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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.
The policy is broader than "don't flash your breasts." According to your link it prohibited any content that "deliberately highlighted breasts, buttocks or pelvic region." I have no trouble believing that women were modded for content that men got away with. If a guy did a squat stream that prominently displayed their ass (maybe for form demonstration reasons) would Twitch mod it for sexual content? What if a woman did the same? I have no trouble believing Twitch would mod the woman but not the man. I think there is a pretty straightforward sexist implication to "men are allowed to do this thing but women aren't."
Because the conception of Twitch rules as existing to level some competitive field between streamers is nonsensical? Should Twitch ban streamers who are too good at games, because they'll get more viewers by being better? Should Twitch ban face cams, because more attractive streamers will get more viewers? Or maybe mandate face cams! No hiding for you uggos, you might get undeserved views! Make everyone use a voice modulator to have the same voice, some people might have nicer voices that lead to more viewers!
Wat? How many men on Twitch do you think are currently using filters to become women to get people to watch and sub?
You didn't need to put this here, it's apparent from the rest of your post.
Wat. What fraction of twitch streamers do you think are involved in this "Fisherian runaway?" What fraction of, say, the top 100 or 1000 streamers?
I'm surprised everyone else just seemed to swallow this proposed injustice. Male and female squat demonstrations should be treated the same. A woman who has some kind of exercise stream and shows all sorts of movements in good faith trying to demonstrate fitness should be fine. But I think we all know that there would be a little bit of that "I know porn when I see it" going on in 95% of the woman squatting streams and like 5% of the male squatting streams.
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Obviously, it's because there is a sexual element to a woman squatting but not the same for a man squatting. That's not Twitch's fault, or my fault, but the unfair reality that we live in a world where people find one situation titillating but not the other. And sure, it's unfair, but oh well.
For straight men or lesbian women or bi/pan people.
For straight women or gay men or bi/pan people, there indeed can be a sexual element to a man squatting, depending on the man. Nice thighs! Not too bulgy, not too weedy!
Many otherwise mundane activities can elicit a sexual response in some people. It doesn't follow that because of a minority of paraphiles, that those activities are sexual.
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But this is not some unalterable fact of the universe. It is a fact about our minds, our social context. It is a thing we can and should change.
You are entitled to your opinion, but I think it's unreasonable to put the burden of realising that change on Twitch.
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I'm... uh... not sure the best way to demonstrate this, especially if you're a straight man or a gay woman, but there's absolutely a lot to be looking at, from either front or back, when there's a guy in tighter clothing squatting.
I am a gay man, so it's not that I don't get it (though I'm more of a leg extension man myself). But then, some people are turned on by women shopping for wonder bread. That doesn't make it sexual.
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I doubt it's a large number, but it's getting easier by the year. I myself played around with Vtuber avatars, and voice changing apps and the results were surprisingly good. Sadly, the voice changing I was using only worked well in English, and I was trying to stream in another language.
It wouldn't surprise me if some successful Vtuber out there is already doing just this.
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When women start getting treated equivalently to men for sexual assault/harassment, THEN AND ONLY THEN will women deserve "equality" in this regard. You don't get to simultaneously claim the same ability to show off while holding extensive privileges in controlling how people respond to your doing so.
I do not think one injustice justifies another. We can, and should, get rid of both.
I don't understand this sentence. No amount of women "show[ing] off" justifies sexual assault or harassment.
Bullshit it doesn't. If I flash my fat stacks of cash and expensive sneakers in the gheto then get jumped by several thugs and robbed I would be getting what I deserve. Same with women.
You don't "deserve" to get robbed because you're stupid about flashing your cash. The people who robbed you are still criminals who should be prosecuted. People might say you were foolish and should have known better, and maybe some people would say you were "asking for it," but you did not literally deserve to have your money stolen. The same applies to women "showing off." A rapist is still a rapist even if the victim was flashing her tits in a back alley. If you think it's okay to harass and assault women because they're showing off, you think it's okay to steal someone's stuff if he's not guarding it sufficiently. And that would make you a rapist/robber, my friend.
