On the day 29-year-old Londoner Lianne moved in with her now-ex boyfriend, six years ago, she remembers crying. (Her name has been changed for privacy, like many others in this piece.) Not, as you might expect, because of excitement or joy. But rather, because it immediately became apparent that she was “going to end up taking on all of [their] life admin”, from that moment on.
Over the year they lived together, this fear became reality. “It hit me he was a man-child when he didn’t know how to use the washing machine or make the bed,” Lianne recalls. And, although he made minor efforts to “improve” at chores, he just “didn’t seem capable of doing so”. He broke her favourite knife, flooded the kitchen, nearly set the flat on fire “multiple times”, and would go missing on three-day benders.
“He seemed to feel bad, but justified his ignorance by saying his parents never expected him to do any chores at home,” she says. “Bear in mind, he’d moved out of his parents’ house seven years earlier.”This behaviour, and the ensuing plethora of excuses, will likely be familiar to many people who’ve lived with cisgender heterosexual men. Though not exclusively – but more on that later.
Dubbed ‘man-children’, these men can be characterised by a number of child-like traits, including ‘not noticing’ the dishes need washing or bins need emptying and weaponising their own incompetence when they eventually do it; being ungrateful for the emotional and physical care provided by their partner, and general helplessness when it comes to taking care of themselves – and, sometimes, their own kids.
Now, this phenomenon has officially been confirmed by science. A recent study, published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour journal, found that not only do man-children exist, but they’re actually killing women’s libidos with their ineptitude. Researchers from universities in Canada and Australia set out to explore if this kind of relationship unfairness could explain why many women, partnered with men, report a low sex drive.
Indeed, they found when women perform more household labour than their partner, they tend to see them like a dependent child. This, unsurprisingly, reduces their sexual desire for that person. Ongoing inequalities in domestic labour have even been cited as why more women file for divorce than men. (Recent statistics show women carry out 60 percent more unpaid work than men.)
According to the authors, until their research, this heteronormative dynamic had never been studied in relation to women’s sexual satisfaction or desire in relationships before. Emily Harris, one of the co-authors, says this is because “there’s a few unspoken assumptions” about women’s sexual desire. “One of these, is that low [sexual] desire is caused by individual factors, like hormones and stress, or general relationship factors, like conflict and dissatisfaction,” she tells VICE. “What these assumptions miss, is the broader context of gender inequity.”
Sari van Anders, another co-author, adds that many people find comfort in these assumptions. “It can feel more manageable to change your hormones, or try stress reduction techniques, than tackle structural inequalities,” she says. The correlation between man-babies and low libido hasn’t been overlooked by the women who’ve dated – or lived with – these men, though.
“Our sex drive completely died after six months of living together,” reveals Lianne. “I couldn’t take him seriously anymore and resented my role in our relationship. I felt like his mum.” Although she’s in a much happier, balanced relationship now, Lianne says her man-child experience has influenced her view on having actual children. “I can’t imagine spending two-plus decades picking up after someone who doesn’t appreciate my labour,” she says.
Emme Witt, a 48-year-old writer from Los Angeles, knows what it’s like to simultaneously care for children and a man-child. In fact, her ex-husband’s childish ways – specifically, his lack of support around the house – only started bothering her when they had kids of their own. “Suddenly I realised that not only was I in charge of the housework, but also all the child-rearing,” she says. “I had to discipline our kids on my own – my ex would even steal away to the bedroom when they were acting out. It was exhausting.”……Continue reading
Megan Gray was eight years old when she got her first period. She was playing hide-and-seek with her older sister and a friend at their friend’s house in suburban Sacramento. She was wearing pink jeans, which she had saved up for a long time to buy. She tied a sweatshirt around her waist to hide the bloodstain, and, later, threw the ruined pink jeans away; when her mother asked where they’d gone, she threw a tantrum to deflect the question.
