I'm an atheist and I still think porn may be a valueless, happiness destroying exploitation of the way the human brain works in a way that makes zynga appear to be an angel of virtue. The less of it there is, the better.
The problem is cultural rather than anything else. I always thought the UK was sexually repressed, and then I experienced the US. As a European you learn fast - never discuss religion, politics or sex with an American. It's a cultural constraint that stems from a government influenced by religion, which paints sex as dirty. Indecent exposure? Social construct, rooted in religion.
Fix that and porn and prostitution take their legitimate place in a balanced society.
Sure, if Americans don't want to talk with you about something personal like sex, access to which depends a lot on looks which is a very personal thing, then it must be because they're repressed. And the government corrupted at its inception?
In fact I encounter a lot of people discussing sex ad nauseum in the US, especially women.
ETA: Gender disparity in willingness to discuss sex in the US at least in the workforce may have to do with sexual harassment laws and company policies, which didn't come from the religious establishment.
Your points are valid. Have you had, or even overhead such conversations in Europe? Compared the amount of nudity you see on prime time TV or in respectable magazines in Europe and the US?
I was reading the piece with a certain amount of sangfroid, until I reached this sentence:
Cindy thinks that the restrictions that policies place on sex-oriented companies like hers are tantamount to wanting to “pretend sex doesn’t exist.”
Actually, that's precisely what companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft aren't doing. Not wanting to be exposed to porn does not mean you think sex doesn't exist. It is an illogical and simplistic equivalence.
As for the charge that American government is "influenced by religion", why single out the USA? All world governments are influenced by religious principles of some kind. Codified law systems spring from religion. It's why the law makes a moral judgement about murder, or speeding (to use a less severe crime as an example).
"Religion", rightly understood, does not paint sex as "dirty." It places sex within the boundaries of a moral, social and legal code. The Puritans were actually some of the most lusty, sex affirming (within marriage) people of their time.
Codified law systems did not spring from religion. They showed up as a direct result of nations growing to large for a single ruler to deal with disputes. Looking at history the USSR was an atheist nation so there may have been influence in absolute terms it's far from supporting your thesis.
PS: If you actually look at history religions where codified well after laws became common.
> All government are influenced by religious principles.
I don't think China or Russia are for example.
> Codified law systems spring from religion. It's why the law makes a moral judgement about murder, or speeding (to use a less severe crime as an example).
You don't need religion to make such moral judgements.
We have an absolutely horrifying clerical renaissance here in Russia. Church gets a lot of media attention, a lot of general public attention, a lot of lawmakers' attention. By recent polls, 75% of Russians consider themselves orthodox christians.
Just two examples of how this influences everyday life:
1. There is a university called MIFI (aka National Research Nuclear University Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). For a long time there was a statue of a wayfarer on their campus with the following words "Дорогу осилит идущий" (I don't know English equivalent, literally: "The one who walks will overcome the path"). This statue, nicknamed "An Eternal Student", was considered an unofficial symbol and words an unofficial motto of MIFI students. However, right before patriarch Kirill visit to the institution, statue was replaced by a cross.
Also, later they announced they were opening a theological faculty there. In a nuclear research university.
2. A road accident happened in Moscow. Drunk hieromonk Ilia was driving a Mercedes G-wagon (!) at 140 kmph and crashed into a Skoda. Afterwards he crashed into three road workers, two of whom died. Putting aside how monk can own and drive expensive cars, mysterious things began to occur to this case. For some reason, no one bothered to take his blood sample or arrest the young monk, who was taken by (allegedly) unknown person home. In the court a person, who wasn't even present at the crash, told the judge that it was Skoda that crashed into and killed road workers. Video records from the case showing Mercedes were, wait for it, "destroyed by a computer virus". For no apparent reason, after all this Ilia decided to confess to everything.
Also, the case of pussy riot, who were given prison time for disorderly conduct and many, many different annoying things.
It's a bit more complicated than that. In many of the former communist countries (Russia looks like one, Romania is another), communist authorities spent great effort to extinguish religion and turn everyone atheist (not sure why). However, that didn't really work; even now, many people are still deeply religious, in spite of everything the communists did.
Most of the sex seen in media has the purpose of making you buy things. While striking down moral barriers about sex will probably allow healthier discussions to take place, it will be drowned by mindless attention grabbing material without any balance nor legitimacy.
