Have you considered the alternative that this is not an evil which you are unable to control but just another way of living / thinking of sexual content? There is nothing inherently evil about this stuff so why is it terrible that it is becoming more accepted/common?
If in 30 years we live in a society where people post nudes like they do facebook posts, is there anything wrong about this? Could you describe the harm caused which doesn't boil down to attitudes of society?
>> If in 30 years we live in a society where people post nudes like they do facebook posts..
..then the calculus will be different. Current culture is what it is, and we live within it.
Imagine a culture where prostitution is "no big deal." It's acceptable for parents to encourage college kids to take a summer job in a brothel and it affects their life in the same way as a summer job at a car wash. Just because you can imagine such a culture doesn't mean that the same advice applies in our world
Similarly, there are plenty of cultures where premarital sex is totally unacceptable, especially for girls. You might think that's silly, and other cultures do exist that aren't like this. Taking your advice might profoundly affect their life, their ability to marry and live within their culture.
We only get to "then" by challenging the norms we are faced with "now". The question is do we want to move forward to a more accepting world, or settle for the narrow, judgmental mess we've inherited.
Well... we get to some sort of "then" regardless. I'm all for challenging norms and striving forward, sexual liberation and such. I just don't think only fans represents that better, more accepting world. Do you?
Seems perfectly reasonable that OP doesn't want his kids engaged in it.
I strongly disagree and would argue that we usually only get to "then" by active struggle, not just by waiting around.
And yes, I absolutely do think that normalization of sex, both for profit and otherwise, is an indispensable part of a more accepting world. OnlyFans has already helped move that needle considerably.
I totally disagree. We've all been teenagers. The content creators posting their OF on TikTok are purposefully targeting teenagers with access to mommy's credit card. I see it a s purely evil and predatory.
In my time it was phone sex. Teenagers with access to parents credit cards will always have things to buy that some will disapprove. Nothing new her. Not even the attempt to make everybody conform the lowest common moral denominator instead of having parents actually supervise their teenagers.
Personally, I don't see why subscribing to a $9 onlyfans account in order to see some tits is so much worse than buying a game.
I have nieces and nephews and my friends have preteens and teenage children. Whenever I ask they how they get past age blockers they say they just lie and put whatever age they need to access the content.
The smarter one won’t tell me how he installs apps on his iPad after his mom uninstalls it. I suspect he figured out his moms password.
In what world do teenagers not just figure out a way to obtain content like this for free on the Internet instead of risking mommy and daddy finding out they watch porn when they check their statement? Like, I get an immediate notification on my phone when a purchase is made, online or offline. The risk is so high I feel like you're inventing a situation so rare it's not worth mentioning.
It's debatable and not as clear cut. Many believe that a "liberation" of sexual content manifests the objectification of women and therefore is a net negative to society and the progress toward equality.
Sexual content and objectification of women have been widely spread on TV since the 70's. The content we consumed as teenagers has always been tinged with an air of exploitation.
Just think of most women's opinion of the majority of pornography, sure they could pick out some they like, but they find a lot of it disgusting. I can't imagine having to grow up with the feeling that the opposite sex is constantly consuming content that's exploitative of your sex.
At least most of these TikTok/OF creators have some level of dignity, and power over their own lives.
No, I don't think it's a net negative. I do however think objectification of women is since it amplifies one of the biggest issues of society for very little gain. The small negative impact Call of Duty has (if any) is minuscule in comparison.
> If you are a parent, teach your children to build respectful, healthy relationships.
If you actually think it's that easy you're minimizing the fight for equality and rights for all women.
This is incredibly naïve. Social norms change, often quite quickly and in unexpected ways. You could have a near future where posting nudes is 100% normal, then 10 years after that it becomes quite taboo again. The problem is that the internet never forgets.
The harm caused is that an action you take that is socially normative, legal, and accepted today, may not be in the future, and if that action is documented online, it will inevitably be judged by an ever-changing set of standards and morals as time marches on.
> If in 30 years we live in a society where people post nudes like they do facebook posts, is there anything wrong about this?
Well, a main issue is society isn't a monolith. Some people might not want to post nudes (just like some people don't want a FB account) but feel societally pressured to do so. Some people, specifically people hiring or electing, might look down on those posting nudes, making people whose nudes happen to be better known more difficult to get jobs. Some people may post nudes and then regret it later, and combined with pressure could lead to them developing some complexes.
Personally, I wouldn't want to live in that society. I can already get porn when I want, so I don't see a huge upside for me. On the other hand, if you think FB/IG/SC stalking post breakups is insane now, let me introduce you to the future.
Putting a monetary value on an activity that otherwise doesn't have it fundamentally alters how people think about that activity whether they want to or not. The best example is selling items in MMOs versus achieving them in game. If you put a $100 price tag on a weapon that otherwise takes 200 hours to grind it will ruin the satisfaction people that ground for it got from the item.
