8 ms·

What Porn Did to American Culture?

38 points by gHeadphone 1y ago

pinewurst 1y ago
https://archive.ph/kmH5a https://archive.ph/kmH5a
AStonesThrow 1y ago
"Did", like past tense? So we're totally over it now?
- almosthere 1y ago
  I think "Does" instead of "Did" does apply too, but I think the take is that the harm is done.
mjevans 1y ago
Edited: Please read and reply if you disagree with my view that porn reflects the greater social contract of society. An apathetic vacuum. (American? Capitalist? Global 'Elite'?) Society does not care about the people, actively seeking to use and exploit. When things go badly who gets the pain? The common person, the modern serf. When things go well who takes the rewards? Their boss's boss's boss. Porn is just a scapegoat, a symptom of the larger issues. Of the broken social contract for being part of a larger whole and everyone being better off for that collective work. Though perhaps it's also a symptom of the failed liberation of society from outdated gender roles. Movements towards equality made some progress on empowering women, but didn't finish the job of shattering the yolk of stereotypical roles entirely to reshape the social contract for equality, inclusion, and freedom from old stereotypes. Echos of those old stereotypes, and new flawed ones, can be seen as the basis of the roles explored through exaggerated fiction even if it's erotic in nature.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  OK, I'll bite. "Porn is... a symptom of the larger issues." Since male monkeys in the lab will willingly trade food for monkey porn, I think you have a pretty high hurdle to prove that societal issues cause porn. Also, you continue the article's unproven premise that "porn is bad". That's an opinion. And objectively, what few factual studies I've seen tends the other direction: ready access to porn correlates with lower sexual violence in countries.
amelius 1y ago
[flagged]
- almosthere 1y ago
  Feel free to create a different post ... Shrug
sepositus 1y ago
I've been helping young men escape the clutches of porn for over a decade now (leading what you might call recovery groups). Never once have I found a single story that ended well (but that's more or less expected given the groups I run). It all starts with an introduction to porn and ends with an addiction that seems to slowly transforms their brains in unpleasant ways, objectification of women being the primary one. One of the best tools that I continue to employ is deprogramming that objectification. Helping them to see the humanity and personhood of women again. It's incredible how most porn can turn from enticing to absolutely repulsive once you adopt this mindset.
- enceladus06 1y ago
  Why is porn such a big deal? I've seen it, but the real thing is much better. How is it even possible to get addicted that just seems weird.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    Everyone’s brain is built different. Some have more executive function and control then others. Alcoholics, drug or food addiction, gambling, etc. Reward centers are tricky.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Magma7404 1y ago
    > the real thing is much better (I'm not judging you but) It's easy for you to say when you have the real thing. And that's why our societies have failed for a lot of people, and why we now must handle porn the same way we are handling drug problems. For the GP: "escape the clutches of porn" when it's the only alternative to suicide due to lack of social contact? You end up with incels who would do anything to have a way to be a part of society, and most of the time it's in a bad way. Been there done that, our society has changed in the wrong way and I don't think we're blaming the right guys. "Helping them to see the humanity and personhood of women again" is misled. The issue is that some people have no human contact with men or women at all. No male parental figure which is more important and impacting than the contact with the other sex, even in a social context. Focusing on porn and women is useless in that context (since I suspect OP is talking about, well, porn and incels and the whole bro thing).
replwoacause 1y ago
I recognized its pernicious effects on me and gave it up after getting married and before having a kid. This was after being exposed to it for decades from a young age through unrestricted access to the internet. I think that’s an all too common story. It’s crazy how normalized it becomes once it worms its way into your life, but having been off of it for some time now, I see clearly what a terrible influence it was on me. It’s also made me aware of the extreme perversions and predatory behaviors out in the world which I’ll use as context to make sure my kids never fall victim to.
- k__ 1y ago
  "I recognized its pernicious effects on me" What effects did it have on you? "made me aware of the extreme perversions" Such as?
  - maroonblazer 1y ago
    Not the parent, but for me, porn served as a kind of supernormal stimulus. It became difficult to become aroused with my partner when I had a practically infinite variety of virtual women to choose from, doing an infinite variety of things. Quitting porn was one of the best things I did for my sex life.
    - bradlys 1y ago
      I hear about this sometimes and I just wonder if the post-nut clarity makes you recoil. If I was finding my partner less attractive to the point of finding it challenging to become aroused around them, it certainly has more to do with them than it does with whatever I am watching. I’ve never experienced this even in the slightest and I’ve definitely had moments where I was unattractive to my partner and not having sex with them and substituting with porn. It was cause they were being a jerk and I didn’t wanna fuck them. Shocker.
      - maroonblazer 1y ago
        It makes me recoil that I replaced my partner with simulacrum of her. I've been in situations like the one you describe but this was not that. It's not about attractiveness. A good analogy is that you can sate your sweet tooth by eating certain fruits. But if you start binging candy bars and ice cream, suddenly that pineapple you used to love no longer does the job.
