The main thing I get out of this article is how easy it is to get trapped in a bubble thanks to algorithmic social media.
For the most part, sexy never left, and statistics bear this out. OnlyFans brings in enormous amount of revenue, even after an expensive, failed attempt to be not-just-a-porn-site. Hypersexualized gacha games are pulling in tens of millions of dollars per month, and not just for men; the women-targeted Love and Deepspace had over $50 million in revenue in October. Marvel Rivals, criticized in some circles (such as the social circles of those in the article) for being an oversexualized "gooner game" has remained in the top 10 games played on Steam since its release a year ago. And nothing drives it home more than stumbling across the shady side of YouTube and finding videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions of views.
> I choose these examples from my personal life because they express sentiments that were once the kind of stuff I encountered only in the messy battlegrounds of Twitter, amid discussions about whether Sabrina Carpenter is being oversexualized, whether kinks are akin to a sexual orientation, whether a woman can truly consent in an age-gap relationship, and whether exposure to sex scenes in movies violates viewer consent.
Ultimately, these are the kind of things discussed only by a small, vocal, very online (some might say terminally online) minority. To think that they represent more than a tiny fraction of the world is, again, reflective of how easy it is to get trapped into online echo chambers.
Yeah, I think she's assuming that, since some of those people are IRL friends, that means they're not terminally online people.
I'm around finance folks and they're all trapped into the same crypto-and-AI influencer bubble, but they would never be able to tell because their physical connections are also finance people who are likely to be caught in the same corner of the algorithm. So their real life conversations reinforce the worldview that the internet presents.
This is likely the same case. The author might not be involved in these people spaces, but she shares characteristics with her friends who make them all be targeted by the same bubble, so everyone she knows falls in the same bag.
[dead]
> “Who are you defending yourself against?” To which he answered, to my astonishment: “I don’t know. The world.”
Indeed. Moving our every interaction in daily life plus our innermost thoughts to the internet has instilled a low-key fear in all of us that we'll be raked over the coals and villified as the world's worst villains. The digital tar and feathers are lurking always, a menacing psychological force. And it can even happen without our knowledge; some stranger can post a two second context-less clip or a snippet of a conversation and make us look our worst.
It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.
> It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.
I suspect the answer is to find out who benefits from our misdirected anger, and whether they are also involved in creating and fostering this misdirected anger.
It's old news now, but when I first heard about social media (Facebook specifically) and gaming companies hiring psychologists years ago, I knew it was pretty much over. Couple this with surveillance for the doom spiral.
Not just that, but death treath, stalking, parasocial obsession, blackmail, scams, catfish, foreign propaganda, and so on, putting yourself out there on the internet brings so many risks nowadays.
Wow, this is terrible. People really live like this?
If I would say to my female friend that I like when hair dresser is stroking my hair, she would probably just look at me: 'ha ha! you nerd!'.
Asking somebody to apologize for your own thoughts... The situation like that it is beyond cringe... if somebody would be doing that in my country, psychological help would be recommended.
What a solid piece of writing. I’m Gen X, and have talked with my siblings about the online realities my teenage nieces and nephews face, and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion the author comes to in the last paragraph. Along the way, though, there was framing of a lot of points that I’ve struggled to find the right words for. So, bravo.
Sounds like a too online person with too online friends. About ten years ago, I had an experience that pointed out the too online nature of people (in that case, myself).
It’s all in the culture of the social media bubble they’re in. I was on Reddit a lot. Reddit had just gone through the Great Hate of Hipsters (with their skinny jeans and ear gauges) and had moved on to a new target: Atheists.
The scorned atheist was (perhaps is?) stereotypically a nerdy young man with, notably, an affection for fedoras and pride in “euphoric” quotes.
All right, so I spent all this time on Reddit and it was clear to me: Americans think fedoras are weird and American girls can’t stand them. I don’t have a predilection for hats personally so this wasn’t a big deal but good to know. But I was a nerdy young man.
