Sex censorship killed the internet we love

If you're unable to effectively filter that stuff out the next pragmatic option is often to ban all pornographic content categorically. That's what happened to tumblr. For years they were an American company that allowed pornography, but they were unable to deal with the burden imposed by their users uploading illegal pornography.

If I had to guess, reddit is probably next. Does reddit check the ID of every user who decides to upload a nude of themselves? I doubt it. It's probably only a matter of time before reddit finds themselves in hot water too and decides to axe all their NSFW subreddits.

WordPress apparently powers 1/3 of websites. But I also know that a lot of webhosts powering those WP sites forbid any adult content. Why? For two reasons — the difficulty in policing it, just as Tumblr had. But more importantly, the web host industry is built on people paying for resources that remain unused (massive overselling).

Adult sites actually use the resources; bandwidth being the primary (which is a lot cheaper than it used to be), but now that video porn is ubiquitous, the processing needed to transcode and deliver video is immense.

Which is likely why almost all porn is centralized now at a few top sites, that fund their operations through deals with porn creators or some kind of upper tier subscription.

This is totally incoherent. Lack of discrimination is the problem that Google solves. Search results can't all be first; that would be the same thing as not having a search engine at all.

I have a niche french blog about Python and porn. Had it for years. Google still brought 10 millions views to us since it started. We are ranked pretty well in the french version of the search engine.

Now It's true I have now way of knowing how well we would rank without the porn, but funnily, it's 10% of the content, but 60% of the traffic.

Have you tested any of these on google.com recently?

I have and I do regularly. There is definitely no shortage of results when looking for information / blogs about any of these three.

I'm in Australia, but the results appear to cover the Anglosphere in general.

The search term blogs about earning money with porn appears to be an industry in and of itself, and well represented on Google search results.

So, in response to your initial question, I'm going to go with: exceedingly unrealistic.

Are you saying that adult content is not legitimate art?

If so, I think you may be part of the problem, not the solution. English is not my first language, so please correct me if I am wrong.

By adult content, most of us think "porn". But as has been said, there's also violence and other things that some culture do not want their children exposed to.

There's no way to ban nudity or other things one may dislike without having to put some kind of filters in place. And once those filters are in place, they are abused to filter legitimate content. Every. Single. Time.

We have to rely on education, the best filter is in our brains. That's the cost to real freedom of speech.

But to make it sustainable, it needs to generate money. Advertisers don't like seeing their brands next to pr0n, so they won't come to your site. Unless, of course, you open it to adverts from people selling sexeh stuff, who can't get an ad to appear anywhere normally.

Of course, you could charge for it... but people have been trained to expect internet services for free. Hopefully that's changing, because it needs to.

Why do you call it an app instead of a website?

The word 'app' to me strongly implies that whatever the service does can only be meaningfully accessed via an app on Android or IOS, and that the publisher has reasons (often for monetization purposes) to keep the software client proprietary and exclusive.

It appears many people do not know how to use urls or ask people about other portals.

If facebook censors it, they may never know it every existed on the internet. For others if Google doesn't show it on the first page of results - it does not exist.

I should of seen this coming years ago I noticed when I would tell people to go to whatever-site-url.com - they would open a browser and put that into the search box.

Heck people put google.com into the box and search for it rather then enter a url and hit ctrl-enter.

Now many phones and tablets are also defaulting search boxes, browsers, and voice searches to be using these censoring services - not showing ways to escape these bubbles, solidifying the walls of the garden.

The article gives Cloudflare as example. Hosting porn content, even if it is art, can get very expensive because most services have an explicit no porn policy.

Also without Google Search and without presence on a big social network, you’re essentially invisible.

The situation for mobile apps is even worse, as Apple doesn’t allow porn content in its App Store and Google started banning such content as well.

Also the article mentions the by-law censorship of articles in which sex workers are interviewed due to FOSTA-SESTA.

So the smaller websites you’re talking about are being pushed off the web ;-)

I feel that her perspective is not very sympathetic to the average couple nor is it relatable with the average corporation. It hasn't been in the past and it isn't now. The closest that she can get to what she's asking for is Fetlife.

Some people just like to create stuff all day and have a ton to show, but only ever learned enough computer skills to do their hobby and go to forums.

For these kind of people, creating a new place in one click is a boon, and getting moderation and management tools out of box is also an incentive to keep it going.

