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Porn is inherently low status. Even in the 80s, being caught going into a porn store to rent a VHS was the height of embarrassment, made fun of on sitcoms etc.
It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.
This is what really makes selling porn online so difficult to make profitable. Terms like “post nut clarity” (which, yes, has a real-world meaning but is most commonly used in relation to porn) speak to the shame of the whole enterprise. Men don’t want to feel like the kind of men who pay for porn.
There’s more deniability when it’s free. If I relentlessly make fun of Disney adults for 10 years and then go with my brother and his kids when they invite me along, my cognitive dissonance is limited. If I spend $300 for a ticket and rock up with Minnie Mouse ears and a rockabilly dress and a Snow White tattoo, I’m going to feel like a fucking loser.
Men don’t want to pay for porn because it makes them feel like losers. I don’t see why that’s not the obvious answer. When men had to pay to access it, more swallowed their pride. Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.
I guess so, but again, there has been massive social change since then in that regard, including dating and so on. For example, the notion that the Sexual Revolution might have deleterious long-term social consequences was almost completely fringe back then, as opposed to today.
In the 80’s? The days of the moral majority? Opposition to the sexual Revolution was if anything more mainstream than today.
The Moral Majority indeed got a lot of attention. On the surface it could indeed appear that the Christian Right is influential. But the social reality was that the abortion rate, the rate of adolescent sex and alcohol consumption, violence, and teenage pregnancy were all peaking in the late '80s and early '90s. It was also the time when the distribution of porn in VHS format was becoming normal in the first place.
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In Japan this behavior wouldn't even be noteworthy. The tattoo might be seen as gauche, unless of course it washed off and was applied to your cheek or something. I knew a girl once named Mitsuki because her mother loved Disney--in Japanese Mitsuki is a play on ミッキー or Mickey, where the ッ there represents a pause, unless it's a big ツ in which case it's just TSU, as in Mitsuki. She's a lovely girl, I still follow her on Instagram.
But we were talking about porn, sorry for the derail. It's true a non-Japanese person engaging in this (Disneyphile) behavior would probably be seen as a square peg--probably not a fucking loser though. More like a white girl in a kimono. Noticeable, but not in any bad way (I'm talking Japanese perception here). My former girlfriend (not Japanese) used to walk around Osaka age 25 wearing a Curious George backpack because she imagined she could get away with it here. And true enough, probably she did. But I knew better.
Edit: As for porn, it's illegal here to show genitalia in porn, so there's a giant underground, of course. I think the same stigma on porn buyers that you mention applies here.
2nd edit: After reading the pocket pussy comment below, I reflected on the ubiquity of the Tenga in Japanese drug stores. I've never seen anyone buy one though.
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Tangentially related but this paragraph reminded me of a passage from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity:
I prefer Diogenes the Cynic to C.S. Lewis on this count:
While Diogenes is a little intense as an example, I think it's much healthier to think of the sex drive as something natural which needs attention from time to time, rather than making it the central focus of your life, or something shameful. I prefer moderate indulgence to sanctimony.
I might take that, if the offer was credible, but I hope you understand why I soured on the promises of only moderate indulgence.
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Lewis in heaven, looking down at mukbang, disappointed that his imagination was so limited.
Really the food analogy is spot on.
Feeling hungry - no shame
Eating a bit of junk food - no shame, everyone does it.
Overindulging on occasion - understandable, forgivable, but not to be lionized.
Eating 15 double cheeseburgers a day for six months and gain 100lbs - commit seppuku immediately, kys to rid your family from shame.
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Can't get away from ol' Lewis on this forum. I prefer Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg "Never be ashamed of who you are". Walk out of that porn store with your pocket pussy held high. It is the act of acting shameful that brings the scorn. Walk out to your Ferrari in a nice suit and people will even try to copy your bold pocket pussy purchase.
C.S. Lewis would probably agree as he was probably a bisexual if not gay
Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time.
Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
Shame is a low class cultural marker. If nothing is a threat to you then you have no shame. The rich and famous certainly have very little of it if it exists at all, mostly just a cultural nod to the lower classes when at that level, and you only feel it in defeat. It is a fear based emotion that only has the power you give it.
Shame is a human constant in all social classes.
No human has ever or will ever exist in a state where nothing is a threat to them.