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The fact that ghettos in which having nice things means people can steal them with impunity exists is a societal failure state. That people should be encouraged to take precautions because certain police forces and judicial systems fail to to do their duty (or are prevented from doing so) doesn’t change that.
Someone who wears a Rolex into the ghetto and gets mugged may be stupid or naive, but they don’t ‘deserve it’. If they are robbed, it is the state that has failed them.
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Empty words. Those pushing for gender equality have proven time and again that they only care about equality when women get the short end of the stick. You need to prove that you will actually get rid of both here rather than stopping once you get the benefits (EDIT:) if you want to convince me to support you.
The problem is that behavior by men towards women that is perceived as sexual assault or harassment isn't perceived as such when done by women toward men. Men have to "justify" behaviors that women get to just do with no consequence. Women showing off therefore either needs to be more restricted than men doing so or women need to put up with all the behaviors from men that men have to put up with from women.
Please, please, when you make this argument explicitly name a specific example of a behavior women can do that men can't. It'd help the conversation so much, and prevent it from getting bogged down in each side repeatedly stating their beliefs without coming into contact with the other side.
See just about any instance of "sexualization". For some specific examples, see Julia Serano's Why Nice Guys Finish Last and my response at /r/theschism.
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I agree. Society does not take sexual harassment and assault of men by women nearly as seriously as it should.
I don't see how this follows. If the thing is bad we should want to have less of the thing, even if the improvement we make is not necessarily equally distributed among all impacted groups.
I don't think that's true; there just isn't enough sexual harassment and assault of men by women to justify taking it much more seriously.
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Men don't need protection from sexual harassment by women. It's a trivial problem.
Men suffer different problems than women. Not necessarily more serious problems, but different ones.
If we are looking for men and women to have equal rights, we need to examine the ways in which each gender is currently harmed by society.
For example, in the current system, men are harmed by an anti-male education system which rewards female traits and punishes male ones. As a result of this anti-maleness, 60% of college students are women. Furthermore, this college experience, which is heavily funded by taxes, often rewards its graduates with tax-funded sinecures that provide little value to society.
Meanwhile, nearly all of dangerous jobs are performed by men. Men are 6 times as likely to die at work than women. The death rate for women at work is less than the death rate for accountants. Dangerous jobs, which are nearly exclusively performed by men, pay less on average than white collar work. Meanwhile white collar work is performed nearly exclusively by college graduates, the beneficiaries of anti-male discrimination.
Instead of worrying about women catcalling men, worry about the actual problems the affect men.
How would you make the current education system more pro-male?
IMO the reason most college students are women is women more strongly follow ideas they see others holding, and education is the thing everyone thinks you're supposed to do.
Put more emphasis on test results and less on subjective grades.
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100% agree with all of this
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Sure, but I'm not going to waste my time and effort supporting improvements that are only seen by other people--especially people who have related privileges relative to me--unless they demonstrate a willingness to do the same for me. As I said before, people supporting gender equality now have a very high bar to meet in that regard, as they have a very strong history of saying they'll support men too to get my support and then never following through.
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Not justifies, is. You don't think a woman showing a lot of cleavage or leg at work might be analogous to other actions considered sexual harassment? That is, if it makes men think about sex or uncomfortable about where to look when talking to the woman, surely that's not dissimilar from men making overheard suggestive comments.
There's probably some line. A bunny suit or something is probably out. The vast majority of clothing women wear to work? Absolutely not.
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Women showing off: OK. Unattractive men noticing: sexual harassment.
Notice with your eyes, not with your hands.
Nybbler expressed it in sneer-adjacent form, but I think he's right.
Why - from first principles, you're an alien looking down at the world - is it sexual harassment to make comments about the amount of clothing a woman is wearing? Especially if the clothing is deliberately designed to be sexually attractive.
"comments about the amount of clothing a woman is wearing" is a very broad category of statements, multiplied by a very broad range of contexts.
The vast majority of that space of events is definitely not sexual harassment.