Gray had a close relationship with her mom, but she was so young that they’d had no conversations about puberty; her older sister had not yet gotten her period. “There was nothing, no context for understanding,” Gray told me. “I knew what a period was—I didn’t think I was dying or anything. But still, I didn’t tell anyone for months. I just used wadded-up toilet paper. It felt so awkward and shameful.” She did eventually talk with her mom about it. But this was the nineteen-eighties.
“It wasn’t some big informational session. It was very Gen X—you just dealt with things by yourself and got on with it.” Gray was taller than her peers and wore layers of tops to conceal her developing breasts. She estimates that she was a C-cup by fifth grade. “There were assumptions about me because I had boobs. And I had never even kissed anyone. I was lucky, because nothing traumatic occurred. Yet I do think that there is a trauma in being sexualized.”
Maritza Gualy got her first period when she was eight going on nine, at the end of the eighties. Her mom showed her how to use a thick Kotex pad. Eventually, her older sister introduced her to o.b. tampons—the ones with no applicator; they were small and easier to hide. The sisters, whose parents were Colombian immigrants, attended a majority-white Catholic school in Nashville.
Her school uniform had no pockets, so whenever Gualy had her period, she had to hide tampons in her bra or in the waistband of her skirt. One day, an o.b. fell out of her skirt when she and her classmates were sitting on the rug together. Later, when they were back at their desks for a spelling test, Gualy recalled, “the teacher went around from kid to kid with the tampon. ‘Is this yours?’ ‘Is this yours?’ Except she was only asking the more well-developed girls! I knew I wasn’t going to admit to it.”
In fifth grade, Gualy’s best friend got her period, and she was upset to learn that Gualy had started hers more than a year earlier and hadn’t mentioned anything. “But I already felt so othered,” Gualy said, “and I didn’t want to add to that.” When Gray and Gualy were kids, pediatricians thought that the average age of onset of puberty in girls—defined in most medical literature as thelarche, when breast tissue begins to develop—was about eleven years old. Menarche, or first period, was thought to happen around age thirteen.
Only a small percentage of girls had started puberty by the age of eight, much less started menstruating. But, by the two-thousands, new research had found that eighteen per cent of white girls, thirty-one per cent of Hispanic girls, and forty-three per cent of Black girls had entered thelarche by age eight, according to a study published in 2010.
Often, these girls were taller than most of their peers and showed other signs of accelerated physical maturation, such as pubic hair and underarm odor. Thelarche typically presages the onset of menstruation by two to three years, meaning that some of these girls would have to deal with the mess and discomfort of a monthly period before they’d finished elementary school.
Researchers and physicians hypothesized about possible causes for the increase in early puberty, such as increasing rates of obesity; greater exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in food, plastics, and personal-care products; and stressful or abusive home environments. Then, during the coronavirus pandemic, pediatric endocrinologists saw a new surge of referrals for girls with early puberty.
Recent retrospective studies from Germany and Turkey show that the number of these referrals doubled or even tripled during the lockdown periods of 2020 (this at a time when many families may have been avoiding non-emergency doctor’s visits for fear of COVID-19). A paper published in August in the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics, which analyzed data from South Korea’s national statistics portal, found that the number of children diagnosed with precocious puberty almost doubled between 2016 and 2021, with a sharp post-2020 spike.
The rise in early puberty “is a phenomenon that is occurring all over the world,” Frank M. Biro, the former director of the adolescent-medicine division at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, told me. (Although there has also been a rise among boys, girls experiencing early puberty still vastly outnumber them.)
The new data may offer some safety in numbers to early-developing girls—if Gray and Gualy were growing up today, they might have found a friend or two on the same accelerated track. But early puberty is associated with a daunting list of adverse physical and psychological outcomes: various studies have suggested that early-maturing girls are at greater risk for developing obesity, breast cancer, eating disorders, depression, and a range of behavioral issues.
Especially in the midst of what is increasingly understood to be a post-COVID youth mental-health crisis, the startling new uptick in early puberty is troubling to some physicians and parents. But, because the spike appears to have been triggered within a compressed, well-defined timeframe, it also offers rich terrain for better understanding the condition’s causes and effects.
