Young people got bored of creepy older guys sexualising everything. They're building newer understandings of sexuality that are based on personal autonomy coupled with consent. Genx may think this...
Exemplary
Young people got bored of creepy older guys sexualising everything. They're building newer understandings of sexuality that are based on personal autonomy coupled with consent.
Genx may think this is prudish, but we (gen x) had pretty gross representation and discussion of sexuality and while gen z is having less sex, they seem to be less tolerant of abuse and more open to diversity.
One example of this might be discussion around people attending emergency department with items retained in the rectum. Gen-X will laugh, and mock, and that will include somewhat homophobic "joking" content. Gen-Z will have a lot more empathy, and they show that by not mocking, and also they'll be the ones giving the safety message of "lots of people enjoy this, there are safe ways to do it, use lube and a designed toy with a flared base".
I think this is giving way too much credit to younger generations and way too little to older ones. There's more porn on the internet now than had been produced in the entire history of humanity...
Exemplary
I think this is giving way too much credit to younger generations and way too little to older ones. There's more porn on the internet now than had been produced in the entire history of humanity up until the year 2000. You could easily turn it around and say older generations had a healthier relationship to sex, because they were having more real relations with real people and spending less time watching porn.
Which isn't really something I believe, but simply an example of how cultural trends can be twisted and reinterpreted. It doesn't make sense to make such sweeping generalizations.
There's also nothing inherently bigoted about raunchy humor. It might seem that way because it was more popular in an era when open bigotry was more socially acceptable. But the joke at the core of racy humor isn't "gay is bad" or "women, amirite?" It's that sex is kind of silly. It really is. If there were an intelligent alien species that reproduced asexually and they came to Earth, they would probably find the human obsession with genitals slapping together exceedingly strange, dare I say, even funny. You can be inclusive and sex positive and still acknowledge the fundamental silliness of it all.
I don't agree with this at all. Sexual reproduction is older than jaws and the tetrapod body plan. You could just as easily say that an alien species that has seven tentacles and eats through...
It's that sex is kind of silly. It really is. If there were an intelligent alien species that reproduced asexually and they came to Earth, they would probably find the human obsession with genitals slapping together exceedingly strange, dare I say, even funny. You can be inclusive and sex positive and still acknowledge the fundamental silliness of it all.
I don't agree with this at all. Sexual reproduction is older than jaws and the tetrapod body plan. You could just as easily say that an alien species that has seven tentacles and eats through osmosis would view our four-limbed mouth-eating as kind of silly.
But it's not, and neither is sex. Both are completely normal activities. It'd be one thing if there wasn't this weird taboo against talking maturely about sex. People joke about food all the time, but there isn't a taboo around talking about food in a non-joke way. With sex, perhaps it's because it's typically done in private (in most modern societies), but that too easily leads people to consider it something shameful that you mustn't talk about. And that's a problem that maybe younger generations are recognizing and pushing back on.
I guess we just have different perspectives. I see "talking maturely about sex" as a license to acknowledge the fundamental playfulness, and therefore, silliness, of non-reproductive sex. I think...
Exemplary
I guess we just have different perspectives. I see "talking maturely about sex" as a license to acknowledge the fundamental playfulness, and therefore, silliness, of non-reproductive sex. I think the tendency to insist on discussing it in very serious and clinical terms is itself a remnant of taboo. Not that it's wrong to discuss it clinically, but I don't think it's a particular sign of maturity to treat it as something that you can't also have fun with or joke about. That just reinforces the old taboos.
Normal human behavior can be funny and playful. I don't disagree that it's normal, but that doesn't make it not playful. Sex, when divorced from reproduction, is a game played between consenting adults. Now, it's a game that has potentially more serious consequences than Call of Duty or Monopoly, and therefore requires appropriate safeguards against nonconsent, STDs and unintended pregnancies. But it's still, in my mind, a playful activity. For the record, in my experience, inclusive sex-positive communities that also talk very seriously about safe sex and consent, very often have exactly that attitude. Once you remove the taboo and talk openly, you can also acknowledge that a Big O face is funny (in my opinion; humor is subjective), or that the games we play during courtship or foreplay can be kinda whacky.
I'm not asexual, so I get the sex appeal of, well, sex. And I don't know where you grew up, but assuming it's in some Western society, we probably have similar taboos culturally imprinted. But I also think the ridiculous lengths some people go to in order to get laid are exactly that, ridiculous (and that includes myself when I was younger). That's what I was imagining the aliens laughing about. And I think the sheer mechanics of it, when divorced from horniness, have a certain comedy to them, but that delves into the realms of the subjectiveness of humor.
Treating something as playful and fun isn't the same as making it the butt of a joke. And joking about something doesn't mean you don't take it seriously (see gallows humor).
But I'm not saying that breaking down taboos about sex talk results in clinical talk. That's a false dichotomy. Playfulness does not equal silliness. In fact, in my mind, play is one of the least...
But I'm not saying that breaking down taboos about sex talk results in clinical talk. That's a false dichotomy.
Playfulness does not equal silliness. In fact, in my mind, play is one of the least trivial endeavors of a sentient being.
And I don't agree that non-reproductive sex is a game played by consenting adults. There's a whole lot more to sex than just the immediate (often) fun intimacy. It can be a way to cement certain social ties or deal with stress or any number of other non-play non-reproductive functions.
I still maintain that people think talking about sex is silly because talking about sex is taboo still in many (especially Western) societies. People laugh at someone making an orgasm face because it's taboo to make that face in most scenarios. The face itself isn't entirely funny (subjective), it's the connotative link to sex talk taboo that makes it funny.
At this point, it's just arguing about semantics, which I find both unproductive and terminally boring. When children play with each other, they're learning vital life and social skills. But...
At this point, it's just arguing about semantics, which I find both unproductive and terminally boring.
When children play with each other, they're learning vital life and social skills. But they're still just playing. It's a fun and nonserious activity to them, which happens to also have other functions. When people play sports, most of them do it for fun. But some make a living off it, and some people treat it practically as a substitute for tribal warfare (unfortunately). An activity or behavior can be more than one thing at once, or in different contexts. And seeing something through the lens of "fun" isn't the same as denying it also plays an important social or evolutionary role. But seeing something through that lens also lends itself to humor in a way that seeing it as an evolutionary adaptation or a tool for social bonding does not.
There's a whole lot more to sex than just the immediate (often) fun intimacy. It can be a way to cement certain social ties or deal with stress or any number of other non-play non-reproductive functions.
People play games for all of those reasons, and more! Whether it's relaxing with Stardew Valley, or learning social skills through childhood make-believe, taking the first steps to literacy by stacking and rearranging wooden blocks with letters printed on them, or fostering national pride through sports, or creating friendships through the local boardgame club... Play and games have many functions, none of which make them not games.
Humor does thrive off taboos, but taboos aren't the only source of comedy. Is it taboo to slip on the ice, or a doorstep, or a banana peel? No, but slapstick is still funny. (Again, assuming it agrees with your sense of humor; it remains subjective, but it's historically a very popular form of comedy, suggesting it taps into something if not universal, at least very common).
Communities that are formed around kink still joke about sex. It can't be because of the taboo, since the taboo is erased within the subculture. And that, I propose, is because when viewed from a certain angle, it's actually funny. Not funny as in "haha taboo", just humorous. It's clear that you're completely closed off to this perspective, so I don't think I can convince you in a hundred tildes comments. So I won't even try. I actually agree with your perspective being valid, I simply don't agree that it's the only valid, or mature, or non socially conditioned way of looking at what is, at the end of the day, both a very simple and an incredibly complex phenomenon.
Nothing to me indicated that this was a conversation worth disengaging from. Seemed like we were having a good debate until you wrote it all off as a matter of semantics and thus unproductive and...
Nothing to me indicated that this was a conversation worth disengaging from. Seemed like we were having a good debate until you wrote it all off as a matter of semantics and thus unproductive and terminally boring. If you go your entire online experience only conversing when it seems like you will convince someone else that your viewpoint is the one they should adopt, well that's an incredibly myopic and toxic experience to cultivate.
So, if you're willing to continue the conversation without prefacing each of your comments from here on out as an exercise in futility, well I'd be happy to reciprocate.
I find your comments fascinating. I don't really agree or disagree, so much as find it all interesting. The one thing I personally wanted to add, though, is that I think what "sex" is can no...
I find your comments fascinating. I don't really agree or disagree, so much as find it all interesting.
The one thing I personally wanted to add, though, is that I think what "sex" is can no longer be viewed exclusively though a "nature" point of view. Which is what I heard when you said "sexual reproduction is older than ..." -- to my mind, the human act of "sex" is now about so much more than simply sexual reproduction. I mean, humans have been creating contraceptives for, at a minimum, thousands of years. At best, sex is about reproduction /and/ about enjoyment of the act (and all the other aspects of "sex" that are less than ideal).
So ya. Interesting to think about whether "sex" can be seen as a "silly" thing again if we frame the conversation around the fact that sex is rarely about reproduction than pleasure, when you add in the total counts of sexual acts in a given period of time where contraception is in the mix and its purely about pleasure.
I'm not necessarily fully convinced of my own argument, but I am thinkin' about it!
Great point! I know nothing about how they avoid reproducing though. Maybe non-ovulating females? I'd almost contend if they get to party without crotch goblins based on their biology it's still a...
Great point! I know nothing about how they avoid reproducing though. Maybe non-ovulating females? I'd almost contend if they get to party without crotch goblins based on their biology it's still a natural party.
So, yes, this is a good argument. While lots of younger people have very solid values around sex and sexuality there are plenty of people with weird red-pill / black-pill / PUA / abusive...
