Sex as a Commodity: Illusions of Progress in the Internet Age.

you know what i find flattering
if i don't upload a video for about two days people write and asking are you okay i upload so regularly so often more than once a day just just a couple days go back like hey man what's going you doing all right i printed out a letter from a member of the audience i can't remember the last time i did a video with anything written down on paper and he asks isn't it the case that these days society is becoming more and more sexualized and that human sexuality is being more and more commercialized i made a video discussing this more than a year ago in response to ashley eliza aka turtleneck sweater girl who has since she was incredibly famous and incredibly successful you've made a lot of money now she's deleted her entire web presence and she's even sent me emails asking me to delete my videos commenting on her which i'm not gonna do roll it and the thing is about hook up culture it's not having a sex with like a lot of people it's having sex without meaning just like doing it with random people because nowadays people are actually having less sex gets more just casual it seems like today with all the hookup apps reliable contraceptives and a general culture that just promotes casual sex it's really just becoming the norm it's almost like a weird thing if you choose not to engage in casual sex with people it's like who are you you're some sort of prude you're some sort of like weirdo [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and then you have a bunch of other articles saying you have to figure out what you like in order to figure out what you like and like having sex you have to have sex with a lot of people and i mean my question to that is why do you have to have sex with a lot of people in order to figure out what you like like wouldn't it just be weird to barely know someone and then want to try some like insane thing you want to i don't know tmi no judgment just my opinion what i mean to suggest to you in opening the video with that clip is that it is very very easy to have this self-serving delusion that whatever social and political problems we're encountering are new to our own age the particular epoch we have to be living through or getting worse during the epoch we happen to be living through and you know i'm not someone who recommends that people read books lightly i don't waste people's time and i take into consideration the position of the particular reader very carefully this is 27 year old man who has a university degree in the sciences he probably has not done the type of historical reading that would make him reluctant to make this sort of statement or raise this sort of question okay you think we have a society that overly commercializes and commodifies sex today how about the 1820s how about the 1820s in the south of france like i remember reading a lot of academic studies about the history of prostitution and sexual exploitation in southeast asia because i used to do a lot of research related to cambodia laos thailand etc and one of the most important things to point out was oh oh if you think this is bad do you know what was going on in marseille the assumption that what was going on in east asia especially in relation to european colonialism you know was this highly exotic highly illicit you know boundary breaking immoral trade in comparison to what was going on europe was really was really false it's very easy to bring in this kind of um unequal and unfair comparison so in this case he's saying and i understand 27 years old this is the this is the world he lives in and this is the transformation he's lived through quote sex is being widely used to promote products and commercials on billboards etc in popular culture right i remember going to the national portrait museum in england sorry i forget one of the big major art galleries in england that doesn't really matter which one i was in and you know it was pointed out that there were a whole lot of paintings of young women selling flowers and they ain't selling flowers you know there was this convention in portrait painting of a young woman selling flowers and this was a culturally acceptable way to depict prostitutes there's a sense in which sex is commodified by beer commercials but they're using sex to sell beer right they're not using beer to sell sex which is what you're going to find in the 19th century the 18th century the 17th century the 16th century the 15th century the 14th century the 12th if you read any historical literature from any prior epoch of history right you're going to start to realize the depth and breadth of the commodification of sex in different cultures at different periods of time by the way even including traditional islamic cultures i've done a lot of research on the history of slavery melissa's currently reading a book about the history of slavery in muslim central asia which i haven't looked at yet i'd love to read it if and when i get time and whenever you look into this and of course it's also just partly the the searing hypocrisy of the history of the muslim world but yes you know uh prostitution commodification of of of sex even within traditional muslim cultures century by century is shocking and appalling the history of sexual exploitation in china pre-modern traditional china you know it's very easy to go from childhood to adulthood in any given decade in any given century and to have the impression oh this is something new this is something that's gotten worse during my lifetime just now no the problem is you went from the naive or jejune perspective of a child to the cynical perspective of a human being this guy's 27 it's probably just in the last 10 years he really started learning about this stuff and and perceiving it and realizing deeply how it fits society how it ruins some young women's lives in