the tail risk of accidentally saying something that crosses the line is too severe when it comes to professional consequences.
Fear is a bad advisor! I take the risk because i know that most people around me know me and trust that i say such things in good faith, without patronizing or overly flirting with people of the opposite sex. If it should have any profesional consequences, then maybe i would have the wrong employer.
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.
I think this is right. Continue to connect with humans and try to evaluate their actions in good faith. Don’t be a creep but don’t skip life either.
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)
Yes! Good Working drone! You must keep on working, that’s your purpose after all!
You think watching someone - on your own - on Only Fans is an example of sexual intimacy?
> 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.
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?
Conflict is actually healthy to have as long as it’s not violent and there’s space for other ways of relating to the same person.
> “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.
This is pure paranoia; none of this requires a centralized bad guy.
Whoever said anything about centralised?
This is what most don’t understand. The reality is, we’re all villains. And we’re all angels. 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.
There is no one benefiting, other than we ourselves. But don’t underestimate the power of the dopamine rush we all get by having our biases validated.
We have already met the enemy..
He is us.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's the Mirror of Erised, one of the deeper concepts presented in the Harry Potter series. Good stuff: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Mirror_of_Erised
It shows the viewer their deepest desires. And many have wasted their life away staring into what could be, but making no move away from the mirror to pursue any sense of happiness in reality.
well, not zero. But yes, you need to find the small hidden paths to take back what we once had.
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.
> you need to find the small hidden paths to take back what we once had.
This will certainly not be offered by capital, though.
Of course not, that's why it's small and hidden.
As an example, you wouldn't even find a place like HN unless you are a particular kind of person or looking a a particular type of news. And I wouldn't even say HN is "hidden" per se. But it has kept its site counter to many other social media trends over the years. Those choices will build a different culture from Instagram or Tiktok.
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'd push back on drawing a sharp line between "institutional abuse" and "genuine erotic connection among equals". As the essay points out, the MeToo campaign did use call-outs against individuals in service of its goal. Some of those callouts were alleging criminal conduct, but on the other end of the spectrum you had much more dubious stuff, or completely unsubstantiated rumors that some person was "bad". I agree that stopping institutional abuse is a noble goal, but the MeToo practice of naming and shaming personal friends in anonymous spreadsheets is the type of thing that builds the internal panopticon: what if our personal circumstances changed so that there's a power imbalance, or someone misinterpreted them? If you accept that practice on political grounds because it's a useful weapon against the "enemies of liberation" (as the author put it), can you really claim to want people to change their attitudes about sex? It doesn't work nearly as well if we stop seeing sexual behavior as inherently scandalous.
I wasn't sure if I should mention this, but there aren't much articles that talks about the negative consequences that metoo campaign had. It had some real consequences beyond just some dubious stuff.
Here in Sweden there is the "Adam case". A couple went through a bad divorce in the later part of MeToo, and the mother of two boys accused the father of sexual assaulting the older boy that was then 7 year old. The court found no evidence of the event, and because of some other aspects, gave full custody to the father. The mother then in the appeal changed the story and claimed that the boy and the father together sexual assaulted the other child, a 3 year old boy. Again the court found no evidence and marked in their decision that the new claim was not believable.
Then social service decided that in contrast to the court that the boy was a danger to other children and put the child in a treatment facility and denied any association with his father or any other member of the family. The boy was also denied access to school and for the most part any contact with other children. This went on for 5 years.
At that point a new social service worker got the case as the previous worker went on parental leave. The new worker found that neither the boy, father or the claimed victim statements had been referenced in the decision and it was exclusive based on the mothers claims. Just like the court findings, there was no evidence to collaborate any of the events. The new social worker decided thus to revert the decision and let the boy return to his father. However this was quickly reverted by his superiors, and the new social worker got removed and put on other cases. At this point investigating journalists got the wind of the case and made a fairly large documentary about it. The media publicity triggered an internal review at that social worker office.
A year later the internal review found, like the court and the new social worker, that there was zero evidence of any sexual assault and that serious mishandling had occurred in this case, especially by only considering the claims of the mother. The boy was finally reunited with his father, by now 6 years later at which point he was 13. No one has been charged with any crime, although the social service office has officially apologized to the family.
It's not so much that sexual behavior is inherently scandalous, the issue is with the broader context where a formalized hierarchy of power and a potential for intimidation are quite antithetical to any kind of genuine, consensual connection. The potential for borderline-abusive behavior in the workplace (not necessarily criminal, either) is orders of magnitude greater than any concern about "naming and shaming".
I think the author's (ex) friend believes the same about the hair salon thing. That there is a hierarchy of power and potential for intimidation in the context of a worker and a client. E.g. the guy at the restaurant being flirty with the waitress.
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 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.
> You can't have a liberal attitude toward sex and a puritanical attitude toward sex at the same time.
