People look at the "corrosion of the social fabric", and they point at the most inconsequential stuff. It's quite funny.
We live in a world where technology made everyone live in their own bubbles, only consume and reinforce what they already believe, create narrow identities with strict rules enforced by groupthink, and lose track of the things and people that we actually interact and have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Yet, people think this small stuff that has been around forever, that are tiny parts of our society or lives, that this stuff is the problem with everything today.
I've worked specifically on payment connected to porn. Money laundering is a fact, but this being the motivation for banks to pull away is not.
There have been several scandals related to payment processing and money laundering, and some of them connected to companies that do a lot of business with porn. Usually, you will see banks breaking away when those scandals break to the public.
However, banks do not break away just because they don't like the transactions they're seeing. What they actually do is to enforce stricter rules by financially penalizing those who make them lose money. Your transactions are getting canceled a lot (by having to be flagged/undone/paid back etc.)? You'll have to pay higher fees, and if it keeps happening, you will lose your license.
You know when they do often break immediately, however? When there are campaigns by special interests groups, usually connected to conservative groups, to paint companies as having illegal content, even when they don't have this problem any more than any social media platform. In those cases, they don't wait for any tribunal.
Two things can be true at the same time, however. The US has a strong stance on freedom, which means that they'll allow most things even if they're against them. Specially when that thing generates income. But that doesn't mean they're not also a puritanical society. They just take more of a "shame you" approach than a "you're forbidden" one to force you not to do stuff.
I bet you that American organizations were involved in the societal pressure that led this Canadian organization to do this. They're just not as effective in their own country in comparison to places where it's not all about money, and values do matter.
> One can make a very strong argument that the manosphere stuff is rooted in poor sexual attitudes of men that only got worse with tons of porn.
This has no bearing in reality. The "manosphere" is mostly neo-conservative guys who are sometimes even performatively against porn.
> Every other game has basically stripper-level female characters now days.
This used to be a lot more pervasive 20 years ago than now? Altogether with the "hip hop" thing, just feels like prejudiced, outdated arguments without data to back it up.
reply