nerdjon 1y ago
I should be very clear here that I am a gay man, so I don't really have exposure to much of what is talked about here even if I have heard about it. What I find interesting is that it seems to equate critiquing porn with critiquing the treatment of the people in porn. Those are 2 very distinct things, you can have issues with treatment within the industry without going down a prudish anti-porn route. Personally I feel like much of the issues with Porn, particularly in the US, stem from being uncomfortable talking about sex. Instead of feeling like we need to hide and be ashamed that we watch porn, it should be talked about so from a younger age we know its fantasy. We know that these positions, angles, noises, the perfection, isn't normal. Sex is messy. This shame about sex, our bodies, leads to many of these problems with how we view porn. I strongly believe that there is nothing wrong with consuming porn, casually, with your partner(s), regularly, whatever. It is just another way to explore your sexuality and we should not demonize that. We should however address the problems with the industry, but without demonizing its existence.
- RHSeeger 1y ago
  Your thoughts along this topic run similar to mine. I would extend it a bit to say that a lot of the problems in the industry, and how it treats people, are a direct result of the fact that it's considered shameful by a lot of society.
  - nerdjon 1y ago
    Yes, 100%. Made worse by maybe afraid to speak up because of how might be judged ("Oh this person was asking for it because they do porn"). Feeling like you have no power. It is for sure a complicated issue and societal norms and expectations play into that.
- thraway79879s8d 1y ago
  The issues at play are really fundamentally about heterosexuality. The gay male money-free casual sex market "clears" --- grindr does in fact work. The (unpaid) heterosexual casual sex market will never clear regardless of app design, there are simply not even women interested in not enough casual sex for it to be any other way. Whether its 2024 voters freaking about inflation (despite it being lower than in other countries), or the rise of the manosphere since hetero dating apps, Americans in particular are very consumer oriented society that freaks out when consumption desires get impeded. Somewhere, between many culture forces (porn, 1990s-2010s sex positivity, hookup culture discourse divorced from reality, hip hop lyrics (?!) the end of the Hayes code (?!), straight men's "needs rising in the hierarchy" rose to include much more casual sex than previous generations aspired to....and now the cat is out of the bag. A lot of the discourse around this reminds me of say, gentrification discourse. There is a wish that the demand would just go away, that we could rewind the clock to when straight men were less horny, or fewer wealthy professionals wanted to live in the urban core. Neverminding that the former is a lot more sympathetic a goal than the latter, it feels like pipe dreaming divorced from actual tactical thinking about the size of the problem and therefore what remedies are actually sufficient. Actually rewinding the clock is, at least, really hard. Capitalism has been invading the domestic sphere for decades. It's the same process as, say, less home-cooking and more takeout or restaurant trips too. (And in that case, freeing women from the kitchen is unambiguously good!) In the housing case, the moral and correct answer is "just build more dense housing" --- allow supply to meet demand. In the straight casual sex case, the analogous answer is "just legalize prostitution", but the morality is admittedly less clear cut. Personally, I think we should try it, as all the other answers seem deeply seriousness given the scale of the problem. Better to do something that might actual work, then half-ass things that will certainly fail while the problem gets worse.
mystraline 1y ago
The article claims porn, and sure, that's a part. The bigger issue here is outmoded predominant protestant christian views of 'morality'. And that percolates all through the rest of USA culture, including into advertisements and commercialism. Their view of sex is as a sin, so its shamed, hidden, and secretly desired. All these things have popped up with all these pretty terrible results. Sexuality is 'tittalting' so it helps sell. Those interactions aren't genuine, but transactional. Transactions themselves aren't the problem, but when people crave genuine sexuality and get faced with '$5 for next hour of OF', yeah. Takes advantage of people. Advertisements also been going on for a while, always pushing harder to see what sells but still legal and norm enough. Like the hot rod magazines - does anybody really think if they buy a red mustang, they'll also get the 44dd blone bimbo? And really, everybody should at least try a sex party (Bacchanal) once. Have to do some std checks ahead of time, but its just so liberating and freeing for everyone. It gets money, possessiveness, prudishness, and all those distorting things out of the way. And puts sex into perspective. And well, its fun.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- blueprint 1y ago
  yeah "possessiveness" has absolutely no basis in anything reasonable, let's villainize it too while we're pretending not to alienate anything about ourselves lol
  - mystraline 1y ago
    I should have expected that my general attack on protestant Christianity's views on sex would get a sarcastic response. And no, possessiveness in regards to other humans is honestly really bad. It may every so often feel good for a moment, in a 'they want me' sort of feel. But that has a really bad tendency to go off the rails and turn violent quickly. There's ways to do sexuality and relationships healthy. Possessiveness, jealousy, shame, and other similar emotions aren't healthy for anyone involved.
