Mental Muses

[Context: Watching Netflix documentary “Hot Girls Wanted“]

The documentary is about how young women decide to go into porn, their experience, and how they leave. The documentary touches upon both sides – how it is a voluntary decision made by people (women) looking for sex & money, as well as how it can be worse than they expected it & get abusive sometimes. As such, at-least partly the documentary has some critique on the society’s taboo of sex; that is what this post is about, and I do not condone the bad effects of this industry.

In the first half, you can see that some women who go into porn are quite willing, and pretty much enjoy it. It’s not the case that they are resorting to porn out of desperation or poverty or force. They seek financial freedom, they like sex, and they find this legal industry offering money for sex. Plus they have very open-minded views about sex such that it is very normalized in their circles to openly talk about it casually. They also seem to be more accepting of sexual dynamics of dominance & submission (or rather bdsm), suggesting that these may be rather natural dynamics which may have been stigmatized by the society coupled with a dose of feminism.

It seems the newer generations are pushing the boundaries and questioning the society’s tabooed perspective of sex more & more. At this rate, it seems it will eventually normalize many sexual things, and separate off highly coupled things like sex & marriage, sex & orgasm, sex & pregnancy, incest & pregnancy, orgasm & relationships etc. It is known that kids who discover masturbation & orgasm do not even have an association of that with relationships & romance until later years; it’s just something that is pleasurable like a massage. So it would make sense that sex & orgasm can be unlinked from various other societal associations with it.

Mainstream people (typically older generations) would typically say “No woman goes into sex work willfully or happily; that’s a very horrible thing.” But perhaps they do not see the other side. Perhaps they do not see that their view of sex is a nurtured-result of the society of their times, not necessarily innate, and thus it can change over generations. They don’t see that it doesn’t have to be horrible. Maybe because in recent-olden times women were treated as properties, there resulted an association of sex with coercion, human trafficking, violence. But as times change and these unfair activities are minimized over the years, newer generations would not bear the burden of that association at all; they would have freer ideas of sex. [sidenote1: Although, they may develop newer, different associations with sex & orgasm; viz kinks & fetishes?]. Despite that, if they are legally restricted from using willful & enjoyable sex for trade, that would rather be suppressive & anti-feminist, won’t it?

Maybe the same could be said about the reasoning behind restricting age of consent to a bit of an arbitrary age of 18 years which is a recent result of our modern society, not of nature which rather makes humans functionally capable a few years earlier. See history of age of consent. (I feel judged even writing this). What if the current mainstream population simply does not see the other perspective? Would the mainstream public term 18 year old girls (adults) going into porn thru various online influences as “grooming”? If not, what’s the difference between that and a 16 year old being “groomed”? Is “grooming” even well defined enough to be able to distinguish? Why is 18 years not too early if they too are susceptible to exploitation while chasing money & seeking consensual sex if that is indeed exploitation? Okay, enough of this rabbit hole of uncomfortable questions because this is not the point of the post.

More on sidenote1: The newer kinks now spread quickly through the society via porn due to technological ease. And this is where it gets a bit icky. Via various porn genres, kinks that are unpleasant to the majority currently (eg. anything depicting S&M) would get propagated to the audiences and establish / reinforce themselves as kinks (association with sex / orgasm) in new viewers / existing viewers. Since more of the newer generation has fewer sexual associations with bad evil things of the past, they would imbibe these new kinks easier eventually trivializing them more. Perhaps they would then voluntarily seek to satisfy such kinks without it being about making money. Is this fundamentally bad to happen to the society? Is the growth of the liberal bdsm community an outcome of this phenomenon?

The next generations (or the non-mainstream exceptions) who have freer ideas of sex would call the mainstream people “conservative” in this aspect. I think if “sex-positive” progression continues happening as it is now, soon Bacchanalian orgies will be back (or are they already back under the radar?).

The Dislike bar was very useful.

1. It indicated the quality of the video / content, allowing us to decide if it was worth watching.
2. It indicated if the video was controversial (think 50-50 bar). Thus it showed where other people stand on the content of the video.
3. It was a quick summary of the public perception without needing to read many comments.
4. It was YouTube’s qualitative advantage over videos & content from FB, Insta, Twitter. Those platforms without a dislike button allow crap content to be prevalent.

