Anytime anyone says it’s so easy to make money with digital sex work, I tell them stories like this. We have to put our photos out there to advertise, we have to show interest in our supporters, we need to traverse so carefully… our lives might be on the line.
Similar to the recent question about artists where you can successfully separate them from their art. Are there any artists who did something so horrible, so despicable, that it has instantly invalidated all art that they have had any part in?
No. The artists I like are pretty much universally good people because they’re not wildly successful and had to mature in order to survive. I can’t think of a single artist I am a fan of who has done things that would cause me to question the integrity of their character or reassess their work.
Usually people who have this issue are ones who listen to shitty music or like shitty actors that only care about making money and being superior to others.
It’s no surprise to me that people like R Kelly pee on teenage girls, or Chris Brown beats women, or David Bowie has sex with underage girls. None of this surprises me because their creations and lifestyles reflect who they are as people. It’s always funny seeing their fans being met with cognitive dissonance, though.
I can’t really name any actors though because I already don’t like the vast majority of shit that gets pumped out of hollywood and I’m not exposed to it often. I’m sure people who are more familiar with their crap will have no problem thinking of examples, though.
I think the best way to deal with the issue includes education, digital skills, and parental oversight of Internet use including the use of personal filters or blocking tools if desired.
As a someone who works in technology and is a parent to 2 kids < 10, I'm already aware of what a niave statement that is.
I keep my kids' iPad locked down and have a router with some basic parental control features, but as the number devices in our lives that are able to browse the web increases along with the number of wireless networks my kids can connect to, trying to police this myself is futile.
And I'm not even concerned about them occasionally seeing "normal" porn. As a former Reddit user, I've seen some things I wish I hadn't. Things I'm not able to fully process as an adult.
I can handle the conversation about...
"you know how people drive in Fast and Furious isn't how people drive in real life? That's what porn sex is like compared to the sex you are going to have."
I cannot explain some of the darker corners of Reddit.
If you applied Geist's logic to alcohol, it would be up to parents to keep kids from going to liquor stores. Sure I can stop my kids from drinking the alcohol I have in my own home, but I rely on laws to make it very difficult for them to do something as a community we've agreed they aren't mature enough to make good decisions about.
Why can't we apply the same policies on to internet services?
Yeah. Its mechanics are amazingly intricately bad. It feels like someone spent a lot of effort on it and then never play tested. I super want to play it with some friends and lean in heavily to silly sex mechanics.
I was talking with a friend today about Hallmark movies because we all seem to have at least one grandma who loves them around this time of year, and we’re hashing out the tropes they all share because they’re so formulaic that you could probably boil it down to a mad libs prompt, and something dawned on me because of one...
As far a marriage having agreement on the big three: Money, sex, kids is helpful. This has long been known.
For me beyond that my only wish is that my partner be herself, cares about me more then my money or what I can do for her, that we like each other and similarly can stand each other, and our lives are heading in a compatible direction.
I have a wonderful wife and we have been together over 20 years and it gets better every year.
Watched this last week. Great movie! Long but I wasn’t tired of it at all at the end. Improbably happy ending by Lanthimos standards. Super lavish sets, lots of entertaining scenes, a whole lot of sex. In fact the movie goes from black and white to color about the time Bela runs off with the Ruffalo character to Lisbon - black and white pre-sex, and color after. Enjoyed the steampunk vibe. Main character is a bit of a Mary Sue, but I’ll allow it.
You misunderstand. I am not excusing the incel community. Any sympathy I had for them died years ago, and frankly I think any guy who thinks women deserve retribution because they won’t sleep with them is a fucking coward.
But here’s the thing, I think it’s a horrific symptom of our societal ills, not a cause. Inceldom is an economic issue first and foremost.
We are a society that profiteers from human misery in so many ways. Men are judged quite harshly for their wealth, status and their ability to provide, even when we’ve made great strides to bring about equality between the sexes. Wealth inequality has created a predominantly male underclass. This affects many things like being able to afford a home, access to physical and mental healthcare, etc.
Another thing that I think doesn’t help is how we’ve commodified sex in so many ways, but that’s a very deep subject that would take me way too long to go into.