For every shameless rich person, I can point to ten drug addicts shitting themselves on a sidewalk without apparent shame. Further, it seems to me that the absence of shame is the marker of defeat, when one is no longer even trying for goodness and virtue.
This at least is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, fear is a necessary and entirely rational response, because there are better states and worse states, and many of the worse states are extremely wretched. Rational fear is a motive force, a protective force. Its absence is a sign of insanity.
The drug addicts are on drugs and "have no choice". The rich guy cheating with 8 different mistresses only "feels shame" insofar as he is found out and it affects his status when they play it on the news. He doesn't feel a "natural shame" when he is fucking #6, or maybe he wouldn't do it. That dumb podcaster science guy being almost the perfect example.
That said, I agree with you personally, and I would never cheat on my wife, but I come on here to exercise the rational part of my brain, not the boyscout part. My behavior isn't always governed by reason. Nor is that the case for most people. But a perfectly rational actor would not feel it. I also have to disagree with the fear portion of your comment. Most is not warranted in this day and age, vestigial nonsense, like people who say they won't sit with their back to the door.
I think both the addict and the rich philanderer have, through their intentional choices, crippled their capacity to feel shame. I don't think this happens automatically; people who haven't intentionally crippled their own capacity for shame continue to feel it. Those who do cripple their capacity for shame in this way have damaged an important part of their own mind, making them less sane in a meaningful sense.
I would argue that the boyscout part is a subset of the rational part. Shame is deeply rational. Those who have crippled their capacity for shame are less rational, not more.
Some fears can be vestigial nonsense, depending on the specific environment. Fear itself remains rational, and always will so long as humans survive.
I don't agree and fuck you.
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Let's say you fail to keep a promise, a promise made to someone you have a great deal of respect for. Is it appropriate to feel shame then? Or maybe some other emotion?
It might be culturally appropriate, but it has no innate value beyond signaling regret for your actions to others in a group.
Do you ever just like, feel bad when you do something wrong? Like ever?
I do, but I was brought up a certain way. You don't have to be raised to feel shame for certain acts. Can't you model minds outside your own?
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Naming your product orfice.ai is almost as bad as calling your new programming language Lolita...
I hate the current year so much. The awful combination of performative histrionic prudishness and obnoxious, ubiquitous safe-horny normie-fap-bait.
Furries go around naming projects after horse diaper fetishes and nobody gives a shit because uwu programmer socks tee hee, but this gets their panties in a twist?
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Brother, I’ve got to say that I think you’ve been had.
That YouTube video and “oriface.ai” is top tier rage bait. I mean, real chef’s kiss level.
On par with “it’s ok to be white” or “Islam was right about women.” Or any entry into the Sokal affair.
It’s absolutely beautiful, I laughed for a full ten minutes after watching that short video. I couldn’t believe it, it was an absolute miracle of trolling, perfectly designed to infuriate a maximum amount of people and trivially accomplished through ai trickery.
A toast to the geniuses at oriface.ai, May their enemies be made ridiculous. Legitimately the funniest thing I’ve seen online in months.
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Or your image processor GIMP.
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But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.
And that means your alarm can be false. Like people who internalize that they should feel shame about approaching members of the opposite sex even respectfully or who feel shame about feeling sexual attraction at all.
So you can't use the alarm to tell you there is a serious problem. All it can do is warn you that you have internalized that X is a problem. It doesn't do much to tell you if X is a problem really.
My grandfather was raised in an ultra strict Quaker offshoot, where any contact with the outside world was seen to be wrong and that music was sinful. He felt ashamed of listening to a choir in the less strict Church of Ireland he later moved to. Is hearing a Christian choir a serious problem he should have been alerted to? Or was his sense of shame miscalibrated because his society was simply wrong?
In other words, I agree shame and shaming is an intrinsic part of the human condition and that it exists to bring together societies through incentivizing behaviors your society see as positive. What it can't do is actually tell you if those behaviors are or are not positive in and of themselves. Because shame is sub-conscious.
And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers. That is the lesson I personally think all ideologies need to learn. Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.
You might argue the results have been wretched, but obviously enough people felt the previous situation was ALSO wretched enough in order to overthrow it.