1) reduces the number of sexual assaults (because horny people have an easy "out") (what supposedly happened after the fall of Soviet Union, after which porn became legal in the eastern block)
2) enables lonely people or others who don't seek companionship an easier way of sexual release
3) historical value: record yourself when you're young, so you can easier remember your sexual joys when you're older.
It's a form of art. A bunch of people doing harmless consensual acts digging that deeply into your psyche actually makes it very strong and effective art.
Classifying something as porn or obscene is a personal decision that each individual makes.
I think nobody doubts that the porn industry is a very exploitative business.
However, an easily overlooked aspect of porn is that it canalizes and binds a lot of "useless" energy. A few years ago I heard this tongue-in-cheek hypothesis about male sexuality: Once they manage to reliably eliminate all porn, it will take two days before mobs with clubs and pitchforks roam the streets making political demands.
Can you provide any evidence at all to this point? I understand that you're just providing a possible potential benefit of porn, but it seems totally unfounded to me.
In truth, no. I've heard this stated by various people, among them Tim Pritlove, who said it in one of his podcasts (I think it was NSFW, but I'm not sure). Nobody I've heard it say has pointed to evidence. It is one of those things that appears plausible to a lot of people from personal experience. This of course means, that it might be wrong.
There seem to be some people trying to collect data about the correlation between availability of pornography and the level of some crimes, but I'm still waiting for something conclusive.
Not that it's easy. Quantitative sociology is, due to the interconnectedness of the system in question, a mess.
> I think nobody doubts that the porn industry is a very exploitative business.
Do you mean that factually, as in "every business is by nature exploitative, thus so is porn industry", or rhetorically, as in "porn industry is more exploitative than most other industries"?
The latter. Leaving hunches and feelings aside, I'd point to a piece of anecdotal evidence: There was a This American Life story some time back about the life of some drug dealer/pimp in the 80s (or 70s, can't remember). As an aside, he told the story of the "genesis" of a prostitute. In short, he showed how, by gradual emotional manipulation through her boyfriend, they turned a "normal" girl that hung out with them into a prostitute.
I kind of cling to that one story, because it answers a question that I've had for a long time. Given that you're prostitution is not your dream job and that it is generally shunned by society, how does one become a prostitute?
For simplicity of the argument, I've assumed that the professions of pornographic performer and prostitute are mostly similar.
It does seem to be a wide-spread perception that porn must be exploitative. I suspect (but have done no researched) that the big players are probably exploitative, at least according to the descriptions of ex-pornstars.
But then, there are lots of "indie" pornsites (such as Girls out West and their ilk; NSFW). There are some interesting interviews with the "indie" pornstar named "Furry Girl"; tldr is that she is there by choice.
This example is not to diminish what sounds like widespread exploitation in many other parts of the porn world. Rather it is to say that porn is not synonymous with exploitation.
> However, an easily overlooked aspect of porn is that it canalizes and binds a lot of "useless" energy. A few years ago I heard this tongue-in-cheek hypothesis about male sexuality: Once they manage to reliably eliminate all porn, it will take two days before mobs with clubs and pitchforks roam the streets making political demands.
This implies that men are unable to control their sexual urges or that men are inherently rapists when porn is unavailable, both of those ideas are patently offensive to people in general. Please don't contribute to rape culture stereotypes about men.
No it does not. I'm from Europe and the whole rape culture discussion has not really made it over here.
If you say that I'm completely off the mark, then let me ask you this: Would you not agree that male teenagers are incredibly angsty and hyped about all things "sex"? Don't you also experience a certain period of incredibly relaxing calm after sex?
Male sexuality has a tension-release aspect to it. Nobody is talking about rape here. If you take a bunch of young males, lock them in together and restrict their access to porn, they will become tense to the point of aggressiveness, mostly against each other. One example would be the interpersonal stuff that goes down in the training phase of military service (not talking about instructors).
Do you think that is true of all porn?
If there are companies who are the zyngas and EAs of porn, can there be a Valve of porn? What about small independent amateur producers?
I am also an atheist. I was brought up in a Calvinist society (Afrikaner). For a long time I thought the same thing about porn. But I think it has much more to do with the strict upbringing that made everything around sex weird.