If you precisely described the content and context of a specific comment in enough detail to determine which category it fell into, I think the 'why' would ussually be a lot easier to explain and most people would agree most of the time.
I think the biggest problem here is the part of that space where someone imagines that if they said a specific thing in a specific context, it would be considered sexual harassment by someone. I've never been accused of sexual harassment, but I share the experience of thinking carefully about the thing I say and holding back sometimes out of worry of giving offense, and can sympathize with people who are frustrated by it. But if you've also never crossed that line into actually being accused, consider the possibility that you're just wrong about where the line is, and the category of things that you think of as 'someone would accuse me of sexual harassment if I said this and that's absurd' are actually mostly things that no one would accuse you of sexual harassment for.
(In point of fact, I am involved in managing the ban list and safety complaints for a rather large social club with mostly young people, and I've never seen a complaint that didn't involve physical contact or explicit threats of violence lead to any disciplinary action. I really just think the situation on the ground isn't as dire as people imagine, as is true for most things in the modern world)
The second biggest problem is all the ambiguous parts of that space where the judgement isn't entirely clear-cut and some people may disagree, and how that space gets exploited by the typical culture-war driven mess of toxoplasma, ragebaiting listacles, 'engagement' reporting, inaccurate anecdotes, etc. etc. etc., same as every other topic we talk about. This has several parts to it:
-I don't think the laws against sexual harassment are actually dangerous in the way these comments imply, and in fact I think they're still heavily skewed towards defendants (as may be correct!). Not my area of expertise, but I definitely have the lived experience of, every time someone says that someone got sued for sexual harassment and lost and it was a crazy absurd thing that should have been fine, when you actually go to look at teh legal documents detailing the case they are much much worse and more justified than the anecdote that's being shared online (think the McDonalds coffee lady). Exacerbating this tenfold is the fact that many of these cases are settled in settlements where the victim signs a nondisclosure agreement that doesn't bind the defendant, ensuring that only one side of the story goes public (yes, even in states where those agreements are unenforceable, victims don't know that and are scared to push it)
-The online ecosphere has the usual incentives to lie, cheat, and steal on this topic. One side pushing absurd standards and stringency as a costly signal about how seriously they take this and how seriously you had better take it, the other side promoting absurd cherry-picked anecdotes to the forefront in an attempt to ragebait for clicks and to paint a skewed picture of the actual situation on the ground. People on tiny sights making outrageous claims in order to get attention, people on other tiny sights excoriating those claims out in order to get attention. Typical stuff.
-The actual idiots and bad actors, from young people with no perspective talking about things they don't understand, to manipulators and opportunists taking advantage of this range of charges for social or economic gain, to genuinely ill or disturbed people pushing their own distorted views or perceptions, to etc. etc. Again, the typical stuff.
I agree. As I said in reply to someone on the other side, I think these discussions would instantly 100x in usefulness and connecting-of-disagreeing-ideas if people simply chose specific, detailed examples of scenarios where they think the standard for sexual harassment is too low or whatever, and then analyzed those.
It can both be true that most instances that are actually prosecuted are egregious, and that the law on paper criminalizes a wide variety of benign behavior and thus significantly discourages it. I also am not sure how important it actually is though.
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That is still considered harassment.
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I'm going to go with "Enough that Twitch felt the need to substantially revise its policy twice in two days."
You don't seem to think this is a big deal, and probably that's true, but it's clearly a big enough deal.
I'm confused. Enough people were showing NSFW material Twitch thought was inappropriate that they reversed course. This seems quite different from your description of humans trying to become "teenage-presenting (cat?)girls."
I'm confused too, I guess.
My comment about Fisherian runaway was related to the AI stuff... like, if lewds are permitted and lewds get clicks, then yeah you're gonna get camgirls but also (I assume) you're going to get camboys using AI filters to present as camgirls for the views. But if that's not what was raising the AI concerns at Twitch then I guess I misunderstood something.