    - 1y ago
backtoyoujim 1y ago
It seems to have made sex scenes in movies seem even dumber and for that i am grateful.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tayo42 1y ago
The claims about the 2000s is not really how I remember it. What exactly changed in the 2000s. I was a teen male on the internet then, i feel like I would be clued in a little... Hasn't American society been hating women since its inception? For a majority of its history they couldn't vote. My not researched take and intuition is if you feel like the world is regressing on treating women well, its because of religion. Like abortion rights being taken back is a religious thing. Ireland did something similar, is Irish culture overly affected by porn too?
palata 1y ago
I am not sure I get it. It starts with this: > One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people. So before porn in the 2000s, women, immigrants, gay and trans people were all respected in the human history? Is that the point the author is trying to make? I mean, "black lives matter", "me too", and generally the wokisme came after that, right? I am not defending porn, just trying to find where the causation is. What if I said "the world we live in has been molded by the violent video games from the 2000s ("obviously"), and probably that is the reason why we started having wars after 2000"? Wouldn't someone be quick to tell me that we had wars long before the 2000s? Like this, I wouldn't immediately think that women's rights have become worse after the 2000s in general. I don't need to go back very far to find the time where women were not even allowed to vote.
whatnow37373 1y ago
Not buying it. She just states “porn shaped society” without anything to prove it. Seems absurd to me on the face of it. Are men objectifying women? Yes. Have they done this since the dawn of mankind? Yes. I could easily claim the reverse. Society shapes porn. It’s a reflection, not the other way around.
- loeg 1y ago
  Presumably to be explored further in her unreleased book. But yeah, certainly this interview is not interesting on its own.
  - cantrecallmypwd 1y ago
    Half of headlines trad media and social media these days tend to conceal promotion of books, other merch, harebrained utopian ideology, and/or self. "Abundance" "Network States" MrBeast half of NYC and whomever this author is
- -__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
  I think "society shapes porn" was totally true up until the point where it no longer was. Porn shapes society the exact moment when the majority of young people get the majority of their beliefs and views on sexuality, romance, relationships, gender roles, sensuality, etc, from porn. This isn't true of all groups of humans everywhere, but it's definitely true of many societies right now already, and I would say obviously so. None of this is meant as a "moral panic" type point. I'm just saying, there's no point hiding from the reality that young people get their views on sex from online porn, and that has major effects on them and the whole of society.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    There is so much porn that people watch what they want to watch rather than what they are fed, whatever you want to find you can find. So the only way it shapes society is that now people are aware of everything you can do in sex and what their preferences are, it doesn't create those preferences it just makes them known.
thraway79879s8d 1y ago
It would probably be way healthier to ban porn and legalize prostitution, than ban prostitution and legalize porn. Much harder to get into the dehumanization mindset trap in person. The interview repeats the common aphorism "sex sells", but it should follow it up "sex sells other things". Sublimated desires into other categories this way doesn't seem good either.
- loeg 1y ago
  > Much harder to get into the dehumanization mindset trap in person. What are you talking about? Sex workers are routinely beaten / degraded / killed at higher rates than other people.
  - thraway79879s8d 1y ago
    That's bad reasoning - Sex work is much more dangerous because it is illegal - Legal sex work could lead to increased trafficking when there is so much unmet demand for legal immigration, but abundant legal immigration would solve that - The people currently seeking out illegal sex work, or seeking it out in countries were there is more violence against women in general, are probably much more prone to violence. Increasing the size of the industry would result in a "regression to the mean" among johns The porn problem is a bunch of people subtlety rewire their libidos in anti-social ways over time. That is involving orders of magnitudes more people than those that currently beat sex workers, and men and women alike (as the interview makes clear). A good legal prostitution system would have be: 1. Still quite expensive 2. No "pimps" or anything of that nature 3. Sex workers higher their own private security, run their own brothels, little reliance on police (who are likely to continue to be misogynist fucks regardless of how the law changes) Basically poorer men, instead of going to cheaper brothels where the workers are treated worse, would have to "save up" for fewer trips to still-expensive establishments where 2 and 3 are still abundantly true. High American equality does also make this a challenge, for sure.
    - thraway79879s8d 1y ago
      * High American [economic] inequality
standardUser 1y ago
This reads like a discussion form the 90's when the porn industry, and most media, were tightly controlled by small number of dominant players that set the norms (whether we liked it or not). I know a lot of people who have created porn in the 2010's and onward and none of them have any connection whatsoever to that porn industry of yesteryear. This feels like a strained attempt to stain the independent porn of today with the worst aspects of studio porn.
- loeg 1y ago