You state that "porn may be a valueless, happiness destroying exploitation of the way the human brain works". What are your reasons for saying this? Is it just your personal aversion? Or do you think it holds in general (in which case you'd at least have to provide some evidence).
Care to elaborate? How is porn an "happiness destroying exploitation of the way the human brain works"? I have yet to hear someone claim porn is making them unhappy except maybe in some extreme case of "porn addiction" (apparently such thing exists). My gut feeling is that lack of porn would make many more people unhappy.
>If the main idea is crap, then there's no "art" that can save it. That's like saying "there can be artful snuff films".
hang on, sir/madam. who the hell are you to judge what is art and what is not? perhaps you would like to be in the censorship and regulation department that will decide whether or not something is art and whether or not something is of "value"? how do you decide whether something has "value"? the amount of smugness is quite astonishing. what "value" do you create? why do you exist?
>hang on, sir/madam. who the hell are you to judge what is art and what is not?
I'm a European. We're not very populist in this here parts. We are judgemental, and we have standards.
They might be flexible, human created standards, that not everybody agrees with, but they are standards nonetheless. Society never knew any other kind of standards, anyway.
E.g we do get to judge that eating Nachos and watching BS TV serials for hours on end is "living like a pig".
>perhaps you would like to be in the censorship and regulation department that will decide whether or not something is art and whether or not something is of "value"?
No need. That's also what critics and cultures do.
You, for example, have adopted wholesale the idea of YOUR culture, that everything is just as good, and it's all a matter of personal taste.
I agree wholeheartedly, and, in fact, this idea is becoming mainstream among both psychologists as well as regular people. Neurologically it works almost identically to any other physical addiction with much the same results. More information at [1], [2], and [3].
There's a reason we have these "archaic" views on sex, and it's more than religious dogma; although, every mainstream religion prohibits the hook-up culture these startups are advocating. In addition to the risk of disease, we seem to be happiest when we treat sex as a very intimate act between people that care deeply for one another rather than simply the casual social act described by Huxley's Brave New World.
Considering you have no issue with the "exploitation of the way the human brain works," and doing it yourself, I find your comment weak and hypocritical.
Replace 'porn' with Wall Street, politics, institutionalized religion, professional sports, etc. and the case could be just as strong. There are many fields of human endeavor and modern society which are built around the idea of taking some natural tendency or desire we have, then leveraging it for private profit, even encouraging an unhealthy degree or type of expression of it. It's not limited to porn with regards to sex.
There's three underlying issues here that drive these decisions:
1) Legal and financial risk, the adult industry sees a vast amount of fraudulent transactions. That's the primary reason that most financial institutions won't deal with it, but there are specialist payment providers who will.
2) Ethical reasons. Many companies won't work with tobacco, alcohol, gambling, porn and other vice industries because it doesn't fit with their corporate objectives.
3) Marketing reasons. Even if a company doesn't intrinsically oppose vice businesses, being involved can clearly impact public perception of the business. This is a much bigger deal if you're running a multisided business like a social network or an app store because it can cause your entire business to shift because of the feedback loop.
To your second point. Aren't the corporate objectives of all US companies to make a shitload of money for their shareholders? If so, they should be jumping on all those businesses like horny teenagers, because those businesses make a lot of money.
You're mistaken, there's virtually no money in the online adult entertainment business. The entire market size is only a few billion in annual revenue and it's primarily long tail, the majority of the larger players (ala Playboy) are losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
It's a small fragmented market which is shrinking every year.
That's true. From Wikipedia: "In 2007, Bang Bros generated a sales total of $1.9 million." That's very tiny given that BangBros is a pretty big player in that industry (2,898 Alexa rank for a paywalled site).
> the adult industry sees a vast amount of fraudulent transactions.
There are two sides to this. For actual porn sites, the "vast amount of fraudulent transactions" are actually friendly fraud. Husbands getting caught and denying they did anything, or claiming to not have approved a charge. While up-sales and cross sales are contributor to this, this actually leads to much less fraud then you'd anticipate. It's usually the 3-day free trial that gets people (and rather than contacting support, who'd promptly refund the money), they just claim their credit card was stolen.
The truth is, when you compare the majority of the porn industry with the majority of the gaming, movie, and music industries (all entertainment industries), porn companies treat their customers far better than the others.
Disclaimer: I worked in adult industry doing credit card processing for about 10 years.