It doesn't seem to me that the shaming norms immediately prior to the Sexual Revolution were particularly strict, from a historical perspective. Nor does this comport with my understanding of how revolutions generally work; they generally don't happen when conditions decline past some critical threshold, but rather when things are getting better, but people think they should be getting better faster. Is that not your understanding? In any case, it's hard to believe that 1950s America leaned harder on shame than, say, Puritan America. Why didn't Puritan America result in a Sexual Revolution, under your model?
Historically speaking, I do not see the Sexual Revolution being driven by people who had been shamed reaching a critical mass. Rather, what I observe is people who were not being shamed buying into the idea that the shame-enforcement system they were already on the right side of could be dismantled without cost or consequence, that the fences against sexual misconduct were pointless and that tearing them down would have no downsides and only benefits, because We Had Progressed. Without a broad-based commitment to the big lie of Progress and all the "little" lies that supported it, the sexual revolution would not have happened. Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society desperately eager to believe them, the sexual revolution doesn't happen.
Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.
Is it culturally formed, or is it culturally deformed? We agree that people can be made to feel shame about things that should not be considered shameful. The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.
I'm sure kids aren't born being ashamed of nakedness or of touching their genitals. On the other hand, they aren't ashamed of casual cruelty either; they have to learn that other people exist and to empathize with them, but that doesn't mean that empathy itself is a cultural construction that we can take or leave as we will. I think modesty is similar: you aren't born knowing it, but you learn about it soon enough unless others expend a great deal of effort trying to hide it from you, and even then sooner or later it'll be back.
The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine. That pitch has been gradually walked back as the resulting disasters become increasingly undeniable. The relatively slow pace of that walk-back has been, in my view, only achievable through large-scale deceit and the intentional obfuscation of the horrors the Revolution's architects unleashed and refused to recognize.
Really? I think that a bunch of people will feel vaguely burned by the SR as adults and retreat towards conservatism, but this won't lead to lasting change and the youth will be even more progressive and sex-positive and weird, and the cycle will repeat just like it did the past two generations.
Nature changes with time, though, for some people at points in history it was natural and healthy that it was shameful to not own a proper number of livestock. Now, that's not true anymore. People look at their situation and try to judge what should and shouldn't be shameful. Instincts in our genes are evolved, too, and as the environment changes the value of an instinct changes. Better to justify the kind of shame you want than just say it emerges naturally.
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There was a clear utopian dimension to Marx. I've never heard anyone argue against that.
Freud is a more complicated case. He also had some utopian impulses and was on record as thinking that the release of repressed sexual instincts would be a positive social development, but this was also tempered (especially in his later work) by a recognition of how the self-contradictory and self-destructive nature of the psyche can upset utopian social aspirations (it was really Lacan who took this aspect of psychoanalysis and ran with it, and he was consequently much more overtly politically conservative than Freud, but the seeds of it are already visible in Freud).
I recommend reading Freud's essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle before you write him off completely.
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I don't think that was the pitch, because like every change, there was no single one movement responsible for it. What you had was a coalition who wanted slightly different things, one part wanted gay sex to be accepted, another wanted women to have more freedom outside of marriage, another wanted men to have more freedom without getting married, another felt sexual urges in general should not be shamed as much, etc. etc. There were few would if you asked would have said for example, should we stop shaming sex with animals or corpses? Almost no-one wanted to remove shame from sex entirely.
To be clear almost everyone is shamed under the old model. They just use that shame to behave differently. Every kid who felt guilty about masturbation. Every husband who felt shame at cheating, or even having thoughts of cheating. Every woman who felt shame at sex outside of wedlock, or who had a sex drive society felt was too much. Every gay person who felt shame at being attracted to their own sex. All of those groups constitute probably a majority of people. That's what I mean by a tipping point.
Now as for why Puritan America did not change, well Puritan America was a result of people fleeing from cultures that shamed differently. There is a reason we call them Puritans after all! So they in fact are a product of a "Revolution" of their own (among other things of course). But even more the 20th Centuries Sexual Revolution I would say the sexual norms of the Puritans did not last, they were relaxed within decades. It's just in the New World there was a lot of space for people who felt differently to just..go somewhere else. And practice things differently. But that isn't the case in the US anymore.
Just to point out, I do think shame is important, as is empathy. They are evolved mechanisms given humanity is a social species. And they are important in ensuring societal stability. I'm not saying that shaming sex is bad, or that not shaming sex is good. I am saying that our history shows that shame has limits and ANY society or culture that wants its beliefs and conditions to continue is on a tight rope. Can't shame to much for too many, can't shame too little. Both will result in the destruction of your system. The good (depending on your point of view!) news is that also is true for whatever comes next. I think there are signs that the shame mechanisms invoked by "wokism" are also going too far and will fail.
Social dynamics mean we are not good at simply arriving at a pretty good spot and just staying there. We almost always push too far, or not far enough.
You say "because" and proceed with an argument that does nothing to support the thesis. Just because there are multiple movements responsible for a change, doesn't mean the discourse doesn't settle on a main pitch.
It's also strange to throw the pitch directly after saying that wasn't the pitch.
Aside of that you're grossly exaggerating the extent to which people were shamed or felt shame for any of these things.
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I'm consistently impressed by the reasoning level of people I don't agree with. That is why I stick around.
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Looks like you replied to a comment that was not yet approved. And since we're on the subject - can you also approve my latest post?
Grah. Done and done, thanks for the heads-up.
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Yeah weird given the poster has been around a while now.
It's because his aggregate comment score is in a crater.
We really should disable that aspect of the feature imo.
The people love mike pence! I'm never getting out!
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It’s a good emergency filter if someone new is spamming, but mods already have to manually approve people’s first few comments iirc so it seems redundant.
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We've asked, believe me. It's baked into the back-end, apparently.
Surely there's somewhere in the code you could just add 'if username in ['guy1', 'guy2']: return'?
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Is there a way to override for specific users, maybe by incorporating a mod bot that manually approves every one of their comments? @ahhthefrench, disagree with him though I frequently might, is clearly a good faith contributor who shouldn’t be caught in the new user filter.
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People get autofiltered when they accumulate downvotes. I don't know if it was always like that, or we pulled some "feature" from rDrama that doesn't fit us, but it seems like this is how things are now.
Autofiltering people who get downvoted too much is like the antithesis of rDrama.
Dramanaughts don't really have an issue with this, dramatic people tend to get upvoted. And it's really probably upstream of them. Remember the Dramacode wasn't written from scratch, it's a customized Lemmy instance.
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We barely have any volunteers to implement features we actually want, so I doubt this one, which literally no one, from mods to posters, really wants, came from us.
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I always find it a pity that CS Lewis' most successful work is Narnia series, considering so much of what he wrote exploring the human condition is so eloquent and excellent.
I feel the same way about George Orwell, 1984 and Animal Farm are great but I find his nonfiction even more insightful.
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The one doesn't take away from the other. All those kids that love the Narnia series wouldn't have been reading "Transposition" if the Narnia books had been less popular.
I momentarily read that as "Transmetropolitan" and was very confused.
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That is a good point. It's easy to skip the introductory literature of an author for their more comprehensive works once you know the depth of their writing.
On the other hand, It's not like Smith or Dostoevsky wrote children's stories, so either way can work?
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Sure, but that doesn't seem like a good explanation for why payment processors would actually ban it. Unless you're alluding to the chargeback theory - but I'm skeptical that that theory can entirely explain their behavior without the need to invoke additional moral/political explanations.
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That's nice and all, but there's quite a lot of us, and certainly more than enough to keep a number of content providers afloat. (Sometimes in surprising ways: the original writer of the Burned Furs manifesto has made a small part-time career in monsterfucker porn.) Fek is at 9k USD a month still, and while I actually appreciate the mechanical stuff he did with Spellbound (cw: technically has one girl, but gaaaaaaay) enough that I kinda want to see it cloned in a not-porn game, given the repeated hiatuses after burnout if anyone was going to get reasonably-motivated chargebacks, he'd be the first hit.
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There's loads of porn available for free. Twitter, reddit, boorus, 4chan, discord... People who pay are suckers or have more money than sense.
It is quite commonly seen that onlyfans/livejasmin is more a parasocial relationship than a sexual gratification one, fulfilling an emotional need that the dopamine hit of an orgasm cannot satisfy Similarly, the concept of ownership and personal control over porn consumed materials fulfils an emotional need that jerking it doesn't quite cut. Creating your own porn by filming with/out consent actually falls in the same psychological space as commissioning, paying for stuff other people produce and thus having the transaction... these actions are rightly viewed as deviant and violating of social norms, but they do happen and so long as people exist there will be strange niches beyond our comprehension that will be filled.
True, there are those people who'll spend hundreds or thousands on gacha girls to get their waifu. Still seems like being a sucker.
I gave Genshin a go, there's some fun to be had. Lots of effort went into the game, it's very big and very pretty. But it's not worth paying for more spins on the roullette wheel, as many have remarked: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M5Hfd4wX2GE
Paying for these emotional relationships is still kind of hollow and artificial. Whether it's pokimane or Beidou or some onlyfans girl it's all still fake. The other party doesn't care about you, they care about your wallet. They're exploiting an emotional weakness in a way that a disciplined and discerning man should observe and reject.
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I mean it’s cope all the way down. If I hate Disney and make fun of it, then go with my brother and have the best time and love it and think it’s the happiest place on earth, clearly I do, in fact, objectively, enjoy Disney as an adult. But I can tell myself that I only went to spend time with my nieces and this satisfies the internal cognitive dissonance.
Similarly, we can imagine that a man who maybe isn’t hugely sexually successful (which of course describes most people) might watch free porn because it’s easy and there and free and there’s nothing wrong with a little onanism now and again, but actually handing over his card details to pay for it (or buying Bitcoin or whatever to do it, I confess I’m not sure how it works) puts into more stark relief the fact that he’s choosing to sit at home at masturbate in a dark room instead of engaging in any kind of self-improvement or socialization or trying to get laid or a relationship in real life. Paying is what turns you from a mere man into a hobbyist, a gooner, a connoisseur, a creepy guy with a funny mustache masturbating under a newspaper in a public park.
Again, I’m not defending this logically. It is, like so much of life, pure cope, but spending money on something often has loser connotations. Consider the difference between using a free dating app and paying a matchmaker, for example, the latter makes someone seem more desperate by default.
The difference between the strip club and porn is just the “you wouldn’t download a car” meme, though. Obviously if people could illegally download a car, they would. Online piracy is a crime that most people don’t really consider a crime, like driving slightly above the limit or DUI before the ‘80s.
One thing about "downloading a car" is that car companies tend to be huge, faceless entities. It's easy to think that Ford or whatever won't lose any sleep over me personally taking a car without paying for it. But of course when everyone starts doing that, the company goes out of business and then no one has any cars.
To bring this back on topic, Pixiv is mostly a community of small artists. I don't have any specific stats, but I really don't think most of them make much money. For example this guy talked about how hard it was to make any money at all as a doujin artist. You can talk to them on twitter and they'll respond, and the prices they charge for art are pathetically low. When you're talking to a real, individual person, and you can tell that they're struggling to make a living from their art, it feels rather sociopathic to just blatantly pirate it and not support them in any way. But of course all the restrictions on Pixiv make that way more of a pain than it would be in real life.
I've also heard- anecdotally- that they get most of their money from Japan, because Japan has such a strong culture against piracy compared to the west. Even though their country has less money, they support the artists much more than we do. It really shows how fragile this stuff we take for granted can be. I don't want to see the entire internet turn into the equivalent of a dead shopping mall.
You mean... no-one has any new models of cars (except for iterations made by the open source community, who have more free time now on account of not having to pay for a car on account of cars being downloadable.)
But they still have access to all the old models of cars. Because they can download them.
The reason people don't think piracy is stealing is because they have a good intuition for when they're being scammed by being charged monopoly pricing instead of the actual cost of creating value.
Most of my favorite artists live off of donations. That we give to them freely because we like them.
I think it's great that you give donations to your favorite artists. But the original topic of this thread was about how Pixiv is making it increasingly difficult to do that. And they're one of the more permissive sites! So for certain forms of art, it's a neverending struggle to just be allowed to give them money, and that struggle seems to be getting worse as the internet becomes more centralized and enshittified.
You might say "hey, who needs new art? we've still got all this old art!" And to an extent that's true. You can spend a lifetime just reading old books and watching old movies. Except that's a pretty sad existence, not being able to experience anything new, or get any art that speaks to contemporary times. And in this case you'd be talking about pirated old porn, so you'd be dealing with blurry low-res scans, h-games that no longer work on modern operating systems, and movies that are corrupted halfway through. Someone has to pay to host the servers, or at least the torrent trackers, and someone has to store all this old data and generously seed it. It doesn't just magically happen, and when every major corporation cracks down on the few weirdos doing it, it has an effect.
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