Not a bad piece, but it does mostly overlook the point that most of the shifts are in favour of (perceived) female interests. Increased safetyism in relationships – women on average have much more to lose from bad relationships (unintended pregnancy, domestic violence, even most STIs are far more commonly male->female transmission). Women seem to have strongly disliked age-gap relationships since atleast the 18th century (women’s lives getting ruined by young marriage is a common enough plot point in novels from that period) and probably before then - gender equality of a culture currently and historically seems to be a fairly strong predictor for age gaps being smaller. Most women outside of highly woke libfems find prostitution to be at best degrading to women, if not exploitative and damaging to women as a whole.
Indeed. "Safteyism" here seems like it's a gender-neutral euphemism for "aggregate female interests". I remember Hanania saying in one of his posts that he'd laugh whenever journalists wouldn't disclose the gender of unnamed sources that were "crying" or "literally shaking" as they were obviously women. He's sort of doing the same thing here.
My thoughts exactly. The paradox of how we can be so accepting of porn (porn, like prostitution, requires women to perform sex acts for money) and so opposed to prostitution is explained by feminist's attitudes on these topics. Where they simultaneously view OnlyFans and porn actressing as empowering, but the objectification of women and prostitution as degrading. It's not that they are against sex, but against any transaction they see as in men's favor.
I am not an expert, but I'm confident that feminists have a variety of opinions about all these things. I'm not aware of any who are Yay! OnlyFans and Boo! prostitution. I do know that many feminists have been advocated decriminalizing prostitution precisely because keeping it illegal makes it easier to exploit prostitutes (or "sex workers," a term many feminists have promoted because they consider it destigmatizing).
You are completely missing the point. So sick of people who clearly have no understanding of feminism trying to explain it.
You think the difference between OnlyFans (a woman consenting to sharing sexual material) and women being objectified against their will is that the second one is in men's favor? Also I've never met a feminist who was pro OnlyFans and anti prostitution. They're almost always either for or against both.
“Also I've never met a feminist who was pro OnlyFans and anti prostitution. They're almost always either for or against both.”
That would be consistent with what I wrote, yes.
On first acquaintance, you have bad manners and poor reading comprehension, and I’d guess you don’t know a lot about feminism either. Nor do I but at least I’m aware of the fact. Do better.
I was replying to Tolu not replying to you. On first acquaintance, you have bad manners and the poor technological literacy. Please learn how to use your computer before making a further fool of yourself. Do better.
The app reported your post as a reply to me, sorry if it wasn’t. But not too sorry, because “You are completely missing the point. So sick of people who clearly have no understanding of X trying to explain it” is an obnoxious way to begin a post, no matter how right you may be.
The only difference between OnlyFans and objectification is that men can do the latter for free. The idea that you need consent to admire a woman's beauty in public is the type of safetyist nonsense that lead us to our current problem.
Anyone can admire a woman's beauty in public with no issue. The issue is when people ogle and make harassing comments.
Something tells me you'd change your tune real quick if the same men who "admire" women were to "admire" you in the same way. Or your mother or daughter.
I think one big social shift has been men socially disengaging, and I do not think this shift has been in favor of female interests. The gender stereotype has always been that women are the more social community and social relationship oriented gender. A world where men are disengaging from social communities, disengaging from trying to be attractive, and disengaging from trying to date, is not a world that is aggregate shifting in favor of women. Even for women who are not trying to date, a world where men systematically disinvest from weak ties is a world where social communities in the aggregate weaken. If your thesis was right, we would see a strong and successful push among women to counter and stigmatize this trend, which has not been happening.
Yeah, I don't think it's at all true that women have disliked "age gaps" since the 18th century. Certainly the kind of arrangement that leads a very young woman to marry a 60-something man was presumably usually pretty unpleasant, but lots of cultures at a wide range of gender ideologies have had something like a 20-year old bride and a 30-year old husband totally standard.
