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.

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.

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.

This is antisocial advice. It's beyond inappropriate to use the pretense of apology to announce your intimate fantasies to strangers.

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.

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.

"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.

"the self" is formed in relation to others, it is not formed by itself. The way that people think of their own self, is the way they imagine themselves to act in relation to others _only_. There is no "me" alone, it's all entirely relational.

The problem I think we have now is that a huge proportion of how we relate to others has been moved online. When I was growing up, being in a picture was something that happened rarely -- on "picture day" for the yearbook, at a family gathering when someone happened to have a disposable camera. But now, kids are in photos and videos all the time, 24/7. The way we relate, from very early on, is influenced by the deeply unnatural online parasocial relationships of Instagram etc.

It goes further than you, a stable self who is worried about cancel culture. It's built into your sense of self, it affects how your self is constructed. It's deeply embedded into who you are, your way of being. To be is to be perceived and we are being perceived in these really weird/unnatural/algorithmic ways, and it is reflecting on us.

> 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?

It's a horrible way to live your life. But it doesn't have to be this way. This has to be this way only for terminally online people. If you don't go to twitter, there's no importance to anything anybody on twitter thinks about you. Of course, for certain people, like actors, politicians, top-level entertainers and so on, there's no other way to achieve anything now, but for most people it's entirely optional. You don't need to be on twitter (substitute any social media here) to be a good teacher, farmer, programmer, designer, builder, gardener, nurse or car mechanic. It's still completely voluntary so far.

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.

Uptight progressives: Your sexual desires are "problematic"

The former group certainly tends to have more power, but the latter are somewhat annoying because they're harder to spot and avoid. But unfortunately, certain legislation cannot be avoided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSTA-SESTA

This bill killed the greatest source of incredibly-specific sexual encounters and exploration the internet has ever known: Craigslist Casual Encounters. Whether you were looking for a man, woman, other, or a group, or so on, whether you sought something vanilla or a combination of kinks you made up in your dreams the night before, you could advertise it or seek it there. Ads could contain nudity, you could view them publicly, you could message people through anonymous email relay without making an account - and it all happened openly (yet with privacy) on a well-known website that people used for all sorts of things. Nothing else on the internet today compares and it's likely impossible to recreate.

Self censorship is the sort of thing we used to look at pekple in China doing and think was strange.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Doing this, will also impair the ability of people to handle such stimuli without getting overloaded by it. That last part is really dangerous... makes people unpredictably behave in light of sudden stimulus....

stop dehumanizing eachother and let eachother be natural in a human way. give eachother chance to experience and learn . the vast 99.9999% of humans will 'do the right thing'. (its why its called the right thing afterall..)

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.

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"...

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...

It's things like this that help me understand why people are voting for Trump.

This is not a throwaway comment -- I really mean it. The above is so ridiculous, it's a great example of "the Left is full of crazies" which half of the country is reacting against.

I'm surprised a woman this. What a weirdo. Also, go walk outside a little, and notice how obese, voluntarily disfigured (e.g., with tattoos), and otherwise repulsive the average American is in 2025. I can't imagine internet surveillance did more than that to kill eroticism.

EDIT: I also think lack of shame or embarrassment, and the ubiquity of porn, and the resulting desensitization to sexuality, are under appreciated. Things that people would keep as secrets 20 years ago are now blasted out on social media like it's no big deal. If some technology professional has a leather fetish, for example, that is not something you or I should have to know about them, yet there it is on their Twitter or Mastodon anyway. If you criticize them for it, then you're "kink shaming."

Good fucking grief, what has HN become?

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.

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?

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!)