faceh
7hr ago
Ding ding.
It is underappreciated how there are a good number of ways to irreversibly lower your quality of life and prospects for success without dying.
Certain drugs, getting paralyzed, losing a limb, and of course, outright brain damage.
There's hardships that you overcome and make you stronger and more robust, then there's hardships that can drag you down to a lower baseline permanently, and we lack the ability, technologically or otherwise, to correct.
The latter tend to be less visible.
I think there is a stable-ish regime of "legal, but regulated so heavily that its only profitable on the absolute margins."
Zoning rules that keep them from being within 5000 feet of a school, bans from advertising on television, heightened liability for harms, special insurance they have to purchase, that sort of thing.
So the ultimate effect is that these activities are run by small outfits with limited capacity (i.e. not industrialized) and/or are pushed to the absolute outskirts of society. Just to keep them from proliferating, I guess.
But Capitalism will be continually seeking ways to route around these regulations and will probably eventually hit on a strategy or loophole that brings them out of hiding.
faceh
7hr ago
Oh that's right, we still had Quantitative easing active during that time.
they thought they were seeing the baseline numbers for a new product instead of 'here is the once-a-century harvest'
This seems to be a common blind spot with large scale investors.
Even if they aren't literally killing the golden goose, they are biased towards assuming current feast conditions are a sign of how things will be going forward.
Same thing that happened with tech hiring during that time, although would have been hard to predict how AI would quickly rise to displace them.
I don't think so, but under current laws and norms, if the parents intervene, particularly in a physical way, to try to reign in their daughter THEY will be punished for restricting her autonomy. On one side you can say the state's role is to protect her autonomy. But to the extent she's susceptible to influence of others, on the other side, the state's role is to protect a malign influence from her parents.
The maximum irony is that a guy who spends months 'grooming' a young girl (as long as he doesn't actually solicit sex or touch her) then helps her set up an Onlyfans and publish explicit content the very day she turns 18 is legally protected from any kind of reprisal from the family if they find out. He has done nothing that the law can punish, and if he doesn't care about social judgment, he escapes Scott-free.
And I'd suggest that current technology makes the groomer's job way easier than the parent trying to keep the daughter out of sex work.
Everyone gets that its absolutely creepy and predatory behavior but the law as written will make it impossible to actually do anything to prevent it other than try your best to monitor the kid's comms.
faceh
23hr ago
The point is that tattoos are, in fact, normalized and a far less reliable sign of dysfunction than they once were. The most basic bitch people get them, albeit if you see full sleeves and facial tattoos, I'd be cautious.
Yes, normalizing things means you get more 'normal' people doing them.
Which is often not good.
And of course pushes the actual deviants to ever more costly signalling to boot.
I'd suggest we are seeing the same thing with OF/sex work, and that's the broader reason why pushback would be good.
And I put up those sticky notes for nothing, let alone the permanent marker on our skin.
I spent an hour in the shower scrubbing those off last time, and I still had to wear long sleeves for the next two days. I'd prefer you just staple the notes straight to our chest.
Think of how tattoos used to be a strong sign of criminality, and how you can see grandpas and yuppies flaunting them in public.
Face tattoos and certain socially taboo symbols still work pretty well though.
And in fact, the proliferation in women getting stupid tattoos is ANOTHER point on which I'd try to dissuade my hypothetical daughter, since the costs of undoing it are substantial, but that's not one I'd be as aggressive about policing.
I am really annoyed with the fact that some women end up getting whole sleeves done very shortly after they turn 18, which again seems a bit too early for most towards grasping the long term consequences.
(Hard drugs also encompass a wide range of drugs, some of them MUCH worse for you)
Yes, the actual physical toll that such drugs take on the body is much worse, but in terms of eroding one's mental health and cutting off social networks, its probably on the same order, since the type of people who will keep you in their social network knowing you're a sex worker are probably not great as a support system. As a point, I'd imagine that other women wouldn't really want their husbands or boyfriends around you if your career is known.
So you'll be mostly stuck with other women who can't keep steady relationships... and men who think you're a potential lay.
Fine, once I'm asleep you can take over our advocacy, just remember to water the succulent and throw out the trash.
Wait, I thought that was a plastic plant. Oh dear.
I also noticed that the dog went missing from the last time I took over, please tell me she's boarded somewhere pleasant and not roaming the streets looking for more roadkill lasagna.
faceh
1d ago
I see several Fix Everything switches if I look around. Nuclear power, an end to NIMBYism, institutionalization of the mentally ill homeless (I have a US bias, some places don't have Fix Everything switches).