Sticking to female novelists, off the top of my head there's about a 7-year age gap in Austen's Pride and Prejudice and ~17 years in Emma; Col. Brandon is probably about 20 years older than Marianne Dashwood in Sense & Sensibility; I don't know what the age gap is Jane Eyre, but it's pretty big; we're given to understand that these are happy relationships that the female protagonists want to happen. There's also an age gap in Wuthering Heights, though again I don't know how much. These age gaps are sometimes a problem for modern adaptations; in Clueless the Emma character's love interest is reduced to her own age. Dorothea's marriage to Causabon in Middlemarch is unhappy, but that's because he's a loser, not because he's older.
As someone who lost his virginity in a brothel, I completely agree with most of the talking point in this essay. The touch from a real woman, even it’s the most transactional/impatient/fake kind, is totally different from whatever I once expected from porn and science literature. Also indeed the “trafficking” scare is getting out of control. I remembered a case (even before the pandemic), in which a prostitute asked her male neighbor to drive her from the Kansas side of Kansas City to the Missouri side (or vice versa), first the prostitute was busted by the police, later the neighbor was arrested by the fbi and indicted with federal felony sex trafficking since he drove through the state line.
The part I disagree with is Hanania trivializing sex between teachers and high school students. I do think it's too harshly punished sometimes, but it IS a serious ethical violation given the roles involved, feeling lucky or not.
I'm ambiguous about the consequences a teacher should face for this, but it reminds me a bit of an example C. S. Lewis gives in The Abolition of Man. You would be very annoyed if you sent your kid to the dentist and he came back with his teeth untouched, and his head stuffed full of the dentist's theories on bioethics or something instead. Inasmuch as school is a service I'm purchasing with either my taxes or directly, I'm paying you to teach my kid math, not game.
As he said, we have to treat both sexes equally under the law as a matter of principle.But aside from that, is there any evidence or indication that consensual sex between a male teen and an adult female is damaging?
It also teaches (no pun intended) a young man exactly the wrong thing about how much effort he should expect to go into pursuing a woman. If he thinks women will throw themselves at him, he'll never develop the (generally good) habit of chasing girls.
As a 71 year old feminist women who agrees with you, I am in a minority of my female peers - particularly younger ones. Essentially, feminism has always been a battle between women who actually think women need lots of protections to those - like me - who think feminism should be about agency - including sexually. And , to me, our job is to support women (and men!) who chose to do whatever they want in their lives - from prostitution to being a trad wife. Of course, there should be enforced laws against coercion, assault, rape, etc. But, there should be freedom for people to do want they want as adults and, I would argue, as teens. No woman I know agrees with me about teens anymore, but 50 years ago, lots of women did. As a teen, I dated young adult men because I found high school boys to be too immature for my taste. My parents, who knew me well, had no problem with this. I doubt in middle-class homes, girls like me are openly dating older guys anymore. In Jean Twenge's books on different generations, she argues that women are much more immature now than my cohort was at the same age. I am sure that is true, so perhaps protection makes more sense in this particular age with social media as the background. But, I still am fighting for women to have agency and get rid of the victim stance that is all too often the default for females.
One would think prostitution would be more restricted in medieval Europe because they took Christianity more seriously than today. That was not the case. Thomas Aquinas thought prostitution should be legal and serve as a social safety valve to prevent worse behavior among men. Porn seems to have taken prostitution's place since the mid-20th century with the rise of Playboy and the rest.
Though the decline of prostitution and rise of porn has benefits for society, it has led to a certain risk-aversion that you point out, Richard. I think I saw a Reddit thread somewhere about famous minds that would be lost to masturbation/gooning if they were born today.
Ben Franklin, who patronized prostitutes in Philadelphia, was up there. If Franklin were born today, he would, waste much of his time and talent gooning and gaming instead of roaming the streets of Philadelphia "exposing himself" to new ideas.
I'm a weird outlier in many ways, but pretty much all my instinctive aversion I had to this went away when I realized that with legal prostitution, there's 0 reason weird outlier women such as myself couldn't purchase the services of male prostitutes if they wanted as well. Way fewer women than men would engage in this, but, whatever, fair trade. I'd much rather purchase the services of an "official" male prostitute at some business that specializes in this than engage in a one-night stand with some random unvetted guy. It ironically makes this safer. I actually hate being subordinated in any way whatever and this arrangement erases the natural advantages the male has and renders me in control of the situation since I explicitly purchased control. So, it also ironically removes some of the power imbalance stuff people fret about as well.
