This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Via conversations with the people who are most affected by this, those who use sites like Pixiv commercially, they seem to believe that there's a cabal of anti-porn American Evangelicals behind payment processing restrictions. This seems to be approximately a consensus. When I tried to question them on alternative hypotheses involving a Visa/Mastercard Duopoly, even the "moderate" suggestion that excess chargebacks is the primary motive for not wanting to deal with adult content, there was a lot of pushback. Didn't even risk discussing right-wing hypotheses involving debanking or Operation Chokepoint. My impression was that they pattern match all politics they dislike to political groups they dislike regardless of whether there's actually a link.
Texas HB 1181 was passed near-unanimously. It contained two requirements for porn sites: age verification, and a surgeon-general style warning. Nothing about payments.
There’s clearly some interest in suppressing pornography. While I can’t say whether they provided MasterCard or Visa with the impetus, I expect they would endorse payment processors’ restrictions.
More options
Context Copy link
The prevailing Twitter conspiracy is that it’s the British to blame. Because the UK has been trying to age verify porn since like 2015 (even though, as of yet, this hasn’t been implemented afaik) many of the world’s major age verification software providers are located in the UK and they’ve lobbied extensively both in parliament and as part of UK trade missions abroad. There was one in Japan recently.
I still don't understand why this is some impossibility. Is it really that huge a technical issue or does British policy just move at a glacial pace?
They keep changing what they think the standard should be and they’ve just attempted another major reorganization of the media regulator which is technically responsible for this. But yeah, very little has happened in the UK with Brexit (and for two years COVID) taking up pretty much all legislative and government energy.
More options
Context Copy link
MindGeek claims to have the tech fully ready to go for a UK-standards version (and that's the subtext behind PornHub, a MindGeek subsidiary, not complying with the American age verification versions), and MindGeek says that it's actually in use in Germany since 2015. It's definitely the political economy of things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No one who is suffering politically likes to be told "actually you have no enemies, it's all an illusion, move along nothing to see here". It's natural to want someone to blame. (And frequently, there is someone who can be blamed to at least some degree.)
When you look at:
you start to get the impression that a lot of people really don't like porn. It's not an isolated incident. And this is all before we even get into the laws against loli manga in many countries, people literally going to jail for lines on paper that clearly depict fictional characters.
Some of these have nothing to do with payment processors either. I receive no payment for putting up free porn on tumblr or youtube, but I'm still not allowed to do it.
The porn artists might be more inclined to believe the "it's just a totally random confluence of business factors" theory if they felt that public sentiment was on their side. If they felt that people really did believe in a principle of free artistic expression, and it really was just the credit card companies who couldn't get on board for some reason. But you ask people about these porn bans and the typical response you get is something along the lines of "of course, this content is totally perverse and obscene, and probably harmful to children and society too, and no one in their right minds would actually want to be caught paying for or even looking at this stuff, and certainly no one will miss it if it's gone... but it's not being banned because people don't like it, don't be silly, it's really just those pesky chargebacks, sorry kid it's just business..."
Do you see why porn artists might get suspicious? Where are their allies? Who is actually willing to support them?
Granted, blaming it on Evangelicals is also wrong. But the basic impulse to see it as a political issue rather than a purely economic one is, I think, quite correct.
Difficulty publishing porn on steam? I find that doubtful.
/images/17139872510847902.webp
Jap publishers have more esoteric content like loli and beast, which steam takes down immediately. Ironically I think guro is also taken down on steam, even though you can flip to the next screen and download gore simulator 20000.
So I get downvoted because some Japan tier messed up porn genres, ones I haven't even heard of are.. not allowed on Steam.
Got it.
Not that it matters, but it wasn't me. For what its worth you're right, and the steam rules are, as others have noted, remarkably nebulous. I think there're incest-adjacent visual novels on Steam, and literal nazi dating sims, but those haven't attracted the eye of sauron. It is more likely Steam is reactive than proactive, and it only needs a moralizer to flag a game and put it under review. Look (not so) hard enough and almost all the adult games will have something objectionable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Steam is so weird about it they even removed a completely safe for work game just because it had art by Muk. There's been feuding review teams at Valve since the old Hatred scandal, so their policy is schizo.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Traditionally for adult Japanese games sold on steam like Muv-Luv and Subahibi they were censored and you had to download a separate patch from an external source to put the porn back in. Maybe Valve has gotten more permissive recently and I missed the memo.
