Comment by jjmarr
2 days ago
If one of America's main exports is culture, why would you ban factor inputs?
They're also not fungible and extremely mobile. People get attached to specific OF stars and the medium inherently requires remote work. So it's an inherently global labour force that protectionism won't help. American OF models won't magically make more money if you ban immigration unless you also ban cultural imports.
The government isn't displacing local talent by importing OF models and gets tax dollars for essentially doing nothing. Those tax dollars pay for schools/hospitals/etc.
OF also skews towards young, unmarried women, which balances the gender surplus of unmarried men that generally tries to immigrate. Since they're young, they also have more productivity before drawing on benefits like Medicare or Social Security.
By any objective standard OF models are the ideal migrant.
...I get this is HN but come on. It is just modern day JasminCam for lonely men that are being exploited through parasocial relationships. It is the opposite of productive. You just have society feeding on itself.
> exploited
Isn’t that a derogatory stereotype? Aren’t those men (and women and other folks) as “exploited” as a reader of a book or a player of a game, who understands they’re about to be a part of a fantasy but willingly suspend the disbelief for a short while?
It’s only exploitation if this suspension of disbelief is artificially prolonged in nefarious way, with a self-reinforcing fantasy so the person loses touch with the reality and spends increasingly unhealthy amounts of time in a fantasy, or otherwise get conditioned and start to exhibit addiction-like behaviors that aren’t in their best long-term interests.
That happens (every entertainment industry has its whales), but saying it’s the norm (rather than a pathological extremity) is sort of stigmatizing.
Parasocial relationships are inherently exploitive.
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It should be stigmatized.
Consent does not bless immoral acts or neutralize damage. A person who takes a drug voluntarily is still being harmed by it. It causes changes in the consumer whether he likes it or not. Causality does not care about your consent.
(And to address your analogy to books, the content of a work of fiction also matters. Reading bad books isn't good for your mind either. But literary fiction at least has the potential to be good. The genre isn't categorically bad.)
And porn is addictive. Porn addiction is extremely widespread and afflicts mostly young men. Porn's ubiquity and the easy with which it can be accessed has created a situation that did not exist before, and from a young age. And not only is it addictive, but it does real psychological damage to these consumers, creating what some call "porn brain". It is an excellent method for producing sexually-crippled creeps and incels unable - and even uninterested, given the nature of their "fantasy" - to have healthy relationships with real human beings, and the stats corroborate this.
It is an incredibly twisted and deranging vice. It destroys individuals and has a destructive impact on society as a whole.
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There is a reason why "the oldest profession" is a polite idiom for prostitution.
Calling it "parasocial", doesn't change what it is, but the technology as a mediator does. And society has been feeding on itself since we moved past hunter gatherers.
>There is a reason why "the oldest profession" is a polite idiom for prostitution.
The term only gained popularity at the start of the 1900s, it's a proto-meme
>It is just modern day JasminCam for lonely men that are being exploited through parasocial relationships. It is the opposite of productive.
You can make all the moral judgments you like, but the fact is: They're making money either way, and then spending that money in their local communities. They can spend that money (and pay taxes on it) in the US or not.
It's no different economically than a musician or an actor doing the same.
It was not a moral judgement.
This seems more like importing culture. These content creators aren't coming to work or American creators, they are coming to America to create their content for American audiences or using American resources.