Yes, an outlier, but you're not the only one. Back when I was last single, if this has actually been an option I would've taken it and used to wish it was. Being able to order up a good looking, skilled, friendly man who would do only exactly what you wanted him to and nothing you didn't, whose feelings you didn't have to worry about, and who,most importantly, would go away afterwards and not stalk or continue after you so you had to hurt his feelings or break things off and end up in a negative/sad confrontation seemed ideal to me. But male prostitutes all just work for male customers and I wouldn't have wanted that. The show Hung on HBO back in the 2010s was about this topic and the theme seemed to be that while he could get female customers with money to spend, it wasn't that easy.
Yes, most men really care about their sexual performance, and they want or need constant signals that they are doing well, or they get mad or hurt feelings. I am extremely non emotive in any typical feminine way. I hate emoting to reassure some dude that he's virile enough or whatever. It can often make sex be more like labor than enjoyable.
I also probably wouldn't have been confident enough to use such services until I was about the age I am now, which let's just say is no longer at the age most men are interested in. This could also help address some middle-aged female angst about desirability.
I think you are right about the rise of safetyism crippling normal adult sexual function. However, on the spectrum of healthy adult sexual behavior versus self-destructive gooner depravity, I think prostitution is much more on the latter end, even if it involves actual physical sex. It seems like it is much closer to masturbating inside another person via in-person pornography. It is a shell-retreating behavior that discourages doing things to acquire a partner.
It is almost tempting to legalize prostitution to watch it effectively cripple the OnlyFans cartel and see all those self-satisfied "sex workers" suddenly want to go back to having basic dignity when that work actually gets grimy. I don't think that will move the needle on the problem of young people not forming meaningful relationships, though. It will just shift the coping mechanism from a pathetic simping outlet behind a screen to a more female-repelling and potentially more harmful and addictive in-person one.
Many OnlyFans girls are already do in person prostitution under the radar and many prostitutes use OnlyFans pages to market themselves. Often it is the same people. The issue is in person meetings are so much more expensive compared to buying videos on OnlyFans. $1000 per hour and higher type expensive.
Linking a person's dignity with how many layers is clothes they have on is a bizarre and irrational kind of worldview I will never be able to understand.
100% agree a world with lots of hookers and little porn would be an improvement in gender relations. It's not the prostitution is better than porn, if fact the old world where you can have 1 porno mag, and they are hard to come by, and prostitution was illegal was just fine. But the aggregate effect of instant always available porn is bad, it's scale. But it's more than that. I was thinking recently I'd rather my kids smoke than watch other people play video games. So much in our world is just masterbation, ASMR videos, unboxings, pet ownership. We need to prioritize the real. The fact that prostitution costs money and porn is mostly free, is also a distorting force in dating markets. If you want to be healthy and happy do real things, get a hooker not a OF fan account, play a sport not a video game, and get a girlfriend not a chatbot.
One problem we keep facing is that the moral foundations of the old world were wrong in comic fashion. But the rules were basically good for entirely unrelated reasons. No looking at porn doesn't make sky daddy mad at you, but not being addicted to at porn is a good thing. So we keep having to reinvent the moral wheel, maybe eventually we'll land in a place with solid foundations and equivalent behaviors, but in the meantime people are confused and losing the plot.
Porn versus prostitution is a false dichotomy. Neither is part of a happy and healthy life just because one of them takes place in the flesh. A person who hires hookers is much more likely also to watch porn than to have some bizarre self-care principle where they use it as an outlet to avoid watching porn. It is also counterproductive for getting a girlfriend. It is hard to think of a behavior that is more repellent to women in the modern dating pool than being a rakish whoremongerer. Many women would rather date a convicted murderer, and I don't think that's an exaggeration.