So, yes, this is a good argument. While lots of younger people have very solid values around sex and sexuality there are plenty of people with weird red-pill / black-pill / PUA / abusive attitudes, and that is a big concern and I completely failed to mention any of that stuff.
Porn is out of control, and it's far more extreme and far more violent and abusive than it used to be. We (gen x) had "books of naked ladies" and gen z has websites with, well, I can't put the titles of the videos here because they're so violent.
And people report this seems to be affecting real life behaviour -- surveys of women say they've been slapped during sex non-consensually, or they've been choked without warning. Proper kink is about safe, legal, and fully consensual and that's a message that seems locked in kink communities that hasn't found its way to mainstream content yet.
So, yes, you make strong points and I didn't mention them.
Hey, I know a relevant comedy! (@Promethean) The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human.
There's also nothing inherently bigoted about raunchy humor. It might seem that way because it was more popular in an era when open bigotry was more socially acceptable. But the joke at the core of racy humor isn't "gay is bad" or "women, amirite?" It's that sex is kind of silly. It really is. If there were an intelligent alien species that reproduced asexually and they came to Earth, they would probably find the human obsession with genitals slapping together exceedingly strange, dare I say, even funny. You can be inclusive and sex positive and still acknowledge the fundamental silliness of it all.
So does that leave only millenials like me as the only generation with both a safe and open-minded understanding of anal sex, and the ability to appreciate a joke about things being stuck up the...
So does that leave only millenials like me as the only generation with both a safe and open-minded understanding of anal sex, and the ability to appreciate a joke about things being stuck up the butt?
It sounds like if I were born a couple years later, I'd be showing up at the ER explaining to the nurse that I "fell" on my sense of humour.
What can I tell you - it reflects mine? We hang out with different people I suppose. I've also met plenty of dickhead homophobic genz kids. My point (and I see it got lost in the meta joke that...
What can I tell you - it reflects mine? We hang out with different people I suppose. I've also met plenty of dickhead homophobic genz kids.
My point (and I see it got lost in the meta joke that was too good to pass up) was that demographics don't just work on an age basis. If you're only looking at what generation a person was born in you're going to miss the forest for the bark of one tree.
I welcome you to one day try targeting an ad on some social media. Among much more, you'll find age brackets, gender, location, ethnicity, job, interests and hobbies. All of these are used very commonly to target content (not just ads!), and if you ask me to find "A blog for 32-45 year old black women in germany that practice crochet", that most definitely exists.
It sounds niche, but when people spend their time on a variety of social media and news aggregators, these niche content pieces are what gets surfaced, highly targeted, for the end user. Websites are more or less successful at it, based on how they implement those algorithms. On Facebook, it's through social circles; On Instagram and YouTube, it's through watch history + recommendations; On TikTok it's self-feeding via shorts watch time and interactions. (The success of the latter is why youtube and instagram popularized shorts and reels: More signal to better filter)
All that content people read/watch/listen to gets lodged in their brain and dictates their moods, desires, what they learn and how they see the world. They have some agency on it of course but this gets reflected on their demographic, which "generation" is just ONE example of.
So yeah, when you have ALL of these websites implementing strict sfw/nsfw divides, it feeds back into how different demographics see sexual content and sex as a whole.
In this context, "[generation] thinks [thing] about [other thing]" is such a hypersimplification that it's barely worth discussing...
Honestly I 100% agree with you on this! I think the joke at the end of your previous comment came off to me as saying the opposite but I see now it was probably sarcastic in that respect.
In this context, "[generation] thinks [thing] about [other thing]" is such a hypersimplification that it's barely worth discussing...
Honestly I 100% agree with you on this! I think the joke at the end of your previous comment came off to me as saying the opposite but I see now it was probably sarcastic in that respect.
I read no attempt at shaming. If anything, I saw an attempt to discuss a thing rather than hide it. Perhaps if the reader thinks the plain text on the internet with no body language or tone able...
I read no attempt at shaming. If anything, I saw an attempt to discuss a thing rather than hide it. Perhaps if the reader thinks the plain text on the internet with no body language or tone able to be perceived, there's not much more there than the words. Obviously that's not always the case.
But as another millennial, I agree with the idea that you can make a joke about something without mocking it. Often times that joke, when done carefully, can help bring others on a learning journey of knowledge and acceptance.
And hey, plenty of people are terrible and will make mean spirited and mocking jokes.
In theory I believe in your concept, that jokes can be made about something without the intent of them being hurtful. But in reality it doesn't work that way, because you or any other observer who...
In theory I believe in your concept, that jokes can be made about something without the intent of them being hurtful. But in reality it doesn't work that way, because you or any other observer who gets a laugh, doesn't get to decide if the joke is fair game. The person being made the, excuse me, butt of the joke gets to decide that. They get to lead the joking, if it's ok, not anyone else.
I hear all of this, and about 90% of my mind agrees. But there's a corner of my brain that whispers, "society has wider problems if it forgets that comedy being harsh is an important portion of...
I hear all of this, and about 90% of my mind agrees.
But there's a corner of my brain that whispers, "society has wider problems if it forgets that comedy being harsh is an important portion of moving the social consciousness forward by forcing people to hear points of view they don't natively embrace".
I happily hold both of these thoughts in my mind without feeling they contradict one another. I file it under the same section as "it's easy to tell the difference between art and pornography".
I totally get that, I’m kind of right there with you and think that’s a healthy place to be. You know it to be true that humor can and will hurt people, and that’s kind of not cool. We’ve learned...
I totally get that, I’m kind of right there with you and think that’s a healthy place to be. You know it to be true that humor can and will hurt people, and that’s kind of not cool. We’ve learned so much about how impactful the way words make us feel is to our development, it’s just holds more and more weight and I think that’s actually development for us as a species.
But I also realize that sometimes making someone uncomfortable serves a purpose. Sometimes not taking someone’s feelings into account can have an effect and so does the experience of those things.
I think we just do our best and sometimes we miss the mark, but we keep trying.
I honestly don't remember seeing people make those kinds of comments. Even, say, on Scrubs, which made plenty of gay jokes, it was really just about things being in your butt being gross. It has...
Especially since "HAHA he has a thing stuck up his butt" is homophobic at its core.
I honestly don't remember seeing people make those kinds of comments. Even, say, on Scrubs, which made plenty of gay jokes, it was really just about things being in your butt being gross. It has always seemed to be more about the weird things rather than the homosexuality of it.
I'm sorry, but I really feel like the only defense I need for my position is "do you not think poop is gross?" I'm sorry, but I find the thought of anal sex gross regardless of who's doing what to...
I'm sorry, but I really feel like the only defense I need for my position is "do you not think poop is gross?" I'm sorry, but I find the thought of anal sex gross regardless of who's doing what to whom. I understand and I don't judge people for what they do, but I still think that sticking an action figure or a lightbulb or a frozen pig's tail up your butt is disgusting and I will not agree that it is homophobic to say so. I'll even go so far as to say that kink shaming someone who sticks a lightbulb where the Sun don't shine is a net positive for society.
So anybody can let anybody else stick whatever body part up whatever holes they want and I won't care or think any less of them, but I will still find the idea icky, just as I find it icky for a man want a woman to pee on him.
I agree. There's a lot of "nudge nudge wink wink" style humour about items retained in rectum, and it's often very "othering". I'm sad to say I was guilty of that too. But I'm so pleased to see...
I agree.
There's a lot of "nudge nudge wink wink" style humour about items retained in rectum, and it's often very "othering". I'm sad to say I was guilty of that too. But I'm so pleased to see things are changing, and I have learnt from younger people.
Raises hand, right there with you. I'm the kinkiest person in my social circle, and I'm gonna sit there and laugh at ultrasounds of things stuck in rectums. Being able to joke about these things...
Raises hand, right there with you. I'm the kinkiest person in my social circle, and I'm gonna sit there and laugh at ultrasounds of things stuck in rectums. Being able to joke about these things also helps you figure out who else is into kinky stuff... The reality is that misfortune befalling people is funny. How many horrible mistakes have you made in your own life that were really funny in retrospect? I certainly have had my share.
I partially blame the attitudes towards censorship that really blossomed in the last 15 years. I think part of it that is the internet's rise as the dominant communication medium. With most communication done as text, much of the nuance of what's being said gets lost. When things are easily taken out of context and society already not understanding satire. When the audience isn't 10 people whom have known each other for 30 years, but 5 million people or more whom have never heard of you. And since the ratio of bad actors is exponentially higher....it's really hard to draw a line.
Was that comment tounge-in-cheek or was it malicious? Much easier to tell verbally with the context of knowing each other.
If anything... in my friend group... the one whom is least comfortable about joking about things stuck in butts and straight men plowing each other is the most homophobic. But if we joked that way on the broader internet....we'd probably be eviscerated, and not entirely without reason either.
Well, it was a video on oddly satisfying not unexpected - I mean, I agree that the video was boring, who the hell watches someone get a facial for five minutes with no real payoff? Not to even put...
Well, it was a video on oddly satisfying not unexpected - I mean, I agree that the video was boring, who the hell watches someone get a facial for five minutes with no real payoff?
Not to even put it down to a generational thing but 'big' websites don't just have the hip kids on there. It's got everyone. Back in the early social media days, once things started 'going viral', it was a lot of jokes that you wouldn't necessarily show your family. Derrick Comedy's 'Blowjob' video wasn't going to be one I showed to my mom but I certainly shared it with friends.