  Not advocating for the article/interview in any way, but: if anything, I think the porn industry is more consolidated today than it was in the 90s? MindGeek owns all of the brands.
  - standardUser 1y ago
    I don't see how it matters what one company owns or doesn't. When dozens of studios ran everything, it didn't matter than there were dozens of them or just one since they all set similarly stifling requirements. What matters is autonomy and creative freedom, of which there is now dramatically more than ever before both in porn and across all media.
  - pseudalopex 1y ago
    MindGeek are Aylo now. They own a large share of studio porn. But OnlyFans increased independent production.
- hdjjhhvvhga 1y ago
  That was my first thought: any woman can easily get into any level of "production" now and get direct profit from it, and also leave it without much stigma, sharing the same platform with non-nude celebrities. She can also control the amount of experience that is delivered to the "fans". It's incomparable with the situation from the 80s/90s.
loeg 1y ago
Right out of the gate the interview has a pretty extreme claim -- that porn is somehow responsible for societal cruelty, not just towards women, but towards a rainbow coalition of progressive causes. No explanation or justification is given; it's just a sound bite. Is the rest of this worth reading? Edit: I ended up reading the rest of it, and... there's just nothing there? If you're interested in a short interview with Sophie Gilbert, maybe this is appealing, but if you've never heard of her, I don't see the draw.
Noumenon72 1y ago
> One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people... And my theory for why it’s happening is that certain kinds of porn have inured so many people to cruelty. Besides being a complete stretch, has anyone even showed that men generally watch porn with cruelty? It's never on the front page, and it's kind of aberrant when hyper-enthusiastic "partners" are on offer.
- ta12653421 1y ago
  no link/source here, but IIRC the most selected content by female users of PornHub is "FemDom", if i remember this correctly does this somehow relate to your idea?
  - pseudalopex 1y ago
    Lesbian was the Pornhub category most viewed by women in 2024. Female domination was none of the top 15.[1] [1] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review#gender-demographics https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review#gender-...
    - mvdtnz 1y ago
      I'm not sure I trust this analysis, at least the gender breakdown. They don't say how they determine if a viewer is male or female, but they make the claim that 38% of viewers are female, and well over half in some markets - this just doesn't seem credible to me.
- hdjjhhvvhga 1y ago
  I believe it's the core of the argument of the author: she wants to link porn to cruelty at several places without offering any argument in favor of it. Paradoxically, I could offer a starkly different argument - it is women who prefer BSDM if you look at the sales numbers of certain books.
vjulian 1y ago
Yet another crappy article about sex from an otherwise respectable publication. Why does this keep happening? The article assumes a negative definition of “porn” without ever seriously examining it. As usual, sexual depiction is assumed as inherently harmful, isolating, or degrading without any good argument as to why. Then, it makes a leap implying that the rise of pornography explains social problems like loneliness or political alienation. Also, American discomfort with public sexual expression is not intrinsic or universal reality. What distinguishes porn from other depictions of sex? Could it be that porn and social atomization are symptoms of deeper technological or cultural trends, rather than assuming one causes the other?
- DangitBobby 1y ago
  > Why does this keep happening? There is a Sophie Gilbert who writes for The Atlantic, so maybe that's how this article came to be. I haven't been able to determine if it's the same person or a coincidence.
  - pseudalopex 1y ago
    It's the same person. The writer called her my colleague and linked a recent article.
hdjjhhvvhga 1y ago
This interview makes no sense. Maybe she actually had some arguments in her book but she didn't express them in this article. Paradoxically, I'd have a more sound argument if I wanted to argue for the opposite (or, more precisely, the disappearance of sexual intercourse form Hollywood moves - it was omnipresent in the 80s and even 90s).
alganet 1y ago
How many incidents involving sex affected the american perception on its institutions? Of course, declaring that in an interview would be impossible. However, it is obvious. Anyone should be able to make that connection. Is porn to blame? If it is, then any other kind of sexualization platform also is (you can think of it, I don't need to name it). It's hard to trace a line that doesn't leave you in a place of hypocrisy. American culture adopted porn as a word, outside its original realm. The expression "action porn", for example, puts the practice into a everyday word, normalizing it. This kind of expression has gone through many entertainment industries and iterations. The combination of sexual repression and porn is dangerous, the dangerous part being the sexual repression. That repression has also became part of the american culture, and in much higher doses than porn.
incomingpain 1y ago
It's relatively trivial to avoid porn IRL. I legit dont even know if they have magazines anymore. It's perhaps less difficult online, but still easy to avoid. So how exactly can it mold the world? Providing 3 examples of things you actively have to seek online; admittedly i dont know instragram but given they have to then redirect you to onlyfans is just yet another hoop to jump through? Not many are actually doing this. >mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people. Then this absurd jump to this? Porn that's not particularly available is somehow impacting immigrant men? This article is really about politics; but they put a sock puppet in front with unbacked up ideas they just leap over.

