No one "empowered" talks about "empowerment:" see the lie
"Empowering" and "empowerment are hugely overused words, and the people using them are neither. The people talking about "empowerment" are trying to escape from some aspect of themselves they don't like, or something they've done that doesn't fit their present narrative. "Empowered" people aren't talking about empowerment, they're busy doing things in the real world. Things that are really empowering include learning rare/unusual skills, building a real business that adds value to the world, having peak experiences, deepening real relationships, and probably a few other activities that don't come immediately to mind. Also, the most "empowered" people I know never talk about empowerment or say they're "empowered," so talking about "empowerment" is a sign of weakness/neediness/something undesirable. I searched for the word "empowerment" on red quest and found it in a single post, used skeptically, despite the fact that red quest is in some sense about "empowering" guys to lead the lives they want. If you do the things advocated, and develop the skills described, you'll be "empowered," and if/when you are, you own't need to talk about it. "Empowering" is used once in this blog, but in a quote.
The paragraph above arose from a discussion with XBTUSD regarding an interview with porn performer Mia Khalifa, who has a bit of a point when she says,
I ask Mia if she thinks that porn gave her a false sense of empowerment, when she entered the industry at 21. She describes it instead as a “false sense of validation” that she “mistook for empowerment”. “The reason I know that now is because I have done things that empower me,” she says astutely. “That’s why I’m here right now,” she adds, “that is why I continue to do everything I’m doing everyday because I am empowered by it and other women are empowered by it. That validation from men, or corporations, or people on the internet, that’s what I’m scared of other women falling into the trap of.”
But I also think Mia K is also admitting that a lot of young people, especially but not exclusively women, don't want to take responsibility for their actions. It's hard to judge how honest she's being here, or how honest she's capable of being. We all re-write our life stories to flatter our "now," and I'm guilty of that too.
Pr0n is a hard space to make money, because it's fundamentally a low skill enterprise. The guys really making money in pr0n are database admins at Mindgeek (parent company of Pornhub and many other front ends)... but being a database admin is hard, taking off your clothes in front of the camera is easy (and videos persist for years or decades after they're shot... being a writer is hard too because anyone writing a book is also competing against all books ever written... it helps to have a very new take on things. Quick, what will this command do?
SELECT country.country_name_eng, SUM(CASE WHEN call.id IS NOT NULL THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS calls, AVG(ISNULL(DATEDIFF(SECOND, call.start_time, call.end_time),0)) AS avg_difference FROM country LEFT JOIN city ON city.country_id = country.id LEFT JOIN customer ON city.id = customer.city_id LEFT JOIN call ON call.customer_id = customer.id GROUP BY country.id, country.country_name_eng HAVING AVG(ISNULL(DATEDIFF(SECOND, call.start_time, call.end_time),0)) > (SELECT AVG(DATEDIFF(SECOND, call.start_time, call.end_time)) FROM call) ORDER BY calls DESC, country.id ASC;
And that is a relatively simple set of joins, not even a performance-oriented set of design decisions. Even stripping is probably smarter, because an experience isn't copy-able, and it will also vanish at the end of the night. What is scarce and what is common? Of course making pr0n is not really empowering... but claiming it is empowering is a useful frame for guys coaxing impressionable chicks into pulling their underwear to the side so everyone can get a better look. I imply to chicks that being a slut is empowering, but I also love sluts.
The "empowering" thing is like drunk girls screaming about how their friends are the best friends in the world (real best friends don't need to say such things), or teenagers posting about the depth of their love on social media (people deeply in love don't need to perform it theatrically), or guys announcing how many girls they lay (the real players know women value discretion and besides, they don't have anything to prove). "Reality TV" is full of this kind of posturing and fake language, and it's popular. Popular, and stupid, and a lot of people can't look beneath the gloss to the underlying structures. If you can, you may succeed wildly, because most people can't. Almost all social media is at best validating, if not simply a waste of time, and almost none of it is empowering.
People do the easy stuff cause it's easy, but most of the stuff really worth doing is hard.