Online dating specifically is a monopoly headed by just two parent companies. They want your experience to be as miserable as humanly possible so that they can sucker you into paying the cost of several MMO subscriptions just to use the premium tier of their apps.
The problem isn’t women, it’s that Bumble Inc and Match Group couldn’t give a flying FUCK about the integrity of their platforms. Socially awkward people depend on these apps to find love and their world view is being poisoned by a lack of interest from anybody who isn’t a bot, sex worker, scam artist or a lady from the other side of the world seeking to marry their way into their country.
As a Christian most of the circles I’m around are pretty chill…no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home....
I had to sit through a poorly made documentary at church as a kid about how Star Wars was evil. Star Wars, which Lucas made to be as generic good vs evil as possible, was labeled as evil by my church. I can pinpoint that as one of the moments in childhood where I started becoming critical of the views of my church, and questioning the things they were telling me. Another key moment was when they had a young man go up to the podium and give his testimony. He talked all about how he was living a life of partying, rock-and-roll, and sex, and then found his way back to the church. I vividly remember thinking “well if that’s an option, that’s the road I’ll take too! Sounds like fun!”. My church did a lot of things like that which had the opposite effect they intended.
People will judge you for it in most situations (aka when it’s not a necessity out of emergency) but you’re not likely to be charged for it and for sure not with anything sex related because… pissing isn’t sexual.
They said fan art of characters fucking. That’s pretty normal. Not my thing, but I get it. There are WAY, way worse things people create than that that go way beyond even kinky sex. I’m pretty sure just the tags on AO3 for some of it have scarred me for life.
Queerbaiting is absolutrly a thing, and worth being annoyed at. If a show constantly hints that two same-sex people are gay for each other, then never actually follows through, that’s annoying.
Ah, the “straight relationships are illegal” fandoms…
“Quick! The showrunners just introduced an opposite sex couple immediately after three same sex ones! We have to make one character bi and the other pan!”
“Oh my gosh! The mean-girl character just started sucking up to a kid she used to be friends with who has since become her social superior in the most transparent power grab of all time! It must mean she had a lesbian crush the entire time!”
I never understand this shit. Like even if you have absolutely no morals, you’re Vin Diesel. You can pretty much have consensual sex whenever you want to. Why do you have to resort to assaulting people?
Porn sites Pornhub, XVideos, and Stripchat face stricter requirements to verify the ages of their users after being officially designated as “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOPs) under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA)....
Snake oil salesmen never had it so good. Without the layers of abstraction provided by computers, nobody would've believed their magic elixirs would protect children from getting interested in sex until their parents approved of it.
Let’s be real, teens, especially males, will actively search for porn. Blocklists can be pointless, because even if you can blacklist 160k pornhub clones, they can just join a discord or telegram server instead.
Frankly, I think parents should just make them aware that just like cinema, those videos are for show, not for “trying at home”. Parents should tell them that if they ever expect sex to be like in the porn they consume, they’ll be sorely disappointed. Most of it is faker than reality tv. Oh, it can also make boys get really fucking insecure, especially about their own size.
Early human minors (until a century or two ago) used to have sex, engage in hebephilia and pedophilia, and underage teenage girls used to be mothers. This is how we still have grandmothers today who married and had kids before the age of 18. So yes, your question is wild and scientifically ignorant. Porn has always been harmful to minors, and in fact, specifically more to minors or anyone under the age of ~25, because that is when neural connections stop forming and adjusting. The neural linking and development starts to slow down by the age of 15. That makes underage minors even more vulnerable, as they hit puberty, have raging hormones and are also at risk of sexual abuse.
Might be a stupid question but is there any peer reviewed research that shows that porn is harmful to minors? Early humans didn’t have clothes so minors were seeing nudity for centuries. Of course, there’s the issue that porn gives men unrealistic expectations about women & sex, but that’s an issue regardless of age.
What’s funny is she used to be very open about her sex life and even said she would be willing to pose topless for Playboy, so I’m not quite sure when this happened.
Marilyn Manson - he had a slow slide from alcoholism to lecher creep to serial abuser. he spent 2009-2011 doing the worst shit to women that you can imagine.
Brand New - turns out that Jesse was a groomer of underage girls.
Arcade Fire - Win Butler is a sex pest.