I mostly agree. I don't think there is a dichotomy. I just think a society that prioritizes social relations, 1-to-1, over para social 1-to-many is healthier. My point was merely if we were in a world with illegal porn and legal prostitution it might be a better world, but I'm highly uncertain. In this world that is true of people who hire hookers are looked down upon, but in that world it might be different. I will say this is an equilibrium in some countries where porn is censored or illegal, (Japan, Korea) and prostitution is tolerated. But those countries, in a point against my thesis aren't faring any better in the gender relations department.
It is interesting to consider, but unless a solar flare hits the Earth and wipes out every microchip that keeps us behind screens, then I don't think that world you describe will ever come about. I don't think Japan or Korea are good examples of societies in an alternative scenario. Porn is illegal in Korea, but still widely accessed through VPNs, and prostitution is prohibited, but like in America, it is inconsistently policed and still widespread, but perhaps more so than in the US. Japan is even worse. They censor genitals in pornography, but it is still widespread and widely consumed. Similarly, non-penetrative prostitution is legal but still widespread regardless. Whether those things are significant causes of poor gender relations in those countries or just mild contributors, I cannot say.
There are some valid things here being obscured by rage bait or academic aloofness. I do think prostitution should be legal. If the point is to make the pursuit of sex safe for men, you need to acknowledge the real harm done to women. Women wouldn't care if their boss hit on them if it were truly harmless. But so often it's not, and to make matters worse, it gets dismissed. That is the real problem, because when you are dismissive of assault and harassment, you enable it. (And to be clear it's not exclusively men that do this. ) A common example I've seen in my personal life is very young girls being SA'd by dad/mom's bf, teacher, family friend, and when they tell their mom she does nothing. She does nothing probably because the same thing happened to her and she was also dismissed. So that allows the small minority of male perpetrators to ruin if for everyone. Enabling sexual predators and scandelizing prostitution are two sides to the same purity culture coin.
"I’d rather live in a world where more young men went to prostitutes and fewer made masturbation a regular hobby."
I'd rather live in a world where people's private sex practices weren't criteria for determining what constitutes a good world to live in. I feel like your thesis is an overreaction away from VR safteyism. Yes, workplace dating, and age gap taboos are dumb, but the answer isn't to lionize prostitution. Porn and prostitution both have downsides, and they aren't any of our business. Can't we just go back to letting consenting adults do whatever they want in private without trying to tip the scales one way or another?
>Nonetheless, there is relatively little moral panic about porn, in the US at least, even as there are increasing worries about what social media does to minors. The attitude is generally live and let live.
In fact, it might even go along with the safetyism thesis. We've always heard of the way porn is psychologically distorting men's idea of sex and relationships. So we block them from porn altogether until they have a license proving they are 18. Young men are just expected to have no urges or desires until adulthood I guess.
I have a modest proposal for “touching-encouraged” nights and establishments (strictly non-sexual) as a middle ground for getting men and women in closer proximity and promoting some comfort with intimacy. Would anyone actually attend?
Well kudos. I tend to disagree with you on geopolitics, but this was just astounding in terms of insights and fearless reasoning. I really like the analogy with how hardware goods are treated vs how software goods are treated. It also moves the discussion away from "it's the social media, dummy" towards "It's ALL media vs ALL direct experience". Sort of mixing Beaudrillard's "simulacra" idea (increasingly favored over reality) with McLuhan's media theories (media type influences perception of the world). People more and more consume everything second hand, and the AI enabled virtual world to come is the likely end point: then, even emotional damage from connecting with people through media will have been eliminated, and we will finally all be completely... alone.
Good point that "trafficking" is doing a lot of work in a lot of statements.
I do think that much of this comes from the "women are just good, men are just bad" framework, and young men feel that living in reality is walking a tightrope. Of course they need to get out there and walk it anyway, but still this whole mess stems from the (leftist) exaltation of women.
Not a bad piece, but it does mostly overlook the point that most of the shifts are in favour of (perceived) female interests. Increased safetyism in relationships – women on average have much more to lose from bad relationships (unintended pregnancy, domestic violence, even most STIs are far more commonly male->female transmission). Women seem to have strongly disliked age-gap relationships since atleast the 18th century (women’s lives getting ruined by young marriage is a common enough plot point in novels from that period) and probably before then - gender equality of a culture currently and historically seems to be a fairly strong predictor for age gaps being smaller. Most women outside of highly woke libfems find prostitution to be at best degrading to women, if not exploitative and damaging to women as a whole.