There's a mob of religious (and some non-religious) activists waiting around for any excuse to raise hell as soon as one of these companies makes any attempt to legitimize porn.
Porn is legal. You are thinking more of any attempt to make porn non-censored and relaxing regulatory restrictions on the distribution of porn. Yes, feminists & the religious "right" will raise hell because they're the primary reason porn is so inflammatory in this country.
That seems very unlikely to be true in the US. There are far more very strongly religious people here than there are strongly religious people, and a considerably larger percentage of religious people than feminists are anti-porn.
While religious groups are likely quite a bit larger and louder (and thus politically relevant) in the US than in europe, there are certainly very strong feminist groups in the picture in the US as well. For reference, see the ongoing debate on the ACA contraception mandate (if feminism held no sway over religious groups, it would be dead and buried long ago) and the fact that abortion is a perennial topic of debate. (Incidentally, most countries in Europe have abortion laws that would be completely unpalatable to US women's groups - on-demand abortion is generally only allowed in the first trimester, while Planned Parenthood fought for the right to partial birth abortion in the US in 2006).
This is the beginning of the plot of the movie Strange Days. Essentially the ability to record the thoughts of people during extremely intimate periods of their lives. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/ It only took us 18 years to get to that point.
Does anyone else think there's just an upper-limit to how much porn can be consumed by the average person? I think it's just assumed that if porn were suddenly as acceptable as mainstream programming, it would suddenly become the most popular thing, ever. But would it? People can read books for hours. People can watch Game of Thrones/Breaking Bad/Mad Men/Downton Abbey/James Bond movies in a marathon fashion. Hell, people can run marathons in a marathon fashion. But watching porn, constantly? Besides porn/sex-addicts, how big of a market is there for porn watching in excess of 10min-1 hour a day?
Wow, if this is the class of insert you get after paying what I presume are not insignificant amounts of fund, I'd hate to see the budget for a compelling one.
Reading between the lines, he sounds butt hurt to me due to dismissals from the sand hill road set. Well, no shit. Everybody (there) knows that adult content can be cash positive very close to day one, and due to their strong balance sheets they are hardly the likeliest M&A targets.
The rest (bulk) of the article seems to riff on mainstream acceptance nay open discussion. But it's far from jerking off that many people have an aversion to speaking frankly about. Go talk to some random guy on the streets about his bowel movements, or if his daughter is still on anti-psychotics and get back me.
If you want "respect" go do a social/mobile/whatever the new hotness is and go to the big firms hat in hand. They'll probably give you the money assuming you keep the crazy bottled up for the duration. Then you'll have no problem getting those business critical speaking gigs and becoming a go to react quote of some 3rd rate blog like tech crunch. And your friends will all be suitably impressed and jealous (to your face).
But after the money runs out all that goes away. Personally I'd just take the cash positive business for what it is ( a gift) and stop trying to validate yourself through others. Or just take up lying.
(yes, I know this doesn't have a lot to do with the specific points raised, but if you let them frame the conversation tehy've already done 90% of their job)
My favorite is when I read about litigious porn companies suing for copyright violations (like Perfect10 vs Google image search), calling their copyrighted images INTELLECTUAL property!
What is weird about that?
IP refers to anything that is a product of intellect, it doesn't make judgements about whether something is high brow or not.
And, to be more exact, what kind of harm you're talking about?
I could think of some very real and large issues that are usually linked with pornography (human abduction, treating [usually] females as sexual objects, etc), but after some thinking (not very deep, I must admit) I've concluded none of them are caused by pornography itself (in a same way knives aren't the cause of homicides, although many people died stabbed with a knife). But I may be missing something.
Alex Petralia specified he was prohibited by PayPal’s privacy policy from divulging information on accounts
I love how the companies use the "privacy policies" as excuses to not answer question even when the question is asked from the media on behalf of the person asking.
It's Sunday, so submissions need less attention to make it to the front page.
HN is not just tech, it's for articles which are "deeply interesting".
This article is interesting because it shows how hard it is for one area of business to exist even though it's legal, and a normal part of everyday life for many (most?) people.
US attitudes to sex have a dampening effect on WWW, affecting sites that have nothing to do with the US. Regular, softer, sites face weird prohibitions. Meanwhile, American porn (often deeply unpleasant) is pervasive and causing some nations to introduce nationwide mandatory filtering.