Smashing Pumpkins - not at all in the same category as the others, but goddamn does Billy Corgan suck. he was always known as a first-class egotist, but he just kept being an asshole long after his prime had become a distant memory. then the weird shit started: crackpot conspiracy theories on Myspace, palling around with Alex Jones on Infowars, dropping alt-right buzzwords in interviews. the latest album is an extended allegory on cancel culture. worse, it’s mostly unlistenable.
Sometimes I wonder if he became pedophilic because of his sad life. Between losing family in the Holocaust and losing more family and friends in the Tate/LaBianca murders by the Manson family, he must felt like his life was out of control. But it’s easy to control teenaged girls into having sex with you. Or maybe the genocide and murders he experienced had nothing to do with his sins. But it’s something I think about occasionally. I’ve seen only a couple of his movies so far but I notice some themes from his life, like the death of babies or babies being evil, and I feel like it’s some personal allegory.
Okay, so this topic is moderately amusing to me. The truth is we still don’t actually know for sure, but it’s WEIRD.
He had a long and apparently well-documented history (letters he wrote) of multiple relationships with adult women. So much so that his family attempted to cover it all up because, by victorian standards, it was absolutely fucking scandalous. Like, wreck the surname for generations scandalous (which admittedly didn’t take much by victorian standards). This makes it look like he had NO relationships with adult women, because being an oddball that way was LESS of a freakshow publicly than sleeping around was.
The victorians also had this weird thing (by today’s standards) about nude children being the very symbol of innocence. Like, so much so that you’d wonder if they thought the mere sight of naked babies restored an adult’s innocence or something.
And these people had WEIRD hangups about sex.
We’re talking they supposedly covered the legs of tables and chairs in cloth so they would less resemble actual people’s legs, lest someone accidentally think of what’s at the TOP of legs on people. (genitalia! scary!)
The schism with Alice’s family may just have been that SOME people were POSSIBLY gossiping behind closed doors about the man and they refused to be associated with even the POSSIBILITY of scandal, especially if that scandal was that he slept with multiple women. There’s also mention that he was interested in Alice’s older sister, and something about a maid.
The whole thing is just straight up odd, but apparently most of the pedo rumors didn’t start until after his death. I’m not sure what, if anything, that means.
So, who knows. an oddball dude in a SUUUPER sexually repressed society, it honestly could go either way on coin flip odds.
Verizon Gave Her Data to a Stalker. ‘This Has Completely Changed My Life’ (www.404media.co)
“Verizon royally fucked up,” Poppy told me in a phone call. “There’s no way around it.” Verizon, she added, was “100% at fault.”...
Is there an artist so horrible that no matter how hard you try that you cannot separate their art from them?
Similar to the recent question about artists where you can successfully separate them from their art. Are there any artists who did something so horrible, so despicable, that it has instantly invalidated all art that they have had any part in?
The Most Dangerous Canadian Internet Bill You’ve Never Heard Of Is a Step Closer to Becoming Law - Michael Geist (www.michaelgeist.ca)
I am astounded that someone made this... (lemmy.world)
Something disturbing about Hallmark movies
I was talking with a friend today about Hallmark movies because we all seem to have at least one grandma who loves them around this time of year, and we’re hashing out the tropes they all share because they’re so formulaic that you could probably boil it down to a mad libs prompt, and something dawned on me because of one...
[DISCUSSION] [SPOILERS] - Poor Things - Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe - Dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos (www.imdb.com)
RELEASE DATE...
Put the fish down. (lemmy.world)
Does "Rock music is evil / of the devil" have racist roots?
As a Christian most of the circles I’m around are pretty chill…no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home....
Be careful when you go for a pee (i.imgflip.com)
I never learn my lesson (startrek.website)
Variety | Vin Diesel Sued for Alleged Sexual Battery of Assistant in 2010 (variety.com)
[Discussion] How do you feel about age verification on Porn sites? (lemmings.world)
Porn sites Pornhub, XVideos, and Stripchat face stricter requirements to verify the ages of their users after being officially designated as “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOPs) under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA)....
Sisko Explains It All (startrek.website)
Is there an artist whose work you love but was a shitty person?
It can sometimes be hard to separate the artist from their art. Are there any artists who were bad people but whose work you still enjoy?...
Pasta (lemmy.world)