See, we're really in agreement on almost everything else.
But I'll just push that one point: how many people ended up as 'mentally ill homeless' because there wasn't an intervention earlier on in their life to keep them on a more productive track?
Like I said, if OF caused giga-AIDS, we should ban it. But not even actual AIDS kills >51% of people, let alone merely things that could cause AIDS.
We've got the tech to make this so, but in living memory it was a mass killer of humans.
And the tech that keeps it at bay relies on a fairly fragile supply chain, so if that goes, it comes back with a vengeance.
Its that sort of thing that makes me believe that we should in fact try to push towards a social order that is more robust against AIDS transmission (same for other serious diseases) as a backstop against a decline in our technological capacity.
And I do feel similarly about other technological solutions that blunt the impact of but do not eliminate some negative effect.
But come on, are you saying starting an OF is remotely as dangerous? If not, I think my decision to remain within legal bounds is both pragmatically valid and in accordance with my values.
I have seen some cases of women who go into that line of work and it seemingly crushes their spirits, collapses their social networks, and ultimately puts them in an emotional condition that wrecks their ability to maintain a romantic connection. I think this impact is at least on the order of that of getting addicted to a hard drug, although it is probably easier to recover if you have support.
Although its most likely that there was some pre-existing mental condition that explains both that outcome and why they tried sex work in the first place.
I've talked to some girls who indicate the main thing keeping them from trying it themselves is their apparently overdeveloped sense of shame, and I'm like "okay but can you not hit on actual logical bases to avoid it, aside from the emotional aversion?"
(Lets be fair, I also DESPISE Multi-level marketing schemes and would love to nuke those from orbit, and would take measures to keep my kids from falling into that trap too, although I'd like to think my kids would know the math well enough to see why those won't work.) OF has many of the same aspects as MLMs when you look at how it works in practice, but you're burning up more than just your time and money if you try to take it seriously.
I'm off to bed in a bit, but a pleasure nonetheless. I don't think your views are unreasonable, even if we do have our differences.
Yep, good to point out where we are different in our beliefs so the others don't catch on LOL.
faceh
1d ago
Either you believe the state has a serious role to play in harm reduction, or it doesn't.
Through direct intervention, I think it doesn't.
Through maintaining general social order, perhaps it might.
faceh
1d ago
Incredibly enjoying this discussion since its one of the few times I'm seeing major daylight between our respective positions, despite coming from almost identical premises, it seems.
If you break your spine while driving drunk, or lose your dick while fucking a blender, then I don't see why society should have to foot the bill. Maybe drug addicts who are violent, criminally inclined and disruptive and entirely unwilling to accept help shouldn't be eligible for housing or most welfare. If they're doing coke on weekends and making a million dollars a year as a quant, why the hell should I care?
I'm gathering that you're ultimately fine with full on Social and Natural Darwinism for deciding punishments and outcomes for risky behavior... but there's a certain amount of nuance when it comes to your own progeny.
If my daughter told me she was going to attempt suicide, or do fentanyl, then I think I would do quite a few things that are clearly illegal, and damn the consequences. Starting an OF or doing sex work is not ideal, but not nearly as bad.
Well let me drill down on that a bit. If you believed that her doing sex work was more likely than not (i.e. 51%) to make it so that she'd be unable to marry a reliable, respectable, supportive husband and thus grievously impact her financial future, her odds of being a mother, her overall mental health, are you still going to stand on the 'autonomy' position, even if she's getting some malicious actor whispering in her ear (but, importantly NOT coercing her)? Yes, I would hope she'd listen to her loving father over the Casanova trying to pimp her out, but if she slips up this one time that might be all it takes.
The position I'm arguing is that there are things that can create lifelong misery and consequences that are nonetheless NOT as serious as death or dismemberment, but have outsized negative impact compared to their benefits. Yes, people should be able to pursue such things. But if your own child, in their youthful indiscretion, is about to go jump off a metaphorical cliff into the water below,
Wouldn't you be willing to take some serious measures to avert that?
but I'd yell at them if they stopped me from going out on a date with someone they don't like.
I mean, depends a bit on what "they don't like" actually means. "This woman is riddled with STDs and has a history of violent outbursts" might justify trying to stop you. But yes, that's a fair distinction.
faceh
1d ago
Nah, too easy to fake or mistake that signal.