Kids today, regardless of gen, have an online presence as well. You're not going to share the sloppy BJ routine if your mom, pastor, or favorite teacher follow you or know your username - that might reflect poorly on you, not even to include the faux pas of accidentally sharing something that's been made by someone who may or may not be a horrible person.
You know what some modern slang is? 'tism. As in 'autism', used whenever someone is geeking out about something. Yep, Gen Z (well, high schoolers so late Z), the paragons of prudishness and morality use autism as a slang word. Kids these days don't put their 'raunchy' comedy in public. They've got meme discords, tiktoks, and so on where they're sharing the 'edgy' stuff and they have their public facing accounts.
You're looking at one of the top ten websites in the world for edgy, raunchy comedy? That's like going to Walmart for your S&M gear. They might have something close to what you want but you've got to find a specialty shop.
The other talk about monetization is correct as well. I think spoof culture died out with the endless Blank Movie franchises though.
This is the first explanation that rang true for me. In the early 2000s, being online felt like being anonymous, and we (or at least, my friend group) were much more carefree about everything...
This is the first explanation that rang true for me. In the early 2000s, being online felt like being anonymous, and we (or at least, my friend group) were much more carefree about everything safety and security related.
Our parents gave us sound advice (don't share personal information with anyone), but we didn't take it too seriously because there weren't strangers in unmarked vans on every corner, handing out free candy. It's just words online, right? Well, now we know that if you say the wrong things online, strangers in office buildings will take away your health insurance.
I was reading down till I found this as well. This imho is the answer as well. Online in the 90s and early 2000s was mostly anonymous. Then people started losing jobs, the people started losing...
I was reading down till I found this as well. This imho is the answer as well. Online in the 90s and early 2000s was mostly anonymous. Then people started losing jobs, the people started losing jobs from 10 plus year old comments, and your family got online and wanted to connect. It wasn't a playground anymore, it's a public, lifetime record of you.
On top of this you have the shrinking of the internet to corporate sites that also don't want hot takes and raunchy humor either, further removing it from view.
That kind of content can't be monetized on YouTube anymore (which is also why cursing and swearing have gotten rarer). This is only a partial answer though; I doubt that's the only reason raunchy...
That kind of content can't be monetized on YouTube anymore (which is also why cursing and swearing have gotten rarer). This is only a partial answer though; I doubt that's the only reason raunchy humour has become less common.
ebaumsworld was sold in 2007 for several millions. It was around for 6 years prior to that, so while there might not have been a business model immediately at launch, there was clearly one after...
ebaumsworld was sold in 2007 for several millions. It was around for 6 years prior to that, so while there might not have been a business model immediately at launch, there was clearly one after that. I don't know if you're strictly thinking of the pre-sale days; I was not on that site, but community building was more popular back then, and you would usually fund the website with some ads. Usually, the self-funded community websites were either by people passionate about the subject and happy to pay for their community to live, or people who enjoy the power trip.
A thesis could be written about this question but I think @Minori is the only correct person responding to you so far. To elaborate, there has been the creation of a gap between SFW and NSFW content due to monetization. SFW content gets monetized one way, NSFW content gets monetized a different way. And because monetized websites make up the bulk of what people read on the internet, this structure influences how people learn, interact, and influences their very tastes.
You see it as censorship, but it's really just a result of how the financial incentives are applied.
Also, early-internet crass humor was popular because the internet was a world you'd step into, clearly cut off from real life. It was an escape from real life. It was also anonymous, and more accessible to younger generations. All this is no longer true.
This is what I was going to say. Advertisers. We’re at a point in the internet where storage content is costly to the large websites, so content they host needs to be worth it to them, and most...
This is what I was going to say. Advertisers. We’re at a point in the internet where storage content is costly to the large websites, so content they host needs to be worth it to them, and most advertisers do not want to be associated with websites that host any kind of that content anymore.
Alright, this is my anecdotal, personal experience having grown up as a chronically online teenager. This kind of humor, nowadays, is overwhelmingly pioneered by free speech absolutists and the...
Alright, this is my anecdotal, personal experience having grown up as a chronically online teenager.
This kind of humor, nowadays, is overwhelmingly pioneered by free speech absolutists and the right - the bad part of the right. When I see memes like what you're describing my mind immediately jumps to these people, because they were among the only places that that kind of stuff was still being posted. I don't mean to suggest anything about you with this statement; it's interesting to me how strongly I linked the two groups when I first read your post, and I realized this is why.
People as a whole are just more careful not to say these things in the larger public. Even if you enjoy this kind of humor, or even using slurs, you're probably not going to do that in big discords because you either don't want to get banned or don't want to hurt anyone. In private, with friends you know don't mind, you might be a bit saucier but even then, slur-use has dropped off the face of the earth among the general online population (big gaming discords, streamer discords, etc).
When I was a teenager I didn't see the problem with any of this, but when I think about it now - especially after transitioning - I realize how easy it is to just not make these jokes in public. No-one needs to say the N word to be funny. No-one needs to edit two random adults into a sexual situation even by implication to be funny. If you do these things you'll get weird looks and most likely booted from the discord not because people were even necessarily offended, but because people just don't want to see that stuff unprompted, and sometimes, even if prompted.
At the end of the day, having been on the other side of the fence, I really don't miss it. There is a certain lack of empathy you need to have in order to constantly make memes making fun of others. But I assure you, the internet has all the raunchy humor you want if you go to where it's supposed to be. I'm not sure of the benefit of just having it laying around when a very large amount of people don't want to see it.
Edit: after posting I realized that I really want to emphasize the editing adults into sexual situations part. This is just not cool anymore, and honestly, it never was.
Because you want to emphasize it, I just want to say that I don't even know what you're referring to.
Edit: after posting I realized that I really want to emphasize the editing adults into sexual situations part. This is just not cool anymore, and honestly, it never was.
Because you want to emphasize it, I just want to say that I don't even know what you're referring to.
I find it very strange and in poor taste to take a random video of two people and edit it to include sexual elements. OPs example for saucy humor includes putting the people on screen into a...
I find it very strange and in poor taste to take a random video of two people and edit it to include sexual elements. OPs example for saucy humor includes putting the people on screen into a scenario that they may not want to see themselves in.
Comedy and humor is fine but we can't forget that there are actual people on the other side. None of us would be happy to find that a meme with our face in it has gone viral, and that someone edited a "hilarious" clip of something sexual. This is, quite literally, high school behaviour, and not something we should be longing for nostalgically.
All in good taste, and all in its place. If you and your friends want to edit one another into sexual situations knock yourself out but leave others out of it and definitely do not start making creepy sexual comments about how funny it would be if two guys (shock) had sex, like those redditors did.
Right, I understand that, but it felt like you were talking about that being a problem when I honestly don't even know what you mean by editing it to include sexual elements, or how you would do...
Right, I understand that, but it felt like you were talking about that being a problem when I honestly don't even know what you mean by editing it to include sexual elements, or how you would do that. I'm not saying it wouldn't be mean, immoral, unethical, or potentially even criminal, I'm just saying that it seems you're essentially making up a scenario that, to my knowledge, doesn't exist.
OP literally asked why there aren't memes and viral content like this anymore. OP posted actual comments that were replies to the video that were used as an example but mentioned how comments in a...
I'm not saying it wouldn't be mean, immoral, unethical, or potentially even criminal, I'm just saying that it seems you're essentially making up a scenario that, to my knowledge, doesn't exist.
OP literally asked why there aren't memes and viral content like this anymore. OP posted actual comments that were replies to the video that were used as an example but mentioned how comments in a reddit thread aren't quite the same as taking it to the next level.
The person you are responding to is accepting the OPs statement that it used to exist to make that remark. You can question if the OP was hallucinating their whole life and it didn't actually exist, but I think it's fair to believe them within this context that it used to exist, even if you weren't around then to see it.
One of the main elements of the question asked by OP is basically, why aren't people making content that spoofs adults into "slightly raunchy" situations.
Ok. Maybe those times were a bit too much. So when I got older, in the early 2010s, people would still spoof these kind of videos, but pixelate the explicit scenes. The video would still be raunchy as hell, but significantly toned down.
How are you finding that parent commenter is "making up a scenario" that doesn't exist to your knowledge, when at the very least if anyone is making it up is OP, but really they're not. I haven't seen anyone in here contending that type of content didn't used to exist at a greater level in the past.
OP didn't say they would edit the videos to be sexual. I'm not sure where you're getting that. They said people would spoof them. That means they're making their own videos. I am familiar with the...
OP didn't say they would edit the videos to be sexual. I'm not sure where you're getting that. They said people would spoof them. That means they're making their own videos. I am familiar with the spoof videos. I am not familiar with edits that take a basic video and make it sexual.
Spoof does not necessarily mean make a wholly original video. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spoof transitive verb 1 : deceive, hoax 2 : to make good-natured fun of spoof 2 of 2 noun 1...
Spoof does not necessarily mean make a wholly original video.
noun
a mocking imitation of someone or something, usually light and good-humored;
lampoon or parody: The show was a spoof of college life.
a hoax; prank.
verb (used with object)
to mock (something or someone) lightly and good-humoredly; kid.
to fool by a hoax; play a trick on, especially one intended to deceive[]().
That isn't to say there aren't definitions that more specifically define it as you did, because there are some, so I'm not trying to make it sound like you're wrong about the definition of the word spoof, that can be one of the definitions, but I think the word can be used more generally than that and that is the impression I had when reading OPs post before I even read any of the comments, and it also seems to be the impression of the parent commenter of this chain of comments, and probably a few other comments in here at least.