Sure you can, they are both matters of degree and scope, but I do think going to the extent of weaponizing either is at odds with the other.
For example, I don't try to act against anyone's personal sexual or romantic inclinations, and don't think it's the place for government or anyone else, that's a freedom we all should have and defend, but that doesn't mean there aren't societal or personal limits. If any of my friends were polyamorous or in a thrupple or open relationship or anything like that, it's not necessarily my business unless it's presenting problems that visibly affect their life or mine. My acceptance of that is independent of the fact that I'm only interested in a long-term monogamous romantic and sexual relationship at the moment, which has in some cases seemed more conservative. If my romantic partner decided she wanted something else, she's of course welcome to explore that on her own terms by ending our romantic relationship.
I guess the nuance really comes down to where the aspect of "morality" comes in, where it's directed, and whether that's fundamentally at odds with a sense of true liberalism.
In one instance for example, I found myself prompted to defend monogamy in opposition to someone who would clearly think of themselves as a progressive, and might arguably be liberal in disposition, but was railing against monogamy because she'd had bad experiences with the people she ended up with in those relationships. She was making a grand moral argument, and I responded with a contrary argument, but I don't think that's incongruent with either of us being liberal.
Nothing about what you just described is puritanical or illiberal. You can have conservative personal behavior without attempting to exert undue control over the behavior of others.
I don't do drugs or want other people to do drugs, but still don't think it's my or the government's business if people do so. That's a textbook liberal position on the issue.
That's why I qualified puritanical and liberal with matters of degree, rather than being diametrically opposed. Having a large scope liberal attitude towards sex enables my inward facing, relatively puritan(ical) disposition to be a choice rather than mandatory and I don't care to demand that of others. I could very well be someone else with a different strict set of moral standards for me and my immediates with a slightly different scope and still be liberal. It seems to me that only when one weaponizes it does it become puritanical and illiberal; you want the same strict moral guidelines for everyone else that you impose on yourself.
> She demanded that I apologize to the women
This is antisocial advice. It's beyond inappropriate to use the pretense of apology to announce your intimate fantasies to strangers.
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.
100% - lots of crazy thoughts come and go, and I can't be expected to apologize for that!
And I absolutely don't want to hear from randoms about how they're "sorry that I thought for a second about what you would look like naked" or whatever other random thought popped into their heads. That world would be absolutely insane.
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.
To be fair, it's likely that the author's former friend would have a hard time disagreeing with this if presented in exactly the way that you have.
I suspect that what such a person finds offensive isn't OOP's behavior (i.e. receiving a hair treatment without incident), but rather the thought in and of itself. Since they know that they can't credibly assault a person's character purely on the basis of an involuntary or intrusive thought, they have to settle for calling out some behavior as a stand-in for the thought. In an alternate timeline where OOP had apologized (which would really just be extremely socially awkward, not outwardly harmful), I'd bet on the former friend making the exact opposite stink and chastising OOP for failing to keep it to herself.
Another layer that wouldn't be surprising in this instance would be subconscious homophobia. The friend thinks she's upset at OOP for "victimizing" two poor strangers without their knowledge, but in reality she's disturbed by the sudden realization that she herself may have been or may one day become the unknowing object of such thoughts. Since she can't say as much without implying that she's categorically uncomfortable being around queer women, she reached for any excuse to turn it around on OOP and make herself feel like the good guy.
My physio therapist is very nice and caring, genuinely interested in conversation and helping with my and other people's physical and sometimes even psychological problems. While she was moving my legs using her upper body, it felt quite intimate and I admired her for being so professional while doing her work physically and giving psychological support as a bonus. I'm sure she will notice at times that some people get intimate feelings but she seems to be okay with that, knowing she is helping patients while such things can happen as a side effect.
All to say that feelings are only natural and they can induce thoughts. Why apologize.
> moving my legs using her upper body, it felt quite intimate and I admired her for being so professional
This highlights something that I've been chewing on a lot lately. I'm not sure what you specifically meant by the word "intimate" when you said that, but I do think it's really interesting to distinguish between "intimate" and "sexual", even though they often coincide.
As an example, years ago I was staying with some out-of-town friends after a break-up and they wanted to introduce me to a couple of lovely single women they knew. I hadn't really been taking great care of myself in the fallout of the breakup, so I went and shaved and got cleaned up. While doing my hair, I realized that my eyebrows were pretty unruly and somewhat sheepishly asked my friend's wife if she'd be comfortable taking some tweezers to them and helping me get them cleaned up. It wasn't, even a little bit, a sexual moment but it ended up being incredibly and unexpectedly intimate. We were both pretty surprised by it and ended up getting closer (as friends) afterwards.
What a nice story! Cleaning up eyebrows shows nicely the discrepancy between intimacy (feeling love and care) and erotica (feeling lust?).
The hair grooming in the article probably felt similar.