It also provides a chance to rethink puberty: to see it not as a gateway into adulthood but as another stage of childhood—one that is highly variable from kid to kid and need not be cause for alarm. “We are in a great natural experiment at the moment, and we might not know the results of it for another ten years or more,” Louise Greenspan, a pediatric endocrinologist at Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco, said.
“I do wonder if this is going to be a cohort of kids whose puberty was more rapid because they were in a critical window of susceptibility during a time of great social upheaval.” For generations, pediatricians have referred to a table of pubertal development known as Tanner stages, named for the pediatric endocrinologist James Tanner, one of the lead investigators of the landmark Harpenden Growth Study, conducted from 1949 to 1971 at a charity home for orphaned and neglected children in a suburb of London.
There, hundreds of boys and girls were photographed naked at three-month intervals. Although the data for the Tanner scale were gathered from kids of a narrow demographic—white, thin, and bearing the internal scars of trauma or adversity in their formative years—it established, in a pair of papers published in 1969, our modern benchmarks of puberty: five distinct stages, ranging from prepubertal to fully developed.
On average, the girls in the study began showing breast buds—the “Tanner II” stage—at age eleven or so, and began menstruating between thirteen and fourteen. Early puberty is identified through physical examination, blood tests to measure levels of sex hormones, and a bone X-ray to estimate “bone age”—how close a child’s skeletal system is to reaching maturation.
Puberty typically begins in girls when the pituitary gland starts secreting hormones known as gonadotropins; these hormones cause the ovaries to grow and to produce estrogen, the sex hormone that triggers the development of secondary sex characteristics…Read more
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Kaplowitz PB, Slora EJ, Wasserman RC, Pedlow SE, Herman-Giddens ME (2001). “Earlier onset of puberty in girls: relation to increased body mass index and race”. Pediatrics. 108 (2): 347–53. doi:10.1542/peds.108.2.347. PMID11483799.Nelson RJ. 2005. Introduction to Behavioral Endocrinology. Sinauer Associates: Massachusetts. p357.
Zuckerman, Diana (May 2009). “Early Puberty in Girls”. National Research Center for Women and Families. Archived from the original on 2013-11-09. Retrieved 2010-07-13. Based on a publication from The Ribbon, a newsletter of the Cornell University Program on Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors in New York States ((BCERF), Vol 6, No. 1, Winter 2001.)
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Hugh Jones, ed. (2008). “Chapter 9. Puberty & Fertility”. Testosterone Deficiency in Men. Oxford Endocrinology Library. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0199545131.[page needed]Finley, Harry. “Average age at menarche in various cultures”. Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health. Retrieved 2007-08-02.
This 2003 electron microscope image made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows mature, oval-shaped monkeypox virions, left, and spherical immature virions, right, obtained from a sample of human skin associated with the 2003 prairie dog outbreak.
A leading doctor who chairs a World Health Organization expert group described the unprecedented outbreak of the rare disease monkeypox in developed countries as “a random event” that might be explained by risky sexual behavior at two recent mass events in Europe.
A leading adviser to the World Health Organization described the unprecedented outbreak of the rare disease monkeypox in developed countries as “a random event” that might be explained by risky sexual behavior at two recent mass events in Europe.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Dr. David Heymann, who formerly headed WHO’s emergencies department, said the leading theory to explain the spread of the disease was sexual transmission among gay and bisexual men at two raves held in Spain and Belgium. Monkeypox has not previously triggered widespread outbreaks beyond Africa, where it is endemic in animals.
“We know monkeypox can spread when there is close contact with the lesions of someone who is infected, and it looks like sexual contact has now amplified that transmission,” said Heymann. That marks a significant departure from the disease’s typical pattern of spread in central and western Africa, where people are mainly infected by animals like wild rodents and primates and outbreaks have not spilled across borders.