Indeed. "Safteyism" here seems like it's a gender-neutral euphemism for "aggregate female interests". I remember Hanania saying in one of his posts that he'd laugh whenever journalists wouldn't disclose the gender of unnamed sources that were "crying" or "literally shaking" as they were obviously women. He's sort of doing the same thing here.
My thoughts exactly. The paradox of how we can be so accepting of porn (porn, like prostitution, requires women to perform sex acts for money) and so opposed to prostitution is explained by feminist's attitudes on these topics. Where they simultaneously view OnlyFans and porn actressing as empowering, but the objectification of women and prostitution as degrading. It's not that they are against sex, but against any transaction they see as in men's favor.
I am not an expert, but I'm confident that feminists have a variety of opinions about all these things. I'm not aware of any who are Yay! OnlyFans and Boo! prostitution. I do know that many feminists have been advocated decriminalizing prostitution precisely because keeping it illegal makes it easier to exploit prostitutes (or "sex workers," a term many feminists have promoted because they consider it destigmatizing).
You are completely missing the point. So sick of people who clearly have no understanding of feminism trying to explain it.
You think the difference between OnlyFans (a woman consenting to sharing sexual material) and women being objectified against their will is that the second one is in men's favor? Also I've never met a feminist who was pro OnlyFans and anti prostitution. They're almost always either for or against both.
“Also I've never met a feminist who was pro OnlyFans and anti prostitution. They're almost always either for or against both.”
That would be consistent with what I wrote, yes.
On first acquaintance, you have bad manners and poor reading comprehension, and I’d guess you don’t know a lot about feminism either. Nor do I but at least I’m aware of the fact. Do better.
I was replying to Tolu not replying to you. On first acquaintance, you have bad manners and the poor technological literacy. Please learn how to use your computer before making a further fool of yourself. Do better.
The app reported your post as a reply to me, sorry if it wasn’t. But not too sorry, because “You are completely missing the point. So sick of people who clearly have no understanding of X trying to explain it” is an obnoxious way to begin a post, no matter how right you may be.
The only difference between OnlyFans and objectification is that men can do the latter for free. The idea that you need consent to admire a woman's beauty in public is the type of safetyist nonsense that lead us to our current problem.
Anyone can admire a woman's beauty in public with no issue. The issue is when people ogle and make harassing comments.
Something tells me you'd change your tune real quick if the same men who "admire" women were to "admire" you in the same way. Or your mother or daughter.
I think one big social shift has been men socially disengaging, and I do not think this shift has been in favor of female interests. The gender stereotype has always been that women are the more social community and social relationship oriented gender. A world where men are disengaging from social communities, disengaging from trying to be attractive, and disengaging from trying to date, is not a world that is aggregate shifting in favor of women. Even for women who are not trying to date, a world where men systematically disinvest from weak ties is a world where social communities in the aggregate weaken. If your thesis was right, we would see a strong and successful push among women to counter and stigmatize this trend, which has not been happening.
Yeah, I don't think it's at all true that women have disliked "age gaps" since the 18th century. Certainly the kind of arrangement that leads a very young woman to marry a 60-something man was presumably usually pretty unpleasant, but lots of cultures at a wide range of gender ideologies have had something like a 20-year old bride and a 30-year old husband totally standard.
Sticking to female novelists, off the top of my head there's about a 7-year age gap in Austen's Pride and Prejudice and ~17 years in Emma; Col. Brandon is probably about 20 years older than Marianne Dashwood in Sense & Sensibility; I don't know what the age gap is Jane Eyre, but it's pretty big; we're given to understand that these are happy relationships that the female protagonists want to happen. There's also an age gap in Wuthering Heights, though again I don't know how much. These age gaps are sometimes a problem for modern adaptations; in Clueless the Emma character's love interest is reduced to her own age. Dorothea's marriage to Causabon in Middlemarch is unhappy, but that's because he's a loser, not because he's older.
What novels have you got in mind?