Thinking about the physio therapy, her upper body felt very warm and soft but it was probably a rather standard technique for firmly moving the joints and ligaments in legs and hips.
What it made most intimate was not just the softness of her body but also the care she took for the movements, knowing that it would help.
So my limbic system went into oxytocin producing mode, which the aware mind easily picks up with warm thoughts. I think that's where the bridge between intimacy and sexual thoughts can happen, but there my thinking was not firmly going into that direction, it just felt warm and comfortable, even a bit emotional.
In your case the feelings apperently came from both directions, it was not a professional/client context after all.
> What it made most intimate was not just the softness of her body but also the care she took for the movements, knowing that it would help.
100% that was a big part of it too for me. It was the care and attention that was going into it, plus the element of trust that goes into giving someone consent to inflict sharp but short-lived pain.
I’d actually be really curious on the physiotherapy side of it whether there is actually a combination of intimacy and professionalism happening on the other side of it. I’ve done physio with people who did not give me warm and fuzzies at all, and with people who, like for you, left me with that nice oxytocin sense of satisfaction. I wonder if the people who left me with that feeling are good at what they do because they have some added degree of empathy or mirror neurons or whatever that makes them feel good when they treat their patients softly and intentionally.
The apology in that case is more a polite society way of expressing "I appreciate your work, this isn't me taking it as something else".
I somewhat agree you don't need to apologize in that particular case you've outlined; medical professionals, of which that person effectively is, have usually seen it all. But there is a reasonable justification for why someone might choose to throw out an apology there all the same.
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.
Yeah that was pretty weird. Minimizing harm means both leaving people alone and not denying yourself random pleasant feelings.
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".
> the expected online (corporate?) etiquette
Trust me, HR does not want anyone telling anyone else about their impure thoughts just because they had them.
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.
Seriously there's a ton of missing context here.
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.
Repression is the hammer. The church, institution, or social circle are the carpenter. The only real difference today is that now the hammer comes standard with wi-fi.
It's possible that Roman Catholicism and then the Reformation made sexual repression a part of Western European culture in a way that survived the transition to a more secular society (although the US in particular is still mostly nominally Christian).
But some kind of sexual repression seems to be a feature of every human society. Probably that's because people in every society often harm themselves and one another for sexual reasons, so people everywhere attempt to repress that.
Birth control, especially barrier methods such as condoms, and modern medicine have dramatically ameliorated the degree to which people harm one another for sexual reasons. But rape, infidelity, and falling in love with harmful partners are still enormous problems, as well as some more prosaic problems mentioned in the article.
Also lots of repression in countries run by atheist ideologies.
Such countries are generally run by personality cults, which are not the least bit atheistic. Same mental bug, just a different exploit.
Go to North Korea and try to sell them atheism, for instance. They'll send your remains home in a cardboard box.
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.
She means being horny and being open about it, but the word "erotic" sort of has lost its meaning as you are saying, yes.
>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
I argue that's eroticism in its purest form.
>a quality that causes sexual feelings, as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality, and romantic love.
both subjects don't need to be purposefully sexualizing for an erotic event to happen. That's a bit of what powers some of the more out there fetishes (like say, having your feet massaged, which has nerve connections to many more part of the body than one expects). It can escalate to something sexual, but most adult humans tend to learn how to suppress such desires, no different than not buying that candy at the store or hot wanting to slap Bob at work when he talks about the latest conspiracy theory.
>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
I guess so. The US has been so screwed on sexuality for decades that there's no one true meaning anymore. Which isn't bad, but when you range from "a person looked pretty" to "Onlyfans DM's" your word may indeed lose meaning.
It's interestingly enough a global issue too, in terms of policy. But unfortunately it's pretty low priority compared to the rest of everything else going on.
Eroticism is more about art and media. Being sexually aroused is not art, it is an occurrence in the real world.
This is like saying science fiction is talking to a chatbot. OP is being a bit pedantic.
>Being sexually aroused is not art, it is an occurrence in the real world.
Based on the definition I shared, it's not about your feelings. It's the quality of what made you feel that way. An important bu subtle difference.
To take your example, it's less about the chatbot and more about how and what it responds with. If suddenly it's responding based on its remembered experiences and sense of the world, I. E. 'Sentience', we would start to wonder if its science fiction.
Of course it isn't about art and media. If you think so, then you need to go and find your soul, because it isn't with you currently.
Edit: Reply to the commenter below, who unfortunately was down voted. I didn't mean it in that way at all. I mean it as in finding a missing part of your essence, which we all have to do at times. Eroticism is in everyday life if we allow it to be and don't shun away from it, just like courage, adventure, challenge, mystery, and a lot of other essential experiences of the soul, which the modern mass man system tries to erase.
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.
Can you elaborate more about relationship sharing? Do you mean having an open relationship or something else?
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.
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.
By the way, the author of the article is also the writer of the McMansion Hell blog.