Then one day I was traveling with a group of friends, mostly girls, and we walked by a hat store. Completely confusingly, the girls were highly enthusiastic about us boys wearing the hats. Some of them specifically picked out the much hated fedora! For me!
I said something about atheist-kid-something and they looked at me confused till one of them said “oh it’s some Reddit thing; forget it, just try it on” and life just moved on.
So what was the deal? I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community.
Anyway, I think this writer’s friends are part of some highly specific community with some kind of Twitter-like norms. And this supposed change in society is just a change in her local group.
> I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community.
That's an interesting way to put it, I think this happens a lot. But sometimes I think an opinion from a highly-specific online community escapes their bubble and becomes a reality in other groups, and sometimes this is sad.
For example I think there are way too many youngsters these days using the words 'chad' and 'incel' and they truly believe these things are true. Some go as far as saying that you are either born one way or another and there is no way to fix it. The very same thinking pattern caused teenagers to kill each other in multiple instances.
It seems some people just fail to realize that whatever is the norm in their online space is not reality.
Great story and I think you're exactly right.
This. I’m on X myself a lot (because everyone else in my circles is, not because I wanted) and it’s just such a bubble. Sometimes I want to just quit it all and touch grass
Haha, I felt the same and never did anything about it. Then this Charlie Kirk fellow got shot and I’d coincidentally clicked on For You on Twitter (I know, first mistake, never do this) moments after and a vague tweet about “can’t believe this something something” had a bloody video of a man getting shot dead in the fucking neck. I remember wondering if I wanted to go through a week, maybe a month, of people tweeting about a guy getting shot and realized I really didn’t.
Stopped. Thanks to that gore poster, I suppose.
Weird stuff, you are just talking to a 5 year younger friend about hair brushing being pleasant and now you needr to apologize to the hair brusher?
> She demanded that I apologize to the women for sexualizing them.
This doesn't work that well in real life. Let me sketch a scenario:
Oh eh, hi, eh, sorry, I have to admit than when you were brushing my hair, I was sexualizing you.
You can't make it much better, perhaps write a formal letter and focus on the hairbrush:
Three weeks ago, I was in your excellent shop. My hair never has been nicer. During the hair brushing, I got the feeling I felt a bit more for the hairbrush than I fell about you, I hope you can forgive me.
That gives a nice feeling about what was first a fairly normal human interaction.
It sounds hot though, good tip. But I got a humiliation kink, oh noes! How to resolve then? It is a catch-22 now. Need to do silly apologize, apologies are sexual, need to apologize for sexual feelings due to silly apologies. Haha, how do I get there?
Makes me glad I have aphantasia, because "undressing someone with my eyes" is a metaphorical expression for me, and I don't have to worry about thinking something I might then need to apologize for. Now for the people who can visualize things in their mind, it's probably quite a lot more literal...
That certainly isn’t my experience, and the example she gives imo says more about her neurotic friends than society.
Yeah, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, I don't actually recognise any of the behaviours described in this article. It does sound like the behavioural traits of a certain subsection of certain generations, who's expectations and norms have been warped by overuse of social media. It all sounds incredibly exhausting and I genuinely feel sorry for those growing up in this climate.
The front fell off the boat outside of society^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the environment.
the need to judge publicly is a subset of the need to publicize everything, a world where everyone is exhibitionist and selfies replace experiences. The people who do the former are primarily engaged in the latter.
This will only get worse, we are one step away from people posting selfies of their foreplay before sex for public validation.
It is already happening in tourism that people go to the beach for the selfies rather than swimming (seen that with my own eyes). Narcissism is slowly eating sexuality as well.
I read the article. I found it hard going so probably was not for me but the impression it left me with was:
"I let the internet fck with my mind, now I want to un-fck it."
USE the internet, don't to let it use YOU.
>USE the internet, don't to let it use YOU.
There are several multi-billion dollar enterprises who spend all day every day trying to make their products more addictive (in your words, using YOU).
It's unlikely a meaningful number of people can pull themselves off of the dopamine treadmill by their bootstraps.
