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Notes -
Victorian-style purity standards applied to men, not women, certainly seems...interesting. Women are allowed to be sexual; men are expected to be chaste and virtuous. This would be an interesting thing indeed.
"Being considered an appropriate topic for any setting and company" is not the same thing as "not pretending it doesn't exist, or that's it's horrible and evil when it does exist".
Well - when looking at the spectrum between "shut down all mention of sexuality and let them figure it out naturally on the wedding night" and "be so open that some people are selling fetish gear to children", what I see is that one extreme is totalizing and bad in itself, while the other's bad parts are the outliers. Much as people here love to mention "kids getting dollars in their underwear in strip clubs", I have never actually encountered people who would endorse that, or endorse similar enough things, in the wild.
It's common advice to "give your children the Talk, or the streets will". Since not all parents follow that advice, I'd rather there be people whose job it is to openly give children the Talk, so they do not have to turn to less official and less scrutinized sources.
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Poor women, forced to strip for internet strangers by... who? Men don't go around telling women, "wow, you're so hot. You should totally start an OnlyFans so I can look at pictures of your hoo-ha for $10 a month". Nor do they go around claiming that it's liberating and all progressive young women that are sufficiently attractive should seize the day and sell pictures of their hoo-ha for $10 per viewer per month while it's still pretty.
I appreciate your tone.
On another reading, I think I understand your point: adult men unconsciously generate a massive demand for sex and sexual/sexualized content simply by existing, it's like a huge reservoir of potential energy that won't go away. Anyone of any gender who consciously tries to make a new hole in the dam that is storing that pent-up desire instead of shoring it up or at least leaving it alone knows that at least some women will be drawn to that new stream of male attention and that far from all of them will benefit from it.
But this draws a different response from me: what does shoring up the dam look like? If men do it, it will look like Saudi Arabia or Ancient Athens, with male guardians policing the sexuality of their charges (and yet Athens still had its prostitutes and I'm sure SA does as well). If women do it, it will be a radfem utopia (or dystopia?), with women actually forming a gender-wide class consciousness and punishing those among their ranks who try to benefit from their own sexuality. Or do you have a third answer to this question of your own?
I mean in the historical west modesty and sexuality norms were mostly policed by other women, even if men had legal responsibility, so I don't think there's as much daylight between the two options as you're representing.
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Not forced, probably. Though there are examples of women working where they have to pay a house fee to rent their internet connected performance stage / bedroom while their travel documents are held for 'safe keeping' by their landlord / manager / pimp. I'll happily concede this is not the majority.
There's been some coverage on Andrew Tate who we are told is lots of -ists, it remains to be seen what the outcome of his legal difficulties will be.
Leonid Radvinsky is the man behind onlyfans, though not it's founder, he made it much pornier than it had been initially. Arguably onlyfans has one of the more transparent ownership structures.
It may not be 'men' promulgating this message, but it's a message that is being heard by a cohort of women. Along with the message that this isn't a degenerate choice and anyone shaming you for choosing totally non-degenerate 'sex work' is misogynist, culturally backwards, insufficiently sex-positive, controlling, etc.
And ironically this is part of the feminist opposition to pornography: it's men who run it and make money out of it, even if women involved claim to be empowered and liberated and really love the work and it's sex positive and all the rest of it. There's a lot of young women scraping pennies with OnlyFans accounts who hope to become one of the few big success stories. Meanwhile, I'm guessing Mr. Radvinsky is not scraping pennies and has never had to flash his tatas to make money out of the platform.
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