To date, WHO has recorded more than 90 cases of monkeypox in a dozen countries including Britain, Spain, Israel, France, Switzerland, the U.S. and Australia. Madrid’s senior health official said on Monday that the Spanish capital has recorded 30 confirmed cases so far. Enrique Ruiz Escudero said authorities are investigating possible links between a recent Gay Pride event in the Canary Islands, which drew some 80,000 people, and cases at a Madrid sauna.
Heymann chaired an urgent meeting of WHO’s advisory group on infectious disease threats on Friday to assess the ongoing epidemic and said there was no evidence to suggest that monkeypox might have mutated into a more infectious form.
Monkeypox typically causes fever, chills, rash, and lesions on the face or genitals. It can be spread through close contact with an infected person or their clothing or bedsheets, but sexual transmission has not yet been documented. Most people recover from the disease within several weeks without requiring hospitalization.
Vaccines against smallpox, a related disease, are also effective in preventing monkeypox and some antiviral drugs are being developed. So far, public health agencies in Europe have confirmed cases in the UK, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden.
In a statement on Friday, the WHO said that the recent outbreaks “are atypical, as they are occurring in non-endemic countries”. It said it was “working with the affected countries and others to expand disease surveillance to find and support people who may be affected”.
It is not yet clear why this unusual outbreak is happening now. One possibility is that the virus has changed in some way, although currently there is little evidence to suggest this is a new variant. Another explanation is that the virus has found itself in the right place at the right time to thrive.
Monkeypox may also spread more easily than it did in the past, when the smallpox vaccine was widely used. WHO’s Europe regional director Hans Kluge warned that “as we enter the summer season… with mass gatherings, festivals and parties, I am concerned that transmission could accelerate”.
He added that all but one of the recent cases had no relevant travel history to areas where monkeypox was endemic. The first case of the disease in the UK was reported on 7 May. The patient had recently travelled to Nigeria, where they are believed to have caught the virus before travelling to England, the UK Health Security Agency said.
There are now 20 confirmed cases in the UK, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said on Friday. Authorities in the UK said they had bought stocks of the smallpox vaccine and started offering it to those with “higher levels of exposure” to monkeypox. Spanish health authorities have also reportedly purchased thousands of smallpox jabs to deal with the outbreak, according to Spanish newspaper El País.
Australia’s first case was detected in a man who fell ill after travelling to the UK, the Victorian Department of Health said. In North America, health authorities in the US state of Massachusetts confirmed that a man has been infected after recently travelling to Canada. He was in “good condition” and “poses no risk to the public”, officials said.
The pandemic caused millions to lean in to good old-fashioned bad behavior. Two years later, business has never been better for cannabis, gaming and porn—and the high times are here to stay.
On March 13, 2020, everything changed for Doug, a 35-year-old manager at a supply chain logistics company in Chicago. He was told his offices were closed until further notice. Then the stock market took a dive, his 401K plunged, and several family members fell ill with Covid-19. As a father of four, in a house he recently bought, he was afraid for his family’s future.
For Doug, the glass of wine he usually had every night to unwind turned into a whole bottle. “My alcohol consumption turned into a seven-day affair,” he says. He’d usually top it off with some THC-infused gummies. And when sporting events returned, gambling helped him assuage his fear of an uncertain future.
Doug was not alone. As stay-at-home orders swept across the country in March 2020, Americans got high, got drunk, and turned to porn in order to cope with the many fears and anxieties that were symptomatic of the pandemic. Alcohol sales in 13 states surged more than 10% that first month of lockdown while wine sales jumped nearly 9%, according to a study conducted by the University of Buffalo. The number of cigarettes sold in the U.S. also increased in 2020, the first time in 20 years, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s Cigarette Report.
Dr. Peter Grinspoon, a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, saw more of his patients turn to drugs and alcohol to “blot out reality” after the start of the pandemic than the years before.
“In a perfect world, when under stress, we do yoga, eat tofu, exercise, talk to our best friend, but in reality, most of us rely on some kind of substance,” says Grinspoon, who has specialized in medical cannabis for more than 25 years. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that while people are home, bored and lonely they’re going to drink and get high.”