I've known more than a handful of women who are UTTERLY NORMAL LOOKING (or maybe just small, discreet signals), and hold down professional careers... and are ridiculously down to clown in some fairly depraved ways when the social context is right. Then clean themselves up and get back to work the next day.
I know there's more of them amongst us who probably haven't been given the opportunity to act out and would leap at it given the chance. But you can't just go around asking them at random, can you. Dating apps might have made it more efficient for them to find outlets, if nothing else.
One sign that does pop up a lot... dead dads. But I think that only interacts with genetic effects.
faceh
1d ago
However, I'm a professor of the benefits of localism, so I'd be arguing against liberalism in the particular social order I would prefer to exist in, not strictly speaking saying it shouldn't be applied anywhere.
See, neither of us disagree that there is scope for guard-rails or restrictions, we just disagree on where to put them.
Yep.
But my 18 year old daughter? I would impose as much punishment as is legal, say threatening to cut her off from college funds or leave her life. But I wouldn't ask the government to make sex work illegal, that is going too far.
Right.
But should it be legal to, e.g. physically fight off the male interlopers who are pulling her into porn? Online grooming/blackmail gangs are a real thing. (That link is quite SFW but the implications are stomach-churning, fair warning) Maybe you can physically detain her for a period of time so she can't hang with the porno guys. That has legal precedent, after all. Maybe require her to wear a tracking bracelet outside the house. Of course, I'm told that's basically what parents do with their phones anyway.
I just find it interesting that you happily suggest using incentives to nudge her behavior around, but might balk at the idea of using even basic physical intervention. I am in agreement that creating a law that reins her in is too far.
Overall, I'm okay with "do your best to train your kid to use all common sense and restraint and to do the better thing, then let them go their own way."
I'm just not sold on the idea that 18 years of age is the correct checkpoint for many kids, and if we say its okay to use certain tactics to control their behavior before age 18, it runs into the same issue, why is it suddenly impermissible after they're 18? Your interest in their wellbeing hasn't shifted!
And no, I'm not limiting this to females. It might be useful to also prevent dudes from doing reckless and stupid stuff too. Its just that physically restraining a fully grown guy from doing a thing is a riskier proposition, for obvious reasons.
I think you have every right to personally disapprove. I do and would disapprove too, if my daughter contemplated something like that, I'd be immensely disappointed, assuming that society and cultural mores around sex stayed much the same as it currently is today. But if it was entirely normalized? I wouldn't forbid her, even if my own upbringing made me queasy.
There's gotta be a line somewhere though, right?
If your child is reaching towards boiling water on the hot stovetop, you'd probably grab their hand to stop them, even though they might not be too badly burned, its not something you want them to risk, and a bad injury will very likely vastly diminish their quality of life in ways they can't easily predict.
So if you see your freshly 18-year-old daughter reaching towards the high-quality webcam and setting up an Amazon wishlist, especially if you notice a skeevy dude with tattoos and a pornstache whispering in her ear, you might feel some obligation to snatch her metaphorical hand away before she takes a step that is likely to diminish her quality of life in ways she can't easily predict.
SEE ALSO: STUDENT LOAN DEBT
If we apply the standard that people who aren't maximally rational and numerate can't do certain risky things, then we would very quickly find ourselves in a situation where the average person can't drink, gamble or smoke or drive large SUVs.
I'm coming around to a social order that's like this. Ties into my musings on 'age of consent' discourse.
I don't think we need to prevent all harms everywhere. But if we're not going to go full Darwinian and let God sort things out, then the guardrails we do set up could be contoured much more wisely than they currently are, ESPECIALLY if we want to try and optimize around humanity's long term survival and (a value I have) expansion into space.
I hope it is clear that I am willing to tolerate, if not endorse, many things that I disagree with or disapprove of.
Same.
I just have lived long enough now to see that certain decisions people make can cause irreversible harm, and it would genuinely be a net good to divert them from those decisions long enough for them to actually become productive and self-assured before they actually accept the full risk of the behavior.
And I'm a radical individualist and anti-federalist! I'm not asking for there to be some big central bureau intervening in everyone's individual decisions! That has its own major problems.
Just a system that insures against the fat-tailed harms as best we can.
IF NOTHING ELSE, we need to be internalizing the externalities so the costs fall specifically on those who create the harms or indulge the vices, rather than the rest of us. Cue my other favorite rant.
You know, sure. Why NOT add in a gambling addiction as a requirement to enter.
Likewise, airdrop pallets of uncut cocaine in on a weekly basis.