Sure these people can start learning how to build places and use hosting services, but that’s a non teivial barrier to entry, and we must be losing so much in the deal.

For example in the pre-Facebook time there used to be a great amount of online chats to get to know people or just for chit-chatting. Then Facebook came, of course everybody was excited and many of the small websites closed down. Those that are left are usually packed with weirdos and fakes, it's a real pity. Although it was all pseudonymous I think back in the days there were less fakes than on Facebook. Not to talk about IRC or Newsgroups, which have become more niche then ever.

Well or HN... There used to be high quality content elsewhere, for instance Dr Dobbs was really nice. Now all that stuff is extremely centralized.

I don't really see this trend reversing at the moment. Despite people talking about decentralization since 3 years or so.

Probably it's Google's fault ;)

Here's one: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-majority-of.... "In fact, when you ask sex workers about their job satisfaction and working conditions – as a study led by Leeds University just has – the majority of them are happy. When asked to describe their work, respondents typically selected positive or neutral words. 91 per cent of sex workers described their work as ‘flexible’, 66 per cent described it as ‘fun’ and over half find their job ‘rewarding’.".

That aside, have you heard many stories where people have found happy and fulfilled lives as coal miners? As Amazon warehouse workers? Lots of jobs suck, but we don't ban them.

>it is because prostitutes are routinely destroyed by their work.

https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/159/8/778/91471 found a standardised mortality rate of 1.9 for American prostitutes (almost twice that of the average member of the population), similar to what https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.54.5.... found for coal miners, but we don't ban coal mining. For prostitution, violence was one of the "predominant causes of death", a situation that would be significantly improved were prostitution legal, as prostitutes could then rely on police protection without fear of being arrested for their work.

Your perception would be wrong. The vast majority of sex workers are doing it for the money, same as any job.

> The illegality of prostitution

Prostitution is not illegal in many parts of the world, and even decriminalised is some parts.

> I hear of no stories where people have found happy and fulfilled lives as prostitutes.

That's because you aren't listening. There's plenty of sex workers who blog or who are on twitter that you can ask. Just follow some and see.

> prostitutes are routinely destroyed by their work.

The biggest risk to sex workers in parts of the world where it is illegal is rape and murder by law enforcement.

I would be more interested in data than one person's subjecting perception.

> I hear of no stories where people have found happy and fulfilled lives as prostitutes

One of the major points of the article is that the voices of sex workers have been driven off the internet. You can't justify censorship by saying that none of the now-censored voices are complaining.

> The "women speaking truth" can only every have authentic voices if they are speaking from positions of power and security; I do not believe that this is the case for prostitutes anywhere.

That is either completely false, OR by your logic nobody can ever speak about what it's like to work a retail job. Some jobs suck; sometimes the people working them don't have a lot of power and security. So either your arguing that we shouldn't listen to anyone who isn't a millionaire, or you're not aware of the voices that exist.

> The illegality of prostitution is not because people are prudes, it is because prostitutes are routinely destroyed by their work.

Funny how that seems to only happen in places prostitution is illegal.

I have not heard a single country that have managed to do this. For rather obvious reasons, it is not practical to make employment illegal where the employee is in need of money.

There are countries however that do treat the problems with prostitution as a labor rights issue and resolve it similarly. For example when people think of human trafficking they think of prostitution, but human trafficking in constructions is actually several times larger. Exploitation in construction is thus a very large problem and the common solution is to impose stricter regulations so the government can catch and punish those that earn money on human suffering.

I strongly support sex positivity and oppose censorship, but this routine of calling out small and troubled minorities, or even the male gender or masculinity in general as the bogeyman, really needs to stop. It excludes close to half of everyone who would otherwise enthusiastically support the cause.

Linguistic and cultural imperialism are a thing. I don't know how to fight back. Those companies have a lot of money.

I noticed in Berlin startups that this is sorta changing. Seems the exported “culture of being offended” is slowly taking hold of, surprisingly, mostly younger people.

It's even more confusing because hypersexualization is totally fine, as long as the areola et al. remain invisible and you don't use plain language to refer to sex.

I think one reason is that violence is much easier to fake than sex.

Everything ends up lowest common denominator. Probably why I don't watch Tom Cruise films anymore.