some young men's lives and you know the effects it hasn't it's all and he's not thinking how is this really different from the 20th century the 19th century the 18th century and how is it different from again history of italy so the france history of thailand history of japan talk about storied histories of of prostitution right so what's really remarkable about our century as is shown in that short clip i showed we're living through a period of people having less and less real sex and what's being commodified is simulation right so i i i sympathize obviously i don't think this is a stupid letter i don't think he's asking bad questions i don't think he has bad intentions i don't think he's being raised for bad reasons i just think you have to recontextualize the whole discourse about the commodification of of sexuality and how it's being transformed by information technology communication technology uh so on and so forth so he says you know through popular culture such as sitcoms movies music including nicki minaj have you read shakespeare dead serious i'm stone cold serious like you know what do you think of the commodification of sex in that whole society as indicated by recorded by shakespeare in his plays in his sonnets and the the just the ubiquity of of prostitution in that society that's attested to throughout it's this is not something new that just came out of nowhere and again by the way there's also literature written from a female perspective right and they're interestingly too some feminist historians are just in this the history of women's advocacy for new laws restricting prostitution right very often those reflect the the woman's experience that women really were concerned about their husbands going and sleep with procedures that part of the public demand for restrictive laws which today most feminists regard negatively part of it did come from women women really did struggle to control their husbands during long long centuries when reckless behavior of this kind was was common and it is documented and i think i can go so far to say i don't have to recommend any particular book the autobiography of napoleon bonaparte napoleon lost his virginity with a prostitute he felt no shame in it he wrote about it autobiographically published this publicly and he went on to advocate for prostitution being completely legalized deregulated and you know throughout the french empire he says nowadays you can flick through tinder profiles with the expectation that somewhere down the line you will get a match can you okay so again i i've used tinder i've known you right i mean what you get on tinder is a is a glittering image is a mirage is an illusion right and those 19th century portraits of a girl selling flowers you know you get the girl not just the flower that's what's being bought and sold right the history of the commodification of sexuality and just the reality of meeting people face to face and believe me i don't glorify any of this culture in a beer hall in a tavern at an inn again this is deep in every culture i know of even the cultures where alcohol was illegal like uh traditional muslim culture no i mean what you get on tinder is nothing you know and i know people are drawn into it he talks about the gamification of romance i understand that there's that it's like gambling right why do people keep uh putting coins into a slot machine because there's a one in a thousand chance or a one in a million chance they're going to get something out of it right but don't you realize how many gamblers will put in the coin and pull the lever and we'll never get anything at all we can certainly ask that about tinder about this whole generation of dissimulated uh internet information technology based uh sexuality right so he then says only fans the website only fans comes like you said selling intimacy but it's not right it's selling a false promise of intimacy it's selling dissimulated intimacy it's selling you you know text messages from someone pretending to know you pretending to care about you pretending to be your girlfriend not somebody actually being your girlfriend i mean so look i'm very much engaged in the critique of video games but i can't criticize video game violence as if it were real violence i can ask people why do you want to spend like six hours at a time watching a video simulation of shooting a person in the head again and again and again some of these games you see someone get shot in the head every 60 seconds you know why do you want to do that i think there are things worth philosophizing about worth reflecting on right but this is nothing like the question of why did you decide to volunteer or to fight in a war in syria and actually see someone get shot in the head maybe you see someone get shot in that every six months in real combat you know maybe maybe not even that they're guys that go into combat and spend the whole time carrying backpacks up and down the side of the hill again read more books you can read some read people's autobiographies of what war is like for a lot of people it's it's not that eventful but my point is i can't conflate these things i can't question the morality of simulated violence as if it's the morality of real violence and i can't question the morality of simulated sexuality as if it's real sexuality or real relationships or even real flirtation as i already showed in that short clip there are some statistics indicating that younger people not really young people but you know people who are younger than old they're actually having less and less sex as the years go by and in a sense we all know why right we all know what it is young people do with their time now and what it is they're not doing and probably some of us have a sigh of relief that people aren't living the same way they did in the 16th century in the 17th century in the 18th century and maybe in some ways