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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24133 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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No, a Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted to Porn

A Times story about the arrival of high-speed internet in a remote Amazon tribe spiraled into its own cautionary tale on the dark side of the web.

Ok, which one of you chuds posted harmful misinformation?

During a weeklong visit, I saw how they used the internet to communicate between villages, chat with faraway loved ones and call for help in emergencies. Many Marubo also told me they were deeply concerned that the connection with the outside world would upend their culture, which they had preserved for generations by living deep in the forest. Some elders complained of teenagers glued to phones, group chats full of gossip and minors who watched pornography

As a result, the story we published June 2 was in part about the Marubo people’s introduction to the ills of the internet.

But after publication, that angle took on a whole different dimension.

Over the past week, more than 100 websites around the world have published headlines that falsely claim the Marubo have become addicted to porn. Alongside those headlines, the sites published images of the Marubo people in their villages.

The New York Post was among the first, saying last week that the Marubo people was “hooked on porn.” Dozens quickly followed that take. TMZ’s headline was perhaps the most blunt: “TRIBE’S STARLINK HOOKUP RESULTS IN PORN ADDICTION!!!”

Ok, what am I missing? This is a paragraph from the original article:

After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography

There is no "some elders complained" here, it's a straightforward portrayal of the Marubo as a collective being afflicted with, among other things, minors watching porn. "Amazon tribe hooked on porn" is a decently accurate headline-length summary. Sure, shit got sensationalized, but that's a far cry from "falsely claim".

I've had a longstanding gripe with the NYT, Vox, and other supposedly higher-quality outlets, where they essentially prime their audience to read their content a certain way, while maintaining plausible deniability if anyone calls them out, but this is the first time I saw them go after someone for going with the intended reading.

What happened here, did the wrong people agree with them, so the story has to be called off?

Is anyone else getting the impression that since the start of the Great Awokening it has become standard practice in the mainstream media to portray the porn industry and its consequences in a categorically negative light, even if it's done in passing, like in this case? This wasn't always the case, as far as I can tell.

It was a useful weapon against the Christians: "come with us, and have all the sexy fun times those awful prudes won't let you!" Now that the Christians are out of the way, that can be reneged upon, especially because a lot of those formerly-forbidden sexy fun times actually are bad. Similarly, I see gerrymandering of the definition of 'consent' so that 'nonconsensual' can be identical with 'bad.'

Yeah, it’s probably no coincidence that the increasing normalization of pornography, and its widespread marketization and distribution via VHS technology coincided with the emergence and increasing influence of the Christian Right. It also served as a useful bait to them, for sure. It also bears mentioning that, as far as I know, they naturally brought up all sorts of arguments against porn consumption, but these were markedly not the anti-porn arguments that have become normalized in current discourse (see my other comment above). Had this not been the case, I guess they’d have had more appeal among non-religious centrists.

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