A story from last summer. I went to Italy to visit some friends. We pulled over at the gas station. Regular spot with regular stuff that any station sells. And with huge newspaper stand. I took first colorful magazine, turn second page and there I see an old man dressed in all jeans, with big beard smiling, holding what could be maximum 2-months old baby... all naked wearing only shoes. Baby's penis is sticking out and the way the man holds him or her is that his hand is under it, basically holding newborn's ballsack. All in color, bright and proud, second page, a newspaper about clothes that you can buy in every single newspaper store across Italy. It was commercial for supposedly oldest shoe company in Italy and the idea is that after you are born, first thing your parents put on your are shoes. I did not know whether to be shocked or what. I showed it to my Italian friends and they looked at me "what?". And then I was dumb enough to take a photo of it. I don't know... I guess wanted to show folks in USA how ads in Europe look like. Of course totally forgot about it later on.

Until a cold sweat showered me when all of sudden, when a Board Patrol agent asked me a random question: any suspicious photography you took on your European trip that I should know about ... on your laptop or your phone? No idea where he got it from... perhaps he was a mind reader or something. I barely could say "nope", but God only knows how much trouble I would have been had I told him the truth...

Sometimes you have to be super careful when you travel across the big pond... Not all laws rules and regulations are all the same everywhere, boys and girls :)

Some common explanations:

- The USA is just way more religious overall;

- Pilgrims were the most radical protestant Christians, they were kicked out of Europe and then spread their social norms in the USA, in a very early moment of the development of American culture. Also, according to Max Weber, and to simplify things a lot :), Protestantism = Capitalism;

- Colonization is risky business, enormous territories were available and increasing the population was urgent. This could explain both acceptance of guns/violence and the need to regulate sexual behavior.

I think there is at least some truth to all of the above, but I always feel unsatisfied. There are so many confounding factors. For example, in Europe the catholic south is more sexually repressive than the protestant north, perhaps with the exception of the UK. But the north is also more atheistic overall. Anglo culture overall seems to me to have some specific flavor of sexual repression that I don't feel from other European cultures. Maybe I'm just more used to the catholic flavor.

I have this cynical suspicion that, for a large scale society such as a country to be possible, and for people to accept collaborating with the project somehow, some tabu must be created. At least one dimension of personal fulfillment must be out of the control of the individual. This is very simplistic but, in modern USA the tabu is sex, in modern Europe it is money. I think it is common for revolutions to destroy one tabu and create another. For example, left-wing revolutions tend to point at sexual tabus as "bourgeois values". But communists can also be super socially conservative.

Yet another detail: the differences in attitude towards sex and nudity in USA vs Europe also apply to alcohol. I feel that alcohol is both way more regulated and seen as more "naughty" in the USA than in Europe.

Perhaps someone here can point me in other interesting directions. Sorry for all the rambling :)

We process fake violence and sexual content very differently. When we see someone get their head blown off in a movie it's over the top and ridiculous. Often times it's used to tell us that something major has happened while being very different from reality.

I've seen videos on liveleak that are absolutely horrific. And yet I've seen much more gruesome scenes in movies that don't make me bat an eye.

Whereas with sexual content there's no difference between naked bodies. I am sure that scenes from shows on hbo will illicit the same reaction as pornographic material.

Also, violence is easy to explain, sexuality and complex hormonal feelings are not. That's why you can have outlandish violence because a kid knows what getting hit is like and what real life physics are like whereas stuff related to sexuality opens up such a large can of worms - what's too sexually liberal, what kind of a message it sends about self worth, social norms with something kids aren't familiar with, etc.

And before someone nitpicks my response, yes the culture and systems around ratings when it comes to nudity aren't always logical or consistent, but my main point is that I don't see why these two things are compared when they're completely different things.

I used to work at a European game company that made erotic games for PocketPC. Our biggest market was US, and most negativity also came from US. Video striptease is labeled as "porn".

What they preach is very different from how they act. You cannot say fuck or shit on tv or internet, but in real life everyone does it.

When Janet Jackson show a nipple on TV, it's a huge fuzz. But having a colleagues gathering in a striptease bar is normal.

I'm pretty sure the prudish public behavior enforces the excessive private behavior.

Technically, because you volunteer to. If the internet companies on your continent are not relieving your suffering, it's either the fault of them or an extremely unfortunate side effect of applying the lowest common denominator of laws on a global medium. Considering the latter, one might similarly question why other countries have to suffer the internet censorship laws of EU countries/companies.

