I think its not right to think of the OF type of person a traditional sex worker. Online sex work used to be the domain of women in failed states, who had no other options for work. But OF and the growing acceptance from the sex positivity crowd has attracted women that leave respectable corporate jobs or school to pursue this line of work. I listened to a lot of them on the Whatever podcast, and it strikes me if OF didn't exist, they would likely be working in HR or communications department in some large organization. They'd probably be getting paid less short term but long term I think it would be a lot better for them in terms of career trajectory, personal satisfaction, finding a partner, etc.
Technology could have brought down labor when it comes to education and health care. Yet these keep growing in price and administrators are added. So maybe in the future we're all just doing admin jobs
Education and health care require people, and technology has continually failed at replacing people in those sectors. If tech could replace labor in education, we would have seen it during covid. Technology also still can't pull out stitches or change a bedpan.
To be honest I've seen more than one man fall down the onlyfans rabbit hole. There's a lot of lonely men out there that are being taken advantage of and if AI can help them stop getting emotionally swindled then all the more power to AI. Of course, ideally, these men should improve themselves by making more money, growing taller at the gym and getting a new jawline but for some its not an option especially since dating nowadays is more of a competition than a means to understand one another.
It seems unlikely that AI will prevent lonely men from being swindled, and instead that it will simply be AI doing the swindling rather than real women.
Seems a much better approach is to advocate for men exercising their agency and building relationships. I don’t see how dating is more a competition today than it has been historically?
If someone thinks it's a swindle when a woman charges for access to a real person but freedom when a tech company charges for access to a bot, they're really in a competition to see who can avoid giving in to the industry that profits from putting people into that mindset.
I've never used Onlyfans but it seems to me the issue is parasocial relationships can be unhealthy, but I don't see why Onlyfans would be worse than obsessing over a Twitch streamer, talk show host, politician, or twitter obsessed billionaire.
It isn't, there's just a lot people out there who don't like women, don't like women with power, don't like women with power over men, don't like women using their sexuality to get power/money, and really don't like women using their sexuality to get power/money from men. So they invent a lot of reasons that porn is bad and unethical, the latest one is using the phrase "parasocial" to imply that any man who pays a woman online for sexual content is being exploited or manipulated in some way, as if every man has a gambling addict between his legs that cannot be trusted. It's ridiculous and motivated entirely by sexism masquerading as puritanicalism.
I think many men don't even try or they restrict themselves to online dating. There are a lot of women looking for partners, regardless of your jawline.
Especially if you have a high level of education there seem to be a lot more women than men and intelligence equally inhibits many of them to find fitting dates. Sure, if you do online dating, better have a good resumé and some good photos.
We let people buy cigarettes, alcohol, etc. Should we not let them buy this dopamine hit also?
The reality of the situation is that the dating marketplace is wildly dysfunctional now [1] [2] [3], and with women empowered and educated, they don't date down like men do [4] (women want high status, high earning men, men want younger, attractive women who can provide kids, very broadly speaking; there are only so many high status, high earning men). So, you have an entire cohort of men, through no fault of their own, who don't want to compete in a Sisyphean effort to attract a potential partner because the odds are very high they will not meet a potentially unrealistic bar [5] [6]. Shouldn't they at least get some enjoyment out of this existence if they weren't lucky to have been born a few decades earlier?
(TLDR: Macroeconomics and unrealistic expectations are causing a relationship market collapse, let people enjoy what they want vs screaming into the void about that which cannot be changed)
Some may draw the conclusion that women have an easier time dating. They do not. They are competing for what they believe are "more desirable" men. Everyone loses.
AI is dangerous here IMHO because it's going to disconnect people even more from the possibility of having a meaningful connection/relationship with another human.
People no longer like any kind of friction when it comes to interacting with other people.
> I guess that women just aren’t so interested in porn as they are in companionship
Depends how you define porn. For example smut books are very popular among women, I think they are even the primary market for them. It is not that they are not interested in porn, they are just looking for a different type.
Note as well in reports women report using the AI boyfriend for sex as well ("Both Valenciano and Ramos say sex with their AIs is the best they’ve ever had." from https://www.thecut.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-ch...). They seem to also use the AI for sexual gratification, but they might not look for the same visual aspect and more as you say the emotional aspect.
> People no longer like any kind of friction when it comes to interacting with other people.
This is the key. We're aiming to make our lives as convenient and frictionless as possible -- and this is monotonically increasing. Technology enables us to essentially be shut-ins, like the hikikomori.
This is a fragmentation/rending of the social fabric on a massive scale, and we're seeing it happen in real time.
Indeed, but you have no leverage to tell people to put work in to meaningful relationships vs social media and superficial signaling. There is no solution one individual can solve this with, and there is no leverage at scale to make people be better to each other in this regard. The system will eventually fail, you can only do what you can for yourself and those you love and care about.
People have to want to care and do better, you cannot make them (in this domain). Pick those you invest your time and emotional energy in wisely, that's all you can do.
