videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing
a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions
of views.
I've had a Flickr account for about 20 years. I used to run a community and I took a lot of pictures at our gatherings, which were primarily 20-somethings. Some photos had 100-1000x the views of other pictures and it took me a while to figure out why.
The photos with surprising view counts had women with large chests.
I know how obvious that sounds but many of these photos were so lowkey that... trust me, it was not obvious. For some of these photos, we're talking about something that would not be out of place as a yearbook photo or hanging on a church's bulletin board. It would just be a group photo of people hanging out, nothing sexy or revealing, and rando woman #7 in the photo might be apparently chesty. And it would have 100x the views of other photos from that event.
Interesting and amusing.
There are a number of ways you could think about it. Some views might be attributable to people who can't access explicit content due to parental controls or local laws but I have a hunch some people actually prefer this sort of thing to explicit content.
(I also wonder if there's a slight voyeuristic/nonconsensual appeal to these photos. Which ties back in to the opening paragraph of the linked article...)
It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.
Give it a while, everyone falls off the attractiveness escalator eventually. For some the only thing worse than being objectified is being invisible.
Overweight, unkempt, awkward around women, and guaranteed zero attention from women.
Atypical, non-standard, or unconventional are more neutral in tone, so given your desire for a non-subjective word I'd recommend these instead.
You fall into the same trap ("non-standard", "atypical"); you just stepped on the euphemism treadmill.
Of course, it's an unprovable conjecture - but it sure would explain a few things.
I mean why do people even post something like that? It takes 2 seconds to look up the definition of abnormal. It's it really not knowing, it's is it (what I believe) trying to sneak in their moral judgements behind a veneer of supposed "neutrality"?
> Abnormal - deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.
Yes, that's precisely what it is. Moral judgements based on outdated ("conservative", especially clerical) understandings of the world, wrapped in some delusional sense of "objectivity". Only the scientifically and philosophically illiterate fall for it. In German, we call it Bauernfängerei (swizzling, duping; lit. "pawn catching").
If the topic is about whether homosexuality is non-normative and heterosexuality is normative (with the actual, common meanings of the words), we can have a philosophical discussion on that.
This is an abjectly silly thing to say, and people who push back on it are not gaslighting. Homosexuality occurs naturally and it's not even rare - it's far more common than red hair, for example.
Calling something like that "abnormal" isn't in the domain of fact, it's purely a side-effect of what you label "normal".
Homophobia arises from seeing homosexuality as a threat to your heterosexuality. The LGBT people are coming after your coveted "straight" status and try to infect you with the "gay" virus which makes it harder to attract a woman.
Basically it's the male equivalent of being "deflowered".
"It's a Wonderful Chest" from Chappelle's Show was ahead of the curve(s) on this.
> you builders, stop wolf-whistling, it's coarse. Except if you do it to me. Then I'd be really pleased ...
Attraction and romance is complicated.
I was an avid viewer of r/analog. I don't know if this was 'recent' or not, but every time someone post a naked picture, either good or not, it goes rapidly to Top posts.
Even though it used to had many comments like "This photo is not interesting other than the naked woman", the upvotes arrived anyway.
I think nowadays they mostly block the comments in those posts, but what used to be an inspiring subreddit that would pop from time to time in my feed, is not longer that interesting to me.
(I'd also love recommendations of other good photography related subreddits, if you have any!)
My first instinct is to agree with this sentiment. There’s a lot of pretty mediocre photography that gets attention because “naked woman”.
At the same time, you could equally say “that landscape photo is not interesting if you take away the lake”. If you take away the interesting piece of a photo, yeah, it’s not interesting anymore. The fact is that people (but especially men) enjoy looking at naked and near-naked women. It’s a consistently compelling subject. It might be “easy” but it’s still compelling.
But I've seen plenty of boring pics of lakes and none were on top posts, contrary to these cases.
It is of course subjective what makes a good photo or not, but sometimes it is pretty clear why a picture reached top posts.
He said nothing improves a landscape picture more than having a person in the picture. I didn't believe him.
Later, I went on a trip to Hawaii, and took maybe 300 landscape pictures of its beauty. Upon looking at them at home, I realized he was right. The ones with people in them, even random strangers, were always more interesting.
Something I do with my friends is look at Annie Liebovitz portraits and try to recreate the ones we like.
Art is judged on feelings it invokes. Naked women invoke strong feelings in a lot of people.