38 points by gHeadphone 1y ago

pinewurst 1y ago

https://archive.ph/kmH5a https://archive.ph/kmH5a

AStonesThrow 1y ago

"Did", like past tense? So we're totally over it now?

almosthere 1y ago
I think "Does" instead of "Did" does apply too, but I think the take is that the harm is done.

mjevans 1y ago

Edited: Please read and reply if you disagree with my view that porn reflects the greater social contract of society. An apathetic vacuum. (American? Capitalist? Global 'Elite'?) Society does not care about the people, actively seeking to use and exploit. When things go badly who gets the pain? The common person, the modern serf. When things go well who takes the rewards? Their boss's boss's boss. Porn is just a scapegoat, a symptom of the larger issues. Of the broken social contract for being part of a larger whole and everyone being better off for that collective work. Though perhaps it's also a symptom of the failed liberation of society from outdated gender roles. Movements towards equality made some progress on empowering women, but didn't finish the job of shattering the yolk of stereotypical roles entirely to reshape the social contract for equality, inclusion, and freedom from old stereotypes. Echos of those old stereotypes, and new flawed ones, can be seen as the basis of the roles explored through exaggerated fiction even if it's erotic in nature.

IAmBroom 1y ago
OK, I'll bite. "Porn is... a symptom of the larger issues." Since male monkeys in the lab will willingly trade food for monkey porn, I think you have a pretty high hurdle to prove that societal issues cause porn. Also, you continue the article's unproven premise that "porn is bad". That's an opinion. And objectively, what few factual studies I've seen tends the other direction: ready access to porn correlates with lower sexual violence in countries.

amelius 1y ago

[flagged]

almosthere 1y ago
Feel free to create a different post ... Shrug

sepositus 1y ago

I've been helping young men escape the clutches of porn for over a decade now (leading what you might call recovery groups). Never once have I found a single story that ended well (but that's more or less expected given the groups I run). It all starts with an introduction to porn and ends with an addiction that seems to slowly transforms their brains in unpleasant ways, objectification of women being the primary one. One of the best tools that I continue to employ is deprogramming that objectification. Helping them to see the humanity and personhood of women again. It's incredible how most porn can turn from enticing to absolutely repulsive once you adopt this mindset.

enceladus06 1y ago
Why is porn such a big deal? I've seen it, but the real thing is much better. How is it even possible to get addicted that just seems weird.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  Everyone’s brain is built different. Some have more executive function and control then others. Alcoholics, drug or food addiction, gambling, etc. Reward centers are tricky.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Magma7404 1y ago
  > the real thing is much better (I'm not judging you but) It's easy for you to say when you have the real thing. And that's why our societies have failed for a lot of people, and why we now must handle porn the same way we are handling drug problems. For the GP: "escape the clutches of porn" when it's the only alternative to suicide due to lack of social contact? You end up with incels who would do anything to have a way to be a part of society, and most of the time it's in a bad way. Been there done that, our society has changed in the wrong way and I don't think we're blaming the right guys. "Helping them to see the humanity and personhood of women again" is misled. The issue is that some people have no human contact with men or women at all. No male parental figure which is more important and impacting than the contact with the other sex, even in a social context. Focusing on porn and women is useless in that context (since I suspect OP is talking about, well, porn and incels and the whole bro thing).

replwoacause 1y ago

I recognized its pernicious effects on me and gave it up after getting married and before having a kid. This was after being exposed to it for decades from a young age through unrestricted access to the internet. I think that’s an all too common story. It’s crazy how normalized it becomes once it worms its way into your life, but having been off of it for some time now, I see clearly what a terrible influence it was on me. It’s also made me aware of the extreme perversions and predatory behaviors out in the world which I’ll use as context to make sure my kids never fall victim to.

k__ 1y ago
"I recognized its pernicious effects on me" What effects did it have on you? "made me aware of the extreme perversions" Such as?
- maroonblazer 1y ago
  Not the parent, but for me, porn served as a kind of supernormal stimulus. It became difficult to become aroused with my partner when I had a practically infinite variety of virtual women to choose from, doing an infinite variety of things. Quitting porn was one of the best things I did for my sex life.
  - bradlys 1y ago
    I hear about this sometimes and I just wonder if the post-nut clarity makes you recoil. If I was finding my partner less attractive to the point of finding it challenging to become aroused around them, it certainly has more to do with them than it does with whatever I am watching. I’ve never experienced this even in the slightest and I’ve definitely had moments where I was unattractive to my partner and not having sex with them and substituting with porn. It was cause they were being a jerk and I didn’t wanna fuck them. Shocker.
    - maroonblazer 1y ago
      It makes me recoil that I replaced my partner with simulacrum of her. I've been in situations like the one you describe but this was not that. It's not about attractiveness. A good analogy is that you can sate your sweet tooth by eating certain fruits. But if you start binging candy bars and ice cream, suddenly that pineapple you used to love no longer does the job.