Covid Lows, Cannabis Highs
As the pandemic took an unimaginable toll on thousands of lives a day and brought the global economy to a standstill, it also helped legitimize the legal marijuana industry. With lockdowns rolling across the country in March 2020, many states deemed cannabis dispensaries “essential businesses,” meaning they could stay open along with pharmacies, grocers and liquor stores.
Cannabis sales in Washington state rose 9% over the same month in 2019 to $99 million while in California, weed sales grew by 53% over March 2019 to $276 million. Several months later, on Election Day 2020, five states passed marijuana legalization laws. Overall, the legal cannabis industry had a sky-high year in 2020: legal sales surpassed $17.5 billion, a 46% increase in sales over pre-pandemic 2019.
With Covid attacking respiratory systems, many longtime pot smokers made the switch to edibles. According to Headset, the Seattle-based cannabis analytics firm, sales of edibles grew by 54% across six states—California, Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon and Washington—during 2020.
Cannabis Laws By State
“In a lot of ways, Covid accelerated the cannabis industry 10 years,” says Aaron Morris, the co-founder of Clackamas, Oregon-based edibles manufacturer Wyld. “It legitimized it in a way as a mainstream coping mechanism along with alcohol.” For Wyld, one of the country’s best-selling edibles brands, the pandemic put the company into overdrive. “Sales got crazy,” says Morris. “It was like toilet paper—edibles flew off the shelves.”
Morris says the pandemic spiked Wyld sales by 20%, but the uptick never slowed. Instead, sales were “boosted permanently,” he says. As a new normal took hold, the only fluctuations Wyld saw in sales were when stimulus checks went out. “Every time the government sent out checks, sales went on steroids for 30 days,” says Morris.
In 2019, Wyld generated $25 million in sales and by the end of 2020, it sold $64 million of its natural fruit gummies. By the end of last year, the company nearly topped $110 million in sales.
Morris is obviously pleased with how the company performed, but not surprised. “Everyone loves cannabis, everyone’s at home, you aren’t socializing, so what are you going to do on a Tuesday night or a Friday night?” says Morris. “Everyone just got lit.”
Higher and Higher
Annual state cannabis sales have grown rapidly and consistently since 2019.
In the United States, annual cannabis sales hit $25 billion in 2021, a 43% increase over 2020. Sales in Florida, where only medical marijuana is legal, and sales in Illinois, which has both medical and adult-use, jumped 70% from 2020 to 2021. In Massachusetts, sales increased 85% during the same period.
Despite the growth of edibles, marijuana flower sales didn’t slow down either. For Emily Paxhia, cofounder of cannabis investment fund Poseidon, what sticks out to her from the past two years is the rise in pre-roll sales. Joint sales shot up 47% from April 2020 to October 2021 in California, Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
Paxhia believes a touch of nihilism is driving this statistic. “I think the pandemic shortened the timeline of how we view and how we live our lives to be focused on today, tomorrow versus what’s happening in five to 10 years,” she says. “Why not just live now and live well now?”
Betting Against Covid
The start of the pandemic hit the gaming industry hard, and as travel restrictions expanded globally, Covid looked like a losing proposition for the house. Casinos across the U.S. shuttered for months due to stay-at-home orders. In Nevada, the country’s gambling mecca, gross gaming revenue dropped from $12 billion in 2019 to $7.8 billion in 2020.
But when vaccines became available and Covid restrictions eased, Americans flocked to Sin City and regional state casinos as gambling became a way for the country to let loose after the height of the pandemic. By the end of 2021, Nevada reported a 10-month winning streak of more than $1 billion in monthly gambling revenue and an annual record of $13.4 billion, an 11.6% increase over pre-pandemic levels.
“People were cooped up for, depending on their risk tolerance, six months to two years,” says Colin Mansfield, an analyst who covers gaming and leisure at Fitch Ratings. “There was a time when there was not much to do from an entertainment perspective except go to a casino. After the shutdown people wanted to go out and have a good time and spend some money.”
