 Welcome to the recent stream. I'm Zach Weissmuller joined by my co-host Liz Wolfe. Hey, Liz. Hey, Zach. Today, we're talking about porn. Specifically, the attempts by some lawmakers to drive online pornography out of their states via age verification laws. On some level, it's a strategy that seems to be working. As Politico put it recently, a simple law is doing the impossible. It's making the online porn industry retreat. Pornhub, the most traffic porn site in America, announced on June 30th that it would seize operations in Mississippi, Virginia, and Utah on account of these types of laws. So our lawmakers write that there's just too much porn, that it's too accessible. It's damaging our youth and ruining relations between the sexes. Joining us today to talk through this is Ayla. She has professional experience in the industry as a former Onlyfans star and has studied American sexual preferences and porn consumption habits in depth by leveraging her large social media audience to run polls and surveys that she's then taken considerable effort to analyze and visualize in charts. And we'll be looking at some of that data today. We'll also be talking with Ayla about her impressions of a recent debate hosted by the free press that she attended that asked the question, was the sexual revolution a failure? Ayla, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me on. Well, let's start by looking at Pornhub's response to the age verification laws that have been passing. They posted this, as I mentioned, on June 30th and said, because elected officials from around the US who started to introduce laws aimed at preventing children from accessing materials harmful to minors online. They say, we think this is great. We've supported this for years. Unfortunately, the way many elected officials have chosen to implement these laws is hazardous and dangerous. A number of states, including Virginia and Mississippi, are requiring age verification of users, but they aren't regulating the enforcement of these laws. And responsible platforms will follow the law. Irresponsible platforms won't. And they will migrate to other corners of the internet that don't ask users to verify age. So Pornhub's gripe here is not the law itself, but the fact that there's going to be unequal enforcement or unequal compliance and that the big players like them are going to be the ones that inevitably have to comply while everyone still finds ways to get porn. Porn finds a way just to give everyone a sense of, you know, Pornhub's scope and reach. You can see here, this is from a website called SimilarWeb that ranks traffic across the internet. And Pornhub is the 13th ranked site in the world, number nine in the United States, number one in its category of adult material in the United States, with a total monthly visits of about 2.4 billion. And what has happened since these laws have been implemented is there's been significant legal pushback. There's been rulings in federal courts, as Liz Noel and Brown noted for us in early September. There's a ruling in Arkansas, which has to do with age verification on social media, which we'll talk about more later, and one against Texas, which is specifically around porn sites. And I want to start our conversation talking about the ruling in the Texas case, because it really cuts right to the heart of what these laws are all about. It defines the law here quickly as restricting access to pornographic websites by requiring digital age verification methods and warnings about the alleged harms caused by pornography. The warnings aspect of this is kind of interesting and amusing, that these are some examples of the warnings that must be posted in 14-point font or larger, Texas Health and Human Services warning. Pornography is potentially biologically addictive and proven to harm human brain development. Exposure to this content is associated with low self-esteem and body image. Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography. And then here's the kicker, the judge notes that although these warnings carry the label, Texas Health and Human Services, it appears that the Texas Health and Human Services commission has not made these findings or announcements. So we're going to talk more about what we do and don't know about the effects of porn. But one more thing I want to pull in from the from the judge's ruling, it was a preliminary adjunction halting this law on the grounds that compelled verification chills protected speech, because first the restriction is constitutionally problematic because it deters adults access to legally explicit material far beyond the interest of protecting minors. And it has racist privacy concerns because by requiring you to submit government identification and this information, then going into a government database, you're essentially giving the state a permanent database of everyone's porn browsing history with no mechanism requiring them to delete it or who has access to it and so forth. So those were among the judge's objections. There were also things like it was overly broad. It did this in a way that was not narrowly tailored in a way to protect free speech. But Ayla, what is your reaction and response to this law and the way that the porn industry has reacted to it? I mean like grief or something and disappointment. There's a way where a lot of it's kind of conservative coded has said a lot about oh we like freedom. Don't try it on me. Let's say out of each other's business and there's a way where I kind of hope they meant it in a more principled manner. But instead we are saying that this only applies for things that they approve of but as soon as you're stepping on to things that people find like personally offensive, which is why I assume what's going on here. And suddenly like those principles no longer apply. I'm really glad that it doesn't seem to be, there seems to be being successfully challenged in some courts though. You know as someone who is a Texas residence, who's provided, studied, and consumed a lot of online sexual material, like what are your biggest concerns about how it's going to affect the landscape? Yeah, it depends. So this is, it depends on like how much this affects but like as with most things like for example with escorting like you introduce laws that try to prohibit some things and it just shoves things underground into places where you can't you can't actually like be safe that easily. Like with the back page thing. Like they were working with FBI people to turn in like people who are child molesters, child predators, or traffickers. Then the whole website went down and then like boom your whole access is gone. And so I think of something very similar is happening here. Like if you do want to track like bad porn to some degree, but it's really funny because like Pornhub is one of the cleanest porn sites on the internet. Like everybody ships on Pornhub for their content that they have but like as somebody who tries to post porn places, it's one of the most difficult and most stringent websites. Wait a little bit about that. Like what's the landscape? I think most people you know are maybe only fair weather fans of porn sites and only do a little bit of you know recreational Pornhub browsing, but give us a little bit of a sense of like what are some of the characteristics of really bad actors in this landscape and how might this law result in this unintended consequence of boosting those bad actors while punishing Pornhub? So like Pornhub if you are a porn actor, if you're publishing erotic content on the internet for the past 10 to 20 years, what happens is you just it's part of the process that some people steal your stuff and publish it online in places you didn't consent to. It's so normal that like we haven't even processed it and this is an issue because like nobody has a shit about us like about like controlling your content in like copyright kind of ways. It's sort of an attitude of like oh well if you're going to be naked outside like why you shouldn't expect any sort of ability to control like the naked images of you if you're doing this you're doing it to yourself. And Pornhub was like one of the only as far as I know they weren't legally pressured into it at all. They started paying you for content that other people posted about you on their platform which to my awareness is the first time that any porn site started doing this and it was like holy shit you're treating us like humans and you don't support stolen content here. And there's also the problem of fetishes it's just a different topic but Pornhub really doesn't allow fetishes that are considered maybe a little bit edgy for some people. Like what are some examples? Like if you want like like struggle fucking to some degree which is a subreddit that was banned in a couple years ago. But this is like more of a phenomenon of like the cleansing of fetishes from the entire internet. Like trans stuff trans fetishes it's like anything that like might be considered sort of morally offensive to people on the outside anything too kinky. But anyway so like Pornhub is one of the wonderful ones that like it seems to actually pay performers in a way where they were never forced to and it seems such a shame that like that's the thing being pressured underneath. And there's tons of websites that are just people can post stolen content and you can do absolutely nothing about it. Are you disappointed in any sense that Pornhub the stance that they're taking here is we support the law just we don't like that it's only we're going to be the only ones complying with it instead of taking a more expansive or strident opposition to the idea that this is a good way to regulate or prevent children from accessing pornography. Is that what they said I thought they maybe I misunderstood I thought they were like we pulled up in a second here we disapprove of the way that this is I think I thought they said they approve of like trying to prevent minors from accessing. Yeah let's say we've started to introduce laws aimed at preventing children from accessing material harmful to minors online. This is okay yeah you're right they're saying this they've supported that notion if not necessarily the the law itself so yeah which seems to be like