For e.g. there's a trend where painters post a painting of them while standing next to it. I do not subscribe to any subreddits but as some of these become popular, they pop into my homepage. 9 out of 10 of these are painted by a pretty woman.
Most woman don't run an OF of course. And wether they do or don't, anyone should be free to socialize over their hobbies on the internet, and/or present their art work for other to appreciate (and get validation with hundreds or thousands of up votes). But those on the intersection that choose to run thinly disguised ads ruin it for me :(
This stock image is roughly the level of thing I'm talking about, except even with women who are less obviously chesty:
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/two-senior-black-fe...
It feels very UNsurprising to me that nudity, or revealing photos, would get more views. There's various ways we can feel about it. But "surprised" would, erm, certainly not be one of them for me!
However, I was still surprised that extremely tame photos of slightly curvy women would get relatively large numbers of views, in a world where most people can easily find all the lewd, nude, and explicit images and videos they want.
The confusing ones in my account were sooooo much tamer though. The chests were not even remotely the focus of the photos. It was subtle enough that it took me a while to even figure out the trend.
So at least there's that.
And how would you distinguish "being sexualized" from "men finding a woman attractive" ?
(While written by a woman, it comes down decisively on the side of "hey - you don't need anybody's permission to find things sexy")
Is there an online forum like posting a URL to such photos?
But yeah.... "links shared on forums" was always my leading theory.
In some cases, I'm sure the thumbnails enticed extra clicks. But some of the pictures just had a bustier than average woman in the background or something. It's not clear to me that the thumbnails were enticing.
(99% of these people were my IRL friends as well, so I wasn't really trying to take salacious pictures....)
men with certain bodies, can't escape being tallized no matter what they do or wear
or you could just say they are tall
You also can't escape being ugly and receiving the opposite reaction as a man.
There are so many things that you can't escape that it seems pretty suspect to focus on this one in particular. The most obvious aspect of being alive is that your body is mortal. You will never be able to escape that fact. You also cannot escape chronic diseases that negatively impact your life every single day.
The idea that men and women pair up to produce new life together is one of the more wholesome aspects of life. There are plenty of insects where one of the partners dies in the process and many species that don't care for the young.
>Ultimately, these are the kind of things discussed only by a small, vocal, very online minority.
They are discussed by a "minority" because we compartmentalized social media to some dozen websites. And they all have a financial incentive to suppress sexual content, be it visual, oral, or print. I think the the cause and effect is there.
"sexy" isn't "sexual". unless any pretty person you pass by is a sexual encounter.
And “pretty”, even “beautiful”, doesn’t mean “sexy”.
I definitely think comments here reflect the large portion of male HN readers.
Talking is good, but be aware there are many readers.
I've definitely put more thought into this topic than many, though. It's not easy at all to tell the difference and my US society certainly doesn't care to delineate between them. But a good part of erotic writing lives and dies on if you can understand which audience you are going for and which forms of language you use to evoke that spectrum.
It can also expand to help in any kind of romantic writing as well.
e.g. She mentions examples of having trouble being “in the moment” in new sexual encounters. Consuming pornography does nothing to help that. If anything it likely makes it worse.
I’m not necessarily saying they are wrong either. It’s a tough zone. If I imagine people I know saying that to me, in my head most of them come off lecherous and creepy.
I feel like close friends could say that stuff to me or vice versa but most of the time it would come off weird at best. Choice of words is also a big factor though. “Beautiful”, “gorgeous”, “attractive” are all more reasonable sounding to me than “hot” even though they all basically mean the same thing.
Wait really, just for thinking someone is hot and telling you, who's presumably their friend?
To be clear, I’m also not saying anyone would ostracized for this, nor that anyone would ostracize me if I said this. But if one of my more casual friends randomly commented that their hairdresser is hot, I’d give them a bit of a sideways look, yeah.
But that’s why I think it’s self selection:
- you mention that even from friends you would find it strange and seem to flock with similar perspectives;
- by contrast, I don’t and flock with people who don’t either.
And I don’t particularly see a problem with that — the world is a big place and not everyone needs to be to everyone else’s taste. But like many things, people seem to form cliques.
Discussing sex in non-sexual contexts is weird. Author goes at length how it was a private, personal experience in her own body and mind. And if it stayed there instead of being babbled out to a friend she would still have that friend.
I'm around finance folks and they're all trapped into the same crypto-and-AI influencer bubble, but they would never be able to tell because their physical connections are also finance people who are likely to be caught in the same corner of the algorithm. So their real life conversations reinforce the worldview that the internet presents.