The Money Lines
Annual state gambling revenue has recovered from the pandemic thanks to pent-up demand and the rise in mobile betting and iGaming.
And as states were eager for more tax revenue, many pushed through laws to get mobile sports betting programs off the ground. In 2018, there were eight states with legal sports betting and by the end of 2021, 31 states had legal markets with 18 launching mobile sports gambling.
New York, which launched its mobile sports betting program in early January 2022, surpassed $1 billion in wagers in the first two weeks of legalization, double the amount sportsbooks took in on The Las Vegas Strip in all of December. By the last week of February, New York bettors had wagered a total of $3.1 billion since the program launched, translating into $204.6 million in gross gaming revenue and $104.3 million in tax revenue.
Mansfield says the pandemic gambling boom is far from over. The industry is growing as more states are legalizing sports betting and the broader casino market is also expanding. “We’re not forecasting any strong pullback in gaming revenues,” he says. “People like to gamble. I don’t think that’s really going away at all.”
Over time, gambling has made the leap from a vice that cities and states wanted to hide on riverboats and away from big cities to placing it in the center of major entertainment districts. The combination of the pandemic and the expansion of mobile sports betting brought gambling to the “mainstream conversation,” says Mansfield. “You can’t watch a game anymore without hearing about gambling.”
Gaming may be on a serious roll right now, but few are thinking about the long-term consequences. Bill Krackomberger, a veteran professional sports gambler, grew up in the seedier edges of the industry among loan sharks and underground bookies. Legalization of sports betting is a good thing, no doubt, but Krackomberger feels uneasy about how quickly an addictive pastime has gone mainstream.
“We’re going to see a fallout in about 10 years, not just among regular degenerates,” says Krackomberger. “I’m talking with doctors, lawyers, professionals, Wall Street guys, you’ll see—you won’t be able to get into a Gamblers Anonymous meeting.”
Legal Sports Betting in the the U.S.
Porn This Way
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, Maya Morena, an adult film performer and sex worker living in New York, knew she had to stop meeting clients. The respectable and polite ones disappeared, and it seemed like the only johns willing to pay for sex and risk getting Covid were the “scummy ones.” So, Morena, like millions of other workers in America, started doing business online—she began treating her OnlyFans page like a full-time job.
By the end of that first month, Morena says she made $4,800 producing and selling erotic videos on the U.K.-based streaming platform best known as the billion-dollar tech company that porn built. By January 2021, Morena, who is originally from Honduras, was making $6,000 a month on OnlyFans. As the pandemic wore on and she advertised her page and recruited new customers, she saw her business boom again. By September of last year, she hit $12,000 for the month.
Of course, the idea that anyone can launch an OnlyFans page and start reeling in money by showing a little skin is a lie, Morena says. It requires a lot of hard work. The number of paying users and content creators joining adult streaming platforms like OnlyFans, FanCentro, IsMyGirl, ManyVids, and others, is exploding but only the most dedicated creators can make a living. “It’s a thriving economy that’s ruthlessly competitive,” says Morena.
For OnlyFans, the pandemic helped it become one of the biggest social media platforms seemingly overnight with more than 180 million users and more than 2 million content creators who have earned a collective $5 billion by selling subscriptions to content. In 2019, it had 348,000 creators and 13.5 million users. In 2020, OnlyFans grew revenue by 540%, hitting $400 million.
The popularity of OnlyFans, which has attracted a diverse group of creators from a former pastor to porn stars like Sophie Dee to celebrities like Cardi B, has given birth to a whole new adult-rated streaming economy.
Naked Ambition
Since 2019, the number of content creators on OnlyFans has increased nearly sixfold, while the number of users has expanded by a factor of 13.
Evan Seinfeld, the Brooklyn-born second cousin of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who launched the online adult content platform IsMyGirl in 2017, says the pandemic turbocharged his business. In 2019, Seinfeld had 500,000 users on his platform and 8,000 creators. By the end of 2020, 25,000 creators signed up and 1.5 million users joined. Today, the site hosts 2.5 million users and 50,000 creators, who collectively make millions of dollars a month.