There are things you can do. Usually given enough time you'll figure out what's going on and you'll adjust your expectations and manage to have mostly good interactions.
But who is adjusting their expectations? The data does not show women are and being willing to partner with men they don't currently believe to be suitable, and men adjusting their expectations is staying home, playing video games, and watching porn (which is entirely reasonable on their part, considering the landscape; if you can't win, why play?).
EDIT: @x86x87 We aren't disagreeing. The marketplace trajectory is already locked in due to the crystallization of ideas in this domain by market participants.
> It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
This fails one of my heuristics for valid statistics: things that don’t deserve to be exactly equal are exactly equal.
We're supposed to believe that the women can be partitioned into groups A (bottom 22%) and B (top 78%). (I'll assume that this is well defined for the sake of argument.) And this study showed that the bottom 80% of men are competing for group A and that group B is competing for the top 20% of men? That is, group B is competing for exactly the set of men that, themselves, arent' competing for group A? That's a remarkable claim!
Fully agree, this is unscientific nonsense trying to model an incredibly hard to model thing. People seem to just Google papers that support their worldview without even bothering to read them.
> While an extensive scientific literature now exists on the use of online dating services, there are very few studies on user satisfaction with dating apps and with the resulting offline dates. This study aimed to assess the level of satisfaction with Tinder use (STU) and the level of satisfaction with Tinder offline dates (STOD) in a sample of adult users of the app. The study also aimed to examine, among 28 variables, those that are the most important in predicting STU and STOD. Overall, 1,387 Tinder users completed an online questionnaire. A machine learning model was used to rank order predictors from most to least important. On a 4-point scale, participants' mean STU score was 2.39, and, on a 5-point scale, mean STOD score was 3.05. The results indicate that satisfaction with dating apps and with resulting offline dates is strongly predicted by participants' age and by their motives for using Tinder (enhancement, emotional coping, socialization, finding “true love,” or casual sexual partners), whereas the variables negatively associated with satisfaction were those related to psychopathology. Interestingly, 65.3 percent of app users were married or “in a relationship,” and only 50.3 percent of app users were using it to meet someone offline. Generally, participants who engage with the app to cope with personal difficulties seem more likely to report higher levels of dissatisfaction, suggesting that dating apps are a poor coping mechanism and highlighting the need to address underlying problems or pathologies that may be driving their use.
> Well, the first truth about what people look for in romantic partners, like so many important truths about life, was expressed by a rock star before the scientists figured it out. As Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows told us in his 1993 masterpiece “Mr. Jones”: We are all looking for “something beautiful.” The conventional attractiveness of a mate is the number one predictor of how many messages someone gets, for both men and women. We are also looking for:
> someone tall (if a man),
someone of a desired race (even though most never admit it),
someone rich,
someone in an enforcement profession (like lawyer or firefighter) if a man,
someone with a sexy name (such as Jacob or Emma),
and someone just like ourselves (people are 11.3 percent more likely to match with someone who shares their initials)
(I should probably just write a blog post putting all of this together and post that here, my apologies for the wall of text to build up context for this; there are no simple explanations for complex topics)
the other side of this is that uneducated women cant reliably date up anymore and this is single handedly exacerbating inequality greater than capital consolidation and other socioeconomic factors
although it might currently masquerade as a cultural thing or a factor of the gender identity, men dated down out of necessity, by population alone.
find the study to corroborate that, this is the first generation where the middle on the higher rungs and the upper middle class actually has enough women in it to date and thats whats happening
entire dynasties of women that thought they could offer their presence alone, and finding out they only have choices with socioeconomic equals instead of higher
lower socioeconomic status groups of women are so vocal about their sex work or balking at questions of “what do they bring to the table” because they thought being available sexually and pleasant would open up a different path, but are just entertainment options. they basically have to be louder because they don’t know what’s going on, notably, this groups considers themselves empowered too, at least self identify as such.
I should clarify, the stats are for who is actually getting married by prior socioeconomic class.
And I’m considering everything else to be an entertainment option.
But the dating patterns corroborate the same view. Wealthy men picking younger and attractive women who offer nothing else have a population constriction too. There are far more poorer people than wealthy, its too small of a population for it to buck a trend further compounded by the newfound existence of women who are the first generation in their higher socioeconomic class.
The free availability of online pornography has distorted sexual behaviors, with some women feeling pressured to indulge in activities they see on screens to "compete". If AI porn can "learn" and create increasingly tailored experiences, it could be even more damaging / addictive, making it that much harder for men and women to relate. A brave new world indeed.
Porn has not distorted sexual behaviours. If anything it allowed people to experiment and not feel shame for wanting to experiment. Most sexual encounters out there are as vanilla as it gets. If you feel the need to compete with someone that has sex on screen for a living you are going to have a bad time.
If you want to argue that porn is not materially distorting sexual behavior, you would have far more credibility if you first acknowledge there’s a range of outcomes.
Pornography absolutely reframes expectations and impacts behaviors. To what extent, that is a fair debate.