As someone who lost his virginity in a brothel, I completely agree with most of the talking point in this essay. The touch from a real woman, even it’s the most transactional/impatient/fake kind, is totally different from whatever I once expected from porn and science literature. Also indeed the “trafficking” scare is getting out of control. I remembered a case (even before the pandemic), in which a prostitute asked her male neighbor to drive her from the Kansas side of Kansas City to the Missouri side (or vice versa), first the prostitute was busted by the police, later the neighbor was arrested by the fbi and indicted with federal felony sex trafficking since he drove through the state line.
The part I disagree with is Hanania trivializing sex between teachers and high school students. I do think it's too harshly punished sometimes, but it IS a serious ethical violation given the roles involved, feeling lucky or not.
I'm ambiguous about the consequences a teacher should face for this, but it reminds me a bit of an example C. S. Lewis gives in The Abolition of Man. You would be very annoyed if you sent your kid to the dentist and he came back with his teeth untouched, and his head stuffed full of the dentist's theories on bioethics or something instead. Inasmuch as school is a service I'm purchasing with either my taxes or directly, I'm paying you to teach my kid math, not game.
Yeah my thoughts exactly.
As he said, we have to treat both sexes equally under the law as a matter of principle.But aside from that, is there any evidence or indication that consensual sex between a male teen and an adult female is damaging?
It also teaches (no pun intended) a young man exactly the wrong thing about how much effort he should expect to go into pursuing a woman. If he thinks women will throw themselves at him, he'll never develop the (generally good) habit of chasing girls.
As a 71 year old feminist women who agrees with you, I am in a minority of my female peers - particularly younger ones. Essentially, feminism has always been a battle between women who actually think women need lots of protections to those - like me - who think feminism should be about agency - including sexually. And , to me, our job is to support women (and men!) who chose to do whatever they want in their lives - from prostitution to being a trad wife. Of course, there should be enforced laws against coercion, assault, rape, etc. But, there should be freedom for people to do want they want as adults and, I would argue, as teens. No woman I know agrees with me about teens anymore, but 50 years ago, lots of women did. As a teen, I dated young adult men because I found high school boys to be too immature for my taste. My parents, who knew me well, had no problem with this. I doubt in middle-class homes, girls like me are openly dating older guys anymore. In Jean Twenge's books on different generations, she argues that women are much more immature now than my cohort was at the same age. I am sure that is true, so perhaps protection makes more sense in this particular age with social media as the background. But, I still am fighting for women to have agency and get rid of the victim stance that is all too often the default for females.
One would think prostitution would be more restricted in medieval Europe because they took Christianity more seriously than today. That was not the case. Thomas Aquinas thought prostitution should be legal and serve as a social safety valve to prevent worse behavior among men. Porn seems to have taken prostitution's place since the mid-20th century with the rise of Playboy and the rest.
Though the decline of prostitution and rise of porn has benefits for society, it has led to a certain risk-aversion that you point out, Richard. I think I saw a Reddit thread somewhere about famous minds that would be lost to masturbation/gooning if they were born today.
Ben Franklin, who patronized prostitutes in Philadelphia, was up there. If Franklin were born today, he would, waste much of his time and talent gooning and gaming instead of roaming the streets of Philadelphia "exposing himself" to new ideas.
I'm a weird outlier in many ways, but pretty much all my instinctive aversion I had to this went away when I realized that with legal prostitution, there's 0 reason weird outlier women such as myself couldn't purchase the services of male prostitutes if they wanted as well. Way fewer women than men would engage in this, but, whatever, fair trade. I'd much rather purchase the services of an "official" male prostitute at some business that specializes in this than engage in a one-night stand with some random unvetted guy. It ironically makes this safer. I actually hate being subordinated in any way whatever and this arrangement erases the natural advantages the male has and renders me in control of the situation since I explicitly purchased control. So, it also ironically removes some of the power imbalance stuff people fret about as well.