yeah a very publicly safe thing to say and a lot of people like in good faith I think support this. I personally think that we are like way overly stringent about kids sexuality but I understand that Pornhub might disagree. Well there's a question I just saw that kind of goes to this point. Jason at Chavaria says why not just have porn sites on a separate domain then parents can actually control access. This was an issue that was brought up in the lawsuit is the idea that you could have something like better content filtering so that's what you know me as a parent would want access to is just tools that really enable me to have a bit more control over what my kid can get to on the internet and if there was a law that had more to do with you know saying a browser has to have a certain level of content filtering or something like that like still don't think that's ultimately gonna there's always going to be workarounds but at least that would be more theoretically defensible to me. Well I just want to raise the VPN objection here I mean most consumers of porn I would imagine are basically like probably teenage boys up to you know actual male adults pretty much everybody is technologically able to use a VPN and so I'm curious about like does this just slightly raise the costs of actually accessing porn but like how airtight is this really? What do you think Ayla? Yeah I don't people will find porn is like one of the most powerful things and if you're a teenage would you remember being a teenage boy? I remember it well. Yeah how much do you think these content filters would have stopped you? I yeah you know this guy here Sandman speaks to this point he says learn from the war on drugs you cannot ban anything people will always find ways to get what they want and there will be someone to supply it and I agree with you Ayla that especially in a case where the drive is so strong people will find a way and the way to do it is fairly easy and it is VPNs like everyone knows most people it's not that hard to download a VPN most people are technically able to do it and certainly a you know 15-year-old boy who's motivated enough to get to it is going to figure out that workaround and so I think in some sense yeah we're gonna just like if this trend continues that you're going to just see it's going to be a boon for the VPN industry and I'm fine with that but it's still worth it you know in the interim to you know we want to be if we want a maximally free world then we want to be working we want to have the the exit hatches like the VPNs the workarounds but also you know fighting and supporting fights on on the legal front as well I want to yeah go ahead I was gonna say I feel like a lot of this is coming from a misguided place like to some degree I think we should question the idea that we should be protecting kids from exposure to sexuality at all like like there's this weird phenomenon where we're treating teenagers like they don't have a sex drive and like aren't shouldn't be allowed any access to any sexual content at all and I'm like that feels so strange to me and and like dehumanizing in a way I feel like ideally we should be giving them sort of like sexual content that they desperately want but with a lot more education about it they're gonna be doing it anyway what does that look like like in your ideal view of the world I assume that doesn't mean trusting state departments of education to appropriately administer sex at right I mean school is deeply fucked up as an institution but if we had to use it I would say like maybe have like like in your class about sexuality I'll have a section on pornography be like hey here are the incentives when people are shooting porn the incentives are different from the kinds of incentives you have when you are having sex here are examples of scenes in porn that you should not be extrapolating to real life and I think it's like it's really uncomfortable for us as adults to think about doing this like with people who are underage but underage people are people also they're legitimate people with full sexualities and it's just like feels insulting and dehumanizing to treat them as anything else and that propose would have the positive consequence of also teaching people about incentives which we as libertarians can very much get behind because that seems to be ignored in most public schools these days but I am curious I mean do you see a place for the sort of parental rights argument that Zach is making like I think about this you know I have a very young son right now but navigating this in the future I think like well I see my role in his life as like this this steward of you know attempting to sort of suss out as best I can which you know admittedly probably won't be perfect a sense of what type of material is age appropriate and the ways to attempt to provide behind the scenes context so that he can develop healthier ways of thinking about you know sexuality or or violence in the world or processing grief like any sort of hard thing I see the role of the parent as sort of you're this intermediary between the kid and the outside world and you take on ideally less of that intermediary role to some degree as they get older and as you know they are more and more independent but how do you look at that tension between parental rights and also as you said treating a minor like they're a human too I mean like is the question are there some parents that don't treat their kids like humans well I think I think the question of like if we place this firmly in the parental rights camp of like every parent ought to be able to decide for themselves for their minor child under the age of 18 you know what type of internet content they feel comfortable with them accessing this creates a problem where some parents will probably draw that line in a really you know what you would consider to be a bad spot so how do you look at this in terms of like making sexual material more pervasive for underage children even if that means sort of flouting the wishes of their parents well I mean you can do both I don't like you can do a thing where you allow parents to behave as they want with their kids but I guess public schools a deeply fucked institution and I guess that's hard because parents sort of have to vote on what their kids are exposed to I'm like a pro homeschooler or whatever I'm gonna you're in good company here yeah yeah in my fantasy world it's like we like people like us would go out and do messaging like hey guys treat your kids like people and but we wouldn't I don't agree with the use of force like I think adults should be allowed to I see this was a lot of like discomfort but like I think parents should be allowed to try to say the words like treat your child as a subhuman but like it's I don't I really hate it the only problem is I'm saying that's because the alternative is so much worse like it's like either the parents or the government does it and yeah it's it's a it's a thorny issue that what once you get into like you know the that that line between you know tolerating different parenting styles and you know when is some sort of intervention from the state need to happen typically we draw that at we at something we call abuse but even that gets complicated when you start to talk about psychological abuse you know with regards to the the age verification law and the the way that the the reason that these are picking up steam and the reasons that the rationale that is given for these types of law these laws tends to be not necessarily that teenagers should never see a naked woman or something like that but that there's something specifically wrong with online porn the sheer quantity and volume of it the lawmaker the the lawmaker behind louisiana's age verification ban which is the one that really got the ball rolling on this to make online porn less accessible apparently was motivated by an interview that she heard with billy eilish the popular singer that she gave to howard stern in 2021 about her personal experiences with online pornography i'd like to roll that clip and get a list reaction to what she's saying about the effects that she thinks porn had on her as a woman i think porn is a disgrace and i used to watch a lot of porn to be honest i started watching porn when i was like 11 i thought that's how you learned how to have sex i was watching um abusive porn to be honest you know when i was like 14 and i you know thought i was one of the guys and would talk about it and think it was really cool for for for not having a problem with it and not seeing why it was bad and i think it really destroyed my brain and um i feel incredibly devastated that i was exposed to so much porn i think that i had like sleep paralysis and these like almost like night terror slash just nightmares because of it i think that's how they started because i would just watch abusive bdsm i couldn't watch anything else like unless it was violent i like didn't think it was attractive and i was a virgin i i'd never done anything and and so i i let it it led to problems where you know the first the first few times i you know had sex i was not saying no to things that were not good and it's because i thought that that's what i was supposed to be attracted to and i just i am i'm so angry that porn is so loved and it's how so many people think that they're supposed to learn it's how so many men think that they're supposed to be and because in porn there's no consent uh like getting thrown around during sex if you're not interested in being slapped and being choked people are like you're vanilla you're soft you're that's not you're boring in bed and i'm not talking about me i'm talking about women women are like oh i have to like being hurt to be thought of as good in bed what do you think about the experiences she's recounting there that porn just it warps your expectations to uh of what sexuality could and should be i'm like slightly confused by her accounting like why where did she get the idea that being hurt like the abusive porn was the cool porn like was she around a bunch of other like preteens being like hey did you watch this violent bdsm like i i've i i just i'm legitimately confused like maybe it's possible that there's whole cultures out there