The range or the spectrum is there and implied for anything in life. The question is: if you take porn free sexual behavior and you overlap watching porn on top of it does the resulting spectrum differ? How do you control the effect porn has on us vs the effect of all the other things we are, as a society, exposed to?
For me porn does not reframe expectations. You still end up fucking and you still end up having to treat the other person as a human being. As long as everyone is having a good time and everything is between consensual adult I'm good.
Simple. While not all activities depicted in porn are damaging to all people, some activities can be damaging some people. Doesn't have to be black or white. Make sense?
Do you think that the distortions effects are negative or positive overall now? And in the future? I'd argue they are positive now and in the future, so it sounds like this is where your disagreement is coming from (since you said it as if it's overwhelmingly negative now and into the future).
Hard disagree. You probably start with the premise that there is a standard, normal behaviour and porn introduced deviations from it. It has not unless we are talking about really extrem, pathological cases.
An example which I’ve seen raised by researchers: 20 years ago, choking was considered an extreme, pathological case due to the risks. Now it’s very easy to find surveys where women report pressure or even attempts to do it without consent because a generation of men grew up with porn presenting that as standard. The same is true for things like anal sex, etc. which aren’t enjoyable and involve hassle/risk for the female partner but a lot of young men don’t realize that because they’re used to seeing porn actors imitating pleasure and often masking discomfort. I wouldn’t expect anyone to say that there were never extreme porn options on the market but it seems pretty broadly accepted that a lot of previously niche things have become mainstream as vendors are trying to stand out in a very competitive market.
I'm sorry, what? Choking someone without their consent? This is not porn, it's assault.
Anal sex is not enjoyable? It is. And has been a thing for eons. In fact anal sex was a way to workaround getting pregnant before birth control was a thing/was mainstream.
I feel like we have the puritan point of view of what sex should be and anything that is not that is bad/not pleasurable.
So here's where I land: what whatever you want. Do whatever you want in the bedroom as long as it's 2 consenting adults. I don't believe that porn itself is to blame or be demonized for anything.
I also firmly believe that porn may provide an outlet for people to see and experience things that they don't want or cannot experience in real life.
You’re starting from the premise that if it’s possible, everyone does it. Obviously wrong. You can be influenced, and the influence of porn is extreme / deviant behaviour (to counteract the hedonic treadmill).
There may be some feeble-minded people whose sexual expectations may have been distorted by viewing porn, like there may exist some people who believe that something they have seen in a superhero movie has some relationship with reality.
Nevertheless, that cannot be true for most people, who are able to distinguish fact from fantasy.
In my opinion a much more important role in distorting the sexual expectations of young and inexperienced people has been played for some centuries by the conventional representation in literature and starting with the 20th century also in movies of a conventional feeling of "romantic love", which has been a completely fictional creation that does not correspond to any feeling that exists between real humans.
Instead of the fictional "love", between real humans there exist 3 or 4 distinct sentiments, which are independent, so they can exist or not exist separately, even if when they exist simultaneously there exists a positive feedback that reinforces them (e.g. physical attraction, love in the sense of opposite of hate, i.e. as also possible towards friends and family, and trust; even physical attraction is a different sentiment from considering that someone is beautiful or handsome).
When I was very young I was confused by the depiction of "love" in novels and movies, where frequently one discovered the appropriate partner for the rest of their lives by falling in "love" at the first sight, after which they never had any interest for different people. In reality, the only sentiment that is possible at the first sight is physical attraction, while "love" in a stricter sense is possible only after months of shared experiences and trust is possible only after several years, outside of completely exceptional circumstances.
Moreover, none of such sentiments is exclusive towards a single human. There are many valid reasons to choose monogamy, but that is a choice enforced by rational will, not a characteristic of human feelings.
So when I was very young, my expectations about human relations were distorted by these conventional incorrect descriptions of "love" from fiction, so I could not be certain of the nature of my feelings towards others, i.e. whether they were "love" or not. I have also seen many others who have been confused for the same reason, so they were not able to analyze their own feelings and distinguish e.g. between physical attraction and trust, with bad consequences.
On the other hand, viewing porn has never distorted my sexual expectations, because there was no doubt about that being fantasy and not reality.
Therefore I believe that many classic novels or RomCom movies may be more prone to distort sexual expectations than viewing porn movies.
Maybe it was true for millenials. We may have grown up with unlimited unsupervised internet, but we didn't have tube sites and mobile phones to make it available privately at any time. Check out what Billie Ellish (gen-z) had to say about the influence on her generation:
> “I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” the “Bad Guy” singer said, saying it helped her feel as if she were cool and “one of the guys.”
> “I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she added, saying she suffered nightmares because some of the content she watched was so violent and abusive...
> “The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to,” she said.
This thought has crossed my mind. Different generation may experience things differently and the subjective experience of any individual cannot capture all pros and cons. That being said, I don't think rich people (eg Billie) can actually capture why something is good or not in the context of "normal" people given how disconnected they are - i may be wrong.
So maybe its a good thing