This is likely the same case. The author might not be involved in certain online spaces, but she shares characteristics with her friends who make them all be targeted by the same bubble, so everyone she knows echoes that space to her.
These are all things about sex but none of them are sex or lead to sex. These are outlets for sexual desires that don't require any social connection at all. You could argue that the article outlines many of the reasons why these things are so popular today - there is a much higher social price to pay for a potentially embarrassing or humiliating situation than there used to be. Easier to avoid it altogether and play gooner games.
Some time ago I said to a coworker who I consider as a friend : 'I enjoy your company'. Another (younger, italian) coworker told me to be careful after I said to him 'she has such a soft voice'.
I really did not expect that reaction. To my feeling, no line got crossed and the fact that we are still friends and at times even share our thoughts about love and relationships in general, proves that we trust and respect each other.
You seem to be to afraid to be friends with your coworkers because of potential consequences? If that is so, i'm sorry, you are missing out a great deal in life.
Unfortunately if someone chooses to interpret your words or actions in an uncharitable way there’s not much you can do other than move on. It’s their burden to carry, not yours (except when there are real world consequences but I do think that’s a rare circumstance)
On 1995, which is 30 years ago, it was neither normal nor accepted. You was major asshole if you did it and lawsuits were already won.
I was in the workforce 30 years ago and, no, it was absolutely not normal.
It was what we called an "HR violation" and a "Career limiting move."
Not sure where you were 30 years ago, but except in bordellos and strip clubs that wasn't "normal." Not even close.
That was a huge no-no 30 years ago, at least in the US. In fact, it was a major no-no at my first job in 1979 and would get you fired.
I'd actually go further and argue that what appears to twist this social fabric inside out is not only the online nature of the interaction itself, but the corporate centralized algorithmic nature of it. I am in no way a proponents of decentralizing everything (social media, money, infra, etc) for the sake of it - most systems work more efficiently when centralized, that's just a fact of reality. Maybe the fact that ads, corporate communications (linkedin -speak posts / slack / mcdonald's twitter account) and social interactions now live in the same space (and barely distinguishable in feeds) must have somehow forced these spaces to use the most uniform neutered language that lacks subtleties allowed in 1:1 communications? So people speak in political slogans and ad jingles instead of actual thoughts? Because these spaces NEED people to speak like that to stay civil and "corporately acceptable"? I am just brainstorming, in no way suggesting that a "free for all" is a solution.
I watched a movie called Anora recently, and toward the end there's a dialogue along the lines of
- If not for these other people in the room, you'd have raped me! - No I wouldn't. - Why not? - (baffled and laughing) Because I am not a rapist.
One way to interpret this movie, this dialogue, and what follows is that the main female character has been used and abused her entire life by the rich / capitalist system in general / embodied by a character of a rich bratty child of an oligarch in particular - that her world almost assumes this kind of transactional exploitation as a part of human relationships - and struggles to feel safe without it - almost seeking more exploitation to feel somewhat in control. And the other person in the dialogue above (who is not a rich child) counters that by asserting and knowing very well who he is (and isn't), and that knowledgeable doesn't require or provide any further justification.
Tldr maybe the magical dream of a conflict-free society where people understand each other is not ours after all - maybe it is the ideal grassland for ad-driven social media to monetize our interactions in a safe controlled fashion? one evidence towards that is the de-personalized neutered templated nature of the kind of "advice" that people give online to earn social credit - that leaks into real world 1-to-1 interactions in the form of anxiety of being "watched and judged" - as described by the author?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Freeze
Maybe having conflict isn’t healthy, and letting people grumble about things under the breath is the right way forward, unironically.
This. For example there are so many awesome videos on YouTube that would actually make the world and cross-culture relations better if more people got to see them, but few people will unless they specifically search for them.
Like just yesterday I stumbled upon this amazing nature documentary [0] from Poland (in English) of a quality rivaling or exceeding that of the major channels, with no ads, no "like and subscribe!!" begging, and it's just as amazing that I didn't hear of this since the 3 years it's been up.
There's many more videos on all topics that you don't need to be a purveyor of the subject to enjoy and appreciate, sitting at criminally low views and likes.
Recently I've seen a figure in a reputable source showing that people tend to have less sex than ~20-30 years ago (even if we just look at married couples).
Puritanism follows a bathtub curve. The most judgmental people are the very young who lack experience in the world, and the old whose experience comes from a different age.
Those zoomers who complain about age gaps will grow up, realise that they quite enjoy such relationships, and laugh at gen alpha for being so puritanical.
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.