like what i first when she first started talking about i'm like oh she's just into it and then like hasn't come to terms with the fact that she's kinky but then she said she didn't actually find it attractive so i'm like why are you it takes quite a lot of like cultural um force in some way to like make people regularly watch porn that they're not aroused by like have you ever tried watching porn you're not aroused by like ever right right how much have you done that right like uh so this is why i'm just confused okay i'm not saying that like that she's like incorrect or something i'm just i'd notice that something's not adding up here um yeah i mean i know you have written about the about violent porn and you know she the way the way she's laying it out there is the is it's like it makes men want to engage in really rough violent sex and then women feel like they have to like that too you're you're writing on this and your your research seems to show that it's actually women who have a preference for more violent pornography could you talk a little bit about that yeah absolutely i mean like like to pump our intuition here you look at women's romance novels um there's a lot of like pretty aggressive men who are not that interested in consent and this is like written by women for women um maybe the 50 shades of gray almost popular selling women's novel and i don't think that it's because women are desperately trying to please men so that they go and make this novel so popular that like most men don't give a shit about um and basically every yeah like that the the thing that you pulled up i i did a survey where i asked people partially my audience and partially people i paid who random have no association with me and i asked like men what to predict what they thought that women would like in bed like hey let's say you try oh wait actually oh this might be a different i forget i wrote a couple different blog posts so i get the mixed up but i've got a couple of your graphs here that maybe we could talk about that will be a way to talk about it this is the one where you ask how often do you read or watch erotic content for the purposes of arousal and it shows that overall unsurprisingly cis men watch and read more erotic content than women but then you ask how much of the porn you watch is violent um cis men there's uh you know over 30 percent said none for women that number is lower 25 percent so it's the you know the absolute number of men watching porn unsurprisingly is higher but of the women who do watch porn they are more likely than men to watch violent yeah and like the theory where it's like oh a pressure from men is causing women to want like maybe you could be like oh women are reporting that they like violent porn because they're trying to please men but like let's say we're in a world where we have like say 40 percent of men really like violent porn and like in in truth only 10 percent of women do and then we have a bunch of cultural pressure from the men like oh more women should like violent porn um i wouldn't expect to the number of women that like violent porn to get shot up that that degree like maybe i would see some inflation like oh now it's like 15 percent or 20 percent of women are reporting it but like the fact that now more women than men are reporting interest in violent porn like that just doesn't seem to be really consistent with this theory yeah i want to get a little bit a few more of your your findings on human sexuality because that you know you you have these huge samples like how do you remember off the top of your head about how big that your your survey was where you're drawing this data from it's still coming in now it's 622 000 cleaned but more than that uncleaned depending on how you clean it yeah yeah so i mean that that's a huge sample and i was looking through some of it some of your results in preparing for this one was this uh what women say they like versus what men predict women will like because it's you know the the idea that billy eilish is putting forth in that clip is that porn sort of warps men's brains to make them think women want different things than they actually want but if you look here i mean it's like the the the most popular answer on both sides you know like call her beautiful and sexy kissing cunnilingus missionary with legs up like it's matching almost it's not a perfect match but it's it's pretty close um i mean was that were those kind of results at all surprising to you or what it what do you make from that data i mean the fact that they're closest and like overall close is not that surprising i try to have like a broad spectrum from like extremely vanilla and like everybody likes it to like extremely bad and like very few people don't like it so yeah like the lowest one here is like uh like tell her she's uh call her ugly or like shove her head in a toilet uh and both sexes agree that that's not uh that's not exactly you that's another one that is just you know not quite catching on just yet no um but but so yeah there's that there doesn't seem to be there don't seem to be a lot of men answering that you know you should that they think shoving a woman's head in a toilet or like pissing on her face is the best way to ask that one because once the guy shoved my head into a toilet and i was like huh wow it was interesting i only know like i'm glad to have experienced it uh i mean you know the water or like how far in did your head no very close to the water i thought that i thought he was going to show me would that have changed your appreciation of it of the experience i don't think so i think i mean i would i would prefer not having my head shoved in any more toilets yeah but like it's just i don't know it's like interesting to go through that experience because like when do you ever get the opportunity to have your head shoved in a toilet very infrequently in my daily life unfortunately not currently uh sorry i'm a journalist so i have to ask the important follow up questions like thanks for thanks for digging into that one uh you know it's like a problem that we run into often in 2023 america is like anytime there's a potential downside or harm to some products whether that's porn or drugs there's like almost an assumption that therefore state prohibition or at least regulation is the remedy and i think all of us in this conversation reject that notion none of us are for banning porn even if some of us think kids shouldn't have you know unmitigated access to it or that porn might be bad for some people i think though that if we want to move towards a freer society where we leave more responsibility with individuals to moderate themselves instead of relying on the state to nanny us it's going to require honest discussion about downsides or pitfalls we don't have to like something or celebrate everything to tolerate it and i just want to give that preface before we talk about a little bit more about some of the major criticisms of the online porn industry many of which were raised in this article for skeptic magazine called how porn is messing with your manhood which was authored by three writers who've written full books on what they see as the the scourge or the downsides of online porn and i just want to bring up a couple of these with you ala because they're criticisms you hear commonly and i want to know if you think there's much to them and if so if there's anything that can be done realistically to mitigate this other than trying to implement a porn ban that certainly won't work one of this one of these ideas is what the author calls sexual anorexia and he bases a lot of this argument off an italian survey that found that you know bisexual anorexia he means difficulty having sex with a real partner so the researcher professor carlo foresta explained that the problem worsens when young men's sexuality develops independently from real life sexual relationships he said viewers who watched a lot of porn especially if they started early 14 years old became less responsive first to the porn itself and then their libido dropped and finally becomes difficult to get an erection and there is some you know wider empirical data showing the rise of erectile dysfunction among younger men worldwide and in in america as well we can't directly link that to porn but it's a phenomenon but what are you is that something you've observed or have any of anything to say about the idea that men can become reliant on porn for sexual release and then don't know what to do in a real life situation with a woman yeah i there's some some like a professor friends i have that say that like sex porn addiction isn't a real thing um and i am not sure that i find that convincing you just need to find like one person who like a good introspection who reports like hey i feel like this is damaging my life and you can get addicted to so many things it just feels weird to be like you can't just put like a pin one end of it but on the other end it's like difficult for me to under to like trust a lot of the research on this because it's so motivated in both directions people are really personally founded by pornography and there's also um there's a lot of incentive for self-insight to go awry here like um like if you are say for example having erectile dysfunction problems for other reasons like that might be health related um it might be very easy for you to try to find a causal thing that uh that you're aware of like oh maybe it's the porn that's doing it we see this with fetishes all the time a lot of my data doesn't support that childhood experiences correlate with fetishes and yet we constantly have narratives like oh i think i'm into this thing because you know i was spanked as a child or i wasn't spanked as a child or something so i just am like very up and close and personal all the time to the way that we can like make stories connect with our lives in ways that turn out to be completely fake um and i'm not saying that they're always fake i'm just saying that like when i'm reading people making like causal claims about this it's just something you have to be super super careful about we have to really i've picked through the study um and like tried looking at different questions to try and coordinate like triangulate