Especially with non-professional internet content and such where copyrights and what not aren't really generally a consideration. The type of content being referred to here, generally I wouldn't consider it coming from like an actual team or something like CollegeHumor or whatever, I'm figuring that when we're talking about pre-2010 "meme" type of things, its one person who is fucking around with photoshop or other editing software. Not to say there weren't more organized places churning out content then, I just don't get the impression that is what OP is referring to. If you take these more general definitions of the word, then spoofing a video in that instance is basically editing the video to change the context or make fun of something. Think about memes and viral content in general, especially older ones, where most of it is literally just using someone else's image without their permission in most cases.
Here's an example that wouldn't fit the "raunchy" type that OP is talking about, but shows the "spoofing" that I think is being talked about.
A video where the kid ends up unwittingly being included in numerous other edits that mock his original video, but basically many of them use his original video and make edits within it or add onto it or cut parts of it into other videos.
I think that if you don't agree that OPs example of the video is editing people into sexual scenarios then we just don't see eye to eye. I've seen these things all over the internet from discord...
I think that if you don't agree that OPs example of the video is editing people into sexual scenarios then we just don't see eye to eye. I've seen these things all over the internet from discord to reddit and though they have gone down like OP says I think that it's a positive thing.
The particular video OP was describing, no. But these kinds of videos are a dime a dozen. There used to be entire 4chan threads dedicated to things like this. People edit clips to include sexual...
The particular video OP was describing, no. But these kinds of videos are a dime a dozen. There used to be entire 4chan threads dedicated to things like this. People edit clips to include sexual elements all the time. Nowadays it's harder for me (and I imagine a lot of others) to find.
I'm not sure why you're being so insistent that this doesn't exist or has never existee. OP literally described this kind of humor as something they long for, which I disagree with but do not hold anything against them for. I don't think there is something I could say to make you agree that this is a problem because nowadays I have to go out of my way to find these things which I don't intend to do. The burden of proof is not really relevant to me because these are my lived experiences, not an article that I can link to.
Besides, just because I emphasized it doesn't mean I think that it's the worst thing to ever happen and our top priority. It's not. The internet as a whole has moved past that kind of thing outside of private discords. The only reason I mentioned it was because OPs example was overtly sexual.
If you could please lay out your entire argument I would appreciate it because it's getting very difficult to understand what you actually expect of my answers or what your point is. My edit was simply "doing this particular thing that OP described is in my eyes wrong", and you've been insisting that you have no idea what I'm talking about even after I've explained the entire thought process behind it.
EDIT: after reading it over again I think you may have the idea that I'm suggesting people are editing specific people into actual well produced sexual videos. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the metric ton of "slightly raunchy" memes that take it upon themselves to implicate sex into a situation that didn't call for it, sometimes overtly like OPs example and sometimes much less so, like 4chan hate threads where they'd edit women's faces onto "ugly" half naked bodies to laugh at.
Since a lot of people are bringing up Millennials vs. Zoomers, let me just point at one thing—and I say this as a Millennial: The internet as it exists today is not the doing of Zoomers. It is the...
Since a lot of people are bringing up Millennials vs. Zoomers, let me just point at one thing—and I say this as a Millennial:
The internet as it exists today is not the doing of Zoomers. It is the doing of Millennials. This is our internet; we are the dominant force now controlling its development. We are now the most influential generation of web developers, financiers, paying customers, flustered parents saying "What about the children?", etc.
The internet we grew up with was not created by us. It was created by Gen X and Boomer web developers and web users. We were just children and had almost no say whatsoever.
Apart from things already mentioned - monetization of the web and social media becoming mainstream and therefore less anonymous and more populated by your relatives, teachers, coworkers etc. seem...
Apart from things already mentioned - monetization of the web and social media becoming mainstream and therefore less anonymous and more populated by your relatives, teachers, coworkers etc. seem to be the most important - I think that a big part of it is an overall shift in online culture.
I don't know if it's a cause or consequence of the culture wars, but people online are way more eager to interpret anything in the worst way possible, seeking malice where there might not be any. This sometimes manifests in ways that are hard to understand for me - for example surprisingly many people do not separate between the opinion of a literary author and the opinions held by their characters. If somebody writes a book about assholes, they must be kind of an asshole.
This inevitably leads to a chilling effect where many people don't post things they would normally post because they don't want to deal with angry people.
I think this has just been a downward trend in culture over decades. The height of raunchiness was in the 1980s, mainly seen in print and in Hollywood films. Then with the mass adoption of...
I think this has just been a downward trend in culture over decades. The height of raunchiness was in the 1980s, mainly seen in print and in Hollywood films. Then with the mass adoption of internet video in the early 2000s there was an uptick but that turned out to just be a temporary reversal. Looking at the younger Gen Zs and whatever the follow-on generation is being called, they seem to be a lot more temperate. They are certainly drinking less, doing drugs less, and having sex less as a whole, if the statistics are to be believed, and seeing the types of comedy people enjoy online these days it is - as you've said - a lot less raunchy.
As a tangent, I've personally been predicting a return to some sort of cultural conservatism in the next generation or two. I'm a staunch social liberal but that's just the mode of my generation, these things tend to eb and flow and I'm sure that's what we're seeing here. Tastes change.
As to where you could find that sort of content, there must be some niche subreddits if you still use that site. There's certainly IG or YouTube accounts that create that type of content, but they won't be mainstream. I know I've followed people in the past on IG who make exactly what you're looking for but I don't follow them anymore so I couldn't tell you.
Edit: For those who are unclear on terminology: conservative means reserved, not prudish. Downward trend means reducing, not an undesirable trend. Please stop reading value judgements into what I wrote
Maybe I'm reading into this too much as a Zillenial myself, but I feel like your comment is a bit off base. I don't think you can draw a connection like that between drugs, sex, and internet...
Maybe I'm reading into this too much as a Zillenial myself, but I feel like your comment is a bit off base. I don't think you can draw a connection like that between drugs, sex, and internet content. Correlation isn't causation. Maybe gen Z is having less sex because they're consuming more porn on the internet. Maybe due to differing ideas on consent, as another commenter mentioned. Or maybe it's just cause the internet isn't young anymore. Shock and awe videos like what OP described are a dime a dozen, and can't be monetized anyways. I think the line of 'Gen Z are prudes' doesn't even begin to address some of the potential reasons there might be for this shift in humor.
Your tangent does not help your case either. It makes you look like someone who goes 'millenials killed the diamond market'. You say, in a nutshell, 'we're going to return to cultural conservatism (bad) and that's the fault of the young people'. It just feels like all of the other generic 'young people bad' claims, and it undermines any points your first paragraph may have.
I don't think that the idea that a generation, on average, does something that's overall worse than what a different generation did, is implausible in any way. People seem to have no issue with...
Your tangent does not help your case either. It makes you look like someone who goes 'millenials killed the diamond market'. You say, in a nutshell, 'we're going to return to cultural conservatism (bad) and that's the fault of the young people'. It just feels like all of the other generic 'young people bad' claims, and it undermines any points your first paragraph may have.
I don't think that the idea that a generation, on average, does something that's overall worse than what a different generation did, is implausible in any way. People seem to have no issue with saying similar things about boomers, for example.
Yes, I think you're reading my comment from the perspective of a baby boomer screaming "Kids, get off my lawn." I stand my perspective that culture is in some ways returning to more conservatism...
Maybe I'm reading into this too much as a Zillenial myself
Yes, I think you're reading my comment from the perspective of a baby boomer screaming "Kids, get off my lawn." I stand my perspective that culture is in some ways returning to more conservatism but I never implied that was a bad thing or that younger generations should be blamed for it. To elaborate I will say that I'm glad that this conservatism still remains open to different forms of gender and sexuality, among other things, so conservatism doesn't necessarily need to be equated to traditional right wing politics.
I think another relevant example is the disappearance of, admittedly cringey, toxic masculinity magazines like Maxim that were so popular with my generation. Those don't really exist anymore in that form because they just don't appeal anymore in a more culturally conservative environment. Younger generations have Andrew Tate, which pushes a different type of toxic masculinity but it's not the same raunchy, booby, sophomoric comedy found in those magazines.
I am entirely neutral about these cultural shifts, it's neither bad nor good if the shifts don't limit acceptance for marginalized people. Younger people just don't find the same raunchy, borderline racist, chauvinistic humor funny anymore. Movies have less sex and PDA is way down. Cultural attitudes, at least in public where it counts, are a lot more conservative than when I was younger and that's okay. Like i said, it's all a matter of taste
Keep in mind, we've had over a decade of people saying "millennials don't want to buy houses" and "millennials don't want to work" when the reality is house prices are soaring and wages are...
Keep in mind, we've had over a decade of people saying "millennials don't want to buy houses" and "millennials don't want to work" when the reality is house prices are soaring and wages are stagnating. Not every difference is a cultural shift.
I just read that Gen Z has home ownership rates higher than both Gen X and Millenials at the same age, so while I'm not saying it's cultural I am saying that your explanation doesn't exactly fit....
I just read that Gen Z has home ownership rates higher than both Gen X and Millenials at the same age, so while I'm not saying it's cultural I am saying that your explanation doesn't exactly fit. It's just a convenient catchall argument
I read that too, most of the article is spent explaining all the differences in economic factors. Basically, if you compare "Millenials at age 25" to "Zoomers at age 25" you're comparing recession...
I read that too, most of the article is spent explaining all the differences in economic factors. Basically, if you compare "Millenials at age 25" to "Zoomers at age 25" you're comparing recession times to non-recession times, with predictable results:
The youngest generation of homeowners benefitted from favorable economic conditions when they entered the workforce, financial assistance from relatives, and flexibility to move to affordable areas, according to experts.
