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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27996 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Would you like a good-faith Marxist explanation for the used panties market?

Is it the labia theory of value?

I'm so confused, why are you asking this question

the flair of the person he's asking is "Can Marx explain the used panties market?"

Sometimes reading is hard

Thank you

Sure, the labor theory of value in particular, and why my (a pretty average looking guy in his 30's) labor of wearing a pair of panties doesn't seem to generate nearly as much value as an attractive 18 year old doing the same. And especially explain how the higher value given to the attractive 18 year old's panties (for equal labor!) appears to be constant even in non-capitalist economies. Also explain how the 18 year old merely claiming to have worn them seems to create more value than if I actually wear them, which seems to create negative value for most.

I will buy panties from you - if you wear them in a manner that is confirmable by a third party, for a long enough period of time for them to be noticably soiled - at a price that the market will bear.

Absolutely!

The explanation here is roughly the same as why a certain Argentinian dwarf can get more people willing to pay absurd amount of money just to look at him and will generate a larger worldwide audience interest than all the 18-year-old e-THOTs combined, without needing to sell his underwear whatsoever (though I'm sure if he wanted to, he would likely generate a higher price than his "competition").

The process for him acquiring this ability is slightly different than that of said attractive 18-year-olds, but not qualitatively so - it is based on people watching him do shit on their electronic devices, similarly to girls you mentioned. A 38-year-old South American male can easily generate a larger audience for anything, even cooking eggs, than the most attractive 18-year-old in history of humanity could possibly hope to.

Does that help?

Not at all. Is my labor of wearing the panties not equal to the labor of the attractive 18 year old female wearing the panties? If not, why not? That's the part Marxists seem to have a lot of trouble explaining, at least without throwing the labor theory of value out the window.

It is not, in much the same way as a blind person's labour of painting is not equal to the labour of a trained, talented renaissance artist. Labour theory of value does not discount the existence of natural talent nor learned abilities - the example of wearing panties is a typical reddit-tier right-wing "gotcha", but it just doesn't apply.

Not everyone is equally qualified to do every sort of labour, and it's not purely proficiency either. No matter how many years you spend perfecting your singing, if you're naturally tone-deaf, you'll never do better than a talented 12-year-old with minimal training and experience.

You seem to say that judgement is a major factor. It's not merely the quantity of labor expended that makes something valuable. People have to like it.

You're evading the question.

The value of eighteen year old nubiles underwear is trivially answered with Subjective Theory of Value, because there are a lot more men who want to buy panties over anyone else wanting to buy a man's boxers. Trying to reduce it to labor is not only nonsensical, in this case: it's meaningless.

And you can do this for pretty much anything you can imagine. Why is a Stradavarius more valuable than any other violin? Why is a signed First Edition book worth more than a reprint? You can't dodge into 'socially necessary labor' - because who defines that? Who measures it?

In every material sense, these goods are no different from other commodities of a similar nature, identical in function and content. But one is worth much more than the other. Where does this value come from?

To admit that there is a subjective value to commodities is to dismantle the entire Marxist argument. Why should a blind person's art be worth less than a Da Vinci? What is the natural talent of a eighteen year old girl to wear underwear? Your examples crumble under the least scrutiny.

It is human beings who decide what the value of things are. And if you still argue against this, what's the value of a bitcoin on a desert island? A bar of gold? Where does the labor come?

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