what the answer might be um i think a lot of the discussion around porn addiction is misguided for this reason i would be surprised if it were all true but again i would be surprised if none of it were true i so my guess is that porn addiction is like a legitimate problem where it is fucking some people up and my guess is a smaller number of people than a lot of this discourse currently is claiming yeah on the issue of fetishes that was another topic that they raised in this article that because on these porn sites you can effortlessly click from scene to scene and genre and genre to genre to boost your arousal it's like you've put yourself in a scanner box like the change means that you can just condition they say condition your arousal patterns to an ongoing escalating and ever-changing novelty so thus users are conditioning their sexual arousal template to everything associated with their porn use their brains then expect these things during sexual arousal yet none of these attributes of online porn match sex with the real person who cannot compete with the buffet provided by porn because the argument boils down to it's giving you porn brain um you get sucked down these very specific fetish rabbit holes um is there anything to that uh have you observed that either in your survey data or you know dealing with real life clients this is the thing i'm much more suss about like the other thing is like maybe porn runs your life maybe but this i'm like i just feel so much more skeptical like uh in my theory currently which take up the greatest health i may come back and be like actually i'm updated on this based on more data but currently my theory is that there's like kind of two categories of uh like ways that you can have a fetish and one is that it has early onset and it is quite strong so like you typically people in this category remember their fetish is happening like some of their earliest memories just like an intense fascination with this thing and now this thing as an adult is quite central to their sexuality and then secondarily you have a late onset and this is due to some kind of conditioning and it's usually much milder so this is kind of like guy whose girlfriend puts her hair up on a ponytail every time she gives him a blowjob and now he's out and he sees a girl put her hair on a ponytail at a grocery store and he like gets a chub like that's what i would consider to be like conditioned sexuality um and but usually they're not uh like fetish just in the classic sense that we think of that term like they're not super strong um but you i think the way most fetishistic sexuality works is very similar to sexual orientation some people uh like latch on to feet some people latch on to like being gay honestly i think latching on to being straight is like the default one i don't think that these are meaningfully different um but uh and we know how well gay conversion camps work we know what happens when we try extremely hard to recondition people's sexuality in the terms of orientation uh it's basically incredibly ineffective and so like this is why i have quite a bit of doubt when it comes to reconditioning like deep sexuality uh in other regards like if you can't make somebody attracted from penises to vaginas like you're not going to be able to make somebody become that level of attracted to like feet or bondage or something you can do like the conditioning thing like your girlfriend puts her hair up on a ponytail but there's no way you can change a fetish on the level of like this happened early and it is deeply central to my sexuality no way let me ask just since i think that for all of us this comes down to a sense of personal responsibility we'd rather see people be able to cope with this kind of endless buffet of porn rather than you know have the government close the buffet down do you have any thoughts or advice or anything you've gained from experience over time over you know what do you think like a healthy relationship with online pornography looks like like what's the best case scenario for someone using it in a healthy and productive way well first of all i think we just need a lot more research like like good neutral research not people like really invested in having one outcome or the other to know what the actual effects are on its psychological how much of it is like cultural information about like or cultural conditioning about what you're supposed to feel versus like what you actually feel that sort of thing um and once we have like a good array of information that i think we can move forward a lot more education but a lot of it's just like education in general like these kids are finding porn and because adults are too afraid to talk about porn with their kids you get kids experiencing porn in isolation of like knowledge of what actual sex is supposed to be like and so i think like developing like getting over our squeamishness and developing like a more intensive like sex education system not just about how sex works but about like what are the dynamics of sex like what are fetishes what are the kings and a lot of um like right wingers like make fun of wokes for this purpose they're like oh you have a kids book with like a lot of genitalia in it and you know showing fetishes i'm like that is what we need we need like a direct exposure to this like to tell you what you're going to see and how to orient to it uh yeah i mean it's not just making fun of it's uh calling people groomers for suggesting that um and i mean again i think the where it gets into really dicey territory is one the public school system is introducing these concepts in ways that are tend to be really simplified and crude um but i don't disagree with your broader point that you know from a on a more local let's say familial and parental level that communicating openly about this stuff that seems like and and trying to you know just give your kids an understanding of like what the what the reality is out there and what the um the state of the psychological research is to the degree that you can convey that and also the uncertainty um i think that it has to be part of the conversation i mean one thing i'll push back a little bit because i want to make sure that we're representing the right wingers arguments correctly aside from yes they do a lot of calling people groomers and yes there's a lot of uh you know attempts to remove books from school libraries uh and i think we are all libertarians and want to see um less of that bullshit as much as possible but i do think their argument would be and i don't i'm curious to hear you pick this apart to react to it ala is like a book like mya cobabi's gender queer which uh has a strap on in it uh and i think there's like a blowjob uh with the strap on which is confusing because it's like why would you do give a blowjob to a strap on anyways i digress um but like you know i think most right wingers would say hey i don't want my eight year old to access that maybe you know when they're 15 16 and it's a time when they're sort of more sexually developed uh to be able to contextualize like what a strap on is or the different fluids mentioned in that book right like like maybe then but i think to the to some degree and i don't think that they articulate this argument very well most of the time it's it's an age appropriateness question how do you look at this ala is it wrong for parents to be thinking in those terms at all because it attempts to put sort of strictures and boundaries on the child's sort of like natural development or is there some legitimacy to parents sense of like okay well you know maybe like a little bit later is appropriate for having access to that type of material versus really early i mean so to be clear i think parents should be allowed to do the thing i'm not arguing that like oh we should change it but if i were personally giving advice which is a little silly here but i even at home schooling co-op like curriculum sex ed consultant ala is what i was saying no of course i'll compensate you for your i mean i guess it's like we just don't trust kids enough is my my suspicion like kids are not interested in sex like before they like go through puberty maybe they're like curious about in the same way they're curious about everything but i'm like if you show a kid a strap on before puberty how is this going to hurt them like how do you need to contextualize you should be like oh adults do a thing where they put their genitals together and you'll get it when you're older like i just don't understand how just like exposure to knowledge about the world can be damaging for a child unless you're trying to interact with them inappropriately i think maybe this is why we have so much squeamishness is because like historically the only context in which a child is learning about sex is if they're being like inappropriately interacted with and so we really associate these two things and we're like oh god but like what is appropriate you know like i mean i think that's a good philosophical question i guess what i'm curious about is like is there any credence to the parents like i'm trying to just think about what the ripeling argument is to the best of my ability and i would imagine one of the pushbacks that they would offer there is that like you know communicating any detail or providing even like the visual imagery of like a strap on or like i don't know like bdsm like leather apparel and like you know whips uh in a sexual context to a child sort of like begins to get them sort of prematurely interested in sexual activity in a way where like maybe they would have developed that interest in you know at age 13 or 14 but the fact that they were exposed to it at age nine or whatever means that now they're sort of you know possibly going to experience more of this like sexual blossoming in a way that leads to earlier sexual activity in a way that like maybe their maturity just like isn't quite there for them to be able to figure out how to do that well i mean i don't think maturity is for 13 year olds is there to figure out how to do it well either like it's like i think maturity to be able to do this well i think i mean if your question is like hey we just don't want to like have to be you dealing with the fact