Also wrote this wonderful article on Formula 1, which was sadly removed by the publisher: https://web.archive.org/web/20240301170542/https://www.roada...
Thank you, this was excellent! From McMansions, to F1, to eroticism the author has quite the range!
Beginning with:
"Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us. Were we peasants instead of spreadsheet jockeys, warehouse workers, and baristas, we would toil in our fields in the shadow of some overbearing castle from which the lord or his steward would ride down on his thunderous charger demanding our fealty and our tithes."
You don't come out of the womb and someone puts a stamp on your head saying "Barista! Paperboy! Grocery bagger!"
Barring considerable physical/mental disabilities, or personal choices like deciding to have kid(s) that you're financially responsible for at a young age with no money, I'd make the argument that most people can become millionaires.
>I'd make the argument that most people can become millionaires.
That's absolutely false, but it takes living in poverty, understanding what being poor means, to know why it's false.
> I'd make the argument that most people can become millionaires.
Make the argument then. How do “most” people become millionaires if that requires owning businesses or getting high up in a company? Who works for them if the majority of people are at the top?
I think a good deal of US adults will become nominal millionaires in their lives. The trick is to marry someone, own a house together, and contribute to 401ks.
There are many more ways of making money, and the economy is not zero sum. And of course just because most could do it doesn't mean most will. Most of us can workout 3 times a week, that doesn't mean most of us do.
It’s not a zero sum game but I think maybe we’re using the term millionaires differently.
When I, and most people I presume, use millionaires in casual conversation the reference is to being wealthier than most of society. It’s not usually meant as precisely having at least a million dollars since inflation has made that not a lot of money already since the colloquial use of the term millionaires first came about.
If you mean literally having a million dollars than we can probably just wait 50 years and even the destitute will be able to scrounge around for that much change.
Probably much sooner than 50 years, but yeah. If you mean filthy rich I think that takes a combination of work skill and luck that's hard for most people to achieve.
That being said, you don't need to be filthy rich to live a good life. There's the perspective that it's all mindset of course, but barring that you don't need to be filthy rich to go see F1 races for example. I've been to some when I was nearly broke. Obviously no Grand Prix grandstands but it's still achievable for the average person.
> I'd make the argument that most people can become millionaires.
That's not so much making an argument, as repeating propaganda.
This is the mentality of a socialist. And their solution isn't to lift everyone up, but rather bring those more successful down.
Uptight conservatives: Your sexual desires are "sinful"
Uptight progressives: Your sexual desires are "problematic"
The former group certainly tends to have more power, but the latter are somewhat annoying because they're harder to spot and avoid. But unfortunately, certain legislation cannot be avoided.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSTA-SESTA
This bill killed the greatest source of incredibly-specific sexual encounters and exploration the internet has ever known: Craigslist Casual Encounters. Whether you were looking for a man, woman, other, or a group, or so on, whether you sought something vanilla or a combination of kinks you made up in your dreams the night before, you could advertise it or seek it there. Ads could contain nudity, you could view them publicly, you could message people through anonymous email relay without making an account - and it all happened openly (yet with privacy) on a well-known website that people used for all sorts of things. Nothing else on the internet today compares and it's likely impossible to recreate.
The pendulum always swings back. What the legacy of metoo shows is that holding others to some idealized moral standard means also being held to that same standard. Winning is not without costs.
> 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.
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?
Makes me glad I have aphantasia, because "undressing someone with my eyes" is a metaphorical expression for me, and I don't have to worry about thinking something I might then need to apologize for. Now for the people who can visualize things in their mind, it's probably quite a lot more literal...
I have solved this by not feeling like I need to apologise for my thoughts. I didn't know that anyone thinks otherwise, and I find it odd.
I was writing in jest, as I assume the parent was too.
Also having aphantasia sucks, I envy those who can visualize things in their mind.
I read the article. I found it hard going so probably was not for me but the impression it left me with was:
"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.
>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.
If enterprises can do that, then so can evil state actors. The only conclusion is that we have to shut down the internet.
We'll have to agree to disagree on "shutting down the Internet" being the only conclusion
It's not that they can't per se, they just don't care that much.
Yeah my grandfather used to say the same thing about cigarettes. He could quit any time he wanted; he just didn't want to.
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.
This seems to be mostly (though not exclusively) a generational thing - as if things have changed to such a degree that you no longer have sovereignty over your internal experience. Like the boundary between public and personal has been removed. Certainly I've noticed this in North America.
I've known people that just demand to know things about you, and simply can't understand that you have boundaries and that there's information which is simply none of their business. Like someone asking you how you voted, or if you find XYZ person attractive, etc. Usually with some intention to sniff out some kind of latent and hidden evidence of wrongthink. Talking with some of these people feels like you're just waiting for them to pounce on you once you step over a line - and of course to out you in a public fashion, even when it's just you and them!