Speaking of double standards, I do find it amusing that depending upon the article one might either despise or cheer country-specific rules affecting the global internet. We should be mindful that others may not share our morals when we impose our will on a global medium. Instead we should apply our morals to ourselves and try to encourage what we want instead of punitively trying to get our way.

But go to a gym. In the US or the UK, people will happily wander around naked and shower together without thinking anything about it. In France and Italy, there are cabins everywhere to enforce the most strict prudery.

My theory is that these two attitudes, the surface level prudishness and the hyper sexuality are actually a reaction to each other, pushing them both to become more extreme as time goes by.

Germany had a HUGE problem with the violence (even the 18+ version has blood and dismemberment removed), US criticized the sexuality (two achievements were called 'topless' and 'gang bang'), and in Japan it was about the promotion of drugs (you could get drunk to perform extra skill shots) and to a lesser extent about the violence.

So every cultural region has its own ideas of what their children need to be shielded from (and what to blame social misconduct on). But they all fail to realize that the children of the others, who get exposed to the 'bad stuff', still turn out fine by some miracle.

Conversely, I found out after travelling a lot in Europe, making foreigner friends and moving to another state it's not about being prudish about sex but about nudity.

From my (admittedly limited) experience Americans are much less prudish about sex than Europeans (especially Western EU countries) but leagues more prudish about nudity.

I actually find it more reasonable coming from Poland. We should keep nudity private and at the same time be able to let ourself go and be free when interacting intimately with another human.

Again, from my experience, Germany (my new country of residence) is extremely open about nudity while at the same time being similarly repressed about sexuality. This actually made me understand why Slavic people consider Germanic people to be "cold" or "passionless" (no offence intended).

Shops that didn't sell black doors would be losing business from non-superstitious people looking to buy black doors, which might be a bigger factor if superstitious group is relatively small.

I think adult content is more similar to black doors than seat numbers.

Let's look at religion: if my religion says "give money to orphans" then you don't need to fight it, it doesn't harm you, if it says "make everyone who's not part of our group subservient or dead" then you must fight it.

Actively fighting a superstition that is not harmful would count as it's own superstition, it's not logically driven.

While most of the consumers probably don't care, influence of a small but committed minority made Coca Cola kosher, halal, and vegan.

[0] https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/the-re...

Imagine a small subgroup decides they really, really love black doors. They will pay double price for a black door because they are so hard to find. Shop owner will satisfy that demand or lose that market to a competitor who's willing to step over that line.

Capitalism is an elegant system for resource allocation, really. I wish more people understood it.

As an example imagine video games that have characters in skimpy outfits. A tiny minority may complain about this. And it's often the case that this minority is not even actually a consumer of the products they're complaining about. But there will rarely be any meaningful voice against this minority going, "Wait.. no, I want my characters in skimpy outfits." Because to do so it makes you look like some sort of 'something' that's certainly undesirable. And so from the perspective a company that may not be particularly well attuned to its own userbase, it will see 100% of respondents on a given topic support censorship, 0% oppose it. That's not such a hard choice to make.

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/video-gam...

You're assuming an awful lot of human cognition that doesn't seem justified. Firstly, that superstition "grows". In fact, empirically, the opposite seems to be the case: people have become naturally less superstitious over time. We have more atheists now than ever. This trend was well established long before the New Atheists, so don't try to attribute it to them.

Secondly, actively fighting any deeply held belief engenders feelings of oppression, causing in-group solidarity and out-group hostility to increase. When facts side with the out-group, then this lead to "alternative facts" and the erosion of social cohesion and compromise. Which is where we are now. "Fighting a culture war" with fellow citizens and leaving the population vulnerable to propaganda and destabilization efforts from foreign powers.

Now that's dangerous.

Plenty of cultures have much looser taboos around this than yours, its not how human beings are wired.

In the 1970's, I once watched a soccer game with a family in France. On of the advertisements showed a naked lady get out of a bath, with full frontal nudity, and hug a very handsome naked man. I was shocked, but my hosts were more intent on getting drinks before play started again.

And, sex is like air and money. If you have enough, it's not really interesting.

So is violence. Not arousing in the same way, we are imitating animals.

> and has the potential to be greatly embarrassing.

That is also a social construct. Why should sex be embarrassing that violence wouldn't be?

That's the very definition of being prude.

Personally, I'm inclined to think that the answer is yes. I think it's all relative. And I think our censorship is directly linked to the fact that it's uncomfortable.