Then once a year have a 'purge night' which is broadcast to the rest of the country on PPV.
This'll help clear space for more dudes to move in.
I'd expect it would be a lot of free sex, swinging, actual harems, and probably some dudes getting killed by other dudes over romantic beefs.
But its either going to succeed on its own merits and help quarantine the hypersexuals from the larger population, or it becomes a helpful cautionary tale you can point out to the 'normal' women.
Imagine taking freshly graduated 18 year old girls on a guided safari through the streets of Orgyville (in an armored bus, mind) to 'scare them straight' about the realities of unrestrained male and female sexuality before sending them off to college.
And for those girls who find the experience appealing, have them spit in a cup and after the test results come back, send them their invite in the mail 2 weeks later.
Yes, I'm proposing recreating the towns of Soddom and Gommorah from the classic Biblical cautionary tale "God smites the sin-riddled towns of Soddom and Gommorah."
faceh
1d ago
Dated a girl when I first moved to my current town who made money on the side as a professional domme.
Showed me her website and everything.
I immediately determined that I wouldn't be marrying her, but being new in town and her being fun to hang out with meant I kept having her around. She also was a REALLY talented singer. Had a hilarious 'date' where I took her to a Country Karaoke bar, and she couldn't resist getting up there and belting out some classic show tunes, to the audience's confusion.
She moved away about a year later, then did end up marrying a dude. Then they divorced about 2-3 years ago. It appeared amicable.
From what I know of her I think she's genuinely enjoying life, and the traditional path was never going to play out for her anyway.
I think the impacts of promiscuity are unfortunately hard to predict, and will depend on exactly how 'traumatic' some of the experiences are, and each one is basically rolling the dice on sustaining permanent emotional damage. Just like how some people can be moderate smokers their whole lives and never really suffer, and others get throat cancer in their 40's.
So from the side of the male suitor, having knowledge of a woman's body count requires you to accept some level of unavoidable risk if you keep her around.
faceh
1d ago
Rare case I directly disagree with you, even though I sort of accept:
I respect their right to do it anyway.
I can't help but think that they're not really giving 'informed consent' to the activity if they can't really grasp the real odds involved (they overestimate their chances of success, nobody dissuades them of this) and the first order harmful effects, much less the second order ones, that can result.
I would never hold a gun to a woman's head to prevent her from prostituting herself (although, if it were my own daughter, I might take several less drastic but still severe measures), but I think the legality of the choice doesn't really absolve the morality of it.
Its one of a pretty long laundry list of things that I expect many women will enthusiastically hop into if enticed, yet come to regret later and be very angry that someone didn't dissuade them at the time.
Yep. And there's probably a way to filter for the women for whom its a minimally harmful diversion/hobby so that they're mainly the ones getting into the sex trades while actively dissuading any other women.
One of the most controversial ideas I've ever had is to hire genetic researchers to identify the 'slut genes' that predict, e.g. hypersexuality, high openness to new experiences, low disgust, and whatever particular brain chemistry it is that makes a woman achieve maximum bliss when she's violating social norms, so we get a profile we can use to identify these women quickly.
And once you've identified that, scour the population for such women then shuttle them away to a particular planned community with very, VERY different norms than your average town (think the exact inverse of an intentional religious community). Then charge men THROUGH THE NOSE to buy property/move there.
Wait, is that just Las Vegas?
faceh
1d ago
I mean more directly. If you can't just order up drugs from an app for immediate delivery, but have to go to a sketchy part of town, with cash, know the right passphrases and handshakes, and STILL risk getting ripped off on occasion. If you can only find prostitutes in the red light district, where its highly shameful to go... these are things that will divert or discourage the average person.
The friction on the back end, that makes it hard to leave the vice, yes, that's also a factor. But we've successfully made it almost frictionless for people to indulge vices, whilst all the standard difficulties of leaving the hole once you've dug it remain, which is probably why things seem sharply WORSE than in previous years.
faceh
1d ago
One prereq for the gambling rise was SCOTUS striking down the Federal Ban in 2018.
Might have been easier to keep a lid on it otherwise.
Not sure what the comparable prereq was for online prostitution, although I mentioned in my other comment that backpage was shut down around the same time, 2018.
What's crazy is that for YEARS they kept up the facade of "any popular figure can be on here for completely innocuous reasons, with completely normal fans giving them money!"
As if people were genuinely signing up in droves to watch cooking videos put out by a B-list football player or some wannabe pop singer talking while she put on makeup. As if there wasn't literally ONE and ONLY ONE thing that a guy would immediately plunk down money to get from an attractive woman on the internet.
