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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

You think watching someone - on your own - on Only Fans is an example of sexual intimacy?

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> "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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

Heh, if repression did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it?

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.

Can you elaborate more about relationship sharing? Do you mean having an open relationship or something else?

Also wrote this wonderful article on Formula 1, which was sadly removed by the publisher: https://web.archive.org/web/20240301170542/https://www.roada...

>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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

Great story and I think you're exactly right.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

Well what else does a blog do but project thoughts to the public?

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.

> 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...

author should find new friends, who touch grass

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.

>... 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.