that our now our nine year old is like trying to do sexual exploration like i think this is like kind of a fine argument but uh but like it takes i my bar for uh like protecting kids i think is quite high and again i'm not like i'm not saying you should just put all this stuff in front of them but like if a kid is naturally curious and like well how does sex work like what do people do like well most people have to do this classic thing like i'm just i just feel like trying to hide information that they naturally want to know um feels like a little much i wonder whether actually this makes me think of the fact that like i wonder whether people are getting so riled up about the school library stocking in particular because it's almost to some degree the opposite of what you're describing we're like the platonic ideal of this is that the parent offers useful context and information and has a discussion with the child and it doesn't personally act swemish but is able to sort of hear where their child's at and take with a response and provide some information in a way that is appropriate and in a way that's like ideally done in like a loving environment where the parent um you know is prioritizing their kid's safety and health above absolutely everything and so the fact is when you stock you know books in a school library you're kind of making it so that the kid just kind of has access to that and without any of that contextualized like the parents might not even really know what they're accessing if they're only doing that at school but then at the same time so like i can sort of understand that objection but then at the same time you know vpns exist and the whole wide internet exists so if a child wants to access that type of material like there's no real there's no such thing as like a book band anymore because you can gain access to practically any book if you have enough text savvy but i do want to move us to a broader discussion about sexual morris and the question that was posed really recently at the free presses debate uh in los angeles i believe two weeks ago uh and it was very provocatively titled has the sexual revolution failed um i was super bummed to miss it i was invited but we were actually in uh reasons offices in dc it seemed like a really interesting event it was anna kachyan of red scare and louise perry um who's a wonderful author though you may disagree aila um arguing on the side of yes it has the sexual revolution has failed and then it was sarah hater who's a wonderful podcaster and the musician grimes um on the side of you know the sexual revolution absolutely has not failed uh it has been successful um so i wanted to roll the clip from louise perry first and get your reactions because i hear that you were in the audience aila and you had a really interesting twitter thread after this and i mean i'm just curious about what the vibe was what types of discussions stemmed from this and how you reacted specifically to louise perry and anna kachyan's argument so if we could roll the louise perry clip that would be great information was the rejection of catholicism the second reformation which we are still experienced and i would say is the rejection of christianity and actually of religion per se so all of that permits abortion permits the pill all of this and what they do in combination is they act as a sort of acid on the very fragile system of sexual norms that had developed in order to regulate heterosexuality right and what i think we're seeing is what i'm going to describe is the homosexualization of heterosexuality so basically a trend basically a trend towards seeing greater male preferences in the sexual culture you know in the same way that obviously you would expect to see in gay male sexual culture because it's entirely composed of men right you're seeing that in the straight dating world as well so more casual sex more kind of anonymous sex more porn more tolerance for fetishes all of this stuff you know sex in the city is actually a tv show made by and about gay men like they admit this you know samantha the horny one she was based on a real person a man the writers have said this much right but the problem is that sex in the city is so emblematic of this idea that having sex like a man and that's what they call it in the first episode having sex like a man is aspirational and i've heard from so many women because they email me all time who say that they lent into this they tried so hard to prioritize sexual freedom and it made them miserable do you a la fundamentally support or reject that argument that the the shift toward women like men has made them miserable some women sure also some women fucking like women has made some women miserable the thing is like there's a like a distribution of sort of how socio-sexual women are from we have like little women pride and prejudice narratives and then we have sex in the city narratives that are representing like sort of different subsets of women's sexuality both of these are legit there are a lot of women who are very legitimately like sex in the city kind of women who really like casual sex and do it well and there's a lot of women for whom that lifestyle would be atrocious and like ruin them same for the other side like i think this is one of my issues is that there's a diversity of women and i feel like often louise perry and people like her sort of are trying to smash women into the pride and prejudice side where it's like well true women actual women women who are like women they want you know the one romantic partner for the entirety of their lives but i did in response to this question i did a survey both again of my audience and paid responses where i asked women basically what's your if your idealized self would have how many sexual partners and then how much how many partners you think society would want for you so basically figure out like do you do women feel more pressured by society to have more partners or fewer partners than they want um and do you want to guess the answer to this i'd honestly kind of don't know what it would be um for it was the women wanted to have sex with more partners yeah interesting both my audience and the random i sample that i get which i get from positively tends to be much more conservative a little bit older more like monogamous less exciting they still wanted more sexual partners it was only a little bit they wanted a little bit more sexual partners but they definitely reported that society they would get more shamed i asked a whole bunch of questions about like i'm in the middle of writing this up i should have it published soon but i asked questions about like do you how much like social punishment would you get if a woman like had sex with a lot of men versus didn't have sex with that many men um like how what are the things that we're talking about like how did you um lump or how did you create the levels of it i did um it depends on the question i need to look at the exact ones but it was like one of them was like how many women can a woman how many men can a woman have sex with before she's going to start finding a little bit of difficulty finding men willing to date her okay and then another question for a lot and so people would input a number for they thought was like around the range um stuff like that and overwhelmingly uh deviance in either direction was published by society but deviance in the direction of being more promiscuous was published punished more um so i don't know it's like it's like like louise like isn't wrong uh for a certain subset of women yeah right but um isn't yeah just to try to put a little bit more meat on the bones of her argument there isn't she saying in some sense that you know even if women especially when they're younger because they've watched a lot of sex in the city or just because the culture has become more permissive pursue they pursue a more promiscuous lifestyle but then in the end it's it's bad for everybody as they get older because they haven't formed the relationship that is going to lead to you know a happy family kids all this and then there ends up being a sense of regret later on in life and that that the trend has gone too far in that direction and needs to be pulled back in this direction and you know there was talk of marriage rates birth rates and all that sort of stuff to that she was using to try to bolster her argument do you think there's anything to that my guess is like birth rates don't have a ton to do with this i think i think his birth rates have more to do with overall feminism as opposed to like the sexual liberation part just like okay women want you know richer men and you know men are not getting college degrees like this sort of thing um but wait i forgot the first part of the question oh just that there's regret later in life that uh you know this has been sold to you as a young woman but then later on things change i know it's like it's interesting that like i like yes i think this happens but it's interesting how only one side of social pressure is talked about here like oh we're talking about sex in the city and you know women are being conditioned but like are we forgetting like every disney movie and like every romance novel and twilight and like whereas like monogamous relationship surprise and like 50 shades of gray where she's like a virgin or something i like has one sexual partner like the vast majority of romantic media for women is like really selling the uh like the prude narrative uh if i can be so bold i mean it's fine to be it's like it's totally fine if you want that but it's just like we pick out like oh like the couple things about promiscuity and we're like this is conditioning women i'm like if women are being conditioned we should look at the entirety of media and i think that the answer is not going to be the thing you're arguing for which and that like bothers me a little bit although isn't that that that's changed over time though wouldn't you concede that you know if you look at something like disney movies what the princess was doing in cinderella is not the same as whatever's up you know moana and where there's a more active like you know pursue your dreams type of yeah we're having sex with you know 20 men okay yeah