Yes, an outlier, but you're not the only one. Back when I was last single, if this has actually been an option I would've taken it and used to wish it was. Being able to order up a good looking, skilled, friendly man who would do only exactly what you wanted him to and nothing you didn't, whose feelings you didn't have to worry about, and who,most importantly, would go away afterwards and not stalk or continue after you so you had to hurt his feelings or break things off and end up in a negative/sad confrontation seemed ideal to me. But male prostitutes all just work for male customers and I wouldn't have wanted that. The show Hung on HBO back in the 2010s was about this topic and the theme seemed to be that while he could get female customers with money to spend, it wasn't that easy.
Yes, most men really care about their sexual performance, and they want or need constant signals that they are doing well, or they get mad or hurt feelings. I am extremely non emotive in any typical feminine way. I hate emoting to reassure some dude that he's virile enough or whatever. It can often make sex be more like labor than enjoyable.
I also probably wouldn't have been confident enough to use such services until I was about the age I am now, which let's just say is no longer at the age most men are interested in. This could also help address some middle-aged female angst about desirability.
I think you are right about the rise of safetyism crippling normal adult sexual function. However, on the spectrum of healthy adult sexual behavior versus self-destructive gooner depravity, I think prostitution is much more on the latter end, even if it involves actual physical sex. It seems like it is much closer to masturbating inside another person via in-person pornography. It is a shell-retreating behavior that discourages doing things to acquire a partner.
It is almost tempting to legalize prostitution to watch it effectively cripple the OnlyFans cartel and see all those self-satisfied "sex workers" suddenly want to go back to having basic dignity when that work actually gets grimy. I don't think that will move the needle on the problem of young people not forming meaningful relationships, though. It will just shift the coping mechanism from a pathetic simping outlet behind a screen to a more female-repelling and potentially more harmful and addictive in-person one.
Many OnlyFans girls are already do in person prostitution under the radar and many prostitutes use OnlyFans pages to market themselves. Often it is the same people. The issue is in person meetings are so much more expensive compared to buying videos on OnlyFans. $1000 per hour and higher type expensive.
Linking a person's dignity with how many layers is clothes they have on is a bizarre and irrational kind of worldview I will never be able to understand.
Legalized prostitution would definitely not cripple OnlyFans, people clearly prefer masturbation.
100% agree a world with lots of hookers and little porn would be an improvement in gender relations. It's not the prostitution is better than porn, if fact the old world where you can have 1 porno mag, and they are hard to come by, and prostitution was illegal was just fine. But the aggregate effect of instant always available porn is bad, it's scale. But it's more than that. I was thinking recently I'd rather my kids smoke than watch other people play video games. So much in our world is just masterbation, ASMR videos, unboxings, pet ownership. We need to prioritize the real. The fact that prostitution costs money and porn is mostly free, is also a distorting force in dating markets. If you want to be healthy and happy do real things, get a hooker not a OF fan account, play a sport not a video game, and get a girlfriend not a chatbot.
One problem we keep facing is that the moral foundations of the old world were wrong in comic fashion. But the rules were basically good for entirely unrelated reasons. No looking at porn doesn't make sky daddy mad at you, but not being addicted to at porn is a good thing. So we keep having to reinvent the moral wheel, maybe eventually we'll land in a place with solid foundations and equivalent behaviors, but in the meantime people are confused and losing the plot.
Porn versus prostitution is a false dichotomy. Neither is part of a happy and healthy life just because one of them takes place in the flesh. A person who hires hookers is much more likely also to watch porn than to have some bizarre self-care principle where they use it as an outlet to avoid watching porn. It is also counterproductive for getting a girlfriend. It is hard to think of a behavior that is more repellent to women in the modern dating pool than being a rakish whoremongerer. Many women would rather date a convicted murderer, and I don't think that's an exaggeration.
I mostly agree. I don't think there is a dichotomy. I just think a society that prioritizes social relations, 1-to-1, over para social 1-to-many is healthier. My point was merely if we were in a world with illegal porn and legal prostitution it might be a better world, but I'm highly uncertain. In this world that is true of people who hire hookers are looked down upon, but in that world it might be different. I will say this is an equilibrium in some countries where porn is censored or illegal, (Japan, Korea) and prostitution is tolerated. But those countries, in a point against my thesis aren't faring any better in the gender relations department.
