desire, no disclaimer

Why is it that sex is all of a sudden looked down upon? Wasn't gen z supposed to be THE generation that completely looks beyond societal sin shaming?

I open my Instagram FYP, and the first account to pop up with its posts is Playboy. What people fail to understand is that media content of this sort is oftentimes consumed because of the emancipation and freedom it exudes. It's a feeling of liberation being able to consume content of this sort and being able to look beyond the naked women with uncensored breasts and think of the artistry of the person clicking these pictures and how, as a man, he's able to capture women in such a free and open state without condemning it.

Secondly, the whole OnlyFans scandal that happens almost every day. Now, I wouldn't personally commit to a profession like OnlyFans, but if I were to come across someone with that profession, I would 100% love to around them. I genuinely find it so difficult to fathom the fact that people consider this to be an "unforgivable sin." What unsettles me isn’t the platform itself, but the intensity of the outrage it provokes. The way autonomy, when exercised too openly, is immediately framed as moral failure. Choosing to profit from one’s body seems to offend people more than the countless systems that profit from bodies without consent. And that contradiction is hard to ignore and total bullshit.

What’s even more ironic is how selectively progressive this discomfort is. We champion freedom in theory, but recoil the moment it becomes too visible, too embodied, too unapologetic. Sex is celebrated when it’s subtle, aesthetic, and safely abstracted, but the moment it becomes explicit or economically autonomous, it’s treated as excessive, vulgar, or morally suspect. It’s as if liberation is only acceptable when it doesn’t disrupt anyone’s comfort.

At its core, this isn’t really about sex at all. It’s about control, about who is allowed to desire, to display, to profit, and to exist without shame. Platforms like Playboy and OnlyFans don’t invent immorality; they simply expose the discomfort society still has with autonomy that can’t be neatly moralized. And perhaps the real issue isn’t that sex has become too visible, but that we still haven’t learned how to look at it without reaching for judgment or opening our zips for self-gratification.