There was a strong nudity culture in germany/europe and nudity wasn't something that was entirely sexual. But now it seems to be entirely sexual, at least on the internet.

> When I Google something in a meeting or in front of my mother, I do not want sexual results to appear because some term has an alternate meaning

I don't agee. Not every mention of sexuality is arousing and when something sexual appears and is embarassing for you, that's a cultural thing. I don't see sexual things appearing when you google stuff front of your mother as embarassing in by human nature, I think it's entirely cultural. I honestly don't know whether I would care? My mother is an adult human being after all and smart enought to know that there's an alternate meaning and I didn't want to google sexual stuff with her! I really don't think this would be a problem at all?

> but we certainly don't want to watch a steamy sex scene together

This was weird when I was a teenager, where steamy sex scenes can overwhelme you very quick. But sex scenes are an important part of many movies, it's part of human nature after all. For example, I like art and my father likes art. When I am in my parents city and we go into a museum together, there are many artworks displaying nudity and some are explicitly concerened with the various forms of sexuality. There's no akwardness there, because we're both adults.

> So having major internet services like Google and Facebook default to being non-sexual seems like a pretty smart move to me.

It may be a smart move from a corporate point of view, but I really think it shapes our culture and defines what is a taboo and what not, they are just too powerfull. I don't think it's good that you can't post pictures of nudity on facebook. Nudity doesn't have to sexual. And if you argue that you shouldn't do that because some eployer could google you and sees you half naked, then that's also cultural, I think. Also, there's a privacy setting in facebook.

The solution for this is to have a cookie to show NSFW content or not, and if you have it set then the content is still there but you get a box in front of it saying "you have chosen not to see this", so that you actually know there is something relevant there that you're not seeing.

> And then there are still countless sites on the internet devoted entirely to sex. Keeping them largely separated seems smart.

The problem with kicking people off the platform or otherwise purposely preventing discovery is that the lines aren't nearly clear enough as would be so convenient.

For example, sometimes sex workers need to get together with civil liberties organizations, or media organizations, or the general public. If you silo the sex workers off into their own universe, how does that happen? They can't come to the big sites because they're immediately banned, because attempting to communicate about their lived experience gets them flagged by an algorithm that isn't smart enough to understand context. But the others can't come to them because their sites are exclusively NSFW, which means companies ban the sites or employees fear being punished for visiting them on company time.

Then we get more garbage like SESTA, which the people it was supposed to "protect" hate because it makes their lives less safe, but they have no voice in the matter because companies decided the public isn't supposed to hear from them.

> And while what happened to Tumblr was very sad, I'm sure other sites will replace it... it's the internet after all.

Sure, after years to rebuild another community. But then what happens when that site gets popular enough for a major company to buy it and decide they want to do the same thing?

Having your community destroyed every time it becomes sufficiently popular is a real problem.

The REAL problem is the tech monopolies ate the internet. The little sites are still out there, but they are slowly bleeding out to the app/social media giant/google filter bubble monopolies.

I hate to put it like this but the NHS is, largely, unknown to the Americans. They have their own version (e.g.: Department of Health, Surgeon General, etc.) but I think you skimmed on something that is a byproduct of that cultural mentality: Sex and nudity is bad; therefore, any education around that is bad.

People might be able to go and find that information on the NHS' website, if the actual act of doing so wasn't - itself - stigmatised.

There are ripe examples across the internet of people up in arms about sexual education in American schools (this used to be something largely concentrated to the Bible Belt, but as demographics move, has been spreading wider across their country)[0,1].

Then, you have the "think of the children!" crowd.[2, 3]

I think someone paying for advertisement time to say, "If your parents, school, government is failing you, try to look for the information elsewhere - say the NHS," might go a long but - even then - you might be "unpatriotic", "unamerican", "literally the devil", etc. for even doing so.

Fighting the herd mentality isn't without it's own plight.

[0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sex-education-controversy-erupt...

[1] - https://pjmedia.com/parenting/2017/03/31/parents-protest-gra...

[2] - https://www.hli.org/2018/04/comprehensive-sex-education/

[3] - https://www.lifezette.com/2016/12/evil-in-the-classroom-sexu...

Also you can launch a website like Nerve if you want, I'm sure you'll find servers to host it.

But who will know about it if you're not in Google's search results, and Facebook doesn't allow linking to your articles?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/payment-processors-are...