Youtube may give bullshit reasons like they removed the Dislike bar to “protect” creators from dislike-harassment but actually their motivation to remove it comes from point (1). If we cannot see the dislike count, it would increase user engagement, user watch time, increasing monetary profits.

Thus, I urge you to realize this, and consciously reduce YouTube engagement.

• Skip over videos that you are unsure of for which you previously would have consulted the Dislike bar. Don’t give them the watch-time, ad-time and Views.
• Unsubscribe from YouTube Premium. Use an adblocker in the browser. I guess if you are a power user who uses it on mobile & TV, this will be hard to resist.
• Try alternative sites like vimeo, dailymotion, FB videos.

By removing the Dislike count, the valuable information gained from points (1), (2) & (3) will be lost forever in the future. The way people use the Dislike button will change because they cannot see the Dislike bar. More of crappy content will become prevalent. Imagine clickbait videos, fake news, fake guru videos for which you would not be able to see how many others have Disliked; you would take that content more seriously than if you could see the Dislike count. Bad content creators won’t get accurate feedback.

I’m sure Google / Youtube understands all these negative consequences; because afterall they are the smartest people. But they can afford to do this because they have a monopoly. This is why we can’t have good things. When a company has a monopoly, the quality of the product goes down. They just think of maximizing profits.

It is sad that Google / Youtube has made this decision for chasing financial profits, by causing a reduction in user experience and reduction in quality of content in the future. Google used to be the charming company that made products for actual good of the world, not for profits. But seeing this deviation change from their original company principle is saddening, lowering their image in the eyes of the public.

Perhaps by boycotting their attempt at increasing user engagement they would bring back the Dislike bar.

Finally, I leave you with the following three videos to watch to understand why censorship on Youtube, FB etc is bad. Hiding the Like/Dislike opinion of other users is a form of censorship.

Ten years ago, after finishing my bachelors when I was in an existential crisis, I had come up with this purpose for my life:

My purpose of life, since we do not know our purpose, is to find that purpose of life. i.e. Work on finding out the Truth, meaning of life and universe. 

One way I figured I could contribute to this is through the field of machine learning and AI – I did not understand it much especially since I had studied mechanical engineering, but I felt it in me that these could be legit avenues. I figured if we ever invent a “self-learning machine”, and provide it the same senses, cognition and motion as humans, it would learn and grow way faster than humans could. And then when it knows more than humans, we could just ask it the purpose of life.

My life did not go as planned for whatever reasons. I could not get onto that academic path of contributing to such science & tech directly [yet?]. Blame it on opportunities, circumstances, resources, personal flaws, procrastination, lack of information, bullshit US visa system, whatever. Life happened. I have been quite depressed about that for long.

Recently, I have been revisiting the simulation hypothesis (like The Matrix), and it has been causing a bit of an existential crisis again. Imagine humans in an effort to understand the universe spend thousands of years with science, tech, art etc, and finally understand it only to discover that they have perfectly understood only a simulation, and there is another real universe outside it with an unknown number of layers of simulations outside it! Our simulation may not have the same behavior as the real universe. The real universe may not even be observable. That information may just not be available to us. What then! Well, that throws out my original purpose which had pacified my existential crisis. 

I have also been reading / watching a little about how there possibly are limits to what we can know. Something like Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

So I guess if purpose-1 would be fundamentally impossible, then what’s there to life at all? Other than just having fun, do your time and get out when it’s time? Hence, I now have a secondary purpose in addition to the original primary purpose (at least tentatively until it gets ingrained):-

Enjoy living, as if you’re in a video game with just 1 life. There’s no meaning to life, just do what you like.

This is the message of the movie Soul. It’s the same message as Kurtzgesagt’s video on Optimistic Nihilism. It’s probably the same message as when people say “Don’t forget to have fun!”. It’s probably the same message as what my mom writes in her email signature – “Be Happy”. It’s the same message as The Happiness Equation’s rule – “Be happy first, then pursue wants”.

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Musings to follow this:

Implications of that purpose. Hedonism? Maximizing fun? Short-term vs Long-term gain? Calculative vs impulsive? Calibration of that? Morality?