nerdjon 1y ago

I should be very clear here that I am a gay man, so I don't really have exposure to much of what is talked about here even if I have heard about it. What I find interesting is that it seems to equate critiquing porn with critiquing the treatment of the people in porn. Those are 2 very distinct things, you can have issues with treatment within the industry without going down a prudish anti-porn route. Personally I feel like much of the issues with Porn, particularly in the US, stem from being uncomfortable talking about sex. Instead of feeling like we need to hide and be ashamed that we watch porn, it should be talked about so from a younger age we know its fantasy. We know that these positions, angles, noises, the perfection, isn't normal. Sex is messy. This shame about sex, our bodies, leads to many of these problems with how we view porn. I strongly believe that there is nothing wrong with consuming porn, casually, with your partner(s), regularly, whatever. It is just another way to explore your sexuality and we should not demonize that. We should however address the problems with the industry, but without demonizing its existence.

RHSeeger 1y ago
Your thoughts along this topic run similar to mine. I would extend it a bit to say that a lot of the problems in the industry, and how it treats people, are a direct result of the fact that it's considered shameful by a lot of society.
- nerdjon 1y ago
  Yes, 100%. Made worse by maybe afraid to speak up because of how might be judged ("Oh this person was asking for it because they do porn"). Feeling like you have no power. It is for sure a complicated issue and societal norms and expectations play into that.
thraway79879s8d 1y ago
The issues at play are really fundamentally about heterosexuality. The gay male money-free casual sex market "clears" --- grindr does in fact work. The (unpaid) heterosexual casual sex market will never clear regardless of app design, there are simply not even women interested in not enough casual sex for it to be any other way. Whether its 2024 voters freaking about inflation (despite it being lower than in other countries), or the rise of the manosphere since hetero dating apps, Americans in particular are very consumer oriented society that freaks out when consumption desires get impeded. Somewhere, between many culture forces (porn, 1990s-2010s sex positivity, hookup culture discourse divorced from reality, hip hop lyrics (?!) the end of the Hayes code (?!), straight men's "needs rising in the hierarchy" rose to include much more casual sex than previous generations aspired to....and now the cat is out of the bag. A lot of the discourse around this reminds me of say, gentrification discourse. There is a wish that the demand would just go away, that we could rewind the clock to when straight men were less horny, or fewer wealthy professionals wanted to live in the urban core. Neverminding that the former is a lot more sympathetic a goal than the latter, it feels like pipe dreaming divorced from actual tactical thinking about the size of the problem and therefore what remedies are actually sufficient. Actually rewinding the clock is, at least, really hard. Capitalism has been invading the domestic sphere for decades. It's the same process as, say, less home-cooking and more takeout or restaurant trips too. (And in that case, freeing women from the kitchen is unambiguously good!) In the housing case, the moral and correct answer is "just build more dense housing" --- allow supply to meet demand. In the straight casual sex case, the analogous answer is "just legalize prostitution", but the morality is admittedly less clear cut. Personally, I think we should try it, as all the other answers seem deeply seriousness given the scale of the problem. Better to do something that might actual work, then half-ass things that will certainly fail while the problem gets worse.

mystraline 1y ago

The article claims porn, and sure, that's a part. The bigger issue here is outmoded predominant protestant christian views of 'morality'. And that percolates all through the rest of USA culture, including into advertisements and commercialism. Their view of sex is as a sin, so its shamed, hidden, and secretly desired. All these things have popped up with all these pretty terrible results. Sexuality is 'tittalting' so it helps sell. Those interactions aren't genuine, but transactional. Transactions themselves aren't the problem, but when people crave genuine sexuality and get faced with '$5 for next hour of OF', yeah. Takes advantage of people. Advertisements also been going on for a while, always pushing harder to see what sells but still legal and norm enough. Like the hot rod magazines - does anybody really think if they buy a red mustang, they'll also get the 44dd blone bimbo? And really, everybody should at least try a sex party (Bacchanal) once. Have to do some std checks ahead of time, but its just so liberating and freeing for everyone. It gets money, possessiveness, prudishness, and all those distorting things out of the way. And puts sex into perspective. And well, its fun.

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blueprint 1y ago
yeah "possessiveness" has absolutely no basis in anything reasonable, let's villainize it too while we're pretending not to alienate anything about ourselves lol
- mystraline 1y ago
  I should have expected that my general attack on protestant Christianity's views on sex would get a sarcastic response. And no, possessiveness in regards to other humans is honestly really bad. It may every so often feel good for a moment, in a 'they want me' sort of feel. But that has a really bad tendency to go off the rails and turn violent quickly. There's ways to do sexuality and relationships healthy. Possessiveness, jealousy, shame, and other similar emotions aren't healthy for anyone involved.
  - 1y ago

backtoyoujim 1y ago

It seems to have made sex scenes in movies seem even dumber and for that i am grateful.