“Everybody’s business is booming and growing,” says Seinfeld. “When people are alone in the house, people crave stimulus, they crave stimulation, they crave sexual excitement.”
While many sex workers and performers may have first joined a site out of desperation, he says, many eventually realized that selling erotic content to lonesome people stuck at home was a sustainable business.
Adds Seinfeld: “A lot of people needed a pandemic to realize that people who aren’t paying your bills don’t really have a right to have an opinion about how you earn your living.”
Or enjoy life.
Two years into the pandemic, Doug from Chicago is doing better financially—no other industry was in more demand than supply chain logistics—but he held onto some of his new vices, which he describes as “comforts.” Before the pandemic, he was trying to live a healthier life and moderate his food, drug, and alcohol intake. But his perspective has changed—happiness, not moderation, is part of his new approach.
“I’m enjoying the comfortability of my life,” says Doug. “Does it come with a few asterisks? Yes. But we’re not going to live forever.”
I am a staff writer on the vices beat, covering cannabis, gambling and more. I believe in the many virtues of vices. Previously at Forbes, I covered the world’s richest people as a member….
Alcohol Addiction 101 – What You Should KnowFor most adults, moderate or social alcohol use is not problematic, however, approximately 18 million American adults have an alcohol addiction. Here is some basic information to help individuals navigate problematic alcohol use.
Bombshell Facebook Investigation And What It Says About Digital AddictionThis week the Wall Street Journal released an investigative report about Facebook after uncovering leaked internal documents reflecting the impact of social media on its users. What may be most surprising about the report is not so much the impact that so
Social media platforms have long been unwelcoming to sex workers and adult content creators trying to make a living online. Even OnlyFans, the subscription-based platform that became a billion-dollar company thanks largely to sex workers monetizing their content on the platform, announced a ban on nudity and sex that would have left sex workers out to dry (yet again) … had the company not backtracked following public outcry.
The most recent attack on sexually explicit content comes from Instagram, where some accounts have lost their “link sticker” privileges for posting images that supposedly go against the platform’s community guidelines. In an absurd report from Buzzfeed, however, Stephanie McNeal details how the policing operation has gone awry.
On top of Instagram’s needless gatekeeping, which still only allows verified accounts or accounts with over 10,000 followers to share links and resources on the platform, the update was intended to block users from further spreading content that has consistently violated Instagram’s safety policies by, say, harassing other individuals or repeatedly making use of hate speech on the platform.
While that policy sounds good in theory, the problem is that the site is currently defining harassment and hate speech in some hilariously loose terms.
Fashion and lifestyle influencer Jess Bonds (@pacificnorthjess_) told McNeal that she lost her access to the link sticker after receiving a violation for “bullying/harassment.” The infraction in question? A video of Bonds jokingly slapping her friend’s boob.
“Starting October 25, you will no longer have access to the link sticker because you have shared content that violates our community guidelines.” That means Bonds loses access to a feature (the replacement of the ol’ swipe-up) that allows her to directly share affiliate links, earning commissions off the purchases her followers make … all for playfully knockin’ around her friend’s knockers.
The platform also jacked link-sticker rights from wine and lifestyle influencer Erika Altes (@whiskeyandlace) for an instance of hate speech in which she posted a pic of her brother and wrote — brace yourselves now — “boys are so gross.”
In a separate post, Altes racked up another ding after attempting to “incite violence.” The post very violently stated that Altes wanted to burn her house down after finding a dead mouse in her Yeti cooler.
In a statement, Instagram told McNeal, “We’re investigating an issue where people may have mistakenly been notified that they will be restricted, and we’re working on resolving this as soon as possible.”
Meanwhile, it would appear you’re still able (but not invited) to drop nonconsensual dick pics into my DMs at your leisure.
Photo: Francesco Carta fotografo...Getty Images