It is interesting to consider, but unless a solar flare hits the Earth and wipes out every microchip that keeps us behind screens, then I don't think that world you describe will ever come about. I don't think Japan or Korea are good examples of societies in an alternative scenario. Porn is illegal in Korea, but still widely accessed through VPNs, and prostitution is prohibited, but like in America, it is inconsistently policed and still widespread, but perhaps more so than in the US. Japan is even worse. They censor genitals in pornography, but it is still widespread and widely consumed. Similarly, non-penetrative prostitution is legal but still widespread regardless. Whether those things are significant causes of poor gender relations in those countries or just mild contributors, I cannot say.
Upcharging for penetrative prostitution is quite common in Japan.
There are some valid things here being obscured by rage bait or academic aloofness. I do think prostitution should be legal. If the point is to make the pursuit of sex safe for men, you need to acknowledge the real harm done to women. Women wouldn't care if their boss hit on them if it were truly harmless. But so often it's not, and to make matters worse, it gets dismissed. That is the real problem, because when you are dismissive of assault and harassment, you enable it. (And to be clear it's not exclusively men that do this. ) A common example I've seen in my personal life is very young girls being SA'd by dad/mom's bf, teacher, family friend, and when they tell their mom she does nothing. She does nothing probably because the same thing happened to her and she was also dismissed. So that allows the small minority of male perpetrators to ruin if for everyone. Enabling sexual predators and scandelizing prostitution are two sides to the same purity culture coin.
"I’d rather live in a world where more young men went to prostitutes and fewer made masturbation a regular hobby."
I'd rather live in a world where people's private sex practices weren't criteria for determining what constitutes a good world to live in. I feel like your thesis is an overreaction away from VR safteyism. Yes, workplace dating, and age gap taboos are dumb, but the answer isn't to lionize prostitution. Porn and prostitution both have downsides, and they aren't any of our business. Can't we just go back to letting consenting adults do whatever they want in private without trying to tip the scales one way or another?
literally no one has ever one time let consenting adults do whatever they want in private.
Very original and thought-provoking essay. Thank you.
Didn't you get the memo? We're not supposed to talk about sex! Lol
This is a good piece on a "touchy" subject.
>Nonetheless, there is relatively little moral panic about porn, in the US at least, even as there are increasing worries about what social media does to minors. The attitude is generally live and let live.
Not to detract from the overall article, but it's worth noting that Pornhub is blocking itself in a bunch of states to protest ID laws (https://www.pcmag.com/news/pornhub-blocked-missouri-ariz-virginia-fla-how-to-watch-anyway-vpn). Pornhub obviously isn't the only place to find porn, but this might be the beginning of a trend.
In fact, it might even go along with the safetyism thesis. We've always heard of the way porn is psychologically distorting men's idea of sex and relationships. So we block them from porn altogether until they have a license proving they are 18. Young men are just expected to have no urges or desires until adulthood I guess.
I have a modest proposal for “touching-encouraged” nights and establishments (strictly non-sexual) as a middle ground for getting men and women in closer proximity and promoting some comfort with intimacy. Would anyone actually attend?
I think that’s social dance! It’s very popular among the 20’s/30’s crowd in the Bay Area.
Clubbing?
Well kudos. I tend to disagree with you on geopolitics, but this was just astounding in terms of insights and fearless reasoning. I really like the analogy with how hardware goods are treated vs how software goods are treated. It also moves the discussion away from "it's the social media, dummy" towards "It's ALL media vs ALL direct experience". Sort of mixing Beaudrillard's "simulacra" idea (increasingly favored over reality) with McLuhan's media theories (media type influences perception of the world). People more and more consume everything second hand, and the AI enabled virtual world to come is the likely end point: then, even emotional damage from connecting with people through media will have been eliminated, and we will finally all be completely... alone.
Good point that "trafficking" is doing a lot of work in a lot of statements.
I do think that much of this comes from the "women are just good, men are just bad" framework, and young men feel that living in reality is walking a tightrope. Of course they need to get out there and walk it anyway, but still this whole mess stems from the (leftist) exaltation of women.