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tayo42 1y ago

The claims about the 2000s is not really how I remember it. What exactly changed in the 2000s. I was a teen male on the internet then, i feel like I would be clued in a little... Hasn't American society been hating women since its inception? For a majority of its history they couldn't vote. My not researched take and intuition is if you feel like the world is regressing on treating women well, its because of religion. Like abortion rights being taken back is a religious thing. Ireland did something similar, is Irish culture overly affected by porn too?

palata 1y ago

I am not sure I get it. It starts with this: > One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people. So before porn in the 2000s, women, immigrants, gay and trans people were all respected in the human history? Is that the point the author is trying to make? I mean, "black lives matter", "me too", and generally the wokisme came after that, right? I am not defending porn, just trying to find where the causation is. What if I said "the world we live in has been molded by the violent video games from the 2000s ("obviously"), and probably that is the reason why we started having wars after 2000"? Wouldn't someone be quick to tell me that we had wars long before the 2000s? Like this, I wouldn't immediately think that women's rights have become worse after the 2000s in general. I don't need to go back very far to find the time where women were not even allowed to vote.

whatnow37373 1y ago

Not buying it. She just states “porn shaped society” without anything to prove it. Seems absurd to me on the face of it. Are men objectifying women? Yes. Have they done this since the dawn of mankind? Yes. I could easily claim the reverse. Society shapes porn. It’s a reflection, not the other way around.

loeg 1y ago
Presumably to be explored further in her unreleased book. But yeah, certainly this interview is not interesting on its own.
- cantrecallmypwd 1y ago
  Half of headlines trad media and social media these days tend to conceal promotion of books, other merch, harebrained utopian ideology, and/or self. "Abundance" "Network States" MrBeast half of NYC and whomever this author is
-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
I think "society shapes porn" was totally true up until the point where it no longer was. Porn shapes society the exact moment when the majority of young people get the majority of their beliefs and views on sexuality, romance, relationships, gender roles, sensuality, etc, from porn. This isn't true of all groups of humans everywhere, but it's definitely true of many societies right now already, and I would say obviously so. None of this is meant as a "moral panic" type point. I'm just saying, there's no point hiding from the reality that young people get their views on sex from online porn, and that has major effects on them and the whole of society.
- Jensson 1y ago
  There is so much porn that people watch what they want to watch rather than what they are fed, whatever you want to find you can find. So the only way it shapes society is that now people are aware of everything you can do in sex and what their preferences are, it doesn't create those preferences it just makes them known.

thraway79879s8d 1y ago

It would probably be way healthier to ban porn and legalize prostitution, than ban prostitution and legalize porn. Much harder to get into the dehumanization mindset trap in person. The interview repeats the common aphorism "sex sells", but it should follow it up "sex sells other things". Sublimated desires into other categories this way doesn't seem good either.

loeg 1y ago
> Much harder to get into the dehumanization mindset trap in person. What are you talking about? Sex workers are routinely beaten / degraded / killed at higher rates than other people.
- thraway79879s8d 1y ago
  That's bad reasoning - Sex work is much more dangerous because it is illegal - Legal sex work could lead to increased trafficking when there is so much unmet demand for legal immigration, but abundant legal immigration would solve that - The people currently seeking out illegal sex work, or seeking it out in countries were there is more violence against women in general, are probably much more prone to violence. Increasing the size of the industry would result in a "regression to the mean" among johns The porn problem is a bunch of people subtlety rewire their libidos in anti-social ways over time. That is involving orders of magnitudes more people than those that currently beat sex workers, and men and women alike (as the interview makes clear). A good legal prostitution system would have be: 1. Still quite expensive 2. No "pimps" or anything of that nature 3. Sex workers higher their own private security, run their own brothels, little reliance on police (who are likely to continue to be misogynist fucks regardless of how the law changes) Basically poorer men, instead of going to cheaper brothels where the workers are treated worse, would have to "save up" for fewer trips to still-expensive establishments where 2 and 3 are still abundantly true. High American equality does also make this a challenge, for sure.
  - thraway79879s8d 1y ago
    * High American [economic] inequality

standardUser 1y ago

This reads like a discussion form the 90's when the porn industry, and most media, were tightly controlled by small number of dominant players that set the norms (whether we liked it or not). I know a lot of people who have created porn in the 2010's and onward and none of them have any connection whatsoever to that porn industry of yesteryear. This feels like a strained attempt to stain the independent porn of today with the worst aspects of studio porn.

