hot take about things 

feminism had good ideas which got invalidated by other societal and technical developments (like many other movements).

take "let's protect sex workers!" for example. probably a great idea, protecting the weak is what a society is about. only now it's a flood of barely legals (of any gender..) who should really do different things than shoving big objects into every orifice of their body, streaming live to a smartphone in your vicinity, for validation and tOkEnZ.
instead of saying "hey, great that you explore your sexuality in this way!11" we should put a fucking stop to this stuff. i'm 100% sure it would be better for everyone. it's not about "exploring sexuality" or "rights of sex workers" _at all_. the hippies did explore their sexuality and often noticed that it's probably not about quantity in the end. the difference was that there was nothing to gain but the experience (maybe it's an interesting parallel that todays drugs of choice are downers/uppers, not psychedelics). now we have silicon valley big tech making money off the insecurities of young people. if anything it is anti-emancipatory to encourage the selling out of ones sexuality on livestream.

hot take about things 

@bonifartius so you would punish those who do so?

hot take about things 

@retroartdt

assuming you mean the live streamers:

no i wouldn't punish anyone who livestreams shoving things into openings, why would punish the victim?

i know that it's not a popular take, but i think that's what the overwhelming majority of the "amateurs" are. we got to the point that they think it's more lucrative for them to sell a livestream of themselves than doing something which doesn't cater to primal insticts. all while making big tech richer. this says a lot about the world we live in.

you know, it wouldn't be that hard to just make a law to outlaw these ultra-monetized amateur pr0n platforms and have any company running a video platform implementing strict rules and age verifications.

kids shouldn't send videos of themselves to anywhere. out of the same reasoning there are laws why they don't get to watch certain movies or buy booze.

@bonifartius @retroartdt some of these "victims" do make very large amounts of money. one woman bought her own house. i don't know how representative that is
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@velartrill

well, judging by purely materialist standards that's not being a victim, sure. i naively assumed that that's not the only thing people care about :)

@retroartdt

@bonifartius @retroartdt i get the impression you think camwhoring is motivated primarily by economic incentives. i don't doubt there's a very real group of women that that describes, i've known a few, but a huge proportion of e.g. onlyfans "content creators" are financially secure women who really are just doing this because they love the male attention, and many would probably still be engaging in similar behaviors if it wasn't so profitable. (certainly many women were happy enough to post nudes on tumblr completely gratis back when that was allowed, i, may or may not be speaking from firsthand experience here >_<). i've even heard of middle-class couples breaking up because the girl wanted to whore herself out on onlyfans (to "supplement her income," when money is mentioned at all) and got mad when her boyfriend wasn't okay with it.

my read of the field (which could be out of date) is that survival sex work mostly happens offline and is invisible to ordinary people. online sex "work" is mostly a bougie affectation, a safe and sanitized version of the real thing that poor women and children get financially forced or enslaved into, and which pays much better. this stems i think from both a cultural and practical gap. a homeless junkie is not going to get the kind of online attention that a girl with a swanky apartment, porn acting coach, and AV crew is. also ime (in the US at least) "the street" is almost completely divorced from the online world, most of those people, while they probably have smartphones (if they're not literally enslaved), are unlikely to have even heard of onlyfans and would probably be unlikely to consider it as an option, for the same reason they don't generally go around creating patreons and gofundmes (tho i have seen the latter happen once or twice).

@velartrill

my issue is more with the normalization of it as means to make money. we're on our way raising a generation of people thinking it's perfectly normal to make money this way. if you wan't to post nudes on the net, be my guest, it can go as "experimentation". taking money for it is IMO a completely different thing, ethically and (from my armchair) psychologically. i think this shows in your anecdote of the couple breaking up over it.

i agree that it's seperate from street prostitution.

@retroartdt

@bonifartius @retroartdt it definitely should not be allowed to become an "acceptable" way to make money

especially since from what i read that was the cultural crutch german courts are leaning on to keep the welfare system from being exploited to force poor women into prostitution…

@velartrill
the idea behind the german legalization was that it's not going away anyway, so at least let the women have the same benefits (social insurance stuff). i can follow the reasoning, but it was made for another time.

@retroartdt

@velartrill
i have the feeling that the last sentence was b0rken english :)

@retroartdt

@velartrill
sometimes i have this weird feeling that the languages are thoroughly mixed up in my brain and that something i wrote/said is completely wrong :D

@retroartdt

@bonifartius @retroartdt the nice thing about english being a germanic language is more than a few of the low-level idioms transfer over perfectly
@velartrill @bonifartius @retroartdt wELL AKSCHUAlly both Wenglish and Germond are Swedic linguans
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