Tumblr and similar sites are just a casualty of monopolistic payment processors doing the bidding of the government. IMO - as long as what you're doing is legal you should be able to make money for it. Anything less is censorship.

Let's stop telling ourselves that you can monetize with erotica. It's just American Puritanism, and yes, it's breaking the internet.

Imagine-- The Internet has made boatloads of money, but 95 percent is un(der)monetized porn. That would assure economic growth until the end of the practically significant future.

Is the author basing this on anything other than checking to see if white nationalists and Nazis are simply using the site as some sort of electronic forward operating base such that it's worth calling Tumblr a "haven" for these groups?

Asked a better way: if you go looking for group x on just about any website, isn't it fair to say you're probably going to find some? Is Tumblr really a haven for these people?

I ask as someone who without really trying, just managed to curate his tumblr "feed" to be full of classic cars, aviation, scifi and comic book stuff plus sometimes video game review, so I admit to being a bit ignorant as to what's going on outside my particular 'bubble' and will concede that I do lack some perspective on the matter.

I remember altavista being ruined by the porn industry. I also remember not needing to go through loops to see "uncensored" fantasy (the D&D type) artwork, where female upper bodies might be uncovered.

To overcome this the actual content needs to return to it's origin: personal/organisational websites, with their own forums, and for legislation writers to leave them alone. In the meanwhile, the rest of the world needs moderators, not automated, bad upload filters.

https://git.sr.ht/~achmizs/AlwaysKillSticky.git

Sad that we have to resort to this sort of thing, but...

p.s: He would probably be happy to accept a patch which makes it compatible with Firefox.

This is one of those cases in which I wished for the first comment I’m seeing to not be so shallow.

[1]: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commedia_sexy_all%27italiana

A quibble - while this negative view of sex may not be the view of other texts in the Bible, it is very clearly part of Paul's worldview, as evidenced in e.g. 2 Corinthians.

The Roman Catholic Church does teach that contraception is sinful. No major Protestant church does.

There is no corresponding change in the religious demographic. If anything that demographic went down until 2015, where for other reasons it started to go up.

It’s supposed to be a priceless gift shared with your true love. Packaging it and selling it makes it less valuable.

I believe that if you approach the subject with that mindset, a lot of the decisions that society has made suddenly make a bit more sense.

Yes, but that religious attitude also goes through the whole culture, so the puritanical / prudish attitude ends up in the minds of atheists and the public in general, even if they haven't stepped into a church in their life. So you get the phenomenon in all ends of the spectrum, from the Hayes code, CD "parental advisory" and moral panics of the right, to the political correctness and moral panics of the left.

At the same time, the are religions like catholicism that can appear similarly reserved, but in social practice the majority of their adherents can be more open to sex, partying, and all kinds of moral ambiguity. There are exception in close knit communities under perceived attack (e.g. Ireland), but in the main they tend to be more open to "sin". That's because protestantism emerged as a fundamentalist "back to the original morality" sect, where strictness was its main thing.

Since the late 60's we split into Puritans and Puritanically anti-Puritans. There's not much middle ground.

If you actually read the Bible though sex and marriage is supposed to be a sort of alagory for the church’s union with Christ and it’s supposed to be pleasant.

What's your basis for saying that?

Certainly Song of Songs (in the OT) presents erotic intimacy in a positive manner, and does not to my recollection mention procreation.

I'd be interested to know why is this and if other languages have a similar way of putting the word in your head without saying it.

At the risk of opening that particular can of worms; I'm curious to know if you can provide more details on this? As an American I suspect I am perhaps too close to the problem and unable to see it but most of the well-educated, intelligent people I know harbor little to no racial opinions.

Bring up Muslims or Roma people to a European and you'll find this isn't a uniquely American problem.

Yes, it is, unless your subject is bashing Americans.

I'm not sure it is. America has strongly patriarchal institutions, enforcing very particular and rigid sex/gender roles. Our economy, for example, relies on women staying at home to raise children. This removes them from the arena of compensated labor, depriving them of commercial agency except as a bread-winning man's proxy.

More or less.

This kind of economic role-enforcement is also heavily racialized; latino workers are massively represented in agriculture, black workers in service work, and both groups are deprived of the high-pay, high-tech opportunities that white men like myself take for granted.

In her indispensable feminist text, "The Will to Change", bell hooks uses the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html