loeg 1y ago
Not advocating for the article/interview in any way, but: if anything, I think the porn industry is more consolidated today than it was in the 90s? MindGeek owns all of the brands.
- standardUser 1y ago
  I don't see how it matters what one company owns or doesn't. When dozens of studios ran everything, it didn't matter than there were dozens of them or just one since they all set similarly stifling requirements. What matters is autonomy and creative freedom, of which there is now dramatically more than ever before both in porn and across all media.
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  MindGeek are Aylo now. They own a large share of studio porn. But OnlyFans increased independent production.
hdjjhhvvhga 1y ago
That was my first thought: any woman can easily get into any level of "production" now and get direct profit from it, and also leave it without much stigma, sharing the same platform with non-nude celebrities. She can also control the amount of experience that is delivered to the "fans". It's incomparable with the situation from the 80s/90s.

loeg 1y ago

Right out of the gate the interview has a pretty extreme claim -- that porn is somehow responsible for societal cruelty, not just towards women, but towards a rainbow coalition of progressive causes. No explanation or justification is given; it's just a sound bite. Is the rest of this worth reading? Edit: I ended up reading the rest of it, and... there's just nothing there? If you're interested in a short interview with Sophie Gilbert, maybe this is appealing, but if you've never heard of her, I don't see the draw.

Noumenon72 1y ago

> One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people... And my theory for why it’s happening is that certain kinds of porn have inured so many people to cruelty. Besides being a complete stretch, has anyone even showed that men generally watch porn with cruelty? It's never on the front page, and it's kind of aberrant when hyper-enthusiastic "partners" are on offer.

ta12653421 1y ago
no link/source here, but IIRC the most selected content by female users of PornHub is "FemDom", if i remember this correctly does this somehow relate to your idea?
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  Lesbian was the Pornhub category most viewed by women in 2024. Female domination was none of the top 15.[1] [1] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review#gender-demographics https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review#gender-...
  - mvdtnz 1y ago
    I'm not sure I trust this analysis, at least the gender breakdown. They don't say how they determine if a viewer is male or female, but they make the claim that 38% of viewers are female, and well over half in some markets - this just doesn't seem credible to me.
hdjjhhvvhga 1y ago
I believe it's the core of the argument of the author: she wants to link porn to cruelty at several places without offering any argument in favor of it. Paradoxically, I could offer a starkly different argument - it is women who prefer BSDM if you look at the sales numbers of certain books.

vjulian 1y ago

Yet another crappy article about sex from an otherwise respectable publication. Why does this keep happening? The article assumes a negative definition of “porn” without ever seriously examining it. As usual, sexual depiction is assumed as inherently harmful, isolating, or degrading without any good argument as to why. Then, it makes a leap implying that the rise of pornography explains social problems like loneliness or political alienation. Also, American discomfort with public sexual expression is not intrinsic or universal reality. What distinguishes porn from other depictions of sex? Could it be that porn and social atomization are symptoms of deeper technological or cultural trends, rather than assuming one causes the other?

DangitBobby 1y ago
> Why does this keep happening? There is a Sophie Gilbert who writes for The Atlantic, so maybe that's how this article came to be. I haven't been able to determine if it's the same person or a coincidence.
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  It's the same person. The writer called her my colleague and linked a recent article.

hdjjhhvvhga 1y ago

This interview makes no sense. Maybe she actually had some arguments in her book but she didn't express them in this article. Paradoxically, I'd have a more sound argument if I wanted to argue for the opposite (or, more precisely, the disappearance of sexual intercourse form Hollywood moves - it was omnipresent in the 80s and even 90s).

alganet 1y ago

How many incidents involving sex affected the american perception on its institutions? Of course, declaring that in an interview would be impossible. However, it is obvious. Anyone should be able to make that connection. Is porn to blame? If it is, then any other kind of sexualization platform also is (you can think of it, I don't need to name it). It's hard to trace a line that doesn't leave you in a place of hypocrisy. American culture adopted porn as a word, outside its original realm. The expression "action porn", for example, puts the practice into a everyday word, normalizing it. This kind of expression has gone through many entertainment industries and iterations. The combination of sexual repression and porn is dangerous, the dangerous part being the sexual repression. That repression has also became part of the american culture, and in much higher doses than porn.

incomingpain 1y ago

It's relatively trivial to avoid porn IRL. I legit dont even know if they have magazines anymore. It's perhaps less difficult online, but still easy to avoid. So how exactly can it mold the world? Providing 3 examples of things you actively have to seek online; admittedly i dont know instragram but given they have to then redirect you to onlyfans is just yet another hoop to jump through? Not many are actually doing this. >mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people. Then this absurd jump to this? Porn that's not particularly available is somehow impacting immigrant men? This article is really about politics; but they put a sock puppet in front with unbacked up ideas they just leap over.