It's like people are bringing their Reddit personality into the real world, trying to score points by knocking others down. It's a really shitty way to be, and I've found even old friends fall into that trap.
I think much of this is due to the shift from an individualistic focus to a more group-related identity. I'm old enough that I find that bizarre, in a creepy authoritarian kind of way.
> Like the boundary between public and personal has been removed.
> Usually with some intention to sniff out some kind of latent and hidden evidence of wrongthink.
"The personal is political." It's been a thing in recent decades.
Imagine if someone did that.
"Hey, sorry I'm not here for a haircut. The other day when you were brushing my hair, I just thought it was really erotic and I wanted to apologize."
That's insanely creepy wow.
It never left, but payment processors should stop trying to ban it already...
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.
> 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.
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.
I think the problem is with Gen-Z and tiktok online unfortunately is their real life more and more these days.
I agree, but I think something the hn crowd misses is that a huge chunk of young people are invested in something like your Reddit bubble, or at least that's true with the mostly trans/queer twentysomethings of Seattle that I hang out with.
It's hard to ignore the tread that the younger a group is, the more being too online is just the default. You can't opt-out of the reality distorting effects of algorithmic content consumption when it is replicated by everyone you meet at school. This problem is especially bad with sex and gender relationships because of how well those topics perform on social media.
Its a depressing time to be a kid, and even more so to be a teenager. 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.
Queer in your 20s in Seattle is the prime demographic for a lot of these online subcultures though. If that's your crowd but you dislike the very online mores I definitely feel for you. A lot of the rest of us have the luxury of having friends not in these bubbles.
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.
This. I’m on X myself a lot (because everyone else in my circles is, not because I wanted) and it’s just such a bubble. Sometimes I want to just quit it all and touch grass
Getting to know the neighbours is what helped me in getting out, so perhaps it could help you as well.
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.
Haha, I felt the same and never did anything about it. Then this Charlie Kirk fellow got shot and I’d coincidentally clicked on For You on Twitter (I know, first mistake, never do this) moments after and a vague tweet about “can’t believe this something something” had a bloody video of a man getting shot dead in the fucking neck. I remember wondering if I wanted to go through a week, maybe a month, of people tweeting about a guy getting shot and realized I really didn’t.
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.
Jeez. Thankfully I carefully avoided almost any and all of that political driven craziness there, as my bubble is just other solopreneurs
So, I hate to be the guy, but Wagner does specifically try to divorce MeToo from this, but it does seem a rather direct line from MeToo to the thing she complains of, no? Just because MeToo may have been with pure and correct intentions, people often take away different things from social movements.
Puritanism has long been embedded in American society. I live in Singapore now, and people abroad seem to think that sexual openness is sort of an American thing compared to both the trad chinese as well as muslim malay cultures here. But, the reality that I think even a lot of Americans don't realise is that hollywood and openness around sex is fundamentally a reaction to american puritanism which was always a foundation part of America's DNA. Hell, the 60's counterculture was specifically a reaction against WASP conservatism which has roots in puritanism. My opinion honestly is once you understand that fact, a lot of things about American culture make a lot more sense. For example, while MeToo arose to address real harms and exploitation, a lot of Americans reached for the tools they knew best from their puritan roots: a new set of morals to measure others against by and public shaming. Ever escalating morality precepts to follow (lack of consent in actual sex somehow being a precursor to the episode in the article, some fleeting and private sexual stimuli being seen as a violation). This sort of pattern that grasps onto the old puritan culture seems to feed a lot of how American cultural trends evolve. See anti-racism as another example: open bigotry is the precursor to only certain races can cook certain foods, and so on.
My point is Americans unfortunately did not learn the underlying lesson about consent that Wagner perhaps wanted out of MeToo, but they did find a new set of puritan morals and a new culture of shaming to enact on others for social capital. I feel like once you sort of believe this idea of the puritanism germ, a lot of what happens to these movements for real change make a lot of sense. It also explains why a lot of movements or reactions against puritanism might change their target (not god or religion) but reproduce the methods and culture of puritanism.
And saying all this, I'm not sure it was avoidable. I am also NOT saying this is MeToo's fault or that MeToo shouldn't have happened, of course not. But, MeToo was the initiation for this. What Wagner describes is clearly an intensification and a fundamentalist form of the consent discourse that underpinned the discussions back in 2015 or whatever. I don't really like the unwillingness to engage with that fact.
I think she says exactly that MeToo, while important in revealing how institutionalised sexual violence against women is in our society, created also this weird neo-puritanism:
> The organized goals of the #MeToo movement are missing from the new puritanism. I think that the prudish revulsion I’ve seen online and in my own life has as much to do with surveillance as with sex.
To me she very clearly engages with the very fact.
That certainly isn’t my experience, and the example she gives imo says more about her neurotic friends than society.