Like their homeownership rates, the economy looked different when the oldest members of each generation hit 25.
Many Gen Xers entered adulthood during the recession of the early ‘90s and older millennials entered the workforce during the Great Recession and housing crisis in the 2010s.
Members of Gen Z still face difficulties in home buying born out of the housing crisis, but they also benefited from entering the workforce at a time of record-low interest rates, said Max Besbris, an associate sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
People who graduated college during a recession experience an initial 9% loss in annual earnings. Those earnings losses compared to people who graduated in a stronger economy shrink over time but don’t disappear until 10 years after graduation
Mortgage rates were at historic lows of under 3% in 2020
Also want to point out that economics is too falsifiable to be a good "convenient catch-all argument", it has causes, effects and mechanisms that can be confirmed or disproven with evidence....
Also want to point out that economics is too falsifiable to be a good "convenient catch-all argument", it has causes, effects and mechanisms that can be confirmed or disproven with evidence.
"Cultural downslope over the decades", on the other hand, now that's a convenient catch-all argument.
I could have worded my reply better. I didn’t want to go down the tangent that you brought up but you were distilling a very complicated economic issue into platitudes. Millennials came of age...
I could have worded my reply better. I didn’t want to go down the tangent that you brought up but you were distilling a very complicated economic issue into platitudes. Millennials came of age during a „recession“ which was actually on par with a depression and real world wages are rising - even when taking inflation into account. There’s even more to it, but again I’m not here to talk about this and don’t want to get off subject. Your argument was catchall for being reductive, mine may be as well but I don’t want to turn the table on you and point out that you’re throwing sand on an entire discipline of social sciences which do analyze and theorize societal trends
Comparing stereotypes of millennial work attitudes and housing market preferences to clear indications that popular culture is moderating in a more conservative direction are nowhere near equivalent
It's a valid comparison. People observed millenials buying fewer houses and changing jobs more frequently, and they attributed that to a change in cultural values without considering the...
It's a valid comparison.
People observed millenials buying fewer houses and changing jobs more frequently, and they attributed that to a change in cultural values without considering the significant external factors (economics) that were actually driving it.
Now I see you observe zoomers partaking less in drink and drugs, having less sex and enjoying less 'raunchy' comedy, and attributing it to a change in cultural values without considering external factors.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that you're making the same oversight.
My observation is that Gen Z is becoming culturally more conservative and all of those things, which are backed by studies, are by definition more conservative. Nowhere am I drawing any...
My observation is that Gen Z is becoming culturally more conservative and all of those things, which are backed by studies, are by definition more conservative. Nowhere am I drawing any connections or trying to show causation or correlation but you sure are. They are not equivalent
Not only are you directly linking cultural conservatism (cause) to zoomers enjoying less sex and substances (effect), you've defined them as one and the same: This is what's called 'begging the...
Not only are you directly linking cultural conservatism (cause) to zoomers enjoying less sex and substances (effect), you've defined them as one and the same:
all of those things, [...], are by definition more conservative
This is what's called 'begging the question', when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion.
The question you've skipped over is why are they having less sex and drink/drugs? If they are just freely choosing to engage with them less, then fine, that's conservative. But if it's because they have less access to those things, or can't afford them as much, or don't have as many social venues to engage in them, or are prevented by mental health issues, or have long covid, or any number of other scenarios where they want to fuck and drink but they can't make it happen as often, that's not culturally conservative, that's an external factor limiting what people can do.
Someone who chooses not to have sex is conservative. Someone who winds up not having sex because they spent two of their college years attending classes over zoom from their parents' house in the countryside and now have very few in-person friends, they can't justifiably be called "by definition more conservative". That's reductive.
You’re misreading that. Gen Z being more conservative than Millennial culture is not a cause. I am not exploring what is causing their culture to be more conservative, whether by choice or...
You’re misreading that. Gen Z being more conservative than Millennial culture is not a cause. I am not exploring what is causing their culture to be more conservative, whether by choice or circumstance is unimportant to the fact that it is indeed more conservative in action. That would only beg the question if I were linking it as a cause, which I’m not. You’re injecting choice into the equation where I have not. I used examples above to illustrate my point but let me rephrase it for you to make it more simple: Gen Z is more reserved in their cultural actions compared to Millennials. Stop trying to overanalyze what I’m saying or make it out to be something more than pure observational commentary of societal trends
To be blunt, that's not what "culturally conservative" means. It does not mean "when people have sex less, regardless of cause". It means someone holds traditional values and/or are averse to...
To be blunt, that's not what "culturally conservative" means. It does not mean "when people have sex less, regardless of cause". It means someone holds traditional values and/or are averse to change. Judging by the edit you made on your top-level post, the other people in this thread didn't subscribe to your private definition of conservative either. Maybe the problem isn't everyone else?
OP, I just finished watching the PBS Frontline documentary The Discord Leaks. I think you should check it out and compare your idea of internet culture. I am not drawing a straight line from your...
OP, I just finished watching the PBS Frontline documentary The Discord Leaks. I think you should check it out and compare your idea of internet culture. I am not drawing a straight line from your questions to that content. Not at all.
I just watched the thing a couple days ago and your comment is relatively related and made me think about some of my own opinions about the internet more in depth.
Young people got bored of creepy older guys sexualising everything. They're building newer understandings of sexuality that are based on personal autonomy coupled with consent.
Genx may think this is prudish, but we (gen x) had pretty gross representation and discussion of sexuality and while gen z is having less sex, they seem to be less tolerant of abuse and more open to diversity.
One example of this might be discussion around people attending emergency department with items retained in the rectum. Gen-X will laugh, and mock, and that will include somewhat homophobic "joking" content. Gen-Z will have a lot more empathy, and they show that by not mocking, and also they'll be the ones giving the safety message of "lots of people enjoy this, there are safe ways to do it, use lube and a designed toy with a flared base".
I dunno, I reckon the kids are alright.
I think this is giving way too much credit to younger generations and way too little to older ones. There's more porn on the internet now than had been produced in the entire history of humanity up until the year 2000. You could easily turn it around and say older generations had a healthier relationship to sex, because they were having more real relations with real people and spending less time watching porn.
Which isn't really something I believe, but simply an example of how cultural trends can be twisted and reinterpreted. It doesn't make sense to make such sweeping generalizations.
There's also nothing inherently bigoted about raunchy humor. It might seem that way because it was more popular in an era when open bigotry was more socially acceptable. But the joke at the core of racy humor isn't "gay is bad" or "women, amirite?" It's that sex is kind of silly. It really is. If there were an intelligent alien species that reproduced asexually and they came to Earth, they would probably find the human obsession with genitals slapping together exceedingly strange, dare I say, even funny. You can be inclusive and sex positive and still acknowledge the fundamental silliness of it all.
I don't agree with this at all. Sexual reproduction is older than jaws and the tetrapod body plan. You could just as easily say that an alien species that has seven tentacles and eats through osmosis would view our four-limbed mouth-eating as kind of silly.
But it's not, and neither is sex. Both are completely normal activities. It'd be one thing if there wasn't this weird taboo against talking maturely about sex. People joke about food all the time, but there isn't a taboo around talking about food in a non-joke way. With sex, perhaps it's because it's typically done in private (in most modern societies), but that too easily leads people to consider it something shameful that you mustn't talk about. And that's a problem that maybe younger generations are recognizing and pushing back on.
I guess we just have different perspectives. I see "talking maturely about sex" as a license to acknowledge the fundamental playfulness, and therefore, silliness, of non-reproductive sex. I think the tendency to insist on discussing it in very serious and clinical terms is itself a remnant of taboo. Not that it's wrong to discuss it clinically, but I don't think it's a particular sign of maturity to treat it as something that you can't also have fun with or joke about. That just reinforces the old taboos.
Normal human behavior can be funny and playful. I don't disagree that it's normal, but that doesn't make it not playful. Sex, when divorced from reproduction, is a game played between consenting adults. Now, it's a game that has potentially more serious consequences than Call of Duty or Monopoly, and therefore requires appropriate safeguards against nonconsent, STDs and unintended pregnancies. But it's still, in my mind, a playful activity. For the record, in my experience, inclusive sex-positive communities that also talk very seriously about safe sex and consent, very often have exactly that attitude. Once you remove the taboo and talk openly, you can also acknowledge that a Big O face is funny (in my opinion; humor is subjective), or that the games we play during courtship or foreplay can be kinda whacky.
I'm not asexual, so I get the sex appeal of, well, sex. And I don't know where you grew up, but assuming it's in some Western society, we probably have similar taboos culturally imprinted. But I also think the ridiculous lengths some people go to in order to get laid are exactly that, ridiculous (and that includes myself when I was younger). That's what I was imagining the aliens laughing about. And I think the sheer mechanics of it, when divorced from horniness, have a certain comedy to them, but that delves into the realms of the subjectiveness of humor.
Treating something as playful and fun isn't the same as making it the butt of a joke. And joking about something doesn't mean you don't take it seriously (see gallows humor).
But I'm not saying that breaking down taboos about sex talk results in clinical talk. That's a false dichotomy.
Playfulness does not equal silliness. In fact, in my mind, play is one of the least trivial endeavors of a sentient being.
And I don't agree that non-reproductive sex is a game played by consenting adults. There's a whole lot more to sex than just the immediate (often) fun intimacy. It can be a way to cement certain social ties or deal with stress or any number of other non-play non-reproductive functions.
I still maintain that people think talking about sex is silly because talking about sex is taboo still in many (especially Western) societies. People laugh at someone making an orgasm face because it's taboo to make that face in most scenarios. The face itself isn't entirely funny (subjective), it's the connotative link to sex talk taboo that makes it funny.
