Just want to give a shoutout to the author for giving a fairly unbiased take here. Sex work is stigmatized way more than it should be, and with places like OnlyFans making it a (relatively) safe option there's a lot of people who are able to make money while maintaining autonomy. I've noticed especially among people working in tech there's quite a bit of sex-work shaming that goes on. Hopefully this article helps break some of that programming.
I personally am not against sex work but I am against giving the illusion of a personal intimacy and manipulation of lonely socially unsavvy guys who pay for this. There is nothing wrong with sex work but a lot wrong with emotional exploitation and preying on the vulnerable.
You're taking about these guys like they're children who are incapable of fending for themselves. They're paying for nudes over the internet, I'm sure most of them know that and are fine with it. If they delude themselves into thinking it's more, maybe they do need someone to watch their wallet for them after all.
This is not treating them like children but more like focusing on the fact that a lot of them are naive and emotionally desperate guys who are not aware that it's all a game and are vulnerable to be preyed on by somebody who is willing to give them fake personal interaction and affection for their cash.
Anyone who thinks they’re getting actual intimacy from some sort of transactional relationship is, to put it bluntly, an idiot. However, I think it reflects more poorly on the people who raised these guys than the guys themselves.
I see how one can come to this point of view, but I think there is a perspective missing here about just how lonely and miserable some people are.
When you have never had a partner, when you have never been hugged and told you're loved, when you may also not even have friends or co-workers, and much more, things... are much different. I've met many males on the Internet where all of this applies, and they have a very easy time getting addicted to things that provide social comfort, whether is is Twitch, OnlyFans, Youtubers, and many other things. They want so badly to feel comfort, friendship, affection, and so on, that it is very easy to be tricked into thinking you're attaining it when you are in fact only attaining many strong correlates of it.
I think a lot of this ends up at it not being socially acceptable for men to show emotion or to seek emotional support. I imagine if that were the case most of these people would realize what they're paying for doesn't even approach being a shadow of the real thing. This is a group that would benefit a lot from some sort of self love/self care messaging but I don't even know what that would look like if it were tailored to this group.
I also kind of feel for all the people who signed up to sell nudes on onlyfans thinking they'd make a quick buck and ended up playing therapist for a bunch of lonely maladjusted dudes.
How so? The way I see it is that they rake in thousands while not giving anything permanently, on the other hand there are people who risk financial and emotional ruin from predatory sex workers (I am not saying all of them are that way, I have met honest ones myself).
If you are talking about pimps, Onlyfans has mostly indepenent workers AFAIK.
What permanence would you expect from transactional intimacy? It’s like going to the movies, you’re paying someone for a temporary escape from reality.
Permanence would be a sex worker on retainer or a committed partner.
They are giving quite a lot permanently. Their images will always be out there on the internet and in the world, and could be used against them when applying for future jobs, etc. The sex worker generally doesn't have XXX footage of their clients. It's the other way around.
Sure, some people give them more than they can afford. Sometimes car dealerships sell people dumb cars they can't afford too.
edit: Regarding pimps, there's plenty of women who are forced by pimps to perform online. It's extremely common. I imagine moreso with COVID.
I would argue that the normalization of virtual sex work is in the process of being socially accepted because a lot of sex workers are forced into it due to unemployment and the current COVID-19 situation, and due to the sheer amount of girls getting into it. It seems quite trivial compared to people losing their wealth and emotional health because they "don't know what the world is really like".
and exploit us of the relentless (and devious) spamming of websites like reddit, dating apps like Tinder, POF, etc.
OnlyFans creators have quickly started to use very underhanded self promotion techniques, and unfortunately many of them are straight up emotional manipulation.
No, but exploitation of the type of man that thinks the stripper is actually into him is not among the most pressing issues surrounding sex work. It's an extremely strange thing to focus on. It's like focusing on anti-white racism. Sure it exists, and it is bad. But it has nowhere near the consequences of anti-black racism, so there is no equivalence between the problems.
Suicide is one of the top causes of death for people under 55. Suicides are overwhelmingly male (4:1). I think exploitation of lonely men absolutely has consequences. None of this downplays the consequences for women in online sex work however
I wouldn’t say it’s extremely strange. For example folks that have been through an issue themselves or know someone that has are likely to be more attuned to it’s effects.