Yeah, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, I don't actually recognise any of the behaviours described in this article. It does sound like the behavioural traits of a certain subsection of certain generations, who's expectations and norms have been warped by overuse of social media. It all sounds incredibly exhausting and I genuinely feel sorry for those growing up in this climate.
The front fell off the boat outside of society^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the environment.
An absurd piece, by a way too online person who seemingly realized they are way too online and thinks everyone else suffers from their affliction.
> I should state at this point that this is not an essay about “cancel culture going too far,” a topic which can now be historicized as little more than a rhetorical cudgel wielded successfully by the right to wrest cultural power back from an ascendant progressive liberalism
Well, maybe it should be. I'm a progressive but I'm tired of people trying to ruin my life over nothing, just as the author is.
I'm am against the far right, and as a result I feel we should not give the far right ammunition. A lot of people voted for DT because they saw him as the lesser a-hole, and the left badly needs to acknowledge that.
> I'm tired of people trying to ruin my life over nothing
Could you give an example? Because most commonly, it seems that people who take this position are writing about what happened to some celebrity who indulged in some ill-advised public behavior, and extrapolating it to their own lives due to some sort of parasocial thinking. What environment are you in that this is actually a real problem in your own life?
Yes, and what happened to me is none of your business. I'm talking about the general atmosphere of distrust and demonization that the author is describing.
Hmm, I am getting a 403 when trying to load the link.
More than halfway through the article: "I remember very viscerally when I’d just come out of the closet as bisexual in 2016." The article looks too much like someone projecting their own problems on society generally.
Well what else does a blog do but project thoughts to the public?
"Projecting one's problems on others" does not mean that someone is sharing their problems with the world. It means they take their problems and assume that they are problems that others have.
So, GP is suggesting that the authors is assuming society has certain attributes, when in reality its likely just attributes of theirself.
>It means they take their problems and assume that they are problems that others have.
Well, it's the internet and no one's singular experienc truly unique. So yes, that is a safe assumption. I doubt the author is the only person in the world with a friendship broken over some relatively benign story.
>GP is suggesting that the authors is assuming society has certain attributes, when in reality its likely just attributes of theirself.
Could be both. Or neither. It's a blog, not a study, so I don't see much point dissenting an anecdote. The point is to share ideas to the world. And given the nature of the internet, some will resonate.
> 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"...
Location sharing is extremely divisive. Loved ones need privacy too, in my eyes. But we are also clearly in time where that kind of tech can save their lives so I don't want to dismiss it all as goverment surveillance.
But my parent use it, so it's clear it depends on the couple.
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.
You're fighting an impossible battle.
Oscar Wilde nailed this one: Everything is about sex except sex, which is about power.
> I'd like to be able to buy some muffins without being reminded about sex on the packaging, the description, and the product name.
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.
This is downvoted, probably because it is considered to be 'conservative' and therefore 'bad' in this rather myopic community. It is also wholly to the point and correct in the observation that the ever-present sexualisation of - if not everything then at least a whole lot of things - is tiring and numbing. 'Sex sells' is taught at the marketing courses so sex is has to be. First a tiny bit, then a bit more because the last ad has already lost its edge. Then, a bit more still. Bit by bit, piece by piece the magic of sex is sold off for a lousy few euros or dollars or pesos or whatnot because sex sells.
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.
I'd wager in the reason it's downloaded if in fact it is, is that it's creepy, not "conservative." Views of sex that are retrograde and nostalgic, motivated by challenging depiction of sexuality, are the problem. As we've seen with some public figures, being closeted about gender preference, kink, etc. is the real problem, not whether young people are being choosier about sexual partners or are just less interested.
Huh? What about Mountain_Skies comment is "creepy"?
They presumably recently came across some muffin shop that has like, a double entendre as a name, or something like that, and took it as emblematic of a larger pattern, which they dislike. (Obviously they weren't saying this is a pattern specific to muffins.)
I don't know what would be creepy about this? I also prefer to not think about sex or sexuality. If I could make it so for the next few months, I couldn't perceive information about sex or sexuality (except if there is something where I ought to do something with that information) and could not experience sexual arousal for those months, I would.
It sounds like you are somehow connecting their preference to like, whether people are socially pressured to keep things about their sexual interests a secret? I don't see the connection.
Can you explain what is creepy about not wanting to be bombarded with sexualised imagery in the service of peddling wares? Do you consider sexuality - our species most basic drive, hard-wired into both sexes and manipulable by those unscrupulous enough to do so - as just another 'expression of personality' that you want people to 'un-closet' their sexual proclivities instead of keeping them where they are traditionally kept, always a bit in tension with 'polite' society but for that all the more exiting?
Ads have become safe and bland. Automotive parts and tools calendars ain't what they used to be. The sexual imagery of things like OF is the product, it's not selling a product. I've never seen one instance where trans visibility has been used in an ad. Closeted sexuality is a big source of society's problems. The combination of shame and power has terrible results. The era before Stonewall was certainly exciting for the police doing the beatings. But maybe those in the wrong people to ask.
What does transgender visability have to do with any of this? The topic was about including sexual things in ads, not things about gender identity?
If the take was intended as conservative, I’d say it’s actually leaning pretty far into “accidentally left-wing”.
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.
I'm a bit "past my prime," so sexy don't have the same appeal to me, as it once did.
But this phrase caught my attention:
> ...the internet’s tendency to reach for the least charitable interpretation of every glancing thought and, as a result, to have pathologized what I would characterize as the normal, internal vagaries...
Really, despite the topic, I feel that this is what she's really talking about, and it applies to a lot more than just sex.
It isn't a "woke" thing (although that's a good demonstration of it). People on the right, do exactly the same thing, with stuff they don't want to hear.
These days, people automatically choose the most offensive, least charitable, brutish, interpretation of the things we say and do.
Lost, are the "cut them slack" days.
I have a friend who is occasionally, casually racist. It isn't an angry "I'm better than them" type. He's just ignorant of folks that aren't white and relatively privileged, and tends to speak without a filter.
Otherwise, he's a pretty amazing guy. He's a deacon at his church, does food drives and coat drives, donates fully-cooked meals to the local homeless shelter (He's a chef), etc. Really decent chap.
But he'll sometimes come out with a "WTF?" zinger, from time to time. Sometimes, I kindly set him straight, and sometimes, just ignore it, and don't feed the troll.
He really doesn't mean badly, but he's coming from a place of bluntness. I appreciate his ignorant bluntness, a lot more than the cultured insults of folks that seem, on the surface, to be more "worldly," but are, inside, actually nasty bigots.
I have come to really enjoy folks, in all their glory; warts and all. If I allow myself to let some of their downsides, wipe out their upsides, I'm the biggest loser.
This is really a long conversation. Sometimes, ignoring bad stuff, is bad, in itself, so we need to figure out how to "draw the line." It's a continuum, not a binary thing.
> Lost, are the "cut them slack" days.
I guess from the inside it feels different: I'll read 99 mind-numbingly bad comments and cut them all slack (in the sense of not replying to them at all), but these 99 instances of benevolence are invisible and count for nothing, because the 100th comment will make me fly in a rage and that's when I'll actually post something. And unload a bunch of my frustrations from the previous 99, too. The internet selects for extreme reactions.
the need to judge publicly is a subset of the need to publicize everything, a world where everyone is exhibitionist and selfies replace experiences. The people who do the former are primarily engaged in the latter.
This will only get worse, we are one step away from people posting selfies of their foreplay before sex for public validation.
It is already happening in tourism that people go to the beach for the selfies rather than swimming (seen that with my own eyes). Narcissism is slowly eating sexuality as well.
The opening anecdote was interesting. The author’s overall point seemed to be that eroticism loses out when privacy is lost. Yet they were upset that when they shared their erotic experience with a friend, that friend didn’t find it erotic and instead found it exploitative.
The friend had a point - there’s no particular reason to share our kinks with the masses and expect agreement. It’s totally fine for some people to have issues with others being sexualized at work. Those people deserve respect too.
Once our ai overlords take their rightful place there will be no more such problems in the world, we will be paired with our mates without fear of reprobation
> [..] seem to have internalized the internet’s tendency to reach for the least charitable interpretation of every glancing thought and, as a result, to have pathologized what I would characterize as the normal, internal vagaries of desire.
I think the internet has some ownership of this, AI didn't help, and our transition from a high-trust society to low-trust society. It's more obvious if you switch the subject to any other - try telling a joke about racism in the wrong setting [1]. Private things should remain private, and consumed within a private context.
In the UK for example, a person can be found guilty under the Malicious Communications Act and/or Online Safety Act. If your badly received joke involves a protected characteristic, that's now and aggravating factor and you just committed a crime against a protected minority.
> I should state at this point that this is not an essay about “cancel culture going too far,” a topic which can now be historicized as little more than a rhetorical cudgel wielded successfully by the right to wrest cultural power back from an ascendant progressive liberalism.
The author was IRL cancelled by their friend: "In fact, it ended the friendship.". And the main complaint is that this has become part of the culture, specifically for sexuality. The author may not want to associate with the anti-movement for cancel culture, it is exactly what they are aligned with.
> #MeToo was smeared by liberals and conservatives alike (united, as they always are, in misogyny) as being inherently punitive in nature, meant to punish men who’d fallen into a rough patch of bad behavior, or who, perhaps, might not have done anything at all (the falsely accused or the misinterpreted man became the real victim, in this view).
You want the power without the responsibility of corruption. It's not like this stuff doesn't have real world consequences [2]. If, instead of adding names to a document, each of these women just stabbed to death the men they are accusing, let's say for really terrible accusations that we can agree that such a penalty should apply for. Sure, many people who are stabbed to death will have earned it, but we cannot be sure unless there is some right to address the accusation.
The point is that without the ability to represent your counter-argument, there can be no real claim of justice. What is claimed as "social justice" is just the vigilante mob doing whatever it likes without accountability, and a lack of accountability is exactly what they are angry about in the first place. Two wrongs do not make a right.
> But that link between sex and fear is operating in more “benign” or common modes of internet practice. There is an online culture that thinks nothing of submitting screenshots, notes, videos, and photos with calls for collective judgement.
Wait wait wait. Hold on a damn second. We just literally spoke about a series of women submitting online notes for collective judgement. Now it's wrong?
This reveals the fundamental problem, which is that the author is suppressed by the very behaviours that they have supported.
[1] https://youtube.com/shorts/-3_-qYw33pU?si=bmPCOa8Ay8YQm4FK
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-repl...
author should touch grass
> A Socialist Feminist Mag For The Masses
Good fucking grief, what has HN become?
The state we're in is the logical consequence of the Hollywood narrative where sexy is tabu but violence is ok. It has been pushing this narrative upon the rest of the Western world for decades.
I hope the downfall of the US in the recent Trump years will help to soften this influence in the future but I doubt this will work out fast. We'll have to face the right wing / christian madness first.
> The state we're in is the logical consequence of the Hollywood narrative where sexy is tabu but violence is ok. It has been pushing this narrative upon the rest of the Western world for decades.
R-rated movies have declined sharply as a percentage of box-office revenue. That trend was recognized by 2005. [1] Variety: “You’re leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table with an R rating,” says one studio marketing exec. “Why? For artistic integrity? Let’s be real.” The trend has continued, rather than turning around.
There's been a huge decline in good sex scenes in movies. Porn scenes are awful, and mainstream Hollywood now avoids sex scenes. The good ones were back in the 1990s.
[1] https://variety.com/2005/film/news/don-t-give-me-an-r-111791...
Yeah Hollywood sold out artistic integrity in an attempt to maximize profit. I think weakening the culture of open sexuality was only a side quest in comparison.
Hollywood has always sold out artistic integrity. That's not new. What's new is the massive size and profitability of the superhero and teen action/adventure genres. Hollywood has found a product segment that pays, and it doesn't happen to have any sex in it.
Some long-form big-budget TV series, such as "Game of Thrones", do, of course, have good sex scenes. It seems to be accepted in that format. Long-form TV doesn't work like Hollywood. Movies have directors, but series have showrunners. The US tradition is that showrunners are writers, not directors. That seems to have an effect on content.
Comments from people in the industry?
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TLDR: Concern trolls are some of the worst people on Earth.
Or should I find my 9th grade algebra teacher (wherever she may be now), and on whom I had a raging crush deep in the throes of puberty, in order to apologize for all the boners I got in her class? I got an A in that class and all math classes I took going forward. But at what price?
How DARE I pleasantly associate mathematics with that long ago raging crush sometimes?
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Has it? Really? I'm pretty sure culture in the US has become significantly more overtly erotic over the past 30 years...
Depends on what you mean - in a very overt, marketed and non-french way, sure.
Yes, and no. in my eyes we compartmentalized sexuality to its own "dark" pocket of the internet. But in that corner it's more diverse, extreme, and widespread as ever.
The latest waves of trying to ban porn certainly shows that this isn't what those in power desire, though.
> I told my friend about an erotic encounter I’d just experienced and very much delighted in, in which I had my hair brushed at the same time by two very beautiful women at the hair salon — one was teaching the other how to do it a certain way. When I finished my story, my friend looked at me, horrified.
I would look at her in horror too. My aversion to touching, being touched by, or even being in a close space with other people comes from exactly this sort of worry, that my presence is being used for some sort of sexual experience unbeknownst to me.
Some lines from the article gave me the ick.
> It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us.
I don't need to be told to free my mind just because I don't conform to your gooner sh*t.
> Only when we are unafraid can we begin to let desire flourish.
Oh okay, if I disagree with the author then I am just ~afraid~
It really seems to me that the author is internally dealing with sexual feelings and rationalizing them as social commentary, transforming her views into a critique of society and cancel culture, while simultaneously backing out and promising that MeToo was valid and that she was definitely not trying to say that MeToo was an overreaction (nice save author!)
>... that my presence is being used for some sort of sexual experience unbeknownst to me.
To me this sounds like you are afraid of that? Can you elaborate where that worry is rooted from? What is the problem of sexual experiences happening (automatically, it is literally in our DNA) inside their thoughts?
I don't see the author placing any judgement on people who are averse to their own erotic arousal. Rather, she is criticising people who are judgemental of other people who do experience and enjoy erotic arousal.
> Oh okay, if I disagree with the author then I am just ~afraid~
You opened your comment with expressing fear and finding the event she described as horrific. That is you being afraid.