This happens... subconsciously and, I think, unavoidably. Commodifying core human interactions will affect sellers whether they want to or not.
We already commodify human interactions. Dating for starters (and arranged marriages before that). You could run the gamut of dates on your own or pay a matchmaker to set you up with a guaranteed relationship (or your money back). There's rarely a point to doing something the hard way if a successful shortcut is available, so long as all involved understand what they're getting out of it.
Whether you like it or not, sex has an implicit emotional component that cannot be overlooked. Sex work is not the same as normal work but naked. Posting nudes is not the same as posting normal pictures. There is an amount of soul involved when humans deal with sex, whether the involved parties realize it at the time or not. The more this becomes normalized, the more unhealthy the soul of a society becomes. No, I don't have a peer reviewed study confirming this. My source is art, history, and the human experience.
I appreciate your personal opinion and just felt like sharing my own personal counter opinion. Being a gay person in the furry community, posting nudes on IM groups is something that is just done almost like you would post a selfie at the beach. I have seen nudes of most of my friends and even some of my coworkers and the other way around. No one treats it as weird or awkward, its just something you do.
It doesn't devalue personal interactions offline or make me feel like a soulless void. I feel like most of the issues that the general public has on this issue is not fundamental parts of humans or society, but simply norms which we have come to embed so deeply they feel fundamental.
I don't mean this as a personal insult but if you are a furry you are already so deep in the degeneracy that you wouldn't notice anything of the sort. Like in BNW, it's rare that the people who submerge themselves in the shallows are cogent of what they've done. Most often it manifests as a vague sense of dissatisfaction or unease in the quiet times. I'm not saying you specifically are this way, but furries are not known for being successful, self actualized, confident people outside of their community.
I agree. I've a lot of experience with the furry community and I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society structured like that. You have issues like the extreme focus on sexuality, the constant barrage of extreme sexual content (like non-consent/rape porn) and the tacit tolerance of pedophilia and/or abuse in some furry spaces. I don't think it's healthy for someone to base their identity on a community whose main focus is pornography, and extreme forms of it, at it. It's not an issue with anthropomorphic characters themselves, but the community that formed around them and how it regulates itself. Some people I've seen even developed an exclusive sexual attraction to anthros, which basically kills their chances of having normal sexual and romantic relationships; such extreme cases are pretty rare, though. I'm not too keen on using the term "degeneracy" because it reeks of religious connotations, but I certainly see why people describe the furry fandom like that.
I used to think porn is pretty neutral in the terms of the harm it does to the consumer, but over my years in the internet, I encountered many people who invest much of their time into porn, or structure the way they view others (women mostly) based on porn and I've come to the conclusion that consumption of porn, specifically during one's teenage years, is psychologically damaging. It does change the way you view sexuality, what you perceive as attractive and your sexual preferences. I was exposed to porn at a young age and I'm pretty sure it did me no good. I worry that kids who are nowadays exposed at even younger age might develop maladaptive sexual preferences and views.
Gender relations becoming gameified and being turned into monetary micro-transactions is not a net win for society. Women debasing themselves and selling their body to appeal to an army of lonely simps that take refuge in a simulated relationship that is emotionally exploitative is not the kind of healthy pair-bonding I wish for my kids. It is socially corrosive.
> Have you considered the alternative that this is not an evil
We have considered it, and came to the conclusion that it is evil. A society that has its morality purely based on "consent" has accepted its own demise.
Thee wouldn't be a demise, it would just be a different kind of society. Males are expendable for most of society, in earlier centuries, they would die from warfare, diseases, working in high risk professions and so on. The current society we are in where we expect or desire pair bonding for life with an exclusive mate is rather new and unstable. Lost of women would be quite fine with a harem like system where they share a high quality mate with other women and now that women earn on par with men they are not limited by the male's resources being shared between children by other women.
What your comment and the other replies are not addressing is whether it’s healthy for kids to be exposed to pornography, which is probably what the parent comment is worried about, and not whether normalizing sex work as something that some adults do is ok.
I’m fine with de-stigmatizing sex work and pornography, but a lot of the content you find online is hyper-stylized and portrays some really unhealthy views on sex and both women and men.
>There is nothing inherently evil about this stuff so why is it terrible that it is becoming more accepted/common?
I disagree, I think it's perverse that creators try to create artificial one-way relationships with their viewers, especially for kids, but also for people at large which aren't adapted to deal with these kinds of relationships (which imo is abusive).
> There is nothing inherently evil about this stuff so why is it terrible that it is becoming more accepted/common?
They specifically talk about their kids being targeted with porn. Targeting kids with porn is grooming behaviour it results in a lot of evil, not something we want to normalise.