I think what you're really going to get is bots. Most of those bots will be female presenting because most of the dummies clicking botspam are thirsty simps. Some of the bots will be male presenting because some of the dummies clicking botspam are thirsty gay simps. From my experience in lonely hearts subreddit moderation, women are 100x less likely to fall for obvious spam accounts, even when they're lesbians. But every time we let a botspam post stay up longer than 2-3 hours, at least 5 male idiots will engage with it.
Bots can't (yet?) do "watch me play" videos, so SFW content creators are going to be easier to distinguish as real humans. NSFW stuff is so easily commoditized that bots can do it pretty well, especially if they also scrape real onlyfans accounts. Like all spam, the NSFW bot accounts only have to convert a handful of suckers to be profitable so if lewds are permitted, lewds will be overwhelmed with scammers. At this point, it's the equivalent of establishing a dedicated Viagra sellers group channel/board. That's going to be 99.9% spam instantly.
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Gotcha. I think the AI concerns with Twitch are more like people using AI to create fake nudes of actual people. They cite to issues with people being able to tell the difference between photo-realistic images and photography.
AI-gen fake nudes of actual (non-consenting) people are a problem and probably the first to bubble up to Twitch's lawyers, but they're just one particularly palatable problem of many:
What about consenting people, even consenting not-nude-in-original people? There's a hard rule against Img2Img using a real person as the base, especially of yourself in the Furry Diffusion Discord, and it exists for a reason.
Do we care how heavily the ML-gen dataset has been curated, even if the output doesn't look like anyone specific? Is there enough of the essence of any input training image to count for copyright/legal problem causes, even if the outputs look nothing like it?
Do we care about possible highly-realistic outputs, even if they clearly can't be real-world?
Do we need to treat the people under an underlay like porn actors (which has significant overhead!), even if not a single pixel of their original real-world body goes through? Does this concern limit itself to AI redraws, or does it include photogrammatry? Do VR actors count, where the in-stream body might not even correspond to the positions of their real-world? What about voice-alone? What about only people who do tech side work, or art-side?
How all of this interact with much of Twitch's ouvre (game and otherwise) having a multiplayer or social component? There's people with a kink for using certain classes of toys while trying to achieve certain challenging tasks -- I can name some good gay fictional examples! -- but the real-world can into awkward questions of consent when a game might match-make you with randos. Same for someone being highlighted, even with good intent, by a nude presenter (of any gender) or in-series with artistic nudes.
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This, along with other comments explaining to me that Twitch does more than video game streaming, was very helpful. Thank you!
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What would you estimate as the ratio on Twitch of women displaying their asses to men displaying their asses salaciously? 1:1?
I would agree that the man is less likely to receive a moderation action. But I also strongly suspect that the main factor here is the viewership levels: given a certain audience size, you're equally likely to be moderated regardless of if you're male, female, or other. Having a larger audience is the culprit, not gender. And that makes sense: if a company thinks it's in its best interests to ban porn from its platform and has limited moderation resources, best to use them to target the people who have the most reach.
Would you expect this to be measured with respect to hours(?) of content created, or hours of content consumed? I would wager those metrics are quite different.
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Part of my point is that salaciousness is something we often project on women's actions that we don't on men's, including when the woman herself does not intend her actions that way.
Otherwise I agree that having a higher viewership, being more visible, is probably a significant causal factor in being moderated.
I do agree that people bring gendered preconceptions about salacious intent, which would probably result in a woman innocently squatting being more likely to be moderated than a man innocently squatting.
Most guys I see at the gym are wearing baggy basketball shorts or joggers. Most women at the gym I see are wearing yoga pants.
There used to be a middle aged flamboyantly gay guy at my gym doing squats in compression shorts and a crop top, moaning what felt like every rep.
Was a bit funny because it was one of these cheap unmanned gyms where almost only dudes go and where a high proportion take steroids and are fairly aggressive.
Well, uh, maybe he was hoping to convince one of the steroid popping freaks to question his sexuality.
Like the underwear and women's shirt?
Sure, or like yoga pants going halfway down your thighs and a shirt that exposes your midriff.
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