I think there are some games on the store that are straight-up uncensored, no patch needed.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am not so surprised that someone wants rape via mind control be kicked out of their platform (or is it somehow something else?)
To my understanding the consumers of hypnosis porn are indulging in the fantasy of they themselves being hypnotized. Something about giving their ego the justification to fantasize about indecent acts with plausible deniability.
OK, I was not expecting this one. So it is fiction, about pretending to be forced into some sexual acts, via nonexisting method?
How many layers of indirection people need here?
Still, it technically includes depiction of rape somewhere so I am not so surprised that they get rid of it.
I think "character/person hypnotized into sex" is more prevalent in illustrated form rather than in live-action. More live-action stuff is probably the preserve of seriously niche and weird fetishes like sissy hypno (one of the genres where, as Aqouta and Prima mention, the viewer is the one that's supposed to be getting mind-controlled).
More options
Context Copy link
Yes it is fiction, typically mind control erotica features elaborate magic/sci-fi scenarios that aren't possible in real life.
It's not about indirection. It's very direct. Contra @aqouta, for most people into hypnosis porn (the people who self-insert as the sub anyway; others might self-insert as the dom), the idea of a total loss of control, of utter submission and objectification, ego death, etc., is the entire point. That is the object of erotic fascination. It's not a preliminary step to another thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Someone who wants porn about X is not the same as someone who wants X.
Well, obviously it is fictional depiction of such acts, maybe at most only fans-style porn.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well hypnosis is fake so it doesn't really matter.
Hypnosis is actually not fake, it just doesn't work the way people think it does. It's used in modern (Western) medicine it just doesn't really work well and the real version isn't mega useful so you don't hear about it a lot.
well, between you, @AhhhTheFrench and this in-depth discussion I'm hoping to continue with @jimm, We've now covered all the possible positions on the subject of hypnosis. I'd certainly be interested to see more discussion about the facts of the matter.
Some of that was deleted (or I otherwise can't see). Missed the previous discussion in the weird psychopathology thread line.
I invite you to read the wikipedia page, which links to some actually studies on the matter (ex: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apt.13706)
Basically the most evidence based approach to hypnosis concludes that it seems to function similar to mindfulness meditation, biofeedback, and other similar modalities where someone hacks their cognitive state and level of arousal, which is often easier to do with assistance from an external resource then by a person on their own.
Obviously this implies a limited level of clinical utility but it can help with psychosomatic adjacent pathology and any time "mind over matter" is more directly relevant.
I was fortunate enough to experience some training in this during my medical education and while I personally was not hypnotized I witnessed some of my colleagues experiencing it....and it was ultimately very unexciting and contrary to media portrayal (which is as this usually goes).
It seems most reputable people who do this emphasize the limitations and the fact that it can't really make you do stuff you don't want to do already.
What do you think would happen to the reputation of the hypnotist that hypnotized your colleagues if he surprised the women with orgasms?
This is bog standard shit in the erotic hypnosis community, and the reason you didn't see it in your medical education isn't that it's not possible.
I mean it's entirely possible it's more potent than described by medical literature. It's also entirely possible that people who buy into it are more likely to have out of character or excessive manifestations.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
shoot, I mangled the link. here's the correct version. For what it's worth, my understanding of hypnotism is the same as yours, but @jimm has a very, very different perspective.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, obviously it is fictional depiction of such acts, maybe at most only fans-style porn.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If we want to drill down to chargebacks, we could still argue at some higher level that society is too prudish around sex work, which explains the high chargebacks. Chargebacks presumably come from men ashamed about their porn habits, because society constructed things such that porn consumption is shameful (e.g. what if the wife looks at the credit card statements? Easy to just claim it was a fraudulent purchase and charge back, no?).
Much like with firearms, your interlocutors are probably coming from a different cultural perspective, where sex work and porn are normal and healthy, where actually paying for porn is something of a point of pride (in opposition to just getting it for free).
As for whatever links evangelicalism has to credit card policies...well, okay, you likely have a point, though I do wonder about the political donations of Visa and MasterCard, if any.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link