videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing
a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions
of views.
Anecdata: even if they're wearing bras and not dressed in a revealing way and it's a still photo... the views will pour in.
I've had a Flickr account for about 20 years. I used to run a community and I took a lot of pictures at our gatherings, which were primarily 20-somethings. Some photos had 100-1000x the views of other pictures and it took me a while to figure out why.
The photos with surprising view counts had women with large chests.
I know how obvious that sounds but many of these photos were so lowkey that... trust me, it was not obvious. For some of these photos, we're talking about something that would not be out of place as a yearbook photo or hanging on a church's bulletin board. It would just be a group photo of people hanging out, nothing sexy or revealing, and rando woman #7 in the photo might be apparently chesty. And it would have 100x the views of other photos from that event.
Interesting and amusing.
There are a number of ways you could think about it. Some views might be attributable to people who can't access explicit content due to parental controls or local laws but I have a hunch some people actually prefer this sort of thing to explicit content.
(I also wonder if there's a slight voyeuristic/nonconsensual appeal to these photos. Which ties back in to the opening paragraph of the linked article...)
It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.
Go to any photography subreddit that's not already focused on nudity or sex. Any photo with naked women will get more upvotes than most other submissions. It can be an objectively bad photo, that doesn't really matter.
For e.g. there's a trend where painters post a painting of them while standing next to it. I do not subscribe to any subreddits but as some of these become popular, they pop into my homepage. 9 out of 10 of these are painted by a pretty woman.
Wait until you learn that some people abuse this to funnel potential subscribers to their OF. And I don't mean the kind that's about the artwork they show off (which would usually be on Patreon these days, I guess?).
Most woman don't run an OF of course. And wether they do or don't, anyone should be free to socialize over their hobbies on the internet, and/or present their art work for other to appreciate (and get validation with hundreds or thousands of up votes). But those on the intersection that choose to run thinly disguised ads ruin it for me :(
It feels very UNsurprising to me that nudity, or revealing photos, would get more views. There's various ways we can feel about it. But "surprised" would, erm, certainly not be one of them for me!
However, I was still surprised that extremely tame photos of slightly curvy women would get relatively large numbers of views, in a world where most people can easily find all the lewd, nude, and explicit images and videos they want.
I was an avid viewer of r/analog. I don't know if this was 'recent' or not, but every time someone post a naked picture, either good or not, it goes rapidly to Top posts.
Even though it used to had many comments like "This photo is not interesting other than the naked woman", the upvotes arrived anyway.
I think nowadays they mostly block the comments in those posts, but what used to be an inspiring subreddit that would pop from time to time in my feed, is not longer that interesting to me.
> “This photo is not interesting other than the naked woman”
My first instinct is to agree with this sentiment. There’s a lot of pretty mediocre photography that gets attention because “naked woman”.
At the same time, you could equally say “that landscape photo is not interesting if you take away the lake”. If you take away the interesting piece of a photo, yeah, it’s not interesting anymore. The fact is that people (but especially men) enjoy looking at naked and near-naked women. It’s a consistently compelling subject. It might be “easy” but it’s still compelling.
My dad was an amateur photographer for a while, and even got one of his photos published in the newspaper.
He said nothing improves a landscape picture more than having a person in the picture. I didn't believe him.
Later, I went on a trip to Hawaii, and took maybe 300 landscape pictures of its beauty. Upon looking at them at home, I realized he was right. The ones with people in them, even random strangers, were always more interesting.
Amazing photographers can shoot landscapes that are deeply compelling in their own right. Good photographers really can’t. There aren’t a lot of Ansel Adamses out there.
Weeelll, I don't find Ansel Adams's work very interesting. I have several coffee table art books, some of which have old west landscape pictures, and it's the people in them that make it work.
Something I do with my friends is look at Annie Liebovitz portraits and try to recreate the ones we like.
That’s totally fair if Adams’s doesn’t do much for you. Regardless, I’m in agreement with you that most landscapes are not actually that interesting without people in them. Humans are naturally drawn to images of other humans.
It’s like throwing bacon into an otherwise average recipe. Is it a cheap way to make it good? Yeah. But is it good? Probably. And very plausibly it tastes better than the more difficult recipe that lacks the bacon.
I think the t-shirt with the wolf howling at the moon is a bit of a stereotype. If you have watched the Simpsons, something the comic book store owner would wear.
Overweight, unkempt, awkward around women, and guaranteed zero attention from women.
I have a pet theory that the reason certain men are homophobic is because they're terrified that another man is looking at them the same way they look at women.
No it has more to do with rigid gender roles. Women expect men to be strong, independent and (sexually) dominant. Being dominated by another man is a sign of weakness. A lot of women also do not leave any room for nuance. There is zero tolerance. Anything with a penis is bad, even transwomen. You could be bisexual with a strong preference for women, but you will still be put in the "100% gay exclusively for men" box.
Homophobia arises from seeing homosexuality as a threat to your heterosexuality. The LGBT people are coming after your coveted "straight" status and try to infect you with the "gay" virus which makes it harder to attract a woman.
Basically it's the male equivalent of being "deflowered".
Perhaps but I think it's just a normal ick response. People instinctively steer clear of "weird" or "perceived to be dirty" things even if it's illogical. (No matter how much some try to gaslight, homosexuality is abnormal. Note that abnormal != wrong. The former is a factual statement and the latter is a subjective/moral one, though for better or worse most of the globe does still treat it negatively and it's only in the social bubbles that we're in where it's accepted)
If something falls out of the center of the normal distribution, it's by definition abnormal. Once again, that doesn't make it bad per se. But trying to police perfectly good words just makes people become more antagonizing to the position you want to defend.