It's not that they can't per se, they just don't care that much.
Yeah my grandfather used to say the same thing about cigarettes. He could quit any time he wanted; he just didn't want to.
> [..] seem to have internalized the internet’s tendency to reach for the least charitable interpretation of every glancing thought and, as a result, to have pathologized what I would characterize as the normal, internal vagaries of desire.
I think the internet has some ownership of this, AI didn't help, and our transition from a high-trust society to low-trust society. It's more obvious if you switch the subject to any other - try telling a joke about racism in the wrong setting [1]. Private things should remain private, and consumed within a private context.
In the UK for example, a person can be found guilty under the Malicious Communications Act and/or Online Safety Act. If your badly received joke involves a protected characteristic, that's now and aggravating factor and you just committed a crime against a protected minority.
> I should state at this point that this is not an essay about “cancel culture going too far,” a topic which can now be historicized as little more than a rhetorical cudgel wielded successfully by the right to wrest cultural power back from an ascendant progressive liberalism.
The author was IRL cancelled by their friend: "In fact, it ended the friendship.". And the main complaint is that this has become part of the culture, specifically for sexuality. The author may not want to associate with the anti-movement for cancel culture, it is exactly what they are aligned with.
> #MeToo was smeared by liberals and conservatives alike (united, as they always are, in misogyny) as being inherently punitive in nature, meant to punish men who’d fallen into a rough patch of bad behavior, or who, perhaps, might not have done anything at all (the falsely accused or the misinterpreted man became the real victim, in this view).
You want the power without the responsibility of corruption. It's not like this stuff doesn't have real world consequences [2]. If, instead of adding names to a document, each of these women just stabbed to death the men they are accusing, let's say for really terrible accusations that we can agree that such a penalty should apply for. Sure, many people who are stabbed to death will have earned it, but we cannot be sure unless there is some right to address the accusation.
The point is that without the ability to represent your counter-argument, there can be no real claim of justice. What is claimed as "social justice" is just the vigilante mob doing whatever it likes without accountability, and a lack of accountability is exactly what they are angry about in the first place. Two wrongs do not make a right.
> But that link between sex and fear is operating in more “benign” or common modes of internet practice. There is an online culture that thinks nothing of submitting screenshots, notes, videos, and photos with calls for collective judgement.
Wait wait wait. Hold on a damn second. We just literally spoke about a series of women submitting online notes for collective judgement. Now it's wrong?
This reveals the fundamental problem, which is that the author is suppressed by the very behaviours that they have supported.
Has it? Really? I'm pretty sure culture in the US has become significantly more overtly erotic over the past 30 years...
Depends on what you mean - in a very overt, marketed and non-french way, sure.
[deleted]
author should touch grass
Nah. I'd like less "sexy" on the internet and most everywhere else. It's exhausting having people shove their sexuality in everyone's focus constantly. I'd like to be able to buy some muffins without being reminded about sex on the packaging, the description, and the product name. Let muffins be muffins. Just like extroverts are energy vampires for introverts, the non-sexually obsessed are tired of the sex obsessed wanting everything to be about celebrating the sexual obsessions of the sex obsessed. Broaden your horizons and get a hobby that doesn't involve telling everyone about what you want to do with your genitals.
This is downvoted, probably because it is considered to be 'conservative' and therefore 'bad' in this rather myopic community. It is also wholly to the point and correct in the observation that the ever-present sexualisation of - if not everything then at least a whole lot of things - is tiring and numbing. 'Sex sells' is taught at the marketing courses so sex is has to be. First a tiny bit, then a bit more because the last ad has already lost its edge. Then, a bit more still. Bit by bit, piece by piece the magic of sex is sold off for a lousy few euros or dollars or pesos or whatnot because sex sells.
While people see more sexualised imagery then probably ever before younger people have less and less of sex with their peers. Sex sells, still. For how long, I wonder.
The main thing I get out of this article is how easy it is to get trapped in a bubble thanks to algorithmic social media.
