alt Hacker NewsBringing Sexy Back. Internet surveillance has killed eroticism
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> “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.
The main part I object to in this essay is the ideological carveout. The author is seemingly willing to defend the #MeToo movement because it was in the service of a mission "to end a long-standing and long-permitted norm of sexual abuse within institutions", and "cancel culture" (I'm also putting it in quotes as I agree it's a very loaded term) because the backlash to it was helpful to the right and detrimental to the left. If you agree with the reasoning, then, all of the behavior being criticized is okay? In that case I don't see how or why anyone would ever change their behavior. The author's friend who wanted her to apologize to the hairdressers probably has a strong belief that being sexualized at work is a serious problem faced by women. From the right, many Christians strongly believe that criticizing behaviors like premarital sex is part of the social immune system that keeps family and community bonds strong.
I think there's a meaningful difference between being a genuine liberal who wants to change how American society thinks about sex, and being a partisan who wants to use puritan callouts as a cudgel on your enemies while ensuring that your own behavior is never subject to criticism. The essay displays an awareness of the tension, but decisively chooses the partisan path.
> She demanded that I apologize to the women
This is antisocial advice. It's beyond inappropriate to use the pretense of apology to announce your intimate fantasies to strangers.
Whatever the direct cause, as an older person who grew up Catholic, quite literally the most surprising thing in life for me to discover: Sexual repression emphatically cannot be strongly blamed on religion.
And I'm not mentioning this to defend religion necessarily, I'm just surprised and almost "impressed" at how, in the absence of religious sexual repression, young people and the internet invented a whole new way of doing it.
The word "eroticism" in this article is quite misplaced. A fleeting sexual thought about a stranger who happens to be providing a service to you in that moment (hair brushing, apparently) has nothing to do with eroticism, precisely because it's not "sexualizing" in any real-world sense. Incidentally, eroticism properly understood (i.e. turning actual consensual love, intimacy and perhaps even sexuality itself into a genuine, positive and human-affirming artform) is also quite dead, but not for any reasons this article is talking about. It's just getting caught in a cross-fire between the most disrespectful and lewdest sort of commercial hardcore pr0n and a kind of renewed, reactive prudery from governments and policy-makers.
Sounds to me more like the author has weird friends and never had a stable relationship in her life. Relationship sharing is awesome if you have a stable relationship. And people usually don't talk about their kinks in this weird fashion.
In fact, I think the Internet has increased eroticism manyfold. Look at porn apps, games and websites. People are more open about their sexuality than ever, but anonymously.
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.
By the way, the author of the article is also the writer of the McMansion Hell blog.
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.
> I told my friend about an erotic encounter I’d just experienced and very much delighted in, in which I had my hair brushed at the same time by two very beautiful women at the hair salon — one was teaching the other how to do it a certain way. When I finished my story, my friend looked at me, horrified.
I would look at her in horror too. My aversion to touching, being touched by, or even being in a close space with other people comes from exactly this sort of worry, that my presence is being used for some sort of sexual experience unbeknownst to me.
Some lines from the article gave me the ick.
> It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us.
I don't need to be told to free my mind just because I don't conform to your gooner sh*t.
> Only when we are unafraid can we begin to let desire flourish.
Oh okay, if I disagree with the author then I am just ~afraid~
It really seems to me that the author is internally dealing with sexual feelings and rationalizing them as social commentary, transforming her views into a critique of society and cancel culture, while simultaneously backing out and promising that MeToo was valid and that she was definitely not trying to say that MeToo was an overreaction (nice save author!)
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?
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.
It never left, but payment processors should stop trying to ban it already...
An absurd piece, by a way too online person who seemingly realized they are way too online and thinks everyone else suffers from their affliction.
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.
So, I hate to be the guy, but Wagner does specifically try to divorce MeToo from this, but it does seem a rather direct line from MeToo to the thing she complains of, no? Just because MeToo may have been with pure and correct intentions, people often take away different things from social movements.
Puritanism has long been embedded in American society. I live in Singapore now, and people abroad seem to think that sexual openness is sort of an American thing compared to both the trad chinese as well as muslim malay cultures here. But, the reality that I think even a lot of Americans don't realise is that hollywood and openness around sex is fundamentally a reaction to american puritanism which was always a foundation part of America's DNA. Hell, the 60's counterculture was specifically a reaction against WASP conservatism which has roots in puritanism. My opinion honestly is once you understand that fact, a lot of things about American culture make a lot more sense. For example, while MeToo arose to address real harms and exploitation, a lot of Americans reached for the tools they knew best from their puritan roots: a new set of morals to measure others against by and public shaming. Ever escalating morality precepts to follow (lack of consent in actual sex somehow being a precursor to the episode in the article, some fleeting and private sexual stimuli being seen as a violation). This sort of pattern that grasps onto the old puritan culture seems to feed a lot of how American cultural trends evolve. See anti-racism as another example: open bigotry is the precursor to only certain races can cook certain foods, and so on.
My point is Americans unfortunately did not learn the underlying lesson about consent that Wagner perhaps wanted out of MeToo, but they did find a new set of puritan morals and a new culture of shaming to enact on others for social capital. I feel like once you sort of believe this idea of the puritanism germ, a lot of what happens to these movements for real change make a lot of sense. It also explains why a lot of movements or reactions against puritanism might change their target (not god or religion) but reproduce the methods and culture of puritanism.
And saying all this, I'm not sure it was avoidable. I am also NOT saying this is MeToo's fault or that MeToo shouldn't have happened, of course not. But, MeToo was the initiation for this. What Wagner describes is clearly an intensification and a fundamentalist form of the consent discourse that underpinned the discussions back in 2015 or whatever. I don't really like the unwillingness to engage with that fact.
That certainly isn’t my experience, and the example she gives imo says more about her neurotic friends than society.
> 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
Well, maybe it should be. I'm a progressive but I'm tired of people trying to ruin my life over nothing, just as the author is.
I'm am against the far right, and as a result I feel we should not give the far right ammunition. A lot of people voted for DT because they saw him as the lesser a-hole, and the left badly needs to acknowledge that.
I'm a bit "past my prime," so sexy don't have the same appeal to me, as it once did.
But this phrase caught my attention:
> ...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...
Really, despite the topic, I feel that this is what she's really talking about, and it applies to a lot more than just sex.
It isn't a "woke" thing (although that's a good demonstration of it). People on the right, do exactly the same thing, with stuff they don't want to hear.
These days, people automatically choose the most offensive, least charitable, brutish, interpretation of the things we say and do.
Lost, are the "cut them slack" days.
I have a friend who is occasionally, casually racist. It isn't an angry "I'm better than them" type. He's just ignorant of folks that aren't white and relatively privileged, and tends to speak without a filter.
Otherwise, he's a pretty amazing guy. He's a deacon at his church, does food drives and coat drives, donates fully-cooked meals to the local homeless shelter (He's a chef), etc. Really decent chap.
But he'll sometimes come out with a "WTF?" zinger, from time to time. Sometimes, I kindly set him straight, and sometimes, just ignore it, and don't feed the troll.
He really doesn't mean badly, but he's coming from a place of bluntness. I appreciate his ignorant bluntness, a lot more than the cultured insults of folks that seem, on the surface, to be more "worldly," but are, inside, actually nasty bigots.
I have come to really enjoy folks, in all their glory; warts and all. If I allow myself to let some of their downsides, wipe out their upsides, I'm the biggest loser.
This is really a long conversation. Sometimes, ignoring bad stuff, is bad, in itself, so we need to figure out how to "draw the line." It's a continuum, not a binary thing.
Once our ai overlords take their rightful place there will be no more such problems in the world, we will be paired with our mates without fear of reprobation
> It is seen as more and more normal to track one’s partner through Find My iPhone or an AirTag, even though the potential for abuse of this technology is staggering and obvious. There are all kinds of new products, such as a biometric ring that is allegedly able to tell you whether your partner is cheating, that expand this capability into more and more granular settings.
These criticisms seem to be more a reflection of the author's paranoia and sex-obsession than legitimate criticisms of the tools and technologies.
IMO, location sharing is pretty awesome among loved ones, and biometrics can help us manage our health? But I guess everything has to be about "sexual surveillance"...
The opening anecdote was interesting. The author’s overall point seemed to be that eroticism loses out when privacy is lost. Yet they were upset that when they shared their erotic experience with a friend, that friend didn’t find it erotic and instead found it exploitative.
The friend had a point - there’s no particular reason to share our kinks with the masses and expect agreement. It’s totally fine for some people to have issues with others being sexualized at work. Those people deserve respect too.
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.
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.
More than halfway through the article: "I remember very viscerally when I’d just come out of the closet as bisexual in 2016." The article looks too much like someone projecting their own problems on society generally.
> [..] 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...
> A Socialist Feminist Mag For The Masses
Good fucking grief, what has HN become?
The state we're in is the logical consequence of the Hollywood narrative where sexy is tabu but violence is ok. It has been pushing this narrative upon the rest of the Western world for decades.
I hope the downfall of the US in the recent Trump years will help to soften this influence in the future but I doubt this will work out fast. We'll have to face the right wing / christian madness first.
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TLDR: Concern trolls are some of the worst people on Earth.
Or should I find my 9th grade algebra teacher (wherever she may be now), and on whom I had a raging crush deep in the throes of puberty, in order to apologize for all the boners I got in her class? I got an A in that class and all math classes I took going forward. But at what price?
How DARE I pleasantly associate mathematics with that long ago raging crush sometimes?
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Has it? Really? I'm pretty sure culture in the US has become significantly more overtly erotic over the past 30 years...
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.