I don't think it will ever happen to be normal if your colleagues find your nude pictures. Or your children for that matter. Or worse, the classmates of your children. This time the "your mom"-jokes might stick.
Prostitution is legal in my country and it should remain this way. But there are mechanism to keep it in certain locations. I think that should also apply to adult content on the net.
Of course there are also repercussion to most forms of intimacy you experience or do not experience later in life. The average 18 year old doesn't pay too much mind to it.
Sexual saturation nulls intimacy. There will be little drive to explore a personal experience when kids treat their libido as a itch to scratch. Not even historical emperor's children had harems at age 14 - this is training their behaviour for instant reward at high monetary costs - instead of working towards a goal. Instant gratification is unnatural and makes for shallow character.
Lots of porn users are unhappy about their use of porn. Lots of people are unhappy about their partner's use of porn. Lots of therapists are worried about their clients' use of porn. Etc. And these are not issues of stigma; we know that because to be taken seriously in the media everyone talking about their problems has to start with "I'm not against porn per se, but ..."
I think I sit in the middle on this. I don't think it is evil but if you dig under the surface a little you will find a lot of trauma, anxiety and desperation whether it is narcissistic instagram posts or OF style porn.
I think you're correct, but I also think that's a property of the human condition and underlies nearly everything humans do for attention (to some extent or another, obviously to a much lesser extent the broader we're talking).
Trauma, anxiety and desperation are so common that I'm not sure what isn't impacted by them, I guess is my meaning.
I don’t know… I think people are cynical these days in large part because the world around us is dominated by this status angst.
But it wasn’t always this way. Not even close. I’ve met many people who grew up in pre- and post-WWII Germany, and from how they describe it, the concept of status didn’t really exist then as it does now.
Yes, there were rich and poor. But people fell in love with and married people in their towns and villages, and were not unhappy in doing so. With the exception of the war (a significant exemption, true) people’s lives seemed clear-cut, and no one felt the need to constantly be posting or drip-feeding off of likes or views or even money.
These apps and platforms are recent inventions, and they are dangerous. Status is no longer a local or regional commodity, it is global. And your status is constantly being evaluated against every metric.
Instead of being satisfied with being the best wine-grower in the region, for example, one is now forced to also compare oneself to the best bodybuilders in the world and the richest businesspeople.
Though at times overdramatized, ”The Social Dilemma” is a great documentary on this topic. I would also recommend Tristan Harris’s podcast episode with Joe Rogan.
Technology has enabled us to feel "close" (or at least simulate closeness) with a larger number of people over greater distances. We just didn't evolve for these large abstract social groups and we're still adapting as a species to it.
We're just like polar bears being confined in a zoo and pacing up and down.
Your description of pre-WWII Germany is overly idyllic. We would not had WWII if pre-WWII Germans were that happy. The Germany was pretty violent, unstable place with serious economical problems including homelessness. The whole phenomenon of young men fighting on the streets with political opponents had a lot to do with them being unhappy about their place and options in society.
Some people and marriages were happy, but definitely not all of them were happy.
The society was changing on all directions leading to conflicts. Young women in particular tended to move away from villages to cities for greater freedom and economic options, followed by backslash over proper female place.
Surely, that's why I added "with the exception of the war (a significant exemption, true)". I only describe Germany in this way because it's the country where I have the deepest roots and speak the language. I am sure this sentiment would mirror across most of Europe, absent the many horrors and tragedies of the 20th century.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I'd like to go back and live in the 20th century, but I do think some ways of life in those times were simpler and better acclimated to human nature.
I was not talking about war. I was talking about period between wars.
From after WWI till dictatorship, Germany was violent place with regular street fights and tons on social problems. After Hitler took power, it continued to be violent place, tho in somewhat different way.
Do you think children should be spending their allowance money on porn? That's surely helpful for OF's bottom line but I question the ramifications of selling our children's sexuality to a few capitalist coders.
Why is it bad? First, teaching children to monetize and sexualize in a capitalistic system, rather than how they evolved which is a more personal and toned down sexual experience. Their psyche is developing, their habits from teenage time will carry forward and affect their only life. It's too risky to gamble on our society's minds by letting any company sell whatever they like to children.
Second, do we want young people wasting their limited money on this content? There's a lot of free things, even if someone is 18, why should they be giving away money for what they can get for free? Is that a sound financial habit?
Children can’t spend money on OF. Only adults can. Children can spend their money on the SI Swimsuit issue, though. And the SI Body issue. Do you take issue with that sexualization that benefits the capitalist behemoth that is Disney Corp?
Is that true? I had a credit card when I was a teenager. Is there a way for them to check your age or is it “you have a credit card so we assume you’re 18?”
A very similar comparison would be “thots” on Twitch, though.
If in 30 years we live in a society where people post nudes like they do facebook posts, is there anything wrong about this? Could you describe the harm caused which doesn't boil down to attitudes of society?