For the most part, sexy never left, and statistics bear this out. OnlyFans brings in enormous amount of revenue, even after an expensive, failed attempt to be not-just-a-porn-site. Hypersexualized gacha games are pulling in tens of millions of dollars per month, and not just for men; the women-targeted Love and Deepspace had over $50 million in revenue in October. Marvel Rivals, criticized in some circles (such as the social circles of those in the article) for being an oversexualized "gooner game" has remained in the top 10 games played on Steam since its release a year ago. And nothing drives it home more than stumbling across the shady side of YouTube and finding videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions of views.
> I choose these examples from my personal life because they express sentiments that were once the kind of stuff I encountered only in the messy battlegrounds of Twitter, amid discussions about whether Sabrina Carpenter is being oversexualized, whether kinks are akin to a sexual orientation, whether a woman can truly consent in an age-gap relationship, and whether exposure to sex scenes in movies violates viewer consent.
Ultimately, these are the kind of things discussed only by a small, vocal, very online (some might say terminally online) minority. To think that they represent more than a tiny fraction of the world is, again, reflective of how easy it is to get trapped into online echo chambers.
Yeah, I think she's assuming that, since some of those people are IRL friends, that means they're not terminally online people.
I'm around finance folks and they're all trapped into the same crypto-and-AI influencer bubble, but they would never be able to tell because their physical connections are also finance people who are likely to be caught in the same corner of the algorithm. So their real life conversations reinforce the worldview that the internet presents.
This is likely the same case. The author might not be involved in these people spaces, but she shares characteristics with her friends who make them all be targeted by the same bubble, so everyone she knows falls in the same bag.
[dead]
> “Who are you defending yourself against?” To which he answered, to my astonishment: “I don’t know. The world.”
Indeed. Moving our every interaction in daily life plus our innermost thoughts to the internet has instilled a low-key fear in all of us that we'll be raked over the coals and villified as the world's worst villains. The digital tar and feathers are lurking always, a menacing psychological force. And it can even happen without our knowledge; some stranger can post a two second context-less clip or a snippet of a conversation and make us look our worst.
It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.
> It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.
I suspect the answer is to find out who benefits from our misdirected anger, and whether they are also involved in creating and fostering this misdirected anger.
It's old news now, but when I first heard about social media (Facebook specifically) and gaming companies hiring psychologists years ago, I knew it was pretty much over. Couple this with surveillance for the doom spiral.
Not just that, but death treath, stalking, parasocial obsession, blackmail, scams, catfish, foreign propaganda, and so on, putting yourself out there on the internet brings so many risks nowadays.
Wow, this is terrible. People really live like this? If I would say to my female friend that I like when hair dresser is stroking my hair, she would probably just look at me: 'ha ha! you nerd!'. Asking somebody to apologize for your own thoughts... The situation like that it is beyond cringe... if somebody would be doing that in my country, psychological help would be recommended.
What a solid piece of writing. I’m Gen X, and have talked with my siblings about the online realities my teenage nieces and nephews face, and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion the author comes to in the last paragraph. Along the way, though, there was framing of a lot of points that I’ve struggled to find the right words for. So, bravo.
Sounds like a too online person with too online friends. About ten years ago, I had an experience that pointed out the too online nature of people (in that case, myself).
It’s all in the culture of the social media bubble they’re in. I was on Reddit a lot. Reddit had just gone through the Great Hate of Hipsters (with their skinny jeans and ear gauges) and had moved on to a new target: Atheists.
The scorned atheist was (perhaps is?) stereotypically a nerdy young man with, notably, an affection for fedoras and pride in “euphoric” quotes.
All right, so I spent all this time on Reddit and it was clear to me: Americans think fedoras are weird and American girls can’t stand them. I don’t have a predilection for hats personally so this wasn’t a big deal but good to know. But I was a nerdy young man.