At this point, it's just arguing about semantics, which I find both unproductive and terminally boring.
When children play with each other, they're learning vital life and social skills. But they're still just playing. It's a fun and nonserious activity to them, which happens to also have other functions. When people play sports, most of them do it for fun. But some make a living off it, and some people treat it practically as a substitute for tribal warfare (unfortunately). An activity or behavior can be more than one thing at once, or in different contexts. And seeing something through the lens of "fun" isn't the same as denying it also plays an important social or evolutionary role. But seeing something through that lens also lends itself to humor in a way that seeing it as an evolutionary adaptation or a tool for social bonding does not.
People play games for all of those reasons, and more! Whether it's relaxing with Stardew Valley, or learning social skills through childhood make-believe, taking the first steps to literacy by stacking and rearranging wooden blocks with letters printed on them, or fostering national pride through sports, or creating friendships through the local boardgame club... Play and games have many functions, none of which make them not games.
Humor does thrive off taboos, but taboos aren't the only source of comedy. Is it taboo to slip on the ice, or a doorstep, or a banana peel? No, but slapstick is still funny. (Again, assuming it agrees with your sense of humor; it remains subjective, but it's historically a very popular form of comedy, suggesting it taps into something if not universal, at least very common).
Communities that are formed around kink still joke about sex. It can't be because of the taboo, since the taboo is erased within the subculture. And that, I propose, is because when viewed from a certain angle, it's actually funny. Not funny as in "haha taboo", just humorous. It's clear that you're completely closed off to this perspective, so I don't think I can convince you in a hundred tildes comments. So I won't even try. I actually agree with your perspective being valid, I simply don't agree that it's the only valid, or mature, or non socially conditioned way of looking at what is, at the end of the day, both a very simple and an incredibly complex phenomenon.
Nothing to me indicated that this was a conversation worth disengaging from. Seemed like we were having a good debate until you wrote it all off as a matter of semantics and thus unproductive and terminally boring. If you go your entire online experience only conversing when it seems like you will convince someone else that your viewpoint is the one they should adopt, well that's an incredibly myopic and toxic experience to cultivate.
So, if you're willing to continue the conversation without prefacing each of your comments from here on out as an exercise in futility, well I'd be happy to reciprocate.
I find your comments fascinating. I don't really agree or disagree, so much as find it all interesting.
The one thing I personally wanted to add, though, is that I think what "sex" is can no longer be viewed exclusively though a "nature" point of view. Which is what I heard when you said "sexual reproduction is older than ..." -- to my mind, the human act of "sex" is now about so much more than simply sexual reproduction. I mean, humans have been creating contraceptives for, at a minimum, thousands of years. At best, sex is about reproduction /and/ about enjoyment of the act (and all the other aspects of "sex" that are less than ideal).
So ya. Interesting to think about whether "sex" can be seen as a "silly" thing again if we frame the conversation around the fact that sex is rarely about reproduction than pleasure, when you add in the total counts of sexual acts in a given period of time where contraception is in the mix and its purely about pleasure.
I'm not necessarily fully convinced of my own argument, but I am thinkin' about it!
To counter that, non-reproductive sex is still natural and occurs in non-human species like bonobos and dolphins.
Great point! I know nothing about how they avoid reproducing though. Maybe non-ovulating females? I'd almost contend if they get to party without crotch goblins based on their biology it's still a natural party.
At this point I'm just cracking jokes, though!
So, yes, this is a good argument. While lots of younger people have very solid values around sex and sexuality there are plenty of people with weird red-pill / black-pill / PUA / abusive attitudes, and that is a big concern and I completely failed to mention any of that stuff.
Porn is out of control, and it's far more extreme and far more violent and abusive than it used to be. We (gen x) had "books of naked ladies" and gen z has websites with, well, I can't put the titles of the videos here because they're so violent.
And people report this seems to be affecting real life behaviour -- surveys of women say they've been slapped during sex non-consensually, or they've been choked without warning. Proper kink is about safe, legal, and fully consensual and that's a message that seems locked in kink communities that hasn't found its way to mainstream content yet.
So, yes, you make strong points and I didn't mention them.
Hey, I know a relevant comedy! (@Promethean)
The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human.
So does that leave only millenials like me as the only generation with both a safe and open-minded understanding of anal sex, and the ability to appreciate a joke about things being stuck up the butt?
It sounds like if I were born a couple years later, I'd be showing up at the ER explaining to the nurse that I "fell" on my sense of humour.
I don't think this remotely reflects my experience with millennials.
What can I tell you - it reflects mine? We hang out with different people I suppose. I've also met plenty of dickhead homophobic genz kids.
My point (and I see it got lost in the meta joke that was too good to pass up) was that demographics don't just work on an age basis. If you're only looking at what generation a person was born in you're going to miss the forest for the bark of one tree.
I welcome you to one day try targeting an ad on some social media. Among much more, you'll find age brackets, gender, location, ethnicity, job, interests and hobbies. All of these are used very commonly to target content (not just ads!), and if you ask me to find "A blog for 32-45 year old black women in germany that practice crochet", that most definitely exists.
It sounds niche, but when people spend their time on a variety of social media and news aggregators, these niche content pieces are what gets surfaced, highly targeted, for the end user. Websites are more or less successful at it, based on how they implement those algorithms. On Facebook, it's through social circles; On Instagram and YouTube, it's through watch history + recommendations; On TikTok it's self-feeding via shorts watch time and interactions. (The success of the latter is why youtube and instagram popularized shorts and reels: More signal to better filter)
All that content people read/watch/listen to gets lodged in their brain and dictates their moods, desires, what they learn and how they see the world. They have some agency on it of course but this gets reflected on their demographic, which "generation" is just ONE example of.
So yeah, when you have ALL of these websites implementing strict sfw/nsfw divides, it feeds back into how different demographics see sexual content and sex as a whole.
In this context, "[generation] thinks [thing] about [other thing]" is such a hypersimplification that it's barely worth discussing...
Honestly I 100% agree with you on this! I think the joke at the end of your previous comment came off to me as saying the opposite but I see now it was probably sarcastic in that respect.
I read no attempt at shaming. If anything, I saw an attempt to discuss a thing rather than hide it. Perhaps if the reader thinks the plain text on the internet with no body language or tone able to be perceived, there's not much more there than the words. Obviously that's not always the case.
But as another millennial, I agree with the idea that you can make a joke about something without mocking it. Often times that joke, when done carefully, can help bring others on a learning journey of knowledge and acceptance.
And hey, plenty of people are terrible and will make mean spirited and mocking jokes.
Fair enough!
Hmm, was the Seinfeld episode homophobic? That has to be the most famous example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fusilli_Jerry
In theory I believe in your concept, that jokes can be made about something without the intent of them being hurtful. But in reality it doesn't work that way, because you or any other observer who gets a laugh, doesn't get to decide if the joke is fair game. The person being made the, excuse me, butt of the joke gets to decide that. They get to lead the joking, if it's ok, not anyone else.
I hear all of this, and about 90% of my mind agrees.
But there's a corner of my brain that whispers, "society has wider problems if it forgets that comedy being harsh is an important portion of moving the social consciousness forward by forcing people to hear points of view they don't natively embrace".
I happily hold both of these thoughts in my mind without feeling they contradict one another. I file it under the same section as "it's easy to tell the difference between art and pornography".
I totally get that, I’m kind of right there with you and think that’s a healthy place to be. You know it to be true that humor can and will hurt people, and that’s kind of not cool. We’ve learned so much about how impactful the way words make us feel is to our development, it’s just holds more and more weight and I think that’s actually development for us as a species.
But I also realize that sometimes making someone uncomfortable serves a purpose. Sometimes not taking someone’s feelings into account can have an effect and so does the experience of those things.
I think we just do our best and sometimes we miss the mark, but we keep trying.
Wise words. 💪👍
I'm shocked you could even comprehend it, with my 3-4 typos. I wrote it on the fly, while out. 😂
I honestly don't remember seeing people make those kinds of comments. Even, say, on Scrubs, which made plenty of gay jokes, it was really just about things being in your butt being gross. It has always seemed to be more about the weird things rather than the homosexuality of it.
I'm sorry, but I really feel like the only defense I need for my position is "do you not think poop is gross?" I'm sorry, but I find the thought of anal sex gross regardless of who's doing what to whom. I understand and I don't judge people for what they do, but I still think that sticking an action figure or a lightbulb or a frozen pig's tail up your butt is disgusting and I will not agree that it is homophobic to say so. I'll even go so far as to say that kink shaming someone who sticks a lightbulb where the Sun don't shine is a net positive for society.
So anybody can let anybody else stick whatever body part up whatever holes they want and I won't care or think any less of them, but I will still find the idea icky, just as I find it icky for a man want a woman to pee on him.
I agree.
There's a lot of "nudge nudge wink wink" style humour about items retained in rectum, and it's often very "othering". I'm sad to say I was guilty of that too. But I'm so pleased to see things are changing, and I have learnt from younger people.
Raises hand, right there with you. I'm the kinkiest person in my social circle, and I'm gonna sit there and laugh at ultrasounds of things stuck in rectums. Being able to joke about these things also helps you figure out who else is into kinky stuff... The reality is that misfortune befalling people is funny. How many horrible mistakes have you made in your own life that were really funny in retrospect? I certainly have had my share.
