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We Are The Porn Generation
- duexmachina 14y agoIs it just me or do I find it ironic that the article is surrounding by the things the author seems to dislike? The twitter/facebook tie ins on the site are one thing, but the recommended content made me laugh. >Why You Should Start Smoking >6 Rules For Increasing Your Chances Of Getting Laid At Parties For The Chronically Alienated, Interspersed With Songs I Like Right Now, Vol. 1 > Paid Distribution What Your "Drink" Says About You on a Date It's a great way to unintentionally strengthening the authors argument.
- icebraining 14y agoAgreed; I smiled when I got to the end and reached the big fat "You should follow on Twitter".
- jcfrei 14y agocurrently a lot of the market players are focused on grasping a part of your attention. essentially there is a constant battle raging inside of you trying to figure out which of all those mental stimuli you should give in to. if you as an individual don't learn to refrain from such distilled indulgence (social media, fast food, pornography) you might as well get lost in the 21st century (and end up void of any free will)... and that's a dangerous outlook (remember Huxley's brave new world?)
- evincarofautumn 14y agoYou do look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma.
- Drbble 14y agoDoes not distilled indulgence save time, which is a modern person's most heavily spent resource?
- joejohnson 14y agoGood article. I just skimmed it for the interesting parts, but I think it looked pretty thought provoking.
- fferen 14y agoPersonally I think I'll wait for the movie adaptation.
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- r0s 14y agoThe attitude towards pornography here is immediately dismissive and negative. By far the biggest movement in porn since the internet is 'amateur'. Unrecognized here as direct reflection of human sexuality, movement away from fantasy to authenticity. I think the point of the article is that all media is entertainment, and journalism has lost it's informant pretense. A legit point, I don't care for porn bashing though.
- kiba 14y agoMost actors/actress are ugly. I don't really care for amateur because they are often ugly too. It'll get the job done, but it's like watching a really badly done horror movie. Not scary or sexy at all. The manga world is often in stark contrast to the reality tubes. Some of them will make you angry and some will make you fell in love with the characters. They are also often beautiful. Even though they are high quality, they might as well be mass produced. The reality tubes is mass produced but is of bad quality.
- kiba 14y agoI am not sure why I get downvoted.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mattgreenrocks 14y agoI see this attitude so often on the Internet: where porn is practically sacrosanct. It's way more complicated than that, and it seems intellectually dishonest to oversimplify matters. However, the real point I'd like to make is this: you are right when you mention that the author was actually discussing the perils of everything being entertaining. He'd do well to read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. It is downright chilling to read when you realize it was written in the eighties as the cultural impact of pervasive television was beginning to become apparent.
- philwelch 14y agoI wouldn't say it's dismissive and negative to point out that porn is inherently reductionist. The main difference is that things like nutrition, music, and intellectual enrichment need a degree of sophistication. Porn is just a method for physiological release, not a proper art form.
- SpaceDragon 14y agoThe way I look at it, anyone who indulges in porn isn't going to be a competitive threat to me or take my job. Why? Because they're preoccupied, lack self control and settle for fantasy over reality.
- SpaceDragon 14y agoAnd overly sensitive to criticism.
- icebraining 14y agoI haven't downvoted your first comment, but I think you have a very prejudiced (and wrong) view of porn. Firstly, (almost) everyone watches porn: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/relationships/6709646/All-men-watch-porn-scientists-find.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/relationships/6709646/All-men-wat... Second, nothing in consuming porn inherently means the person "lacks self-control" (there's certainly porn addicts, but they're not the majority) or "settles for fantasy" - in fact, many couples watch porn together and use it to improve their own sex life. Thirdly, porn is a highly competitive industry with a lot of talent in producing, managing and distributing content, both online and offline. They run very big websites and serve huge amounts of video traffic per minute. Xvideos alone has twice the page views of Reddit.
- SpaceDragon 14y agoPorn is a plague that degrades women, trivializes intimacy and is poison for children and families. It's junk food of the worst kind for the mind.
- swordswinger12 14y agoInteresting viewpoint. Can you expand on it a little bit though? How does porn do each of the things you listed?
- icebraining 14y agoWell, I don't think there's any point in discussing this. We're obviously not going to change our opinions about it. But I'd like to say that personally, I prefer to let women decide for themselves what degrades them, instead of taking the position that I know best, and considering that many women nowadays watch porn (1 in 3 porn viewers, according to Nielsen), I'm not sure if they feel that way.
- choros12 14y agoporn is like fast-food. I.e. good quantity, bad quality.
- icebraining 14y agoIt's funny; I started thinking about his examples and except for the TED talks (which for me complement but haven't replaced reading), the only kind of porn I'm exposed to is actual pornography. I don't really spend a lot of time with the others (commercial radio and MacDonalds are particularly unpleasant). I also don't get when he says If you’re a vegetarian… Well, you’re shit out of luck. and then two paragraphs later he inverts that by saying the other stuff is still out there. And, in my opinion, it's not just "still out there" - there's actually more of such content available.
- sreyaNotfilc 14y ago" If you’re a vegetarian… Well, you’re shit out of luck. " Ya, I'll just skip this rant of his and wait for the full length film of this article. Its funny how the author is using a medium in which he describes as fading to convey his distaste in another medium which "everyone" is using. But, expects us to use the fading medium to understand his "vegetarian" ideas. Yes, this article was THAT confusing.
- buntar 14y agoUsing 'porn' in the title is also kinda porn. Edit: Seriously though, I would replace 'the porn generation' with 'the porned generation'. "Corporations are not looking out for your best interests; they’re looking to make as much money as possible." That's the obvious part. But the interesting part is how all this big corporations managed it to finally break into our lives. Not only the sell us all kinds off stuff we don't need. They also very actively comment our consume behavior. Something is always wrong with our lives. We are too fat, too boring, our relationships are not thrilling enough, we don't manage to get what we deserve. Corporations are not longer selling stuff to us in the traditional way, from producer to consumer. For them, we are gigantic consumption mass, trained to buy and to be evaluated from day one. We are not consumers, we are here to be consumed. We get porned.
- backbonetutes 14y agoGreat post!
- quinndupont 14y agoIt's very curious that there is no discussion of affect or feminism in general in this post, both of which are useful to this discussion.
- aarontait 14y agoThis is an analogy for mindlessness versus mindfulness. It's also been well understood, for over 2,500 years, that mindless activities only lead to suffering. Even though they deliver immediate satisfaction. Mindful activities on the other hand lead to happiness.
- tmh88j 14y agoI agree with this article, however, it overlooks one huge aspect; porn has been popular long before America became fat and obsessed with the "I want it now" massive $1 cheeseburgers.
- why-el 14y agoOk, so I have a point to make. I don't quite understand how, whenever porn is discussed, all the HN community gets very rational about it and we start discussing it as if it was a normal product. It is absolutely not. It is not what human beings are and it degrades women (And increasingly, trends in porn change only in one way: How they degrade women). It is also dull, and repetitive, despite their sad attempts to innovate; there is a finite number of sexual positions, and you can only go past that once you establish the fact that women will choose to degrade themselves and go with it, which the makers (men, always) happily decide its the case. So yes, as a hacker, there things to learn from the porn industry (scaling, traffic analysis..),but its effect on society and its subjugation of half of said society far outweigh those few technological insights.
- kiba 14y agoYou said it degrade women, but you don't explain how.
- zerostar07 14y agoLooks like you don't watch porn lately.
- drumdance 14y agoAnd you didn't provide an answer either.
- zerostar07 14y agoWell, humiliated.com has a girls section but not boys
- icebraining 14y agoAnd FemaleDom.com only has women dominating men. So?
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- seanp2k2 14y agoLet me keep in style with this article and TL;DR it for you: instant gratification is awesome, and it's easier than it's ever been. I embrace this and look forward to a day when I can just go into dreamland in my mind while my body is controlled by a computer to do space mining that robots can't. Then I can spend more time doing exactly what I want.
- waveman 14y agoPorn = porn that men like Erotica = porn that women like
- horsehead 14y agoWe were just talking about this in an IRC channel. I think the article is saying that we've cut everything down to the common denominator. I've also heard it called the 'fast food' generation. We want the quick hit, the down and dirty. We live in an incredibly fast paced society. But in that context, how can you not chop everything down to the kibbles and bits, in order to get people even interested? (or in other terms: tl;dr)
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- airlocksoftware 14y agoIsn't this rehashing PG's essay, The Acceleration of Addictiveness? http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
- naner 14y agoThe comparisons he made reminded me of something I read not too long ago: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/02/hes_just_not_that_into_anyone.html http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/02/hes_just_not_that_int... In other words, online porn isn't a drug, it isn't an addiction, it isn't a sign of deviancy or a trigger for disease: porn is junk food. It is a bag of potato chips you eat when you aren't even hungry, and once you start and the initial "mmmm!" passes you're all in, may as well finish the bag, you've ruined your diet/night already, start over clean tomorrow. After a while potato chips just figure into your routine, there's a passing thought that perhaps you shouldn't but since there aren't any obvious and immediate consequences... And now it's part of who you are. But no one would ever say that "other foods don't measure up", no one says that potato chips taste better than steak not because they don't but because no sane person makes those kinds of comparisons. If you did, if you played it all out in your head and now deliberately avoid eating a steak in order to get to potato chips-- then you have a problem that is deeper than steak or potato chips. Junk food is stripped of the essentials of real food, leaving just the vulgar, the simple, the obvious of taste: sugar, salt, fat, repeat. It is the pornographization of food. The mistake people make is that they think it is delicious, but it's really just easy, comforting, reliable, satisfying. And that's where we are now: online porn is the pornographization of porn.
- waterhouse 14y agoOh man, I wrote a giant post, but it was too big to post here. Essentially I disagree with the author, and I probably have said some interesting things in my rant. Here it is: http://pastebin.com/EV64mvm8 http://pastebin.com/EV64mvm8
- rsanchez1 14y agoThis article made me think of the foodgasm: http://foodnetworkhumor.com/2009/12/the-top-10-biggest-food-network-foodgasms-of-2009/ http://foodnetworkhumor.com/2009/12/the-top-10-biggest-food-...