Then one day I was traveling with a group of friends, mostly girls, and we walked by a hat store. Completely confusingly, the girls were highly enthusiastic about us boys wearing the hats. Some of them specifically picked out the much hated fedora! For me!
I said something about atheist-kid-something and they looked at me confused till one of them said “oh it’s some Reddit thing; forget it, just try it on” and life just moved on.
So what was the deal? I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community.
Anyway, I think this writer’s friends are part of some highly specific community with some kind of Twitter-like norms. And this supposed change in society is just a change in her local group.
> I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community.
That's an interesting way to put it, I think this happens a lot. But sometimes I think an opinion from a highly-specific online community escapes their bubble and becomes a reality in other groups, and sometimes this is sad.
For example I think there are way too many youngsters these days using the words 'chad' and 'incel' and they truly believe these things are true. Some go as far as saying that you are either born one way or another and there is no way to fix it. The very same thinking pattern caused teenagers to kill each other in multiple instances.
It seems some people just fail to realize that whatever is the norm in their online space is not reality.
Great story and I think you're exactly right.
This. I’m on X myself a lot (because everyone else in my circles is, not because I wanted) and it’s just such a bubble. Sometimes I want to just quit it all and touch grass
Haha, I felt the same and never did anything about it. Then this Charlie Kirk fellow got shot and I’d coincidentally clicked on For You on Twitter (I know, first mistake, never do this) moments after and a vague tweet about “can’t believe this something something” had a bloody video of a man getting shot dead in the fucking neck. I remember wondering if I wanted to go through a week, maybe a month, of people tweeting about a guy getting shot and realized I really didn’t.
Stopped. Thanks to that gore poster, I suppose.
Weird stuff, you are just talking to a 5 year younger friend about hair brushing being pleasant and now you needr to apologize to the hair brusher?
> She demanded that I apologize to the women for sexualizing them.
This doesn't work that well in real life. Let me sketch a scenario:
Oh eh, hi, eh, sorry, I have to admit than when you were brushing my hair, I was sexualizing you.
You can't make it much better, perhaps write a formal letter and focus on the hairbrush:
Three weeks ago, I was in your excellent shop. My hair never has been nicer. During the hair brushing, I got the feeling I felt a bit more for the hairbrush than I fell about you, I hope you can forgive me.
That gives a nice feeling about what was first a fairly normal human interaction.
It sounds hot though, good tip. But I got a humiliation kink, oh noes! How to resolve then? It is a catch-22 now. Need to do silly apologize, apologies are sexual, need to apologize for sexual feelings due to silly apologies. Haha, how do I get there?
Makes me glad I have aphantasia, because "undressing someone with my eyes" is a metaphorical expression for me, and I don't have to worry about thinking something I might then need to apologize for. Now for the people who can visualize things in their mind, it's probably quite a lot more literal...
That certainly isn’t my experience, and the example she gives imo says more about her neurotic friends than society.
Yeah, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, I don't actually recognise any of the behaviours described in this article. It does sound like the behavioural traits of a certain subsection of certain generations, who's expectations and norms have been warped by overuse of social media. It all sounds incredibly exhausting and I genuinely feel sorry for those growing up in this climate.
The front fell off the boat outside of society^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the environment.
the need to judge publicly is a subset of the need to publicize everything, a world where everyone is exhibitionist and selfies replace experiences. The people who do the former are primarily engaged in the latter.
This will only get worse, we are one step away from people posting selfies of their foreplay before sex for public validation.
It is already happening in tourism that people go to the beach for the selfies rather than swimming (seen that with my own eyes). Narcissism is slowly eating sexuality as well.
I read the article. I found it hard going so probably was not for me but the impression it left me with was:
"I let the internet fck with my mind, now I want to un-fck it."
USE the internet, don't to let it use YOU.
>USE the internet, don't to let it use YOU.
There are several multi-billion dollar enterprises who spend all day every day trying to make their products more addictive (in your words, using YOU).
It's unlikely a meaningful number of people can pull themselves off of the dopamine treadmill by their bootstraps.
It's not that they can't per se, they just don't care that much.