I guess they HAD to keep that up so they could let their payment processors keep looking the other way.
And in a way, the payment processors might prefer that OF be the central spot they have to deal with, rather than playing increasingly elaborate games with smaller companies ('Modeling' agencies, Cam sites, various file upload sites, for instance).
Another possible factor in all this was Backpage dissolving circa 2018.
Given how heavy the scrutiny against Craigslist and Backpage actually was, it IS rather amazing that OF has avoided serious inquiry, since it enables functionally the exact same practices.
faceh
1d ago
I mean, the 'issue' is that many people can use cocaine and not be addicted, not have it screw up their life, and treat it like a party drug when they're out having fun.
Likewise with sex. I honestly believe there's some subset of women who can be 'happy whores' and generally enjoy promiscuity without it dragging other aspects of their life down. A small subset.
So you have some that aren't debilitated by the 'mere' availability of the vice, and arguably their life is enhanced by using it on occasion for fun.
And then you have a larger group that would be debilitated but if there's enough friction to obtain their vice, they won't bother.
But the dishonesty is usually downplaying the impact the vice has on the second group and emphasizing the interests of the first group to promote universal availability, and at the very least enable various workarounds for the second group even if we DO try to regulate it.
My personal preference is "the vice is available but there's lots of friction/a high cost associated with obtaining it."
In practice, everything seems to trend towards universal availability UNLESS you ban and aggressively enforce rules against the vice.
I remember when OF became a 'thing' right around Covid times when even the sex workers had to figure out how to work from home.
I recall that there was a brief-ish period where the benefit was that Onlyfans WASN'T a sex worker site, so there was just enough plausible deniability that a woman could create one without admitting she was going to post nudes. And they would start with standard racy photos before getting the hardcore stuff.
Hell, I can recall that VERY brief period where a certain type of guy could 'get away' with pushing a girl to 'start an Onlyfans' because 'you can make so much money' and pretend to hide behind nonprurient interest.
The thing I do wonder is about a few counterfactuals:
A) Covid lockdowns don't happen (big one, I know), do we see a noticeable rise in online prostitution at all?
B) If Onlyfans cracked down early, or was cracked down on early, does that function get replaced by a different site, or do things stay mostly decentralized and small. There were still sites for online whores, of course, but they were mostly sketchy and disparate and didn't have a fig leaf of respectability.
Instagram was still used for thirst-trapping, but monetizing that was more challenging, I think.
C) What if OF still arose for this purpose but we didn't have certain creators hit it huge (Amouranth and a few others I recall being the biggest profiteers early on), thus creating the illusion that huge wealth was up for grabs if you were willing to sacrifice your dignity. Does it draw in as many young women? I think a particular strain of female streamer becoming popular was a prerequisite to OF rising.
D) And thus, in all of this, do we possibly never gain a central 'attractor' for women to dip their toe into sex work, and perhaps as a side effect less blatant and wanton online simping, since it would remain more relegated to the shady side of the internet.
In a sense I think the rise of a site LIKE OF was inevitable. We had feminists doing SlutWalks and pushing "Sex work is work!" well before then, and paywalled content was an established trend by then through Patreon et al., NSFW artists were already doing quite well.
So it seems unavoidable that some site would navigate the cultural, economic, and regulatory labyrinth to become the first 'mainstream' online whore store. And this one managed to hide behind the "its empowering the women, they get to choose exactly how and what they post, its really good for them" shield long enough to get entrenched.
On the other, a lot of surprising stuff happened in the last 10 years that was probably a coin flip at best towards going 'the other way' (Trump 1, for sure) so who knows.
Yep.
I'm not that big of a boomer, I get "the kids will find ways to smoke/drink/have sex regardless of the rules."
But flipping the valence from "this is something you do in secret in the abandoned shed out behind the football field" to "This is something actively advertised and facilitated, including for children" basically portends the complete capitulation of your society to this particular vice.
And I do suggest that the revealed preference is that anyone who has the funds/capacity to escape these things and move to a place where they ARE more restricted/marginalized does so. There are no places that are considered "nice to live" that also have strip clubs on every other corner and THC gummies available over the counter at the convenience store.
This is also why I think "YIMBYs" aren't really a thing. They may claim and honestly believe they want to have affordable housing units built in their neighborhood, but they also know all the disorder and additional nuisances that will come along with these things so in practice they'll oppose it when the rubber meets the road.
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