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So onlyfans owner has died of cancer.
Which means that in the next 72 hours we will hear a lot of hot takes about onlyfans. Then it will be Trump all over again.
One of the things I noticed when trawling reddit was absolute lack of sympathy from anyone. The guy may have been the most exposed to culture war dude in the world - some hate him because of onlyfans, some hate him because he is jewish and aipac donor.
For onlyfans - I don't think this is boon for humanity. And I think in a way it is just Sports Betting but for women. Mild to severe ruin of your life for the slim chance to make it big. There could be such things as too many creators, too many influences, too many habibis living in Dubai and Bali.
IMO OnlyFans is to women what video game lootboxes / sportsbetting are to men. Deep in male nature is the desire to seek fortune through competition / warring, and deep in female nature is the desire to present themselves for sex and obtain resources from the wealthy. These are primitive drives, millions of years old, predating modern human evolution. In both instances it triggers an urge that can overpower rational risk-reward calculation in many people. These things should be banned just like cocaine is banned. They are physiologically the same as cocaine. Cocaine is an endogenous dopamine hack, OF / gambling are exogenous dopamine hacks.
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.
But isn't this "friction" what causes the vice to be be debilitating in the first place? There would be nothing problematic about widespread promiscuity and sex work (certainly not about cyberpornography with zero risk of STDs etc.) if it carried no social stigma that makes it more difficult to settle down later in life or get a good job, etc. It's not the actual sex that directly ruins women's lives in the way that doing too much cocaine will physically kill you, it's the very same negative consequences which, yes, also serve the prosocial function of warning most away from that lifestyle.
Hard disagree. Most men (most "male people", if we're still doing the trans-inclusive thing) see a boost to their self-esteem the morning after a one-night stand, while most women see a decrease to theirs. Claim that this is purely the result of social stigma, internalised misogyny, internalised slut-shaming etc. all you like: from an evolutionary perspective, I don't think it's hard to understand why the sex which does the impregnating would feel good after carrying out the act which is a reliable evolutionary proxy for impregnating, while the sex getting impregnated would feel bad after doing that act without extracting commitment from the impregnater.
But we're not talking about one-night stands; we're talking about nude pics and camgirls. Even taking the innateness of the feeling you describe for granted it's nonobvious that the evo-psych dynamic would translate to that kind of thing - indeed someone upthread argued the opposite, that being camgirls makes women feel good about themselves for atavistic reasons because it activates the "I am successfully wooing high-status males" circuits rather than the "I've just had sex" circuits.
Well we're talking about two different things which are loosely correlated, and I'm basically just summarising an argument I made elsewhere.
When it comes to promiscuity, I think the proportion of women for whom it is a net-positive is very small. Most women will feel sad the morning after a one-night stand. Stigma and internalised slut-shaming may play some role in this, but I'd hazard a guess the same is true even in free love communes.
When it comes to pornography, among circles of friends, it's generally seen as poor form for a woman to directly tell one of her female friends that she isn't very good-looking: deranged yasslighting seems to be the rule rather than the exception. As a consequence of this, many women end up with an inflated perception of how physically attractive they are, and some decide to open an OnlyFans account on that basis: after all, if you're a 10/10 bad bitch, you're sure to make bank. But they're in for a rude awakening when, after a few months, their account is pulling down somewhere near the median of the OnlyFans income distribution, thousands of dollars below the US minimum wage, and potentially for far more hours worked. No matter how much we end the "social stigma" associated with sex work, if a woman joins a platform in which her expected revenue is heavily correlated with her physical attractiveness, and then she doesn't end up making much money, that's bound to be a disheartening experience. (I think this is what @coffee_enjoyer's comment upthread was arguing: that OnlyFans sells woman a fantasy of being able to use their sex appeal to extract money from wealthy men, but most of these women, by virtue of being insufficiently attractive, are being sold a bill of goods.) It will be an even more disheartening experience if the only way she can make ends meet is by appealing to the fetishes of perverts: I can't imagine anyone feels that good about themselves after a long hard day of producing golden shower videos. And we can talk about "ending the stigma" til the cows come home, but short of a nudist colony, every employer will look a little askance at someone (male or female) if they Google their name and the first result is a photo of their rectum.
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