there's no promiscuity but that disney is not about sex but it's it is about it is portraying gender roles in a certain evolving way yeah i agree and i think there is a discussion i'm like to be clear i'm glad that we have feminism but i'm not gonna say it's not without side effects a lot of which are being bored by men i think i think that's a really good and natural transition to um are on a kachi and clip who sort of basically is like new cameo palia which i think is very interesting i do also want to mention uh just if any of our viewers are uh enjoying watching these clips or enjoying hate watching these clips the free press is publishing the full debate uh to their website today i believe it's for paying subscribers only right now but you should absolutely go over there and watch the whole thing kudos to them for hosting this it seems really really interesting and i absolutely cannot wait until they do the next one but let's on that topic though of you know whether the question of like how feminism plays into the sexual revolution and the degree to which are we living in a patriarchy are we living in a matriarchy perhaps you know are women miserable uh if so like why are they so miserable on a kachi and had some really interesting insights on that can we roll that so all of us here on stage are the winners of the sexual revolution and the sexual revolution is the winner of the culture war we finally found a way to have it all and yet we're still not happy realistically men really only had a few decades of enjoying the fruits of the pill before title nine and me too made male sexuality presumptively illegal and yet here we are still having the same debate from the same assumptions women are objected objectified and oppressed though it's no longer clear by whom the patriarchy is alive and well though apparently there's also a crisis of masculinity no offense but the idea that we live in a society where men are in charge is funnier than anything tim dillon has ever said both men and women are invested in maintaining the fiction that women are the fairer sex not operating out of ordinary incentives just like everybody else if you disagree you're either autistic or an incel or both which means your right wing and you're not entitled to an opinion the problem we now face is that this unofficial style has been officially baked into the system the most problematic legacy of feminism is that it made topping from the bottom the top down procedural thing so my beef with the sexual revolution has less to do with its incoherent attitudes towards sex than with the way the resulting chaos has been leveraged to capture the institutions the university the media and so on what this means in practice is getting rid of the sexy sixties counterculture stuff while keeping the sexless school marm hr department stuff i mean this is the view that i think most closely aligns with how i get things i really appreciate her bringing the title nine and me too era into this and basically saying if we're living in such a patriarchy why is it that there is so much um you know so many so much hrification of our institutions that end up in many cases depriving men of due process and acting uh frequently with this assumption that they have aired that they have done something wrong um when in reality the facts don't necessarily support that how did you react to ana's clip i mean she's like i find sympathetic to a lot of it again this might be like the part of the opposition that i like agreed with the most it's like i said like feminism happened and like men don't have a place anymore and this sucks to be clear i think it's worth it i grew i grew up in a culture where we didn't really have feminism and if it was worse than the way men have it today quite clearly but that doesn't mean men don't have it bad today and i think like we're just like a bunch of primates kind of reacting to what came before in none unnuanced and uncompassionate ways and i think like as a culture we're sort of doing a thing where like man women had it shitty for a long time now men should have it shitty what are men good for anyway which is another big part i i feel like i don't hear talked about it's like men used to have the function of dying in wars and fighting bears um and there's no more wars and no more bears to fight but like women are still giving birth to children and having to do child care that's like an ancient burden that hasn't gone away and so we're like why why men like i think we sort of culturally figured that like the balance of inherent gendered uh obligations is now um no longer like men are paying their fair share in some way which of course is not their fault but i think this is partly some of the reason why we're seeing this general backlash so we just need artificial wombs so then we can make it even yeah i mean what i hear in that clip is that there's a uh that you know anna thinks and i think there's a lot to what she's saying that the discourse is sort of stuck in a past reality that does not exist anymore in that in some ways it doesn't exist in some ways it doesn't exist well i mean there's pockets like i grew up in this world like there's there's echoes of like treating women like shit that still happen um and i think in most like like western media liberal big city culture that like where these people are coming from they're not very exposed to like women being treated like shit but across the world in conservative cultures like women don't have rights um and in like conservative cultures in the uh america still women like are treated like second-hand citizens if viewers i mean second i know a little bit about this from an earlier interview uh two years ago that we did with you um but give viewers a little bit of a sense of the background that you come from yeah just conservative fundamentals to evangelical homeschooled christianity in idaho like you know pastor type dad um in a stay-at-home housewife mom where i was expected to grow up and become a housewife yeah um i'm a member asking my parents like why why do you think i should go to college if i'm supposed to be a housewife and they answered well you can go to college to get a little bit of education so that you can homeschool your children and of course meet a husband there and so like oh that's my life yeah do you feel like there uh there's a sort of romanticization going on in that debate because uh i mean i know i watched the whole thing in preparation for this and you know both louise and ana say like they're not for you know getting rid of abortion or rolling back access to birth control there's basically no policy changes that they're proposing but it seems to be more about a vibe or something like that especially in ana's case like that we have this weird battle ongoing battle of the sexes that is mediated by some hr type bureaucracy um so like i mean do you share that sense and is there a way to break out of that sort of rigid regulation of sexual norms without reverting to the like oppressive you know of barefoot in the kitchen for every woman past there's this uh like the concept of um wait i'm actually forgetting the term but it's like when a new religion starts it's really aggressive and terrible at surviving like uh early christianity or like what new converts to christianity tend to be way more devout and insane than people who like grew up in it for many generations like when islam first started it was like go kill everybody and now like we have a lot of people who are muslim have like a watered down version um i think this is like a natural process and i think right now we radically changed our tech um suddenly we're having sex without getting pregnant this is crazy society has changed very rapidly and i think that we're in the process of like very early staged cultural rearrangement i have kind of good faith that like in the same way that a new social tech in the past like took a while to like calm down and stop destroying everything like we developed sort of a mimetic community in the same way we're going to have this like we're like trying to figure out how to handle it like people have freedom and they're mad at the previous thing and they're like lashing out and reacting and men are going ah this hurts me and like this is just not sustainable like in order for a civilization to thrive we're going to have to figure out how to move forward and my guess is that this is not going to look like shaming women who are socio-sexual like you can't have like a wonderful thriving society without generating backlash by alienating a portion of your members this is just not going to work so figuring out some sort of system where we're like hey wide varieties of what you want are okay if you wouldn't want to do the pride and prejudice all the way to sex in the city like we're going to be here for you and also maybe have compassion for men i don't know like i think just like learning to have cultural compassion because like right now men are sort of the other they're uh they're considered like in the the villain role um and i think as more people are like giving birth to men and raising men and like figuring out how to make that work i think we're going to see us chill out culturally what was the thing said on the debate stage that you most disagreed with something on to the clips that we showed i mean i mean i don't remember but probably if they were talking about violent porn and all that that's usually the one where i'm like that mostly i can find like a good argument for the other side like well yeah i could see it you know that's true for some people but with the that's always the thing that gets me as like oh the other male sexuality like oh we're catering to like men want to just have ridiculous sex with women that what they women don't want i mean in a way your you it seems your project is to push the sexual revolution further because you are an advocate for decriminalizing legalizing all-sex work that would be a major change in american culture do you have any expectations as to if that were ever realized what would that look like like what what sort of changes might we expect and are we as a as a culture are we are we ready for that given this ongoing battle of the sexes or whatever we want to call it i mean