i think the problem is when you bring the "women are bad too!" argument into a conversation that has nothing to do about saying women are perfect angels or so much better than men lol. like that isn't relevant in this conversation and the way i see it, its taking away from the convo because, is lil tay one of these "single moms thats not instilling good morals on her kids" or whatever? no... she's just a kid who is being exploited.
also you said you don't see how it's sexual exploitation... onlyfans is literally a platform known for sex work. this is a marketing strat to get girls to sell their body. she was wearing a pornstar in training shirt. you can say yeah she didn't do anything sexual on that day, but are we really going to act like the idea of her sex appeal as a "FRESHLY LEGAL 18!!!" year old girl was not part of the reason so many people paid? cus i know damn well it aint me payin for that weird stuff
also "Maybe... but it is the moms making their girls available... so... I always wonder why the moms in those scenarios aren't getting the same scrutiny as the definitely creepy leering men."
the mom IS getting scrutiny everywhere lol, the mom and the parents are being pointed out for pushing the girl into this lifestyle of being online from a young age. but the reason the 'creepy men' get the focus is that on a large scale, they are the ones perpetuating this a lot. i don't think EVERY SINGLE girl doing OF or sex work is being pushed into it by their moms. and i think the ones that even are, are not just because of their mom but because of the greater value society puts on sex and youth, and i don't think its a wild take to say a lot of that has its roots in the.... patriarchy...
"Do men get off on it? Maybe... but it is the moms making their girls available..."
bro..............
"On one hand, it's easy to look at a just-turned-18 girl and think she must not want to do that, she must have been tricked or forced into it... but..."
i don't think you're thinking of the greater implications and impact of things like this on young girls everywhere.
i'm sorry but you clearly didn't understand my post or my point about society at all... yeah she can want to do it and know it'll make her a lot of money, and it DID like i said, but that is DISGUSTING TO ME regardless. disgusting it's normalized when we know how harmful it can be. and how people will scrutinize her. we can say oh yeah but she wants to do it! and you can say 18 year olds can vote or whatever, but those ARE apples to oranges and even then legality doesn't determine to me what is good or bad so why use that as the metric?
i appreciate you acknowledging that it's creepy, but i think the conversation you want to have about 'well women are bad too, moms push their kids into this' and 'well sometimes girls can want to do this, how do we know if they want to or not!' is not the discussion or really thing i was trying to get at when i was venting...
like ok yea some cases moms push their kids into it
well my mom tried to save me from bad things
and i still got groomed and hurt by men?
there will always be an alternative but that's not what this post is about n i think ur statements unintentionally are 'softening the blow' of the disturbing reality of these things and simplifying it too much.
anyways i already said too much
ב''ה,
Don't really want to wade into this thread and yet it caught my attention, so I'm with the other old fart that people in general have been awful for quite a while, but in the actual bad old days for some kinds of gender equality (though now it's nuts and into plaid and fewer people are even thinking about marriage).. honestly, weirdly, this was the hazing females had to consider if they wanted an entertainment/acting career or many kinds of office work, and to afford hygiene products, so not going to say it hasn't always been fucked up.
And if I'm going to point out general cultural-economic schizophrenias (split mindedness, though the actual neurological conditions.. totally different) let me say that the pre-1990s sort of culture also pretty much only gave males the option of being locker room talking ravenous sex beasts with the option of calming it down at home in married life *or not* and no one would know either way. Or you could be a nerd but most of the nerds are either so autistic they take the locker room talk seriously so became worse, and/or are dead from or distributing meth now to keep the *real* trap culture going.
Anyway, if the particular personality here was forced by someone else to do an OF that's gross and if not, it's embarrassing yourself on Facebook except the younger folks have the sense to get paid for it, good for them.
But what I want to point out is that, it's made somewhat worse that male fashion is generally for utility and female fashion has often tended towards adornment to the point of stupid shit like the lack of pockets.. well, again, to calm y'all down, let me point out that guys actively looking for female partners are apparently just really bad at considering the 'this bird of paradise shit may be to keep up with the girls at the factory, not specifically for me, just like getting stuck wearing a suit and a tie.'
But since traditionally guys are supposed to take the lead.. you pretty much have to be Maxwell before it's possible to be culturally as gross as a MSW has to be to see if anyone is interested.
And it's stupid to blame the adornment directly, but finishing school and all that (and how often is that forced?) - actually every gender can easily be commercially caught up in trying not to be ugly to ourselves, yet for dumb reasons, again to be charitable, it's the whole girls dress up thing that requires more nudity to try to snag a compliment, though NYC can try bringing business chaps into style.
So I'm not exactly trying to shit on it because everyone has the opportunity to go through versions of this, but it's weird that cosmetics were literally invented for prostitution because, weirdly, en masse guys' libidos really are that easy to trigger with the adversarial banana of some face spackle.
And that brings on the idiocy of can anyone dress like they're asking for it and what's up with these clothing fetishes, and that's dumb yet only maybe 20% of people at best are even taught any of the history of this (maybe you'd have to be from a fashion district like NY, Los Angeles or Paris) and many cultures (Texas, Islamabad) are specifically about being willfully ignorant.
So, whatever, this is the stupidity we were all born into.
But are y'all dressing up for yourselves, or to fish compliments, or to actually attract someone?
So really, 99% of life is misfiring sex and love spells for everyone, but males are supposed to keep busy and spend less than the 50% or more of life females are supposed to invest in appearance on it, as only leaves the average Louis CK gross level of guys time to goon at OnlyFans.
It's weird, if you've ever been cosmopolitan it helps to know the whole world functions on strip club etiquette, and somehow there's always a bunch of people who don't know this, and yet I'm going to gesture vaguely at not the fashion (whee, costume can be fun if you can afford it) but the entire vibe that gets put off. Is it come here or go away? Is it who cares if it's behind a screen? As the idiotic song from the 90s said, "is it good to get these men worked up so sexual?" (Goofing on how 'cheap' and easy *and* tragic it is, though if guys had to buy everything it takes for a woman to not be considered underdressed everyone would be twice as broke.)
Now, really what's up is, y'know, we'd all rather have a million dollars and a nap, and if anyone does get stuck with a kid, that labor (what a pun) is undervalued outside of Northern Europe as quickly figured out you could calm everyone's shit down by making breeding not much worse than using a public restroom with toilet paper, pads and air freshener provided.. but everywhere else that's the end of life while trying to hold down two jobs and a side hustle. So after a decade of the no makeup pantsuit braless feminism, the majority of ladies now realized they want to feel pretty, as includes the right to look ready to twerk at any moment, and yet this is at least as expensive and annoying as being as ripped as Arnie, yet may attract even more 'gross' attention, so now everyone is angry about it.
G-d may have had a point about 'modest' dress, although each culture really has to develop its own, and it's stupid to point out because showing skin is never really "asking for it" unless you live in the Islamic world and then better hope no one ever snags fabric on a nail, but having a costume option that's specifically hanky code for "you're out of line if you're doing more than slipping a number" .. I get it, it's ridiculous that's needed, but when that's recognized at least all the world's hair tugging middle schoolers should know when they're overstepping.
Actually just in this for the "misfiring love spells" line, because that's how this stuff is literally sold, and y'all keep buying it, and somehow there's 5000 years of 'the dumber a hetero guy's libido is the more it gets triggered by it' behind it.
I was speaking to the larger point that essentially was implying that men drove her to this life and men are singularly responsible because they are primary consumers of it. I mean, again, I'm not defending creepy men that sexualize young girls and groom them. And I'm certainly not defending men who traffic in women, coerce or outright force them into this sort of thing.
But at the same time. Women make up about 50% of the US population... of the world, but specifically here in the US where I live. Men do try and oppress women, I'll grant you that. But women have the same right to vote as men do... they have had it for about 100 years or so now... but women are often every bit holding back other women and girls as are men.
Men aren't the driving force behind those child beauty pageants I brought up. That's a female driven industry right there. It's creepy as hell and a lot of men are getting off on it, and women are running that shitshow. Men do lots of creepy stuff, but I just think it does a disservice to young girls to pretend that everything wrong with their lives is 100% the creepy/horrible men.
In the "me too" movement we found that while men were the offenders/harassers in almost every case... there were a lot of women who were defending those men and covering up for their misdeeds. Women who should have known better, were aligning themselves with the abusive men. I've related stories in my own life where I was with one or more women complaining about misogyny in the workplace and I was supportive of them and supplementing their examples with men I'd seen exhibiting bad behavior to women... only to have those women turn on me and defend those guys as being "fun" even as those guys were oppressing those women.
Larger society is to blame for all the rightfully bad things pointed out in this thread. Society. Not just men. As horrible as men can sometimes be, they don't have the market cornered on cruelty or ruining kids' lives. I don't think we're helping kids by focusing on one gender or another. Focus on specific people harming specific victims, I'm with you 100%... but generally painting one side as evil and the other side as benign isn't going to help those kids.
ב''ה,
Meh, I'm going to drop one more here -
Let's just acknowledge we're in the fucked up part, just like we're in the fucked up part of undoing US slavery (except now that's evenly distributed if you don't somehow have license to legally distribute cocaine if you've tried working recently).
100 years is a long time and yet it's only two or three generations of educators as far as what everyone's mores and goals should be. So when I mentioned finishing school attitudes (and it's complicated, and do guys get male shittiness specifically from locker rooms? but yikes finishing schools existed specifically to create marryin' material when things were more old fashioned).. chase a husband because playing dress up doesn't come cheap takes a while to get modified even if the current Culture Wars weren't making it weird.
Anyway, I have family that's had to build extra closets, and good for them, they're actually happy, but it really is kind of ridiculous. [It has been pointed out that shopping hijacks a certain reflexive urge to pick berries the same way eyeliner apparently turns some morons into rapists, but one is more socially acceptable because it contributes to the economy.]
Gonna make the weird religious reference that this is kinda what G-d and Torah mean about "sins" sticking around for 4 generations. It takes that long for something to seem as completely outmoded as a bustle and hoop skirt.