I partially blame the attitudes towards censorship that really blossomed in the last 15 years. I think part of it that is the internet's rise as the dominant communication medium. With most communication done as text, much of the nuance of what's being said gets lost. When things are easily taken out of context and society already not understanding satire. When the audience isn't 10 people whom have known each other for 30 years, but 5 million people or more whom have never heard of you. And since the ratio of bad actors is exponentially higher....it's really hard to draw a line.
Was that comment tounge-in-cheek or was it malicious? Much easier to tell verbally with the context of knowing each other.
If anything... in my friend group... the one whom is least comfortable about joking about things stuck in butts and straight men plowing each other is the most homophobic. But if we joked that way on the broader internet....we'd probably be eviscerated, and not entirely without reason either.
Well, it was a video on oddly satisfying not unexpected - I mean, I agree that the video was boring, who the hell watches someone get a facial for five minutes with no real payoff?
Not to even put it down to a generational thing but 'big' websites don't just have the hip kids on there. It's got everyone. Back in the early social media days, once things started 'going viral', it was a lot of jokes that you wouldn't necessarily show your family. Derrick Comedy's 'Blowjob' video wasn't going to be one I showed to my mom but I certainly shared it with friends.
Kids today, regardless of gen, have an online presence as well. You're not going to share the sloppy BJ routine if your mom, pastor, or favorite teacher follow you or know your username - that might reflect poorly on you, not even to include the faux pas of accidentally sharing something that's been made by someone who may or may not be a horrible person.
You know what some modern slang is? 'tism. As in 'autism', used whenever someone is geeking out about something. Yep, Gen Z (well, high schoolers so late Z), the paragons of prudishness and morality use autism as a slang word. Kids these days don't put their 'raunchy' comedy in public. They've got meme discords, tiktoks, and so on where they're sharing the 'edgy' stuff and they have their public facing accounts.
You're looking at one of the top ten websites in the world for edgy, raunchy comedy? That's like going to Walmart for your S&M gear. They might have something close to what you want but you've got to find a specialty shop.
The other talk about monetization is correct as well. I think spoof culture died out with the endless Blank Movie franchises though.
This is the first explanation that rang true for me. In the early 2000s, being online felt like being anonymous, and we (or at least, my friend group) were much more carefree about everything safety and security related.
Our parents gave us sound advice (don't share personal information with anyone), but we didn't take it too seriously because there weren't strangers in unmarked vans on every corner, handing out free candy. It's just words online, right? Well, now we know that if you say the wrong things online, strangers in office buildings will take away your health insurance.
I was reading down till I found this as well. This imho is the answer as well. Online in the 90s and early 2000s was mostly anonymous. Then people started losing jobs, the people started losing jobs from 10 plus year old comments, and your family got online and wanted to connect. It wasn't a playground anymore, it's a public, lifetime record of you.
On top of this you have the shrinking of the internet to corporate sites that also don't want hot takes and raunchy humor either, further removing it from view.
That kind of content can't be monetized on YouTube anymore (which is also why cursing and swearing have gotten rarer). This is only a partial answer though; I doubt that's the only reason raunchy humour has become less common.
ebaumsworld was sold in 2007 for several millions. It was around for 6 years prior to that, so while there might not have been a business model immediately at launch, there was clearly one after that. I don't know if you're strictly thinking of the pre-sale days; I was not on that site, but community building was more popular back then, and you would usually fund the website with some ads. Usually, the self-funded community websites were either by people passionate about the subject and happy to pay for their community to live, or people who enjoy the power trip.
A thesis could be written about this question but I think @Minori is the only correct person responding to you so far. To elaborate, there has been the creation of a gap between SFW and NSFW content due to monetization. SFW content gets monetized one way, NSFW content gets monetized a different way. And because monetized websites make up the bulk of what people read on the internet, this structure influences how people learn, interact, and influences their very tastes.
You see it as censorship, but it's really just a result of how the financial incentives are applied.
Also, early-internet crass humor was popular because the internet was a world you'd step into, clearly cut off from real life. It was an escape from real life. It was also anonymous, and more accessible to younger generations. All this is no longer true.
This is what I was going to say. Advertisers. We’re at a point in the internet where storage content is costly to the large websites, so content they host needs to be worth it to them, and most advertisers do not want to be associated with websites that host any kind of that content anymore.
Alright, this is my anecdotal, personal experience having grown up as a chronically online teenager.
This kind of humor, nowadays, is overwhelmingly pioneered by free speech absolutists and the right - the bad part of the right. When I see memes like what you're describing my mind immediately jumps to these people, because they were among the only places that that kind of stuff was still being posted. I don't mean to suggest anything about you with this statement; it's interesting to me how strongly I linked the two groups when I first read your post, and I realized this is why.
People as a whole are just more careful not to say these things in the larger public. Even if you enjoy this kind of humor, or even using slurs, you're probably not going to do that in big discords because you either don't want to get banned or don't want to hurt anyone. In private, with friends you know don't mind, you might be a bit saucier but even then, slur-use has dropped off the face of the earth among the general online population (big gaming discords, streamer discords, etc).
When I was a teenager I didn't see the problem with any of this, but when I think about it now - especially after transitioning - I realize how easy it is to just not make these jokes in public. No-one needs to say the N word to be funny. No-one needs to edit two random adults into a sexual situation even by implication to be funny. If you do these things you'll get weird looks and most likely booted from the discord not because people were even necessarily offended, but because people just don't want to see that stuff unprompted, and sometimes, even if prompted.
At the end of the day, having been on the other side of the fence, I really don't miss it. There is a certain lack of empathy you need to have in order to constantly make memes making fun of others. But I assure you, the internet has all the raunchy humor you want if you go to where it's supposed to be. I'm not sure of the benefit of just having it laying around when a very large amount of people don't want to see it.
Edit: after posting I realized that I really want to emphasize the editing adults into sexual situations part. This is just not cool anymore, and honestly, it never was.
Because you want to emphasize it, I just want to say that I don't even know what you're referring to.
I find it very strange and in poor taste to take a random video of two people and edit it to include sexual elements. OPs example for saucy humor includes putting the people on screen into a scenario that they may not want to see themselves in.
Comedy and humor is fine but we can't forget that there are actual people on the other side. None of us would be happy to find that a meme with our face in it has gone viral, and that someone edited a "hilarious" clip of something sexual. This is, quite literally, high school behaviour, and not something we should be longing for nostalgically.
All in good taste, and all in its place. If you and your friends want to edit one another into sexual situations knock yourself out but leave others out of it and definitely do not start making creepy sexual comments about how funny it would be if two guys (shock) had sex, like those redditors did.
Right, I understand that, but it felt like you were talking about that being a problem when I honestly don't even know what you mean by editing it to include sexual elements, or how you would do that. I'm not saying it wouldn't be mean, immoral, unethical, or potentially even criminal, I'm just saying that it seems you're essentially making up a scenario that, to my knowledge, doesn't exist.
OP literally asked why there aren't memes and viral content like this anymore. OP posted actual comments that were replies to the video that were used as an example but mentioned how comments in a reddit thread aren't quite the same as taking it to the next level.
The person you are responding to is accepting the OPs statement that it used to exist to make that remark. You can question if the OP was hallucinating their whole life and it didn't actually exist, but I think it's fair to believe them within this context that it used to exist, even if you weren't around then to see it.
One of the main elements of the question asked by OP is basically, why aren't people making content that spoofs adults into "slightly raunchy" situations.
How are you finding that parent commenter is "making up a scenario" that doesn't exist to your knowledge, when at the very least if anyone is making it up is OP, but really they're not. I haven't seen anyone in here contending that type of content didn't used to exist at a greater level in the past.
OP didn't say they would edit the videos to be sexual. I'm not sure where you're getting that. They said people would spoof them. That means they're making their own videos. I am familiar with the spoof videos. I am not familiar with edits that take a basic video and make it sexual.
Spoof does not necessarily mean make a wholly original video.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spoof
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/spoof
That isn't to say there aren't definitions that more specifically define it as you did, because there are some, so I'm not trying to make it sound like you're wrong about the definition of the word spoof, that can be one of the definitions, but I think the word can be used more generally than that and that is the impression I had when reading OPs post before I even read any of the comments, and it also seems to be the impression of the parent commenter of this chain of comments, and probably a few other comments in here at least.
Especially with non-professional internet content and such where copyrights and what not aren't really generally a consideration. The type of content being referred to here, generally I wouldn't consider it coming from like an actual team or something like CollegeHumor or whatever, I'm figuring that when we're talking about pre-2010 "meme" type of things, its one person who is fucking around with photoshop or other editing software. Not to say there weren't more organized places churning out content then, I just don't get the impression that is what OP is referring to. If you take these more general definitions of the word, then spoofing a video in that instance is basically editing the video to change the context or make fun of something. Think about memes and viral content in general, especially older ones, where most of it is literally just using someone else's image without their permission in most cases.
Here's an example that wouldn't fit the "raunchy" type that OP is talking about, but shows the "spoofing" that I think is being talked about.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/star-wars-kid
A video where the kid ends up unwittingly being included in numerous other edits that mock his original video, but basically many of them use his original video and make edits within it or add onto it or cut parts of it into other videos.
I think that if you don't agree that OPs example of the video is editing people into sexual scenarios then we just don't see eye to eye. I've seen these things all over the internet from discord to reddit and though they have gone down like OP says I think that it's a positive thing.
You're saying that you watched the video and thought that it edited the people into sexual situations when they weren't doing anything sexual?
The particular video OP was describing, no. But these kinds of videos are a dime a dozen. There used to be entire 4chan threads dedicated to things like this. People edit clips to include sexual elements all the time. Nowadays it's harder for me (and I imagine a lot of others) to find.