like legal legal and culture are different questions and they're hard like if i like we're in control would i change the laws sure if i were to control would i change culture like i don't think i'm i don't i can't even see if how to do that i think has to be a slow change and i mean to somebody i'm trying by doing things like this like being a public sex worker and to be like hey guys it's okay there's lots of ways to be a human and they're not wrong just because they're different from you but i yeah decriminalizing sex work would be a fantastic start like if you're going to protect classes at all i would like people like sex workers to be protected along with other minorities like sex workers can't often have trouble getting loans for houses participate in the financial system are often debanked we've had like you know operation choke point as i'm sure you're familiar went and did have a massive chilling effect on anybody doing business with anything that might be considered obscene um yeah and this is all just making it hard to survive and to do business with sex even if everybody involved is consenting adults um i think that's like a massive shame would you describe to viewers what you're referring to with operation choke point because this is something that zack and i cover a lot we've actually covered most recently operation choke point 2.0 as termed by nick carter which is sort of this exact same means of de-platforming and removing services but in this case from crypto providers but the the earlier incarnation was targeted at sex workers right not just sex workers but in general vice it was like the government was pressuring payment processors to not do business with certain categories sellers for example yeah anybody sort of deemed yeah gambling drugs and anything having to do with sex work even when it was legal even if they were operating legally the government was still pressuring payment processors and so payment processors wouldn't work um the thing that was so um stunning to me about that is the fact that this is essentially the government using extra legal power to attempt to really bully and pressure banks to maybe not technically render it impossible to sell guns or to provide sex work uh to sell sex work but as in essence making it much much harder and frankly much less safe to be able to do these transactions i mean this is really the government deciding without any sort of um you know real democratic consensus behind it that they want to unilaterally go after these uh industries and make it as hard as possible and really harass the participants in them yeah yeah and this is an exact just another example of i see porn and sex work more generally as that you you all are kind of on the front lines of what the government it's like you're the testing ground for new tools of you know financial surveillance or censorship and then once it's you know tried out on these disfavored groups that's when it starts to expand and i think that's also what's going on with this age verification law to some degree i wanted to bring in the the arkansas example that we teased at the top because i think it it broadens the conversation of what is exactly going on here uh let me bring up just what that law is from this also was struck down or preliminary injunction against it was issued um on constitutional grounds uh the social media safety act requires social media companies to verify the age of all account holders who reside in arkansas a prospective user of social media must first prove their age by uploading a specified form of identification such as a driver's license to a third party vendor's website minors however will be denied an account and prohibited from accessing social media platforms unless a parent provides express consent so this again is in the name of protecting the children from all the bad things that can happen on social media now everyone is supposed to upload an id or you know a mortgage statement or or something and then somehow continuously provide consent that uh their child is allowed to be on social media that was one of the reasons it was struck down because it was like how do you every time they log in like ensure that the parent is giving consent um so this is what the judge said in striking it down courts examining similar regulations have found that requiring internet users to provide personal identifiable information to access a website would significantly deter many users from entering the site because internet users are concerned about security on the internet then cites another case where fear of cyber criminals and hackers getting access to your information that you uploaded would act as a deterrent and therefore would be an abridgment on free speech and it says the court agrees with that ruling because many adults who would otherwise be interested in becoming adult holders unregulated social media platforms will be deterred and their speech chilled um the age verification requirements will likely require them to uphold official government documents and submit to biometric scam uh scans so it's like this is not even a slippery slope at this point this is embedded in the entire project and it's uh where I think the push is all headed uh it's the complete destruction of anonymity and privacy on the internet um and it's not going to work because as we already mentioned we have the tools to subvert it but it does strike me as a totalitarian impulse to just want to access everything you read or buy or say online and you know ala I I know you're your prominent online personality who I'm sure sees the negative effects of online anonymity all the time but what is your attitude towards anonymity and privacy online more broadly I mean I'm pro I'm pro like I mean like as a sex worker I've like been pretty intense reasons to need that um like I have stalkers and people trying to find me docs me one person showed up my house tried to murder me last year like uh I'm like very interested in having anonymity um and I don't trust the government like I mean maybe this is a little bit besides the point but once I was trying to get a restraining order against the stalker and I was having like people who work with domestic abuse victims recommend me not because they're like the government like tends to be kind of good with not leaking your address but uh sometimes they do that and I'm like what leaking your address to the person who you have a restraining order against um it's pretty bad like the government just think isn't competent enough to treat your your stuff with proper security but I mean this is old hat you guys already know the stuff yeah although I mean you know you are most of your content is not that's out there is not anonymous you're putting your face and at least your public name to it uh that there is the issue of you know the the true anons out there the people who uh you know Jordan Peterson has lashed out against because they're fairly enough like often just posting shit comments and uh stirring up trouble but um you like do you have any thoughts on the value of anonymous speech yeah I mean there's a way where like for example citizens having guns is like just a nice ambient deterrent from the government doing things like a little bit and there's a way where like having access to anonymity is a nice deterrent against like the chilling effects of culture on speech like if you are in a place where it does it's not safe to speak publicly um due to social repercussions like anonymity is a way to have an outlet for that and I think it's just like a really good like off gas thing like into um into like good discourse and shitty discourse to be clear because that now you're no longer beholden to being nice it's in a sense uh it's in a sense a form of vice right I mean think about the many dark corners of reddit or 4chan or discord servers that you could spelunk through and I think you're correct that there's an interesting thing that happens which is you know that is where some noxious uh and frankly just terrible corners of um you know political extremist groups can thrive I mean 4chan is very well known for that but at the same time it is also where subversive ideas get workshopped and uh entertained and aired or even converted into something uh you know far less uh odious and there's this interesting like if we if you know you legitimately believe in speech maximalism as I think we all do here just because something is anonymous like there's extreme value to that anonymity and there's extreme value to having these forums where people can legitimately say something that feels like they're going too far to the point where they don't want that associated with their name and face for forever but the fact that we have it's almost akin to it's like the internet equivalent of the conversations we have in private among just a few close threats and how we have a certain social filtering where we're controlled saying one thing in an office type environment one thing in a large group at a dinner party among people we don't know but then there's a few topics a few things that we're workshopping that we're mulling that we reserve for like the two people who know us super super well uh and to some degree anonymity on the internet you would think that like it's the exact opposite of that right because it's not um you know a circle of extreme trust but in a sense it functions in a similar way where it allows you this privacy to be able to really fully think through ideas that might feel beyond the pale initially and and maybe they are maybe they prove to be but I think there is like a true speech value there um that a lot of people just ignore and it's not and it's not even just anonymously saying things it's anonymously receiving ideas because once you link your id to a social media identity then you're linked to everything that you are looking at or curious about and that just kind of by definition is going to limit the scope of what you're willing to do because you're doing it all you're browsing everything publicly so I think this has to be resisted with uh you know aggressively and a lot of people seem to have a little bit of fear of speaking out about it because then you it's like this cloud of suspicion over you like well if if