Yeah my grandfather used to say the same thing about cigarettes. He could quit any time he wanted; he just didn't want to.
> [..] seem to have internalized the internet’s tendency to reach for the least charitable interpretation of every glancing thought and, as a result, to have pathologized what I would characterize as the normal, internal vagaries of desire.
I think the internet has some ownership of this, AI didn't help, and our transition from a high-trust society to low-trust society. It's more obvious if you switch the subject to any other - try telling a joke about racism in the wrong setting [1]. Private things should remain private, and consumed within a private context.
In the UK for example, a person can be found guilty under the Malicious Communications Act and/or Online Safety Act. If your badly received joke involves a protected characteristic, that's now and aggravating factor and you just committed a crime against a protected minority.
> I should state at this point that this is not an essay about “cancel culture going too far,” a topic which can now be historicized as little more than a rhetorical cudgel wielded successfully by the right to wrest cultural power back from an ascendant progressive liberalism.
The author was IRL cancelled by their friend: "In fact, it ended the friendship.". And the main complaint is that this has become part of the culture, specifically for sexuality. The author may not want to associate with the anti-movement for cancel culture, it is exactly what they are aligned with.
> #MeToo was smeared by liberals and conservatives alike (united, as they always are, in misogyny) as being inherently punitive in nature, meant to punish men who’d fallen into a rough patch of bad behavior, or who, perhaps, might not have done anything at all (the falsely accused or the misinterpreted man became the real victim, in this view).
You want the power without the responsibility of corruption. It's not like this stuff doesn't have real world consequences [2]. If, instead of adding names to a document, each of these women just stabbed to death the men they are accusing, let's say for really terrible accusations that we can agree that such a penalty should apply for. Sure, many people who are stabbed to death will have earned it, but we cannot be sure unless there is some right to address the accusation.
The point is that without the ability to represent your counter-argument, there can be no real claim of justice. What is claimed as "social justice" is just the vigilante mob doing whatever it likes without accountability, and a lack of accountability is exactly what they are angry about in the first place. Two wrongs do not make a right.
> But that link between sex and fear is operating in more “benign” or common modes of internet practice. There is an online culture that thinks nothing of submitting screenshots, notes, videos, and photos with calls for collective judgement.
Wait wait wait. Hold on a damn second. We just literally spoke about a series of women submitting online notes for collective judgement. Now it's wrong?
This reveals the fundamental problem, which is that the author is suppressed by the very behaviours that they have supported.
[1] https://youtube.com/shorts/-3_-qYw33pU?si=bmPCOa8Ay8YQm4FK
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-repl...
Has it? Really? I'm pretty sure culture in the US has become significantly more overtly erotic over the past 30 years...
Depends on what you mean - in a very overt, marketed and non-french way, sure.
author should touch grass
Nah. I'd like less "sexy" on the internet and most everywhere else. It's exhausting having people shove their sexuality in everyone's focus constantly. I'd like to be able to buy some muffins without being reminded about sex on the packaging, the description, and the product name. Let muffins be muffins. Just like extroverts are energy vampires for introverts, the non-sexually obsessed are tired of the sex obsessed wanting everything to be about celebrating the sexual obsessions of the sex obsessed. Broaden your horizons and get a hobby that doesn't involve telling everyone about what you want to do with your genitals.
This is downvoted, probably because it is considered to be 'conservative' and therefore 'bad' in this rather myopic community. It is also wholly to the point and correct in the observation that the ever-present sexualisation of - if not everything then at least a whole lot of things - is tiring and numbing. 'Sex sells' is taught at the marketing courses so sex is has to be. First a tiny bit, then a bit more because the last ad has already lost its edge. Then, a bit more still. Bit by bit, piece by piece the magic of sex is sold off for a lousy few euros or dollars or pesos or whatnot because sex sells.
While people see more sexualised imagery then probably ever before younger people have less and less of sex with their peers. Sex sells, still. For how long, I wonder.
[dead]
[dead]