we're terrified that we've lost touch with uh some of that animal reality of what it is to be a human being you know in the in the 21st century he says quote i hope i'm not suffering cognitive dissonance but i'd like to think that as a rule of thumb people are better off not objectifying themselves and not engaging in promiscuity or polygamy but i constantly get overwhelmed from my more left-leaning friends with the answer quote what's wrong with it if it's not hurting anyone close quote all of this transpires or unfolds in the context of the kind of person you could be what you might be doing with your time who you might become right how would you feel if you had a 25 year old male friend who had never lost his virginity and you told him to just give up and pay a prostitute and lose lose his virginity to a prostitute how would you feel if you had an 18 year old female friend who said she's sick and tired of working at mcdonald's or at a pizza restaurant and you told her to give up and become a prostitute what is it we're giving up on right giving up on ourselves we're giving up on our own potential to do something else with our lives right to lead some kind of meaningful life it's very slippery i don't have a simple 100 percent opposition to prostitution i've mentioned this many many times i remember being on the border between cambodia and laos and meeting a guy who had his face caved in by a gunshot wound and just realizing when i met this guy that's not what we talked about we did have a conversation in cambodia believe it or not this guy had not had any reconstructive surgery his face was just caved in by a bullet and he survived he kept on living with it he kept on coping with it and i just realized wow you know in this culture no woman is ever going to touch this guy nobody woman is ever going to sleep with this guy he's going to have no love or romance's life if it's not you know through prostitution and that was a culture where prostitution was ubiquitous prostitution was everywhere they had prostitution in small towns that didn't have any electricity or any running water you know what i mean um you know and just sorry i knew a lot of people involved in charity work related to people who were born disabled and also people who had become disabled through car accidents through sometimes through warfare through stepping on a land mine it's the you know glorified cause you know those people matter too right and look maybe even within your own family maybe you've got a cousin or a brother or someone maybe they're mentally disabled maybe they're physically disabled there are all kinds of people where i can't say to you that you know their celibacy is worth something positive or that they should live and die their whole lives as a virgin let's even say hypothetically rather than you know getting involved with prostitution with you know the sex trade and becoming becoming clients i can't make that claim because i don't believe in christianity i don't believe in some positive value to ignorance i don't believe in some positive value you know maintaining your virginity right but um want to have young women right to me as soon as i have middle-aged women write to me in response to my many many videos talking about the only fans phenomena uh and you know they asked the question in effect you know shouldn't there be a more meaningful life than this for a good-looking young woman who has the option who has the opportunity to just cash in on her appearance on offense you know what i say back is um couldn't you try you know maybe there isn't you know maybe there is really nothing more meaningful for life in this life for you than getting unonly fans and wearing a bikini and exploiting your body and supporting your friends but but i doubt it right couldn't you try and if you failed right like if you tried to have some kind of more meaningful life whether that's through career education the arts poetry music i don't know if you tried to have some more meaningful life than just sexually exploiting yourself and you failed and it didn't work out at least you have the satisfaction of that failure and that very process of trying and failing would i think in a really meaningful way change who you are inform who you are it would be part of becoming you know the person you you wanted to be that's one of the pieces of advice i could give to somebody the other side of that a young man who feels completely crestfallen that he's never gonna fall in love that he's never gonna have a romance or he's never even gonna lose his virginity that he's on tinder you know swiping through this stuff and you know if some young man said to me that he feels like just giving up and sleeping with prostitutes becoming with the part of the commercialized side of it you know you know what you could give up later right it's never going to be too late to give up right you could try you could try to do something positive you could try to have a more meaningful life you could really earnestly try and if you fail right at least you would have that development of your character you'd have something that comes you know uh from that failure okay so look there's a difference between living in a city where more and more people are being shot to death and living in a city where the proliferation of video camera technology means that more and more of the shootings are captured on film shared on the internet and discussed in the news there's a difference between living through a period of time in which people are actually having more sex or which people are actually commodifying sex to a greater extent and living through a period of time when the proliferation of introduction technology communication technology the cheapness of cameras simply records it better shares it better makes us more aware of these options [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes