The pendulum has clearly started to swing back to sexual repression. Society has started to see sexual freedom and expression as grotesque. Now the only question is how far it'll swing.
I think it’s more likely that hosting sexual content involves having to deal with loads of abusive material which is hard to detect and process, and which requires great haste in dealing with.
It’s hard to have an army of dirt cheap outsourced moderators sort out regular porn from revenge porn.
If you take too long dealing with regular spam, not much happens. If you take too long dealing with this kind of content, you get cut off from payment providers and advertising.
Props to you for looking into more ethical means of consumption. It's a real tragedy that the taboo around sex prevents more meaningful discussions in public live about this stuff.
Personally I got so sick of it all that I have up pornography completely about 4 years ago. I'm not saying everyone else should follow suit but I count it as the single best thing I ever did for myself, my mental health and my real life relationships.
living in a midsize French city, this has not at all been my experience. Could be due to sampling bias (I'm basing this off of people I know, who are probably not representative of the population as a whole), but most people here seem pretty open sexually.
You can assume that any comment on internet culture is from an American point of view. As a European, I only find a percent of a percent that resonates with my offline world - although the dominance of American internet companies still enforces their culture online.
I would say it's more male sexuality (primarily hetero) and female sexuality that is seen as threatening and uncontrolled that is categorized as grotesque. Things like OnlyFans has never been more normal.
There's plenty of sexual progression online. Imgur's decision has little to do with society as a whole. It's one company wanting to get off the porn train so they look better to potential buyers.
We really ought to update Napoleon’s quote about malice and stupidity to something like “never attribute to moral preening that which can be explained by financial incentives”
But the people I know are more sexually free than ever. This seems more about repression and Puritanism in government and investors that doesn’t match the populace.
I think we live in an increasingly neo-victorian age. It's not just sex. It has become toxic to express a wide range of opinions. For example, the systematic deplatforming of conservatives. (I am a liberal, and my need to state that to be taken seriously is further evidence of all this.)
Agreed. I can also agree to some degree to couple other comments that people are more sexually open than ever, but the "accepted" modes and diversity of thoughts and opinions are reducing quite uncomfortably fast.
People aren't systematically deplatforming conservatives. People are systematically deplatforming hate. That that happens to affect one political party more than others is a condemnation of that party, not of the practice of deplatforming hate.
Post all the conservative political opinions you want. As long as you stay away from posting hate, personal attacks, and similar, you're not going to lose your Twitter account
Is this a satirical comment? One of the big issues is how incredibly loosely defined 'hate' has come to be by a significant number of people. This is not without precedent in other areas, look at the differences in what is considered obscene in say, Sweden, vs the US to see how loosely defined such concepts can be and how dangerous it is to say things like 'as long as you stay away from [loosely defined and extremely political topic] you'll be fine'.
It's weird how people will sea lion about how "conservative views are being deplatformed" while refusing to admit that the "conservative views" that are in question are their beliefs that entire groups of human beings shouldn't exist.
Exactly. Conservative opinions like "unions aren't an unmitigated good" or "people should have more of their money to spend as they see fit rather than paying it in taxes" or "governmental options are less efficient than private alternatives" are perfectly reasonable things to argue about and evaluate. I genuinely think it's a shame that positions like those that would make for interesting discussions and considerations are being drowned out by people whose identity revolves around attacking others.
Some things are objectively hateful. "This class of people should not have rights" is objectively hateful. "This class of people is subhuman and we'd be better off if they died" is objectively hateful. "This event that killed dozens of people was good, actually" is objectively hateful. If we can't agree on things like those then we have no common ground. If we can agree on those then it's just a question of where the line is, rather than whether a line exists.
Just because it isn't a perfectly bright dividing line doesn't mean it's entirely subjective. It is also to the benefit of a side regularly spewing hate to also argue that it's subjective.
(And to be clear, none of those things short of imminent threats should ever be considered punishable by a government; that has far more negative outcomes than positive ones. But they absolutely should have consequences by individuals and groups who choose not to associate with such things.)
Despite the fact that the Victorian era was quite conservative? So your point doesn't make a lot of sense to me. We're moving to a neo-victorian(more conservative/prude) era that is also shutting down Conservative speech?
Yes, it has absolutely nothing to do with the exact ideology and everything to do with a narrowing of what is publicly acceptable. For an example, compare any hollywood comedy from 10 years ago to one from today. So it's neo-victorian in the sense that we have become quite prudish about what we allow in public, but nothing to do with exactly what we allow, which of course, would have made the actual Victorians blush.
Personally, I think it’s fine for people whose only goal is to be assholes to others or to spread disinformation to be deplatformed by private services. If that happens to primarily center around conservatives, then that sounds like conservatives should do some soul searching.