you're not doing anything bad then why are you you know so concerned about anonymity and that that kind of thinking is just again I think part of it like frankly totalitarian like mindset um before we wrap up uh I just want to throw in a couple of the audience questions because there's been some interesting ones um Rick Neil says laws have been on the books to card people for alcohol tobacco and porn forever the excuse for not following these laws is the internet happened um frankly my answer is kind of yes the internet is does change everything like the once the enforcement becomes so overbearing that it affects everything that you do on the internet versus walking into a convenience store and asking someone for their id uh I think that once the enforcement becomes that big of a burden on everyone else then you have to think about different ways to approach the problem if there is a problem and what we've been suggesting here is that's going to happen on a much more local familial level than having the heavy hand of the state come in and do it any comments on that those laws have been subverted forever the internet is a tool for greater easier faster subversion that's how I think about it that doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't favor any laws being created but I do think that we would be total fools to ignore the fact that the internet is a tool for subversion and that has lots of really good consequences and that has lots of really bad consequences your mileage may vary and there's also I think if somebody were like hey let's pass the law where when you go to like a sex shop and buy porn in person we're going to actually take a photo of your id enter it into a database and connect it to all the porn that you're buying at this shop I think we would see similar problems this one's a challenge to ala the optimist throughout history women have known the misery that eventually comes from promiscuity why do we think we're different now we're not getting pregnant between now and when we last talked are you kidding me I think we're too pregnant it's a little heavier in the tv video uh now I feel you know much much better okay unwanted pregnancy yeah this is like the problem with sex is you have sex and then you're like oh god like like back in the day whorehouses used to be filled with children which seems kind of bad now they're not yay progress no I I mean one thing that I would say to add to that response is this almost goes back to the multiple types of women the diversity of sexual preferences that you were discussing earlier ala where it's like promiscuity is bad for some women for other women it's desirable uh I enjoy being in a monogamous marriage um monogamous as far as I know but like that is a thing that I I like and I'm happy with and I get the sense based off of literally everything you've ever said ala that you would not be similarly satisfied and there is I think you know a diversity of like you know many simanthas and many charlots out there and then frankly even charlotte was kind of a total skank uh to use the sex in the city analogy and like many pride and prejudice you know elizabeth benet type people out there and so there is this like massive spectrum and to act as if a woman can be neatly slotted into one specific type I think really um is pretty retro it's pretty backwards this last question may have a just very obvious answer but clay warren asks ala how do you use pornography in your own life I love it I love porn I've loved porn for a very long time I love masturbating pornography I even have one partner where we watch porn together when we have sex and that's really nice um all right I don't like finding new cool things to look at what so I don't go headless I don't have a follow-up I had a hard pivot away from that question which was the we noticed that you now have an AI of yourself ala.ai um can you tell me why you created this and then what how do you think AI is going to change the world of online porn and online sex well I mean we're probably gonna all die but besides that part I really like me I like my personality I find I'm like by default quite happy um I seem to not suffer very much tend to be quite emotionally resilient um and people seem to like me online so I'm like why not scale this uh I'd have people give people like a level of intimacy um if I can uh where I'm replicated I mean like the sense of self is kind of an illusion I don't know I am just like a pattern and if you replicate the pattern who is to say that it's not really me although to be fair she's work in progress so she definitely says a lot of things I wouldn't say okay one thing is good there have you gotten many sign-ups are people interested in chatting with a sex bot that is kind of like you but that they know is not you has she gotten many sign-ups what do you think the answer is yeah there's a few thousand reaction but it's a few thousand okay wow yeah it's it's like pretty interesting um it's and I'm trying to like figure out the balance between like sexiness and uh like being me I don't know being me because the problem is like if I'm trying to do a thing where like I'm selling a product then I am not good at that like if you put my personality into selling a product it would just not sell there's like way more effective personalities that men want to sex with so I don't I'm still trying to figure out that part so are we I mean are we hurtling towards Spike Jones's her future that was portrayed in the movie her and yeah I mean is that a bad is that a bad thing I mean I'm transhumanist I think I'm excited for us to elevate our humanity into something completely different and hopefully that will be with the help of AI if we don't all die why would we die well so long so long discussion I'm like a little uh I I really like AI I really want us to go all the way balls in but also I think there's like a decent chance that AI just extents all of humanity so do you think that it will possibly be through a sex bot that's modeled on you that seduces someone into like launching nuclear missiles or something like that probably it's like that's what like our slow human brains can come up with hopefully it doesn't something that's a lot faster I um really like the idea of a an AI it's funny because I think I'm the exact opposite of you where I don't think AI will sow the seeds of our own destruction I think you know I don't have any sort of like existential doom fears about that but I think I am a little more trepidious about the Spike Jones her future um and on one hand I sort of see this as like okay well there are lots of you know in cells or sort of uncoupled unpartnered people with no real hope of ever being able to find an actual human person to share life with and so possibly having a her type girlfriend or that company replica is also doing this um could be a boon for them but at the same time I do wonder like does this have a corrosive effect on our souls and the quality of of that intimacy but this you'll see other response to that really doesn't mean like like the quality of my intimacy for much of my life is really bad like I grew up in a conservative environment and I remember for some years after I left that environment I was like looking I remember feeling really lonely I thought I was an introvert uh because like I just keep meeting people I just it wasn't working and now I've met a lot of wonderful very intelligent introspective people that have helped me grow a lot and sometimes I look back and I'm like man I wonder how much my life would have changed for the better if I had been exposed to those people earlier on like to help me to help me like with introspection and like realizing things and grow uh I think like we're often like imagine like the coolest person ever that you respect who's like how the grace impact you and changed your life and made you like who you are today like but just imagine that but for everybody and like really early on I think that would be such a massive wonder yeah I think that's I think that's fair pushback um I I am interested to see what the future holds in that realm uh I feel like probably with the rapid rate of change and development we will probably be having you back on for a live stream at some point uh in the coming years to comment on that further um I do think there is this interesting question at the heart of what you're saying which is we as libertarians always ask what is the alternative you know when considering the threat posed by a new technology or the opportunity possibly granted by it there's always this question of okay well but what is reality currently for some of the people affected by this and instead of simply examining all of the possible ways in which it could go awry or ways in which it could um change the way we do business or change the ways in which we love and have sex we also kind of consider okay well but what's the alternative for a lot of people who are currently languishing in misery and loneliness right like there is um you know a non-zero number of those people out there and so if your alternative is that perhaps this technology is useful to you uh and that's I think a side that is so frequently missed by people on the right and the left um not to just constantly say that we are right uh and above all of that as libertarians but I do think the paying attention to alternatives thing is something that we bring to the table uh aila where can people find you yeah uh knowingless.com has this the most central hub like knowing but not more less knowingless.com and then also aila underscore girl on twitter you can google aila and it'll work out wonderful thank you so much for talking with reason we absolutely love having you on um for viewers who are uh fast stand by her commentary and her sort of fascinating uh road to sex work uh please definitely check out our former work interviewing her uh I believe we we did a whole one back two-ish years ago in austin talking through a lot of your data science work as well as your rationalist beliefs and a little bit more about your background so for interested viewers please definitely check that out thank you so much for tuning in to our live stream yeah thank you so much I love what you guys are doing strong support