I'm not sure why you're being so insistent that this doesn't exist or has never existee. OP literally described this kind of humor as something they long for, which I disagree with but do not hold anything against them for. I don't think there is something I could say to make you agree that this is a problem because nowadays I have to go out of my way to find these things which I don't intend to do. The burden of proof is not really relevant to me because these are my lived experiences, not an article that I can link to.
Besides, just because I emphasized it doesn't mean I think that it's the worst thing to ever happen and our top priority. It's not. The internet as a whole has moved past that kind of thing outside of private discords. The only reason I mentioned it was because OPs example was overtly sexual.
If you could please lay out your entire argument I would appreciate it because it's getting very difficult to understand what you actually expect of my answers or what your point is. My edit was simply "doing this particular thing that OP described is in my eyes wrong", and you've been insisting that you have no idea what I'm talking about even after I've explained the entire thought process behind it.
EDIT: after reading it over again I think you may have the idea that I'm suggesting people are editing specific people into actual well produced sexual videos. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the metric ton of "slightly raunchy" memes that take it upon themselves to implicate sex into a situation that didn't call for it, sometimes overtly like OPs example and sometimes much less so, like 4chan hate threads where they'd edit women's faces onto "ugly" half naked bodies to laugh at.
Since a lot of people are bringing up Millennials vs. Zoomers, let me just point at one thing—and I say this as a Millennial:
The internet as it exists today is not the doing of Zoomers. It is the doing of Millennials. This is our internet; we are the dominant force now controlling its development. We are now the most influential generation of web developers, financiers, paying customers, flustered parents saying "What about the children?", etc.
The internet we grew up with was not created by us. It was created by Gen X and Boomer web developers and web users. We were just children and had almost no say whatsoever.
Apart from things already mentioned - monetization of the web and social media becoming mainstream and therefore less anonymous and more populated by your relatives, teachers, coworkers etc. seem to be the most important - I think that a big part of it is an overall shift in online culture.
I don't know if it's a cause or consequence of the culture wars, but people online are way more eager to interpret anything in the worst way possible, seeking malice where there might not be any. This sometimes manifests in ways that are hard to understand for me - for example surprisingly many people do not separate between the opinion of a literary author and the opinions held by their characters. If somebody writes a book about assholes, they must be kind of an asshole.
This inevitably leads to a chilling effect where many people don't post things they would normally post because they don't want to deal with angry people.
I think this has just been a downward trend in culture over decades. The height of raunchiness was in the 1980s, mainly seen in print and in Hollywood films. Then with the mass adoption of internet video in the early 2000s there was an uptick but that turned out to just be a temporary reversal. Looking at the younger Gen Zs and whatever the follow-on generation is being called, they seem to be a lot more temperate. They are certainly drinking less, doing drugs less, and having sex less as a whole, if the statistics are to be believed, and seeing the types of comedy people enjoy online these days it is - as you've said - a lot less raunchy.
As a tangent, I've personally been predicting a return to some sort of cultural conservatism in the next generation or two. I'm a staunch social liberal but that's just the mode of my generation, these things tend to eb and flow and I'm sure that's what we're seeing here. Tastes change.
As to where you could find that sort of content, there must be some niche subreddits if you still use that site. There's certainly IG or YouTube accounts that create that type of content, but they won't be mainstream. I know I've followed people in the past on IG who make exactly what you're looking for but I don't follow them anymore so I couldn't tell you.
Edit: For those who are unclear on terminology: conservative means reserved, not prudish. Downward trend means reducing, not an undesirable trend. Please stop reading value judgements into what I wrote
Maybe I'm reading into this too much as a Zillenial myself, but I feel like your comment is a bit off base. I don't think you can draw a connection like that between drugs, sex, and internet content. Correlation isn't causation. Maybe gen Z is having less sex because they're consuming more porn on the internet. Maybe due to differing ideas on consent, as another commenter mentioned. Or maybe it's just cause the internet isn't young anymore. Shock and awe videos like what OP described are a dime a dozen, and can't be monetized anyways. I think the line of 'Gen Z are prudes' doesn't even begin to address some of the potential reasons there might be for this shift in humor.
Your tangent does not help your case either. It makes you look like someone who goes 'millenials killed the diamond market'. You say, in a nutshell, 'we're going to return to cultural conservatism (bad) and that's the fault of the young people'. It just feels like all of the other generic 'young people bad' claims, and it undermines any points your first paragraph may have.
I don't think that the idea that a generation, on average, does something that's overall worse than what a different generation did, is implausible in any way. People seem to have no issue with saying similar things about boomers, for example.
Yes, I think you're reading my comment from the perspective of a baby boomer screaming "Kids, get off my lawn." I stand my perspective that culture is in some ways returning to more conservatism but I never implied that was a bad thing or that younger generations should be blamed for it. To elaborate I will say that I'm glad that this conservatism still remains open to different forms of gender and sexuality, among other things, so conservatism doesn't necessarily need to be equated to traditional right wing politics.
I think another relevant example is the disappearance of, admittedly cringey, toxic masculinity magazines like Maxim that were so popular with my generation. Those don't really exist anymore in that form because they just don't appeal anymore in a more culturally conservative environment. Younger generations have Andrew Tate, which pushes a different type of toxic masculinity but it's not the same raunchy, booby, sophomoric comedy found in those magazines.
I am entirely neutral about these cultural shifts, it's neither bad nor good if the shifts don't limit acceptance for marginalized people. Younger people just don't find the same raunchy, borderline racist, chauvinistic humor funny anymore. Movies have less sex and PDA is way down. Cultural attitudes, at least in public where it counts, are a lot more conservative than when I was younger and that's okay. Like i said, it's all a matter of taste
Keep in mind, we've had over a decade of people saying "millennials don't want to buy houses" and "millennials don't want to work" when the reality is house prices are soaring and wages are stagnating. Not every difference is a cultural shift.
I just read that Gen Z has home ownership rates higher than both Gen X and Millenials at the same age, so while I'm not saying it's cultural I am saying that your explanation doesn't exactly fit. It's just a convenient catchall argument
I read that too, most of the article is spent explaining all the differences in economic factors. Basically, if you compare "Millenials at age 25" to "Zoomers at age 25" you're comparing recession times to non-recession times, with predictable results:
Also want to point out that economics is too falsifiable to be a good "convenient catch-all argument", it has causes, effects and mechanisms that can be confirmed or disproven with evidence.
"Cultural downslope over the decades", on the other hand, now that's a convenient catch-all argument.
I could have worded my reply better. I didn’t want to go down the tangent that you brought up but you were distilling a very complicated economic issue into platitudes. Millennials came of age during a „recession“ which was actually on par with a depression and real world wages are rising - even when taking inflation into account. There’s even more to it, but again I’m not here to talk about this and don’t want to get off subject. Your argument was catchall for being reductive, mine may be as well but I don’t want to turn the table on you and point out that you’re throwing sand on an entire discipline of social sciences which do analyze and theorize societal trends
Comparing stereotypes of millennial work attitudes and housing market preferences to clear indications that popular culture is moderating in a more conservative direction are nowhere near equivalent
It's a valid comparison.
People observed millenials buying fewer houses and changing jobs more frequently, and they attributed that to a change in cultural values without considering the significant external factors (economics) that were actually driving it.
Now I see you observe zoomers partaking less in drink and drugs, having less sex and enjoying less 'raunchy' comedy, and attributing it to a change in cultural values without considering external factors.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to point out that you're making the same oversight.
My observation is that Gen Z is becoming culturally more conservative and all of those things, which are backed by studies, are by definition more conservative. Nowhere am I drawing any connections or trying to show causation or correlation but you sure are. They are not equivalent
Not only are you directly linking cultural conservatism (cause) to zoomers enjoying less sex and substances (effect), you've defined them as one and the same:
This is what's called 'begging the question', when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion.
The question you've skipped over is why are they having less sex and drink/drugs? If they are just freely choosing to engage with them less, then fine, that's conservative. But if it's because they have less access to those things, or can't afford them as much, or don't have as many social venues to engage in them, or are prevented by mental health issues, or have long covid, or any number of other scenarios where they want to fuck and drink but they can't make it happen as often, that's not culturally conservative, that's an external factor limiting what people can do.
Someone who chooses not to have sex is conservative. Someone who winds up not having sex because they spent two of their college years attending classes over zoom from their parents' house in the countryside and now have very few in-person friends, they can't justifiably be called "by definition more conservative". That's reductive.
You’re misreading that. Gen Z being more conservative than Millennial culture is not a cause. I am not exploring what is causing their culture to be more conservative, whether by choice or circumstance is unimportant to the fact that it is indeed more conservative in action. That would only beg the question if I were linking it as a cause, which I’m not. You’re injecting choice into the equation where I have not. I used examples above to illustrate my point but let me rephrase it for you to make it more simple: Gen Z is more reserved in their cultural actions compared to Millennials. Stop trying to overanalyze what I’m saying or make it out to be something more than pure observational commentary of societal trends
To be blunt, that's not what "culturally conservative" means. It does not mean "when people have sex less, regardless of cause". It means someone holds traditional values and/or are averse to change. Judging by the edit you made on your top-level post, the other people in this thread didn't subscribe to your private definition of conservative either. Maybe the problem isn't everyone else?
OP, I just finished watching the PBS Frontline documentary The Discord Leaks. I think you should check it out and compare your idea of internet culture. I am not drawing a straight line from your questions to that content. Not at all.
I just watched the thing a couple days ago and your comment is relatively related and made me think about some of my own opinions about the internet more in depth.
Enjoy if you do!