There’s also statistically a rather large reduction in initiation and frequency of sexual activity for young adults in the us, particularly young men. Things like this could be causal factor.
Lastly young adults are killing themselves at record rates and young men 4x as much as young women, again things that feed into depression and detachment are worth considering.
The exploitation of lonely socially disabled men is not something insignificant. It's actually quite big on the severity scale compared to the exposure of the material of the performer as Onlyfans is in the process of being normalized to society.
How am I supposed to feel about a sentence like this?
> "Like there was one guy who paid me to make a reaction video about his ‘appendage’ and it took me like seven takes to sound like I was excited by it."
To me, that's just deeply sad. Paying a woman to act as though she's interested in you is the commoditization of an innate yearning for companionship. It's turning something that poems are written about into mere transaction. And it's baffling to me how people who tend to be "against capitalism" somehow rally to the free market when it comes to selling sex.
> And it's baffling to me how people who tend to be "against capitalism" somehow rally to the free market when it comes to selling sex.
People that are against capitalism on the left tend not to be against volintary exchange of labor for money but the power relations between capitalist and laborer in capitalist industry. That's not an issue with individual sales of labor on the marketplace direct to end consumers of a service, which seems to be the issue here. The fact that the kind of service involved is sexual is beside the point.
And ironically, same its happening with sex and intimacy. Let's listen to Houellebecq one moment:
“It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”
> Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.
It's a trait of a natural darwinian systems imho. Look at how it works in nature - a pride of lions would have 1 alpha male who dominates most, if not all females.
I have no reason to believe that humans don't have the same innate behaviour as lions.
In fact i've read on some forum focused on prehistoric events (Neandertalis and sapiens "cohabitation") that the theory of humans having wolf/lion pack type of behavior (Alpha male with multiple females, beta couples leaving the pack during hard time, stuff like this).
> Maybe that's true for Marxists but it's not true for "the left" more generally.
It's true of a lot of the non-Marxist Left, too.
> The environment it creates is ruthlessly competitive. Winners win big, losers starve.
Im struggling to see how you imagine a crackdown on voluntary sex work would make that better, except as a way of draining more resources from everyone (itself making more people starve) to guarantee that fewer people could make a living in voluntary exchange (making even more people starve.)
Sure, I think with genuinely left policies, there's be less people who felt that sex work that lots of people not doing it find unacceptably degrading was a net win, and so fewer people choosing to voluntarily engage in that; capitalism naturally is economically coercive that way. But there's nothing particular about sex work here, fewer people would accept agricultural field work at current wages, absent economic coercion, too. The fix for the problems capitalism creates index work has everything to do with capitalism and very little to do with sex work.
> Im struggling to see how you imagine a crackdown on voluntary sex work would make that better, except as a way of draining more resources from everyone (itself making more people starve) to guarantee that fewer people could make a living in voluntary exchange (making even more people starve.)
I'm "struggling to see" how you interpreted my post this way.
As long as we're both struggling here, please explain how sex work doesn't entail massively imbalanced power relations. I wasn't just talking about OnlyFans: the post I responded to says "sex work is stigmatized way more than it should be". But even if we're only talking about the internet, I think you're extremely naive if you think physical separation means there's no coercive power involved. The money comes from somewhere. And don't forget, there's a middleman between the performers and the audience.
> Sure, I think with genuinely left policies, there's be less people who felt that sex work that lots of people not doing it find unacceptably degrading was a net win, and so fewer people choosing to voluntarily engage in that; capitalism naturally is economically coercive that way. But there's nothing particular about sex work here, fewer people would accept agricultural field work at current wages, absent economic coercion, too. The fix for the problems capitalism creates index work has everything to do with capitalism and very little to do with sex work.
I can't parse this. I don't claim to know how to solve this problem or "the problems of capitalism".
I think that general revulsion toward capitalism has very little to do with Marx and much more to do with unfairness (perceived and real), cutthroat competition that seems to reward dishonesty, the dispossession of the losers in that competition, and crass materialism. To me, all of those things clearly apply here.
I dunno about unbiased, seems pretty concerned about 18 year old girls specifically might be "at risk" but then wants to say "well maybe that 18 year old comes from an abusive household and so she could use the money", like come on
Women profiting from OF is not some bubble-like behavior that might sabotage American society down the line if we're not 'careful', sex work has existed since the beginning of time and in much much more liberal forums than American society, and will continue to exist to a non-trivial degree wherever urban populations exist. Like no shit, lotta single people stuck in front of their screens so its a gold rush at the moment; who cares.
The more concerning problem is the growing puerility of hetero men for lack of a better term and porn trends in America tend to confirm that. These women aren't putting a gun to anyone's head, and Jordan Peterson had a very big audience for a reason
OF is a cynical take on relationships and love. I don't know how anyone could be taken in by this fantasy. It's a hollow thing. Still, if that's what you want, that's fine.
I happen to be single, and I'd say 95% of my interactions on dating sites are these gals who are "selling."
This is my main problem with the thing-- I am looking for a wife, and I am bombarded with insincere people on these sites.
Damn, that sucks! I think the only non-genuine messages I got on dating apps were from obvious spambots, so it never wasted too much of my time to filter through them. But it's probably gotten worse in the last few years.
Ah yes, nothing like exploiting teenage girls and pretending to be feminist liberal progressive while doing it!
There is no physical pimp in this case, but lots of viral marketing duping immature teenagers into believing they can make it by selling their dignity.
I don't care if some 30 year old person wants to make a life out of camming, but don't come here pretending like Onlyfans is some force for good.
And then you dare criticize people like me who call a spade a spade, instead of criticizing the people profiting from this scam.
Very cool! I tried doing some signal processing stuff back in the day and got absolutely discouraged after discovering how much linear algebra was involved.
I particularly appreciate the ability to preview compression. Compression is probably what I use most when I'm editing audio and having that at my fingertips without loading Audacity or Ableton would be super nice for quick, rough changes.
One thing that I'd really like to see would be a de-essing plugin, or even better a multiband compressor.
My therapist told me that a lot of her anxious clients are actually doing really well with all this, because now everybody is anxious and it feels less alienating.
I definitely think that the worst part about typing on a computer is how easy it makes it to not draft. I write about music on the side, and if I spend 15 minutes planning what I'm going to write prior to actually writing it (for a 500 word piece) then everything turns out much more cohesive at the end. I can pretty much type as fast as I can think, but my thoughts are pretty garbage unless I get a chance to organize them first.
doubt this very much since google is currently getting waaaaay too much free ML training data from captcha, and most users are blissfully unaware and happy to continue filling out their puzzles.
I just want a version of captcha that isn't tied to my google account. This is particularly an issue on anonymous message boards like 4chan. If google wanted to, they could tie pretty much every 4chan post to a google account.
My experience is limited, but what you're listing above to me sounds an awful lot like some fundamental issues with capitalism and not fundamental issues with technology. I can't speak to the rise and fall of your company, but I can speak with some confidence on your experience at a Tech Giant(tm) and a unicorn startup, having some experience with both and certainly many friends who work at both types of company.
Any Tech Giant office is going to be an absolutely miserable working environment. I had one interview with a larger company and I was struck by how openly bored my interviewers were. Obviously, YMMV and some places may be better than others. But having enough friends, even newly minted college graduates with a "six figs or bust", burn out after 6 months in a development role, it was enough to pretty much convince me to avoid them forever.
Furthermore, the "unicorn" startup is going to be extremely similar to a tech giant but with more desperation. You're joining a team of people who, in all likelihood, have very little attachment to the product and have read a few HN articles about how this is going to be the next big thing. Plus you have the young, fratty egos in play. A lot of these places are going to cover up the fact that it actually sucks to work there with "hey free keg at lunch!! haha don't have more than four ;)"
This might be too hot of a take for HN, but there is, in fact, NO job that you can work at and be valued as a person. You're appreciated for whatever value you bring into the company, but don't fool yourself into thinking that there is anything but a monetary string tying you together. You're not looking at anything wrong, you don't need an attitude shift, the system is broken from the ground up and we're forced to be participants, otherwise we won't make rent.
Find something you don't mind doing; I'd recommend looking at smaller companies with leaders who worked a long time at larger companies. In all likelihood, these companies were founded after the leaders experienced something similar to what you did. But it is your birthright as an American (citizen at least) to be perpetually unfulfilled.