Very few people would agree that red hair is "abnormal". Why do you think that people in general are more likely to describe homosexuality as "abnormal" when the prevalence of homosexuality is roughly on par with that of red hair?
> If something falls out of the center of the normal distribution, it's by definition abnormal. Once again, that doesn't make it bad per se. But trying to police perfectly good words just makes people become more antagonizing to the position you want to defend.
I mean why do people even post something like that? It takes 2 seconds to look up the definition of abnormal. It's it really not knowing, it's is it (what I believe) trying to sneak in their moral judgements behind a veneer of supposed "neutrality"?
> Abnormal - deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.
> "[...] is it (what I believe) trying to sneak in their moral judgements behind a veneer of supposed 'neutrality'?"
Yes, that's precisely what it is. Moral judgements based on outdated ("conservative", especially clerical) understandings of the world, wrapped in some delusional sense of "objectivity". Only the scientifically and philosophically illiterate fall for it. In German, we call it Bauernfängerei (swizzling, duping; lit. "pawn catching").
What’s the normal distribution here? If attraction to men forms a normal distribution, it makes the argument weaker. If you are making things up, at least make them up well.
Yes, the analogy to the bell curve doesn't fit this use case very well, I didn't noticed it before. But the point still stands: non heterosexual behaviour is a tiny minority compared to the norm. So, abnormal is a perfectly good word to describe non-heterosexual behaviour. Once again, it doesn't make it bad per se. I just can't stand word police, which is just another facet of thought police.
"Abnormal" has a very specific meaning. It is not used for everything that is just uncommon. It is used for behaviours that are non-normative. If you have an idiosyncratic way you use this word, ok, but communication is supposed to require and assume a common understanding of a language. So there is no point to discuss if abnormal refers to frequency of a behaviour in a population or in a normativity-related judgement of it, because in common usage it refers to the latter, because either we do not speak a common language or I have to assume disingenuity here (and leaning towards the latter in this case).
If the topic is about whether homosexuality is non-normative and heterosexuality is normative (with the actual, common meanings of the words), we can have a philosophical discussion on that.
Abnormal = non normal / non normative. Words have meaning. If for you it causes a bad reaction to it, you are the one that needs to deal with it. That's excatly the problem, normal people are tired of being called bad for seeing the world through normal, reasonable lenses. When a behavior does not follow the norm, it's abnormal.
Abnormal is a completely unscientific and immoral word to use in the context of consentual sexual behaviors for it is factually wrong (see the distribution of homosexual or bisexual behaviors in mammal species including humans), and also invoking a moral presciptive by declaration "what should be normal" via telling other people what "is not normal".
You fall into the same trap ("non-standard", "atypical"); you just stepped on the euphemism treadmill.
It's not abnormal. Statistically, you don't call anything "abnormal". Neither biologically, nor "naturalistically", there are a million things we all do, that are not "normal" in that sense and we don't call it abnormal.
> No matter how much some try to gaslight, homosexuality is abnormal
This is an abjectly silly thing to say, and people who push back on it are not gaslighting. Homosexuality occurs naturally and it's not even rare - it's far more common than red hair, for example.
Calling something like that "abnormal" isn't in the domain of fact, it's purely a side-effect of what you label "normal".
The confusing ones in my account were sooooo much tamer though. The chests were not even remotely the focus of the photos. It was subtle enough that it took me a while to even figure out the trend.
>It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.
You also can't escape being ugly and receiving the opposite reaction as a man.
There are so many things that you can't escape that it seems pretty suspect to focus on this one in particular. The most obvious aspect of being alive is that your body is mortal. You will never be able to escape that fact. You also cannot escape chronic diseases that negatively impact your life every single day.
The idea that men and women pair up to produce new life together is one of the more wholesome aspects of life. There are plenty of insects where one of the partners dies in the process and many species that don't care for the young.
I feel called out here :( I physically cannot resist on clicking on videos or photos with even mildly attractive women in the thumbnail. Same thing IRL. Which is strange because I don't even care about porn.
Naked woman is like endgame. Seems great, but it actually sucks (hehe). Attractive woman in a completely normal situation is like starting new game and knowing it's gonna be really good.
Flickr doesn't break down views, so, for all I know it could have been bots doing image recognition or a single guy in his bedroom clicking on certain pictures 100x a day.
But yeah.... "links shared on forums" was always my leading theory.
In some cases, I'm sure the thumbnails enticed extra clicks. But some of the pictures just had a bustier than average woman in the background or something. It's not clear to me that the thumbnails were enticing.
(99% of these people were my IRL friends as well, so I wasn't really trying to take salacious pictures....)
I've had a Flickr account for about 20 years. I used to run a community and I took a lot of pictures at our gatherings, which were primarily 20-somethings. Some photos had 100-1000x the views of other pictures and it took me a while to figure out why.
The photos with surprising view counts had women with large chests.
I know how obvious that sounds but many of these photos were so lowkey that... trust me, it was not obvious. For some of these photos, we're talking about something that would not be out of place as a yearbook photo or hanging on a church's bulletin board. It would just be a group photo of people hanging out, nothing sexy or revealing, and rando woman #7 in the photo might be apparently chesty. And it would have 100x the views of other photos from that event.
Interesting and amusing.
There are a number of ways you could think about it. Some views might be attributable to people who can't access explicit content due to parental controls or local laws but I have a hunch some people actually prefer this sort of thing to explicit content.
(I also wonder if there's a slight voyeuristic/nonconsensual appeal to these photos. Which ties back in to the opening paragraph of the linked article...)
It also underscored for me how women, especially women with certain bodies, can't escape being sexualized no matter what they do or wear.