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Twitch allowing more nudity after disproportionately banning female streamers. Twitch confirmed its policy banning nudity was sexist.
Of course, on seeing this news I immediately wondered why it would count as "punishing" women to prevent them from doing something men don't generally have the option of doing (that is, making money by flashing breasts). Why don't we say it "levels the playing field" to prevent women from using their sex appeal to crush their competitors on a gaming platform? I was going to do a great Simpsons callback and everything, "Twitch became a hardcore pornography platform so gradually I didn't even notice," I had this whole post I was going to write about the sexual appeal of females versus males, maybe do a little amateur evo-psych ("as a treat!")--
--and then the whiplash hit.
Twitch Reverses Policy Allowing ‘Artistic Nudity,’ Citing AI’s Ability to Create Realistic Images
Here is Twitch's reversal of its... reversal? The meat is straightforward:
I guess someone realized that if you allow streamers to turn your site into OnlyFans with Vidya, then the women are going to drop their tops and the men are going to just... use filters? (I don't actually know, I don't use Twitch because I play video games and have no interest in watching others do so, but I am decrepit and out of touch so whatever. I have an Amazon Prime account so sometimes I pop over to Twitch if there's an incentive or something but otherwise it's a mystery to me.)
Now I'm left pondering the apparent Fisherian runaway of human beings trying to become--virtually, at least--teenage-presenting (cat?)girls as quickly as possible. I hadn't previously considered the impact of AI on parasocial human relationships, and now I'm having a hard time considering anything else. But I also have to wonder--is the new policy re-sexist? Will it make any difference at all?
EDIT: From the helpful comments below, today I learned that Twitch is not just a video game streaming site, but also streams other activities like art creation; that the AI nudity concerns are not limited to filters/avatars but to art being produced on Twitch; and that Twitch's reverse-course was likely driven at least as much by AI "nudification" concerns as anything. I remain interested in the thought processes that led to the first change-in-policy, and in knowing what (if anything) actually happened on the server side to cause the rapid about-face! But I appreciate having the bits I did not understand explained to me.
This is the new zoomer take on that old saw about sleeping under bridges. Male and female alike, nobody's allowed to show their tits for simps.
As for the sexism, I think it was a fig leaf from the start. Someone thought they could monetize the skanks. My guess is that the lawyers weren't consulted first and they had to be the guys to remind twitch that their average user is like 13. In any case, you can find better nudity on a bunch of better sites. And players worth watching don't have to get naked.
I don’t think this was about topfreedom/bare nipple advocates. I think it was about twitch not wanting to be a porn site.
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That old saw was absolutely correct. We ban sleeping under bridges because it imposes a cost on society, and a rich person sleeping under a bridge imposes the same cost on society that a poor person sleeping under a bridge does hence doing so is banned for everyone.
But a rich person wouldn't sleep under the bridge, which is the whole point of that saying. Namely, that what counts as a universal ban can often just be a targeted ban at a select group of people, even if that was never the intent.
There's nothing wrong with a targeted ban. All bans are targeted bans. Murder bans target murderers. Theft bans target thieves. Not all people would engage in all banned activities were they not banned. This has no bearing at all on whether such activities should be banned.
The point of the saying is that targeted bans are not seen for what they are, and that what may be an ostensibly universal ban is only focused on one particular group more than others.
It is, as you say, those with murderous inclinations who are most affected by bans on murder. But the existence of good targeted bans shouldn't be a shield for any particular one.
Framing it as a targeted ban at all, or as "focused on one particular group", is dangerously misleading, because it strongly implies intent.
The way I see it, the saying is a classic motte and bailey. The motte is that we should be careful that our universal bans are actually universal. The bailey is that any disparate impact is intentional, and any actually universal ban would not have disparate impact.
Yes, and if this was a more casual conversation, you would rightfully call me out on it. But I am not lying when I say that I only believe in the motte.
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I think both you and @BurdensomeCount demonstrate the different perspectives one can approach this from. For one, it's about the relatively minor suffering diffused among all the rest of people of society, for the other, it's about the acute suffering of a much smaller and distinct subset of society. I feel like so much of the culture war is around who prioritizes which higher in what context. Personally, in this, I'm sympathetic to the point of the original quote, but unfortunately the point can't really be made convincingly to people who see it from the other angle.
Really? I wouldn't have expected this for someone who accepts:
If you accept that framing you must accept that what is happening here is no different to the tragedy of the commons. By choosing to shit on the commons you are causing a minor suffering diffused to everyone in society while by choosing to behave properly and pay for the disposal of your waste you are taking a much bigger hit upon yourself and keeping the commons nice and feces free.
Pretty much everyone I know consider the tragedy of the commons to be an actual tragedy, they think that causing the minor suffering diffused upon the rest of society (in our example sleeping under bridges/shitting on the commons) in return for reducing the suffering upon yourself is a net bad and should be strongly discouraged, even if it leads to people having to pay more for their personal costs. Here that position translates to forbidding sleeping under bridges; it's directly isomorphic to the original tragedy of the commons and yet a large amount of people have the opposite views here than they do with the TotC.
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I've seen a lot of takedowns of that obnoxious construction, but yours is the most clear and concise. Well done!
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